Not every business needs to have professional signage, but your business is definitely losing out if you don’t have a web site. In each case I noticed, they were offering some kind of service I was interested in, but because they didn’t have a web site, none of them will be getting my business. Not from spite, but from the practical reality of the situation. When I see someone driving down the road and their advertising catches my eye, I don’t have the time or mental “bandwidth” to write down or memorize a phone number. A catchy web address on the other hand, stands a chance of me remembering it long enough to write it down, or look it up later.

You don’t need to be planning to sell online to need a web site these days. If you don’t have a web site on your vehicle and print advertising, you are missing out on business, and you may be missing out on an opportunity to lower some of your customer service burdens. Just having a static web site with your address, phone number, email address and hours of operations could lower the number of incoming calls, freeing up staff for other important tasks.

A web site doesn’t have to be an expensive, inconvenient hassle. Contact me, and I’ll show you how you can get your web presence started with minimal cost and headaches.

Facebook rather quickly jumped on the bandwagon, asking companies not to violate the privacy of its users. I found it very interesting that their reasoning was not just on the incredibly bad judgment and extreme overreaching of such requests but on the possibility that they might leave the offending companies open to lawsuits. Whether that was a warning or a threat remains to be seen, but should Facebook itself decide to sue on behalf of its users for privacy violations, that would be a case worth watching, with popcorn. What a delicious bundle of irony that would be, no?

One must wonder what in heaven’s name these companies are thinking? They could get everything they need to know by asking for a “friend” request to be accepted. That would be bad, but nowhere near the level of fascist over-reach that is implied in demanding a password to someone’s Facebook account. And besides, anyone with something to hide could simply set up a bogus account for the sake of their job seeking.

There really does seem to be a disconnect in corporate culture with any form of empathy or ethics, and the Facebook Password Scandal is only one in a string of seemingly increasingly hostile violations of worker’s rights. This can only go on for so long before there is some kind of push back. Kudos to Facebook for quickly taking a stand on it.

FACEBOOK CHANGES

Have you noticed that you are only seeing updates in your newsfeed from the same people lately? Have you also noticed that when you post things like status messages, photos and links, the same circle of people are commenting and everyone else seems to be ignoring you?

Don’t worry, everyone still loves you and nobody has intentionally blocked you. The problem is that a large chunk of your friend/fan list can’t see anything you post and here’s why:

The “New Facebook” has a newsfeed setting that by default is automatically set to show ONLY posts from people who you’ve recently interacted with or interacted the most with (which would be limited to the couple of weeks just before people started switching to the new profile). So in other words, for both business and personal pages, unless your friends/fans commented on one of your posts within those few weeks or vice versa – you are now invisible to them and they are invisible to you!!

HERE’S THE FIX: Scroll down to the bottom of the newsfeed on the homepage and click on “Edit Options”, click on “Show Posts From” and change the setting to “All Of Your Friends and Pages” Note: This is the fix for personal pages but I am unsure of whether or not the business pages are set up the same way.

Simply posting an update about it won’t do any good because lots of your friends/fans already can’t see your posts by default. You’ll either have to send out a message to everyone on your list (which I’m not even sure business pages can do and is a rather tedious method) or post an event explaining the situation like this one and invite your entire fan base and/or friend list. You can also tweet about it hoping that most of your fellow facebookers are also on twitter.

Shame on facebook for altering the default setting and not telling people and business pages about it! Just think about how many companies posted Christmas sales and discounts without having any idea that their customers couldn’t see the updates.

I couldn’t agree more. By all means offer us this as an option. But don’t whip it on everyone without even notifying us. Facebook has to wrap its head around the idea that it is “our” Facebook too. We have a right to know what they are doing to our pages. I expect some geek there thought this was a tremendous way to make content more “relevant” but in essence it’s another form of censorship.  What Facebook really needs is someone on their Board of Directors who acts as an Ombudsman for the end user. A council of elected peers, like CafePress had at one time, would be a great start. Someone to say “Sounds great on paper, but in the real world …” … in the real world this would have been great if it was opt-in. Making it opt out is yet another insult added to the many injuries Facebook has inflicted on its own users recently.

In consulting positions I have held, I notice that the corporate clients tend to design their systems quite deliberately to block incoming feedback from employees, customers and stakeholders. The rationale is that they don’t want to spend a lot of time or money on frivolous complaints. Yet those same companies often spend millions of dollars holding “focus groups” to get feedback so they can better understand their client’s needs. The feedback through the focus group process is invariably skewed, especially where it comes to employee feedback. Employees simply do not feel comfortable giving honest feedback, especially when they know it won’t be what management wants to hear. Customers who are paid for feedback suffer from a kind of “Stockholm Syndrome” where they tend to identify with their momentary captors, can can sometimes provide the feedback the company wants to hear.

At one web company I once consulted for, they actually set up a reporting system that was set up to block access to the very people they were soliciting input from. The reporting system had been designed by the designer of the system with little outside direction. Nobody had thought to check the system to ensure it was accessible to the target audience. On the sales floor, everyone was complaining about the system, yet management was convinced everyone found it highly useful. After all, there weren’t many complaints! Talking to the staff, I realized that there was a strong corp-culture message: “Don’t criticize the system to management.” Management seemed shocked when I reported how universally reviled the system had become, but management was so invested in that system that they continued status-quo despite its obvious and easily-repaired shortcomings.

Our fear of negative feedback is one of the single-largest roadblocks to success in our culture. I have seen tremendous efforts made at every level to avoid the dreaded “critique”. Yet blunt, honest criticism can be incredibly valuable. How can you know where you can improve your services or products if you go out of your way to avoid any critical input?

My advice to large or small companies … shave a few grand out of your focus group budget and hire a manager to oversee and analyze incoming emails from your key audiences. Set up an anonymous relay for your employees so they can provide honest feedback without fear of retribution from management (in their own department or others). Ideally, find an independent  consultant who doesn’t have a stake in your decision-making process. I provide screening and analysis to small and medium-sized companies and training services to larger companies to integrate feedback management as part of an over-all usability and marketing strategy. Contact me for an initial consultation.

This may be an odd position for a social media consultant to take, but it’s an honest one. I am good at building lists of followers, great at creating content, and terrific at managing customer interactions for my clients (if I do say so myself).

BUT …

I have not yet found that social media activity actually translates to increased sales, or even increased web traffic for a small or micro-sized business, the very people who need that most. The only people I see claiming that are the social media gurus. I have looked into a number of online classes, and they all repeat the same hype and bumpfh, but none of them really give you any secrets for making a buck or even getting your signal out of the noise cloud. If you have found one that you are not affiliating for … email me. If you are hyping or marketing one, send it to me, and I’ll review it. I’d be delighted to be proven wrong about this.

Social media sites do offer the opportunity to improve customer service, increase your brand awareness, and better engage with customers, but that part should be a no-brainer. The rubber meets the road in the pocketbook. You and I can do that stuff on our own web sites. We don’t need Twitter or Facebook for that. The only ROI the social media sites truly offer us is one more place to be found. Otherwise, they are actually a resource negative.

As a marketing effort so far I have found Facebook and Twitter to be a monumental waste of time. At this point, I don’t think anyone is really making a decent buck in social media except those people who are selling classes! I’ll be willing to dramatically revise that assessment if someone can clue me in on how it’s done. And please don’t quote success stories at me like “Look at Aston Kutcher!” … that guy was already famous before he found Twitter. I’d say Twitter has benefited more from him than he has from them. There are occasional (and usually bizarre) exceptions … but I want to know how they succeeded in turning their social media traffic into profits.

Right now I tell my clients the only reasons to be on FB and Twitter are to offer improved customer service, build their reputation, possibly increase brand awareness, and engage with existing customers. I tell them it is one more place they should be found to have a presence online, and I can help them do that. But until someone shows me a working model of how to reliably translate those presences into profit, I will continue to advise them to spend only a minimal amount of time and effort on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social media platforms as part of their marketing campaigns.

I have a great deal of experience with social media management, web site design and online marketing. For several years, I was the TUCOWS.com media relations director, editor in chief, review writer, I even ghost-wrote reviews for their CEO in Boardwatch Magazine. Few people outside Toronto know that at the time of the peak growth of the Internet during the 1990′s TUCOWS also owned an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and web portal (iDirect and MyDirect, respectively). I was iDirect’s chief communications officer, abuse admin, portal content manager, and the author of the new user manual that is still in use at the company that currently runs their old servers. You could say that manual was a best seller – there are over 400,000 copies of the booklet in print!

Now I’m an independent digital media consultant, designer and social media developer, and I have room in my portfolio for a few select clients. If you are seeking outsourced or off-site talent to run your campaigns, or are looking for a consultant to assist with developing an online strategy across multiple sites, please contact me for an initial consultation.