Influential Marketing Blog

Facebook, Cauliflower And How Liking Anything Just Became Important Again

I actively hate cauliflower. In marketing terms, you could call me a brand dectractor ... as I am generally pretty vocal about my dislike of the sweat-sock-smelling-mush-flavored vegetable. Hate is often extreme like that, and most of us believe passionately in what we dislike. What we "like" on the other hand, has been getting devalued for some time. Five years ago, I might have described my likes with a similar passion. Now I might click a "like" button just to download a free PDF, or get a coupon for a free drink. Facebook made the "Like" button a price of admission, and in doing so, they started the trend towards devaluing the idea of liking anything.

Last week at the f8 Developers Conference, they announced a fix that will not only change how you use Facebook - it will also change the way that we generally perceive the value of liking something as well. As Mark Zuckerberg described in his keynote, "you don't have to LIKE a book - you can just READ a book. You don't have to LIKE a movie, you can just WATCH a movie."  Over the coming weeks, Facebook will launch a standard set of buttons for "watching, reading and listening" - as well as using their Open Graph to let developers create buttons of their own (follow link for source of the mock graphic list of potential Facebook buttons at right). As the AllThingsD blog from the Wall Street Journal notes, this will likely lead to an "oversharing explosion" as people can get over the barrier of not wanting to broadcast an implied endorsement for something that they may just be consuming but not really "liking." 

More importantly, I think this will help us all return to the importance that we have assigned for centuries to the idea of actually liking something. Now I don't have to like something as a cost of entry, so I'm free to only declare my like for those things that I truly feel that way about. Likeability always mattered - but with Facebook's latest update it can finally return to the importance it once had.

By rethinking the Like button, Facebook has finally made liking anything as important as it used to be. 

Author's Note: I had a special connection to this topic as I'm working on a book with a working title of Likeonomics. It is not a book about Facebook, it is about the value and importance of likeability to marketing, communications and personal success. Though I am not finished writing it yet, you can bet this story and Facebook's mixed history with the "Like" button will be an important story in the book ...

The South Asian Entertainment & Media Movement

I have always had a mixed relationship with Apu. The long standing joke in many South Asian communities was that he was really our first and most recognizable movie star. Still, he was a caricature of a convenience store owner - one of several typecasts for South Asians that have included taxi drivers and call center workers. While NBC's Outsourced did a great job of poking fun at this with smart cultural humor ... it was still a niche. We were still a niche.

This past weekend I had the chance to spend time with more than 300 of my fellow South Asians working in the media, entertainment and marketing industries at the SAMMA Summit in NY. In a room filled with leaders from big marketing agencies, movie studio executives, music industry pioneers, actors and dancers there was a lot of excitement. Coming together as a community offered one of the rare moments to collectively celebrate the impact that South Asians have been having on the industry and the culture of the United States and beyond. Through a collection of great individual stories and company successes, it was clear that South Asians are creating a movement right now and here are a few reasons why:

1. India is growing more important as a media market for expansion.

During the lunchtime keynote the President of Turner International Louise Sams shared how Turner is expanding many of their networks including Cartoon Network into the Indian and South Asian market and their ambitious growth plans for that market. Other networks are similarly vying not just to expand their programming and channels into that market, but also working with local talent to produce custom programming specifically tailored for the South Asian market.

2. "Desification" of the music industry.

As music composer Salim Merchant of Salim-Suleiman once shared, "internationally, Bollywood is the new hip-hop." This year, there was a lot of attention on Desi Hits! - a website founded by Anjula Acharia Bath where you can listen to remixes of pop songs, see collaborations between popular singers like Brittany Spears and well known Bollywood artists. Desi Hits is also bringing iconic Bollywood actresses like Priyanka Chopra to America, taking musicians like Lady Gaga to India, helping up and coming actresses like performer Anusha and breaking down the boundaries between Bollywood and Hollywood. 

3. Being South Asian is no longer a defining or limiting description.

As Rishad Tobaccowala shared in his keynote address, "I never wanted to be the best Indian in marketing. I just wanted to be the best person."  Today there are more examples of people who are succeeding based solely on who they are and what they do, and not because they are Indian or cater to a South Asian audience. One example mentioned was Frieda Pinto, who reached success initially through her role in Slumdog Millionaire, starring as the female lead in the recently released Planet of the Apes. Over the last several years, there have been many others in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue as well.

4. South Asians pioneer an entire media infrastructure.

One of the best discussions of the day delved into the world of South Asian niche media and how there is now a complete ecosystem. From movie theater agreements to ethnic magazines to television channels - South Asian filmmakers in particular have the ability to tap an entire diaspora to promote a new film in a way that can achieve a niche success in a way that many other minorities in the US have yet to build.

5. Individual stories of South Asian success become commonplace.

In a powerful reminder that there are South Asians doing amazing work in unexpected industries, there were lots of great success stories. Sunil Gulati, the President of the United States Soccer Federation and Dr. Sanjay Gupta from CNN were both winners of a SAMMA trailblazers award. Legendary media executive Rishad Tobaccowala, Floyd Cardoz winner of Top Chef Masters 2011 on Bravo, Bobby Ghosh (World Editor at TIME magazine) as well as Naveen Selvadurai (co-Founder of Foursquare) were all participating in the event.

In one of the highlights, keynote speaker Padmini Sharma from Frito-Lay shared a video from an award winning old campaign from Times of India celebrating the 60th anniversary of India's independence. In it, India's most famous actor Amitabh Bachchan reads what was a cover ad from the Times of India about "One India" (video embedded below).

It was a fitting reminder of the power of uniting as a community as South Asians found a moment to gather, reflect and celebrate the growing contributions of our community to culture in the United States. I only hope I don't have to wait a year for another moment to celebrate.

Everything You Need To Know About Twitter Strategy In Two Tweets

How many times have you heard that being successful in using social media is all about engagement? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it isn't. For a consumer that is going on Twitter to complain about how their mobile phone doesn't have coverage, they don't want to be "engaged" with your brand ... they want you to fix your coverage. Engagement, as social media experts often think about it, is about having a conversation with customers as if you have a relationship with them. Sometimes you do, and that's great. Yet often you may be communicating from a nonexistent place of familiarity and you'd be much better off focused on ADDING VALUE instead of trying to offer engagement. 

I recently experienced two very real examples of this with two brands which on the surface both seem to be using Twitter well for engagement. In reality, they offer a perfect contrast of what to do and what NOT to do when building your strategy for engaging with customers. Let's start with the example of what not to do:

CARNIVAL CRUISE LINES

Carnival has more than 36,000 fans and lots of direct engagement. They have lots of @replies to individuals, and they help customers when someone tweets about an issue or problem. So what else could they be doing? 

1. Separate customer service from main Twitter account. By having a stream of replies only, they miss the opportunity to use the channel more for news and special offers (which have more value for any potential cruiser). Ironically, Carnival has a separate Twitter account for customer service (@CCLSupport), yet they are not actively trying to move customer support related issues over to that account. Even the simple step of directly responding to people who tweet about @CarnivalCruise from that account instead of the main one could help.
2. Turn Tweeters into advocates by offering real value. When people tweet about going on vacation, why not offer them some incentive to surprise them and keep them talking instead of just telling them to have a nice time? Even something as simple and zero-cost as offering them priority check-in for their cruise would likely delight many of those people tweeting about the experience ... and you already know they will tell their entire network on Twitter. I want my friends to wish me a great cruise ... I'd love for Carnival to actually give me something to make that really happen.
3. Follow your customers to enable direct contact. If you are going to use a Twitter as a direct channel to communicate with customers, they why wouldn't you follow every one of your customers who say that they are going on one of your cruises? Currently Carnival follows less than 1% of their followers back. Doing so not only offers them a direct channel to get in touch with you, it will also help to take some of the 1-to-1 conversations happening on Twitter out of the conversation stream and turn them into private conversations so they don't annoy those following your account but not involved in that conversation. 

CIRQUE DU SOLEIL

In contrast, Cirque Du Soleil has more than 225,000 followers on Twitter. More importantly, their stream on Twitter includes many special offers, exclusive events and lots of things that anyone who is interested in any one of Cirque's 22 productions around the world would want to know about - along with direct replies to consumers. What makes their Twitter account work so well?

1. Create a sense of exclusivity. Throughout the account, Cirque shares photos from exclusive events, links to interesting special offers and generally does a good job of including lots of content that their followers would probably be interested in seeing. More importantly, they leverage the specific value of Twitter to share some of those deals on a platform that is likely to be shared. 
2. Follow and engage your followers. While Cirque "only" follows less than 20% of the people who follow them, chances are many of their followers are not necessarily engaged Twitter users, so the more important number to consider is that they have a direct connection with more than 35,000 Twitter users. This has a very high value because those people can connect with Cirque directly and become advocates. 
3. Engage influencers beyond Twitter. Cirque also wins by going beyond Twitter. Over the past several years, I have met people who work in social media at Cirque at events and been lucky enough to be invited to attend several of their shows. Each time, I have had an amazing experience and often shared it through Twitter. 

 

Facebook Bankruptcy: How (And Why) To Convert Your Personal Profile To A Facebook Page

FINAL UPDATE: This process did not go as expected for me and there are several downsides to converting your profile to a page.  Read my update at the end of this post for why you may NOT want to do this before you make a decision - it includes some things I wish I knew before starting this process.

For more than a year now, I have had a problem with Facebook. When I first joined the social network several years ago, I intended to be completely open.  I accepted every friend request and posted whatever I wanted. Over time, as my friend circle on Facebook started to grow, I found that I was less personally connected to the people who I was "friends" with on Facebook. Now, several years later, my Facebook page is a mashup of people who I am connected with for different reasons. As of today, I have 2434 friends on my personal profile and hundreds of friend invites which are sitting in my queue unapproved because I don't really know what to do with them. Sound familiar?

This is a problem that I know many others have, and one that Burger King brilliantly brought to life back in 2009 with their "Whopper Sacrifice" campaign which infamously called upon Facebook users to defriend people in exchange for a free whopper and had more than 234,000 people choose to defriend 10 people each. As the reasoning went, anyone you would trade in for a whopper couldn't have been that good of a friend, right?  In case you were wondering, I didn't dump anyone for a free burger.  Still, my problem of losing the separation between personal and business contacts on Facebook continued. This weekend I am finally going to fix that problem by declaring "Facebook bankruptcy."

"Facebook Bankruptcy" is the extreme act of either closing an account altogether or migrating it to a different type of account in an effort to reduce or better organize your friends. 

5 Good Reasons To Convert Your Personal Profile To A Page

This weekend, I will convert my personal profile into a Facebook Page, something that I read about doing some time ago in a Mashable post.  For me, I think this is going to be useful 5 reasons:

1. Leverage your best URL: I can start to use www.facebook.com/rohitbhargava as my official Facebook page URL instead of my personal profile URL, which is what it is now. This is a BIG motivator for me to make this change because I really want to be able to use a better and more logical URL at events (my current Facebook Author Page URL is www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor). 
2. More effectively segment people by relationships: It will be easier to separate my work colleagues and acquaintances from my closer friends and family who I know in person (and have generally met!)
3. Handle pending friend requests: It will give me a solution for how to handle all the backlog of pending friend requests that I have. I am going to approve everyone over the weekend and then convert the page. 
4. Allow relationships to scale: I will no longer be limited by the 5000 friend maximum that a personal profile has, which means my page will be able to scale over time. 
5. Enable better privacy control + Share better content: One reason I don't share too much about my family and kids is because I don't have a more personal way to do it. After this, I can share more personal thoughts and images with my smaller circle of friends - something that I have wanted to be able to do for a long time.

What Are The Risks?

There are a few big risks that I have been considering related to this, as well as how I might be able to handle them:

1. Multiple Facebook Pages: Given that I already have an Author page for myself, converting my personal profile will give me two pages for myself. This is not a problem that I have found a great solution for yet (so please let me know if you have one!).  There is a page on Facebook about how to merge two pages, but otherwise I may try to contact Facebook directly to find a way to do this and combine the fans.
2. Losing past content and conversations: The help page for migrating a page clearly says that all your profile photos will remain, but the other content such as wall posts and messages will be lost - so you need to download them before converting. For some people this may be a big problem, but I never tended to use Facebook messages a lot, and my wall posts are about moments in time so while I would love to have access to them, I am ok with losing them because the benefits of migrating my profile to a page are higher. 
3. Annoying friends by trying to turn them into "fans": This is probably my biggest concern, because of the inherent rudeness of turning someone who wants to be your "friend" into what is essentially a "fan" even though Facebook doesn't use that term anymore. Part of my method for dealing with it is to write this post and publicize WHY I am doing this so people who already follow me understand my reasons. The other better reason is because I think that the content I am able to share with people will improve because I can share what they ACTUALLY care about. Having a Facebook Page helps me to separate my more marketing related thoughts and ideas which MOST of my friends who are not in marketing don't really care about.

So, taking those pieces together - I have decided it's time to finally do it. In case you happen to be following me on any of these places, thanks and I hope you continue to stay there. If this change makes you angry or somehow otherwise unhappy, I'm truly sorry. And for those who just want to see how the experience goes, here are a few links to my existing Facebook pages:

http://www.facebook.com/rohitbhargava (Currently my personal profile)

http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor (Currently my Facebook Author Page)

NOTE: I will likely come back to this post after several weeks and share an update on how the experience went - in case anyone is considering doing the same thing in the future. 

Update: Why NOT To Update Your Personal Profile Into A Facebook Page

Let's just say I wish I had done a bit more research on this process before taking the plunge to migrate my profile.  After having a few issues, I read these two posts which I highly recommend you follow the links to read right now:

• http://mashable.com/2011/03/31/facebook-profile-migration-warning/
• http://www.zeldman.com/2011/03/05/migrating-from-a-conventional-facebook-account-to-a-public-figure-fan-page-%E2%80%93-a-report-from-the-trenches/

For my own experience, there were a few things that I wish I had considered before which might have impacted my decision to migrate my page.

1. Facebook URLs don't transfer - One of the main reasons I wanted to change my profile to my page was so that I could use the URL I had registered as my public facing URL. When you convert your page, you lose the URL - a strange policy since anyone who has a profile and wants to migrate to page would probably want to keep any URL they have.
2. The "Facebook Suicide Moment" is painful - When you first migrate your account and it shows up, your profile is gone right away, but your new page has 0 likes. The immediate result is that you think you just killed yourself on Facebook and lost all your friends. Eventually after a couple of hours your friends come back as likes, but it's a traumatic experience - be warned!
3. Profiles can't be added to pages - Once you convert your account, if you then want to create a separate personal profile (as I did) then you will need to create a SEPARATE account in order to do that.  I wanted to keep all my accounts under one umbrella, and though I could create a new profile and then make that an admin on all my pages to control it centrally, it is still a unwanted extra step.
4. Friends can't be easily re-added to a profile - Perhaps the toughest thing about this migration, as Christina Warren shared in her post linked above is that you can't add all the friends that you want to because Facebook thinks that you are spamming people even though you actually know them.

So I am going to try and find a Facebook connection who can help me migrate my page back into my profile (I already submitted an online request).  After that, I will likely take the manual step of trying to reduce my friends on my personal profile to only family, friends and those whom I have met in person.  Wish me luck.

Final Update: How My Experience Ended Up (11/11/11)

After trying unsuccessfully to get my page converted back, I have moved ahead with my original plan.  So now the fans on my official Page have doubled and that is now going to be my page moving forward.  I created a separate personal profile and now have made that mostly private and am only accepting friend invitations there from family and people that I know in real life or have an actual personal connection to (rather than just a shared interest in marketing, for example).  Here are a few things I've finally learned about this process, as well as a few ongoing sources of frustration:

1. Page name is lost - I have officially lost my original URL that I had associated with my personal profile when that profile was converted to a page.  I am working through a Facebook connection to get it back, but in case you are very attached to the URL you currently have for your personal page, you may want to reconsider converting that profile into a page because you will lose that URL.
2. Friend network is tough to rebuild - You can add your friends based on Facebook's suggestion tool to your new personal profile, but after adding a few - you will continually be blocked because Facebook assumes that you are spamming.  The end result is that you may have to wait months to add people who you legitimately know because you can't send them invites and they don't realize that you are no longer friends and have converted them into "likers" of your page instead.  There seems to be no way around this. 
3. The "Admin" Hack - One workaround that you will figure out quickly is due to the fact that your profile that you now converted into a page will only let you log into the page and not add your personal profile to the same account.  That means you will now have two accounts, but the hack to get around this is to add your new account and profile as an adminstrator of any pages that you manage.  Then you can manage all your pages from your new personal account directly.

Ultimately, the entire experience of doing this was useful to get all my fans onto a single page, but has exposed some serious usability problems with Facebook when it comes to doing a more complex task like this.  That coupled with the near impossiblity of using Facebook to accomplish a simple task (such as letting any of your friends or family who live in NY know that you will be there next weekend) makes Facebook a major pain to use as a primary social network.  It is not surprising several people I respect like Chris Brogan are actively moving away from Facebook to Google+. One bottom line result of this entire experience is that I will likely start to do the same myself. 

How To Reward Customers Unfairly (And Get Away with It)

It is natural to worry about being fair.  When you have current customers and are trying to create promotions to lure in new customers, the last thing you want is for those people or organizations that you already work with or other groups of potential new customers to feel unappreciated or marginalized.  At the same time, you want to be able to offer the best incentives at any particular time that work for your business and not have to limit yourself.  So how can you get around this problem and choose to be a bit unfair … but still get away with it?

There are three basic models for unfairly rewarding customers that are being increasingly used by small business owners to face this challenge.  Here is a description of all three and how you might use each one to promote your small business.   

Tactic #1: The First Mover Reward

With this tactic you are setting up a promotion that will reward those who act quickly to get a specific type of service.  While existing customers might be able to take advantage of this, you can increase your chances of reaching primarily newer customers by choosing specifically where you will offer this type of promotion. If your business is focused on helping people to organize their garages and outdoor living, for example, you might consider offering a promotion specifically at an event like a Home & Garden show that mostly newer consumers who you have not worked with before would be likely to attend.  Then you can reward those who do sign up from that event and maintain your regular prices for the rest of your customers.

Tactic #2: The Random Reward

This tactic is self explanatory, but has the added power of engaging customers and potential customers with an uncertain outcome. Everyone loves to win something, but regardless of who wins the reward, you still have a chance to engage each participant with the opportunity to win. This could be something as simple as discounts for products, or more complex like a competition online to be randomly rewarded with some type of prize.

Tactic #3 – The Merit-Based Reward

More and more co-creation style competitions are being launched online where people need to share their best ideas in order to win some type of support or recognition. Doritos let consumers create Super Bowl ads to run on air, but unless you’ve got a few million dollars lying around you probably won’t be recreating that effort.  You might, though, be able to engage your customers and potential customers in an effort to share their best ideas on a specific topic that has some relation to your small business.  That could mean creating a question on Quora.com and asking consumers to answer it. Or creating a series of polls that customers need to answer in order to “earn” some type of discount or special offer. Once you have set some rules in place for getting this special offer through actions, you can follow through and only reward those who are the most engaged.

This post is republished from the original article I wrote for the American Express Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog (though sometimes I'm a day late!) - a featured series on ideas and marketing techniques for small businesses.

To read more articles like this, visit the "Small Business Friday" category on this blog.