commbasics

...if your content is crap it doesn't matter how much you spend on social media, unless people find your content amusing, useful or thought provoking, NO ONE WANTS TO READ IT! With all the negative feelings about Facebook in the marketing communications industry, I gotta say: Facebook has been doing great by me. The big meme blasting the social network recently has been the video purporting that if you pay to boost likes they are probably fake. Then came the fashion magazine magnate who spent tens of thousands of dollars on Facebook advertising and got zero return.  Finally, marketers are pissed that Facebook is downgrading organic feeds. The problem with all of these complaints is the fact that if your content is crap it doesn't matter how much you spend on social media, unless people find your content amusing, useful or thought provoking, NO ONE WANTS TO READ IT!  What marketers forget is, before all this failure of their social efforts, was an uprising of users who ...

Five years ago I threw out a statement in a blog about how Facebook gets content, that caused a bit of a stir.  I said, “ Advertising doesn't work the way you think it does.”  No one commented on the focus of the post, just on that statement.  They didn’t like it.  They were mostly advertising people and a few B2B marketers .  A few things have happened in 2014 that makes me want to restate my position (not change it) and get a little deeper. Advertising does not work the way you think it does, especially in the 21st Century .   In the “Facebook Fraud” video, by Derek Muller of the science blog Veritasium, Muller makes the claim that pretty much all the business engagement you get from Facebook is bogus.  For the most part, he’s right because most people use Facebook as though it were a magic marketing box.  They believe that all they have to do is plug in pictures and content about their product and services and the world will be be...

There's a change coming to your news feed on Facebook .  Boring content will be relegated to social media purgatory . Users should be happy about this, but companies using the social network to promote their company may be seeing failure in their content marketing . It's been a poorly kept secret that Facebook games its Edgerank algorithm to favor companies that pay to promote content, but some companies have been able to get around paying for play by swamping their feeds with a constant flow of content, that is not only self serving but boring.  Now Facebook is saying if everyone is ignoring your spam, then they aren't going to let it rise in users newsfeed to any level of visibility. That's not just true of companies, though.  The biggest criticism of Facebook is that people posting pictures of what they are eating or thinking is useless.  I've been seeing complaints lately of people saying they aren't seeing posts by friends and family...

Just read an interesting post in ReadWrite about Mark Cuban deciding to abandon Facebook because of the algorithm change forcing corporations to pay exorbitant fees to get play on the social network.  Frankly, I think he's wrong to do it, but Facebook is finally doing something right. The great thing about Facebook, as opposed to Google, was that companies could get a lot of good exposure if they could get their customers to talk about what they thought about products.That's why I was an initial FB booster rather than press releases on Google  as a means to reach an audience. It was true public relations, not companies gaming the SEO of Google for a higher page rank.  In the beginning, it worked well.  Then companies got lazy, and so did Facebook, by creating corporate pages and finding ways to game the community attraction, just like Google allowed.  I was really getting sick of having to completely reorder my FB feed to keep the crappy fa...

 Today I... Helped a young entrepreneur in Qatar refine his executive summary on a social media app designed to help charities raise money. ( Linkedin ) Conducted a staff meeting ( Skype ) and reviewed documents and reports with the team in Boston and Austin ( Dropbox ) Encouraged a young friend in Washington state who was in a sudden moment of crisis. ( Facebook ) Finished editing a series of videos to help local voters work their way through the California ballot without using divisive campaign rhetoric. (Youtube) Helped someone adjust their security settings on Facebook so she wasn’t blasting everything about her life to everyone on the web. (Facebook) Suggested several candidates for a senior communications executive to a major semiconductor company identify. (Talent.me) Put the early workings together for a fund raising project to help teacher take care of their cars. (Causes.com) Set up a video channel to broadcast my daughter’s wedding to people who cannot attend. (Ustre...

Continuing on with our discussion about good content, I've come across some fascinating data regarding how customers in the world of semiconductor design are consuming it and what it means for social media.  Let's start with a poll taken by a company I've been consulting to in recent weeks. The company wanted to get some attention from a select segment of customers.  The company estimates that their entire customer base consists of a few thousand people worldwide and they only need to reach a small part of that to be successful.  So they were looking into ways to best reach them.  Good content was a given in their estimation, but how to create that content and how to deliver it most efficiently was the question.  They had an assumption on what would be the best path that I questioned so I asked them to do something: talk to your current and potential customer about where they get their information. I've asked my clients to do this for many y...

There was a significant kerfuffle last week as General Motors' pulled their advertising from Facebook, with prognosticators pointing to the failure of Facebook as a marketing tools.  Having been recently in the market for a new car, and having bought a GM car in the end, I can say with certainty that GM's use of Facebook advertising really sucked.  And Ford's was much better. Once I started online research for my car I started noticing ads for car manufacturers popping up on FB.  I noticed that GM ads were pretty standard.  Essentially, they said, "buy our car."  I was not impressed.  Then there was this one ad I found that didn't even mention who it was from.  It was a link to an article about the raw materials that go into electric vehicles.  I was considering EVs so I clicked on it.  It took me to a another manufacturers site, but not an ad. it was actually an article about the raw materials used in EVs. ...

My Brit pal and partner in "crime," Peter van der Sluijs just did a brief post on whether "old web is dying."  His post was actually referencing a similar piece by his social media consultant Brendan Cooper  waxing wistful over the death of the freewheeling (and free) social web. There have been several much more hyperbolic articles on this over the past few months (and I've been waiting for the right push.  This was it.) about how Google and Facebook are doomed; about the corporational takeover of the web; about how it's all falling apart, blah, blah, blah.  It was actually nice to read a couple of reasonable view about how things are changing.  I especially liked Peter's pithy assessment: "It’s easy to hyperventilate about the next big thing and whether or not Blogs / Twitter / Facebook are too yesterday for words.  If you do that, you miss the big picture." That, in a nutshell, has been the problem with mo...