Facebook “Ch Ch Changes”

Facebook “Ch Ch Changes”

David Bowie is probably looking at his Facebook news feed this very moment and singing this classic at the top of his lungs. I picture him saying “I thought I unfriended Prince after the ginkgo biloba incident” and “Why am I seeing ads about men’s makeup? That was only a phase.”  In actuality, I have to admit that's probably only playing out in my overworked imagination. But I’m sure many of you have noticed that Facebook has changed it’s news feed again and you might be wondering why.

The social media juggernaut is trying to design the perfect user experience. All the while attempting placate shareholders that require the business to find new, more effective ways to monetize their platform. This can be a tricky endeavor for a company that doesn’t charge a dime for usage. So the brain trust is in a constant state of tweakage. A little adjustment here, a line of code added there, and an algorithm overhaul, all designed to put the most accurate products or services in front of their customers...ahem...members. Here's a link to a video about the changes. http://vimeo.com/97740886

That’s right Facebook is learning. The reason your news feed if full of ads you actually like is because they want it that way. Every time you click on an ad or express interest in something that data is stored and your news feed adjusts accordingly. So if you don’t want to see ads about the top ten celebrity nose jobs, then I suggest not clicking on the ad. However, if you have charts and graphs that you constantly update that centers around sitcom stars plastic surgery procedures, then I say click away. Nothing screams “I need a social life” like a pie chart titled Calf Implants on Modern Family. In actuality, this pretty genius. The end goal here is to make Facebook the go to place for news and social interactions and the better they can make the experience, the more often you’ll return. 

A recent Mashable poll shows that 44.87% of users “Don’t Love It, But Will Deal With It”. My guess is that number changes over the next few months for the better. Meaning, you, me, and the 687 people in your friends list will slowly come around to "like" the experience. For any company their are two ways to market your business. The first is to respond to the market. Essentially a business owner takes a look around at what's going on in the world and responds to it by creating a product or service, or marketing a product or service in response to new trends. For instance, the click through rate is going up on Google Adwords, so you venture out and throw a couple thousand dollars at it to see if it works. Or you notice that more and more consumers are using alternative transportation to get to work so you open a bike shop. This is how most small businesses start. The second method is to create the market. The most cutting edge mega corporations do it this way. They predict what the consumer wants and then leads them in that direction. This is what Facebook does. In a nutshell they decided that their ads platform had to be cutting edge. So they decided the best way to do it was to launch a custom advertising platform and collected enough behavioral data to make it as close to perfect for business owners buying ad space. It's Google's platform on steroids. A business owner is only advertising to people who have already shown an interest in their product or service and now they're simply showing up as an option. Money well spent I say. 

Like most new things we're initially resistant to the change but rest assured you'll come around. Facebook ads aren't going away. If I look at it objectively why would I not want stuff in my news feed I'm interested in? Those Facebook execs are so smart. 

To Blog Or Not To Blog That Is The Question

It shouldn't even be a question, to be honest.  According to ThinkCreative, "Small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than small businesses that do not blog." While numbers usually lie, that's too big of a number to be totally wrong. What we've seen at E35 Creative is blogging went from something that those crazy artist types used to vomit their musings onto the intraweb, to being a useful tool for small business, to being a important part of the SEO puzzle, to not being an important part of the SEO puzzle, then back to being important again, to being the best way to get keyword rich content out on the web, and finally to actually being a very useful way to communicate with potential clients and customers. I know that's probably a run on sentence even with the commas. 

Yahoo for small business has compiled a bunch of statistics as to why  it's so important but I won't bore you with them all here. Just know that as digital trends are consistently in flux, often times driven by Google's algorithm changes, blogging is carving out a significant niche that looks like it's here to stay. 

Here's a few quick tips to make the blogging process easier.


1. Stick with what you know. We do a ton of research to be able to blog for clients, it takes time, but that's one of our services. If your a plumber blog about plumbing, if your a financial advisor blog stuff that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Regardless of what you do, you can find things to blog about.

2. Keywords matter. Make sure your content is rich with keywords. The search engine see that and it can positively affect your rankings.

3. Consistency is important. Your clients need to get used to seeing content from you. You will become the trusted authority. Also it matters for the search engines.

4. If you don't have time to blog hire somebody to do it. Over time it will pay for itself.

Original Content.... At Least For Now

At E:35 Creative  the question we most often get from potential clients is "Why does Google keep messing with my ranking?" It's a simple answer really, because they don't make a dime off of organic search results. At least up until this point they haven't figured out how to monetize them, therefor they'll continue to mix it up. "Well that sucks!" is usually the reaction. I usually follow with some ever-so-sincere response, wink wink, of how I empathize with them, and how they aren't the only business owner in this boat, and they just have to play the game. I tell them, that's why I'm here and I'm sure I can help. The reality is Google's schizophrenia keeps the phones ringing, even though SEO is only part of what we do.

I love the game to be honest. When I dream about Google's algorithm meetings, and I do it's an occupational hazard, I imagine a sinister group of a dark suit wearing executives sitting around a huge meeting table in a dimly lit board room, and they say things like "no it has to be more complicated than that" and "great idea that will really mess with people". It's probably not the way it all goes down but that's the movie that plays in my head.

All that drama aside, the latest Google updates have sent website owners into a tizzy and the best answer I have for them is "original, relevant content". The days of spamming backlinks are over. Although that still has to be part of your strategy. The best way to maintain and increase your ranking is to put out as much original content as possible, and the best way to do that is through social media. Your social activity is as important as breathing when it comes to Google's spiders.

Unfortunately the social world is ever expanding and contracting. What was relevant yesterday is not today. My advice is to start with the obvious platforms; Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+. One of the decisions that has emerged from one of those dimly lit Google meetings is forcing people and businesses to interact with Google+. Don't bother fighting it, just accept it. When you fight Google you lose.



Our best advice for a new client is this method: Update Facebook everyday, and link it to twitter, update Google+ everyday, blog once a week and put it on your website and social pages, write a press release every month, and put a video on Youtube once per month, Youtube is now a Google owned property. This is a tried and true method for moving your ranking. It won't happen overnight but after a few months it will. If you don't have time for all this, most business owners don't, you can always contact us. This is, after all what we do.

Your Faith and Business: Should You Wear It On Your Sleeve?

As a Christian business owner I have to ask myself how far out in front of my business card do I want to dangle my Christianity. There are a handful of questions that come to mind... Will wearing my faith on my sleeve turn a certain percentage of  potential clients off? Do we care? Do I expose myself to extra criticism when we make a mistake? Which we inevitably will.  Will we gain an advantage with Christian clients simply because we are like minded? Do we care? Morals and ethics aside, doesanything change during working hours as opposed to personal hours? Do we dumb it down between 9 am and 5 pm?

The questions really could go on and on but I'll stop there. The fact is that we could come up with a thousand questions and try to answer them individually but in reality we are only asking one: How "Christian" should I make my business? Here's the answer, drum roll please...... Uh, I don't know. I can't tell you that. That is between you and God. I'm not sure there's a formula.

I know a couple of business owners who have different takes on this. My good friend and mentor Mike who owns a very successful chemical application company and is as far out as he can be. From the name of the company to bible verses on their trucks, you know that this is a Christian company. He would say that over the years the his "way out in front" approach to his faith has certainly cost him customers but that God has blessed it so much it has more than made up for the loss. He would also say that his approach holds himself, his managers, and his employees accountable to a standard that is extremely high. If your going to be quoting Proverbs you better do world class work.

I also have a client that used to be a pastor and is now business consultant specializing in succession planning that doesn't nearly take that approach. He would never shy away from a conversation if one developed organically but he feels that he and his clients are best served by operating with honesty, integrity, and the highest level of client service. He feels these things will speak volumes into his client's companies as well as to them personally and if there is a time share his faith he will take it but he is mostly concerned about delivering world class service.

Here's the rub, both approaches are right and God honoring. Don't dismiss the fact that you have to get with God and figure this out for your company. There is no formula. This is a deeply personal thing God needs to speak into your heart.

Looks like there may be some face time in the near future.

Spokane Marketing, Spokane Marketing Companies, Spokane Graphic Design

How to Take a Social Venture to Scale

By Paul Bloom


For a social entrepreneur with an innovative solution, the holy grail is scaling it—that is, taking it to a level where the new approach operates efficiently and effectively to achieve significant mitigation of a social problem. Indeed, many are under real pressure to scale as their supporters, not unlike investors in commercial ventures, clamor for higher social returns on their investments. But for every Habitat for Humanity, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and Teach for America that has managed to scale, there are thousands that have stagnated or failed.
For the past several years, I have been studying the successful scalers to discover how they made the leap from local to large-scale impact. The answer isn't as simple as we might wish: their leaders have pursued a variety of strategies, and there is no single "best practice" formula for scaling a social venture. But the good news is that there are common elements—seven organizational capabilities that can be developed and combined in different ways to take a promising innovation to the next level. They are:
Staffing. It's hard to take a venture to the next level without knowing how to recruit, train, and retain talented people. Perhaps more than anything else, this has been the key to PlayWorks' successful scaling. It has figured out how to keep growing a staff of great "coaches" to supervise and manage recess in schools all over the USA.
Communicating. Susan G. Komen for the Cure has excelled here, getting the word out about breast cancer and persuading hundreds of thousands to support its work combatting it.
Alliance-Building. A great way to grow impact without a large organization is to partner with other entities such as community groups, governments, and corporations. KaBoom does this to build playgrounds in needy neighborhoods.
Lobbying. Here, a model is the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which has accomplished much by persuading legislatures, judges, and regulatory authorities to make tobacco products harder and more expensive for young people to acquire.
Earnings Generation. Increasing numbers of social programs grow with revenue generated by their own operations. Examples include the social enterprises in the "portfolio" of REDF (Roberts Enterprise Development Fund), which helps nonprofits create viable businesses (in food-service, property-maintenance, extermination, recycling, and other areas) to provide jobs to disadvantaged workers.
Replicating. Aflatoun has scaled its impact by making it easy for others to copy what it does, providing access to the curriculum materials it has developed for teaching children financial skills to franchise partners all over the world.
Stimulating Market Forces. The textbook example on this front is Fair Trade USA, which by creating a certification system for "fair trade" goods (that is, sustainably produced commodities like coffee, chocolate, bananas whose growers are not exploited by middlemen) gives consumers market information they previously lacked.
Does a venture need to have all seven of these SCALERS capabilities in place to have major impact? It seems safe to say that, in any scaling effort, improving at least most of them should be a goal. A given venture's "scaling strategy," however, can be thought of as the particular emphasis it puts on each of these capabilities relative to the others. And how does a given organization get that strategic balance right? It's a matter of careful thinking about the implications of the venture's theory of change and the ecosystem in which it operates.
Before even attempting to scale, the organization should be able to articulate and justify its theory of change—the logic model that shows how its innovation (whether it's a new product, new service, new way of harnessing human resources, new financing approach, new distribution method, or new legal or policy approach) contributes to mitigation of a social problem. If the innovation is a new pedagogical technique, it must be evident how it leads to lower drop-out rates, for example. If it is a new way to encourage childhood vaccinations, the innovator must show how it improves public health.
With the pathway to better outcomes clearly laid out, the next requirement is for the organization to study its ecosystem to understand how other resource providers, allies and rivals, forces and trends could affect its success. Depending on the "capital" (which can be financial, human, social, political, technological, or natural-resource capital) that others bring to the table, the organization can adjust the emphasis it places on building its own capabilities. Of course, ecosystems evolve, especially as economic climates and cultural norms shift, so this cannot be a one-time exercise.
A scaling strategy, in short, is a plan for creating a special blend of capabilities that fit well with an organization's theory of change and its surrounding ecosystem. Most social entrepreneurs want to maximize their ROI, even though the "social returns" they seek have more to do with jobs created, lives saved, or cleaner water. A well-thought-out scaling strategy is the best assurance —not only to them but to their many stakeholders —that they have the potential to make a real difference in the world.

Communication- Changing Forever

We normally don't consider 18-29 year old's a viable market unless your marketing energy drinks or a new way to download free music. It's not like there are too many 26 year old young men looking for marketing services or someone to build their new deck. This generation (the millennials) is living at home longer, going to school longer and not engaging in what even Gen Xers like myself would consider to be the adult norm, marriage, kids, house, car payment, blah blah blah. However while they may be slower to come around to adulthood, infuriating marketing firms across the nation, they are not that far off and the way they have chosen to communicate between each other and the rest of the world is altering the landscape of traditional marketing forever. Sound crazy, consider this, when is that last time you saw a young person pick up a phone book, or stop and write a number down off a billboard, or even watch a television commercial?

I don't want to say there isn't a genuine need for these things because there are quite a few generations ahead of these guys where this marketing is still relatively effective. Not nearly as effective as it used to be because even these preceding generation are adopting some of these communication mediums, albeit more slowly, but adopting none the less. The mediums include but aren't limited to: online video, text messaging, facebook, twitter, pintrest, blogging, and forums.

So the choice has to be made, do we choose to test the waters now on some of these non-traditional marketing ideas or do we let the wave crash on our heads in the next few years. There are so many opportunities to inexpensively make your marketing/advertising dollars work for you that doesn't include a $2000 monthly billboard.

Seek and you shall find.

spokane marketing companies, spokane website design, spokane branding companies,

Posted 11 June 2012 21:13pm by Patricio Robles 

Since going public in what may be remembered as one of biggest IPO disasters ever, Facebook has come under fire as industry observers question the efficacy of its ad offerings.
But is all of the criticism of Facebook deserved? No, at least according to comScore.
Despite the fact that a large percentage of Facebook users say they're ignoring Facebook ads, comScore says that it's "time to change the discussion on measuring Facebook effectiveness."
In a blog post last Thursday, it previewed some of its findings from its upcoming report, The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works. comScore's key claim: "Facebook earned media is having a statistically significant positive lift on people’s purchasing of a brand."
It came to this conclusion through a "test vs. control methodology", which the analytics firm believes is far superior to the surveys which have indicated most Facebook users are not paying attention to ads and marketing content on Facebook.
"While surveys can be useful in assessing ad effectiveness lifts across attitudinal dimensions such as brand awareness, favorability and purchase intent, people tend not to provide very accurate assessments of their own behavior. And their accuracy in recalling their own behavior over an extended period of time can be especially unreliable," comScore's Andrew Lipsman explained.
So do comScore's findings, which will apparently cast a more positive light on Facebook, trump all of the evidence, some of it anecdotal, that Facebook just isn't as powerful a marketing platform as many had hoped it would be? Perhaps, but there are a few key points worth keeping in mind:

• comScore is not a disinterested observer. As AllThingsDigital's Peter Kafka notes, Facebook is a comScore client and the two companies collaborated on this new report, as well as an earlier report on Facebook marketing. While it would be inappropriate to suggest that comScore and Facebook are cooking the books so to speak, there's no doubt that with so much money being invested in social, companies in the online advertising ecosystem have little incentive to say "It just doesn't work!"
• There is no such thing as earned media on Facebook. comScore's report focuses on 'earned media' on Facebook, but is there really such a thing? Brands invest a lot of money in their Facebook Pages, but they don't really own them. Through its EdgeRank algorithm, Facebook can control the reach of brand messages, and when Facebook makes changes, those changes can have a huge impact -- and not always for the better.
• ROI may still be questionable. Even if there are ways marketers can use Facebook to positive effect, brands will still need to look at ROI. After all, 'earned media' on Facebook isn't free. Case in point: of GM's $30m in Facebook spend, $20m of it was apparently going to its 'free' Facebook Page. Clearly, content doesn't create itself, and Facebook initiatives don't run themselves.

At the end of the day, the differing views on the efficacy of marketing on Facebook serve as a strong reminder that there's no substitute for defining, tracking and analyzing.
Facebook is changing, and will continue to change. Mobile usage is up, audience growth is slowing, and the company will continue to try new things. The only way brands can really make smart, well-informed strategic decisions around their Facebook marketing investments is to make sure they've defined KPIs for Facebook initiatives, are collecting the data needed to measure them and have staff diligently analyzing the data regularly to see if their investments are bearing fruit.
Brands doing anything less than this (like trusting a survey or a report) might as well flip a coin to answer the question, "Does Facebook marketing work?"

spokane marketing companies, spokane branding companies, spokane website design