Social Media Marketing

There have been a bevy of instant Facebook tab creators to hit the market lately. After wasting quite a bit of time fumbling around with some that weren’t effective, I thought I might as well document my findings to save others from making the same mistakes.

The tools I have outlined below are the best ones I have found that don’t cost an arm and a leg. Frankly, many of the new tools that have been created since the addition of iFrames to Facebook are on a ‘Freemium’ model and rival other tools that had cost thousands of dollars per month.

If you are among those looking for more comprehensive options, Social Fresh has started a shared spreadsheet that anyone can contribute to. There are also other options listed there.

Here are my top pics listed in order of how much I like them. continue

As both a Portland Timbers season ticket holder and a social media professional, I thought it would be a great idea to celebrate the Portland Timbers’ social media success.

As the Portland Timbers made the move up to Major League Soccer this season, the club faced a situation of how to market itself to not just soccer supporters, but Oregonian sports fans as a whole. Unlike the Trail Blazers, soccer (or football) is still considered by most mainstream sports fans as a niche competition. By integrating their large grass roots following with an innovative social media campaign, the team has been able to win over new fans while keeping their loyal fanbase engaged when they’re not chanting during the games.

Almost half-way into its inaugural MLS campaign, the team finds itself having won over many hometown supporters in terms of both their play and social media marketing activities. Out of the 18 MLS teams, the Timbers Facebook Fan Page currently rank 7th in terms of Facebook ‘likers’ which shows the support of the Rose City!

Integrating Traditional Media
Driving around the Rose City prior to the new season, Portlanders could see a number of Portland Timbers billboards. Portraying a wide variety of Timbers fans, the billboards were a huge success. The Timbers were able to make the billboards ‘social’ by creating a contest in which every fan could get their photo taken with the famous Timbers axe. These were then posted online and the online community voted for their favorite. This type of promotion shows how social media and traditional forms of marketing can be integrated for optimum results. continue

It is never a bad thing when great work is recognized.

Bonfire was thrilled to receive a nomination for the 2011 ‘Best ROI Under 25K’ award at this year’s Social Media Awards in Portland, Oregon. We were surprised and delighted when host Daniel Baldwin called our name as the winner!

The winning campaign involved Gresham Toyota, a long-standing client and one of the top Toyota dealerships in the Pacific Northwest. In an industry known for pushy salesmen and “hard” selling, we were able to take a step back and highlight what made Gresham Toyota stand out from other dealerships: outstanding, pressure-free customer service. We built an engaged community, turned existing customers into brand advocates, and increased inbound sales calls by an impressive 600%. We were especially pleased to be receiving an award in the “Best ROI’ category, illustrating our commitment to outstanding business results for our clients. Read the full case study to learn more.

If you are ready to light the fire, contact Justin Albano, Bonfire’s Director of Business Development today at JAlbano@bonfiresmm.com.

This post started out as a tribute to May Day – searching for creative ways labor unions and anti-union supporters were using Facebook. I had recently read an article about how Facebook could potentially REPLACE labor unions and excitedly went to work looking for well-organized, active pages. What I found instead was a handful of pages that seemed to have little in the way of followers and even less interaction. So, I changed the topic of this post to covering politicians and political groups that DO have a following on Facebook. Below I have outlined the top US politicians on Facebook and what we can learn from their pages.

Union Woes Continue on Facebook

If there ARE active labor union themed pages out there, they are hidden deep within Facebook’s inept search function. I was able to find this page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Union-Labor-Works – one of the few union pages I could find with more than 10 fans. The page had only one wall post and 233 ‘likers.’ There were no custom tabs and I could find very little information about the organization. No photos, no videos, nada. There WERE active groups and events surrounding union topics and perhaps these Facebook tools work better to provide an on-line rallying cry. continue

Find any great April Fool’s pranks on Facebook last week? I had some difficulties spotting them. I was hoping to report on brands playfully posting outrageous updates, wacky profile pics and basically playing their community for fools.

One of my clients did have some success with this April Fools prank: The Mauve Power Ranger! (Image below) The community LOVED it and engaged with the Facebook update throughout the day.

Pranks aside, what I did find on Facebook last week was an array of businesses attempting to engage. Looking for the most creative uses of the coveted 520 pixels on a tab, I started with allfacebook.com’s most ‘Explosive Facebook Pages’ of the week. I figured that Facebook pages quickly recruiting ‘likers’ must be offering up great content. This assumption was proven to be incorrect with just a few exceptions.

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As a professional who has been implementing campaigns in Facebook for clients over the last few years, I know one thing to be true: change is coming. If you learn to deal well with change, chances are you’ll be able to bypass the frustrations with Facebook that many developers and marketers experience. As of yesterday, all Facebook pages now reflect a new lay-out and offer users additional functionality . I’ve been eagerly anticipating the move to allow iFrame functionality on page ‘tabs’.

Facebook has been promising this feature to developers for months and I had grown skeptical that they would ever make it work. The issue is that in order to create an interactive experience on a page tab you were limited by FBML, a bastardized mark-up language with limited functionality. Common scripting languages like Javascript wouldn’t work on Facebook tabs. This meant marketers had two options: 1) use a ready-built application that could do the job but offered little or no customization or 2) pay a company thousands of dollars to create one for you. After some testing, I can assure you THAT has all changed. continue

Bonfire Social Media recently conducted a survey and there was one stat that really stood out. A whopping 94% of businesses surveyed felt that adding social media to the marketing mix would help meet overall business objectives. That was expected since social media has become THE marketing buzz word over the last few years. The shocking part was that 68% of those businesses neglected to allocate resources to social media. So many businesses completely get the value of social media, but haven’t made the move to put their money where their mouths are.

This article is for those who recognize the value of social media but due to lack of time, knowledge or fear have refused to step-up and commit to implementing a social media campaign. continue

by Lisa Peyton, VP Bonfire Social Media
Deals. They are everywhere these days. With our economy in a serious recession, consumers are laser-focused on getting the most for their money and EVERYONE loves a great deal.

With the advent of location-based applications like Foursquare and Facebook Places, deals are becoming more relevant than ever before. The ability to geo-target a consumer walking into your store or down your block is a marketing first so it’s not surprising that many platform developers are jumping on the ‘location-based’ bandwagon.

All the hype surrounding these new tools makes it difficult for business owners to make informed decisions about where to put their efforts. So let’s examine the facts and compare some of the more popular applications side by side.

I chose to report on the most popular applications for location-based deal creation as well as those I have the most experience with. These include Facebook Places Deals, Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp. I implore readers to comment with any information about additional platforms they feel have offered value to their business. continue

By Lisa Peyton, VP Bonfire Social Media

Let me start off by announcing that none of the platforms mentioned have compensated me in any way or asked me to promote their products. I simply hoped to find a good tool for a reasonable price that would allow me to track metrics associated with campaign goals. I would also like to add the disclaimer that with the dozens of great tools available, there was no way to include them all. If you have experience with a great tool, PLEASE SHARE with the community by commenting on this post.

The information provided on each tool below is only PART of the equation when searching for a good social media monitoring solution. The MOST important question that should be asked is – what do you need to track and why? Most tools out there will report on endless amounts of data; the real trick is finding the tool that will report on the data you need to determine if campaign goals are being met.

Goals

The first step to finding a great tool for my client was taking a look at campaign goals. The primary goals included growing their Facebook fan base as rapidly as possible (BAD GOAL) and tracking – that is, which social media platforms and influencers were the most active for their brand terms. A good goal is measurable and time-sensitive, but not many clients come to the table armed with goals that include this level of detail so I made a few changes and came up with these working goals:

• Grow Facebook fan base by 100% over the next 3 months
• Increase overall fan page interactions by 100% over the next 3 months
• Identify the most active social media platforms for brand terms over the next 3 months
• Identify the most influential and active brand advocates on social media networks continue

For the first time, social media platforms were included in recent reports on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The platforms included Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube. ForeSee Results recently released their Annual E-Business Report that  highlighted the surveys key findings. continue