Why Do SoMe Evangelists Recommend Facebook Groups For Big Brands?

(In case you’re wondering, SoMe is twargon for Social Media).

If you know me at all you’ll know that I have many and varied pet peeves and it really gets my goat* when I see instances of them. Like working on a big screen monitor instead of a laptop**, having the toilet paper roll fall on the inside – as is customary - at home, bad text etiquette, people who repeat themselves and well…general stupidity.  My latest pet peeve is social media evangelists continuing to confuse Facebook Pages with Groups. I was at an after-work knowledge share last week where an expert actually suggested Groups as a good idea for large companies (yep, LARGE). And I came across something else today suggesting the same. So I’m laying down the law once and for all in this post. Well, at least till Facebook comes up with another solution for company/brand/product pages.

So, what is a Facebook Page?It’s a relatively new product added by Facebook in November ‘07 to make it easier for companies/brands/products to connect with their fans and vice versa, and is viral in nature. Page status updates and new wall posts show up on a fan’s home page – any fan comments will be posted on the fan’s wall and can be seen by all their friends as will any event RSVPs. And the Page will show up on the fan’s Info page. And lastly, a Page is a separate entity and does not in any way reflect back on the Administrator’s personal account – although there could be professional repercussions at work for truly terrible Administrators…

What then, is a Facebook Group?A Facebook Group is like a club (public or private) that you have to audition for. As an Administrator of a Group, you can only send an email to your members if the Group has fewer than 5,000 members – making it unsuitable for big brands. A Group is generally missing many of the viral benefits that a Page enjoys. And of course, unlike a Page, it reflects back on the Administrator’s personal profile(s). There are also some social advertising restrictions that I’m not going to go into as I’m not big on social ads. Today. Of course, tomorrow is a brand new sunshiny day

One final comparison point – a Page can host apps while a Group can’t. And that pretty much seals the deal for me.

So if you’re a big brand or a mid-to-large corporation trying to connect with customers and prospects – please pleeeeease consider a Facebook Page instead of a Group?

- Peeved Parneet

* From my pre-Hegira days, meaning makes Parneet very annoyed or angry.

** No one at work has questioned this (lovable but quirky) idiosyncrasy yet – something I thank both my wonderful work colleagues and the credit crisis for.

(Bada)Bing! Demystifying Microsoft’s New Search Engine For Fellow Geeks

(Note: I also occasionally guest blog on FinTel Communications’ website. Click here to read this post on fintelcom.com)

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in Search Engine Land. Microsoft finally launched a re-branded Live Search called Bing and geeks everywhere have been consumed with comparisons between Google, Yahoo and Bing ever since. Microsoft held a widely heralded Bingathon or live infomercial on Hulu on June 8…to mixed reviews. It also spent a reported $80-100 Million on an ad campaign – an amount that seems egregious by any one’s standards, especially when compared to the $25 Million that Google spent on ads in 2008. Not to be outdone, CEOs Eric Schmidt (Google) and Carol Bartz (Yahoo) took turns at Bing-bashing, accusing Microsoft of focusing on advertising rather than tech improvements. And it only got better. Uber geek Michael Kordahi used a tool called BlindSearch for a more equitable comparison between the three search engines by removing all branding and logos and allowing searchers to vote on pure results alone. As of June 7, results showed that Google was in the lead, followed by Bing and then Yahoo. Caveat: these results are at best temporary as it is probable that they are skewed by the number of technologists testing out Bing for a while who may eventually revert to their original engine of choice.

This media circus left me more confused than ever, so I decided to do a little test of my own. I decided to test Bing against Google, my default search engine, on topics that were of immediate interest to me*. This is what I found:

• Bing: it has a simple, clean interface and makes it easy to search by related searches and past searches with a single click. Google offers related searches as well (but not past searches as far as I know) but it takes 2 clicks to get to them. Bing also gives the searcher the choice of searching locally or globally. In comparison, Google automatically gives higher priority to local searches and does not allow searchers to choose. While both engines allowed me to search for images, video etc., I liked that Bing made it easier for me to get to information on lactose intolerance* by categorizing it in buckets such as “articles”, “medicine” and “children”. I also loved the Travel category in Bing and have already started using it to search for flights, hotels and travel recommendations.

• Google: in addition to the above observations, Google offers cool gimmicky functionality such as Timeline and the Wonder Wheel – it’s hard to compete with that. Google searches in general are more real time while Bing’s results tend to be 1-2 days old and it tends to perform much better than Bing (or any other engine for that matter) on more generic searches. Google also has an extremely strong brand, tighter integration with social media and a reputation for innovation all of which make it a formidable incumbent for any challenger.

So what’s the verdict? While Bing may have a chance to gain search share from Yahoo, it is unlikely to erode into Google’s share significantly in the near term. It’s possible, even likely, that users will start going to Bing for travel ideas. If so, it may differentiate top travel aggregators such as Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Cheapoair from other sites even more** while potentially negatively impacting Yahoo Travel (currently ranked as a top travel aggregator). It may even encourage price competition amongst them although I wouldn’t bet on it. What remains to be seen is how Google reacts to this relaunch…and what Yahoo’s redesign will look like later this year when the media circus starts all over again!

- Parneet

* My search terms were lactose intolerance since I was recently diagnosed with the condition and Sedona hiking as I will be traveling to Sedona shortly and need to research activities.

** Bing Travel acts as an intermediary and funnels traffic to these travel aggregator sites.

Why Some Websites Perform Better Than Others

I had trouble sleeping again last night. I’d swear on a stack of Bibles that my friends don’t sleep – I was getting calls till 1am! And while this makes me feel very loved and I do love my friends very very much (two of them in particular – you know who you are you late callers you), it tends to interfere with my sleep. So I had trouble falling asleep last night. Naturally I turned to that faithful time-waster, Facebook to pass the wee hours. I caught up on my friends’ latest shenanigans and a funny TWI* incident. I read about Facebook offering vanity URLs to users to make it easier for us to share our Facebook profiles. And I started thinking about trends and how websites are evolving in order to be successful. Here are three trends in particular that I’m seeing in websites that perform well: 

1. Shareable – in order to grow their audience share, websites are turning to multi-platform strategies. They are promoting their content across other platforms such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter, YouTube and cross promoting these platforms on all online properties e.g. making it easy for fans to see content on Facebook and click through to the website from there. They’re also making it easy for users to share website content and their comments on it, with their friends and the public at large. As I have written before, most of us love to air our opinions and websites are making it easier for us to do just that with social media. Facebook Connect and the new Facebook vanity URLs are a case in point. Even movie studios are jumping on this bandwagon – Epix, the new movie site launched by Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM, will allow users to have a private screening of movies remotely with four friends and have a conversation via real time chat while the movie is playing (or streaming).
2. Customizable - this one is trickier. It is clear that website owners and publishers will have to make their ad serving more targeted in order to boost rates for online ads that have historically been priced much lower that print ads…and it is beginning to happen. Advertisers such as Volvo and Lionsgate are combining multiple formats such as video, gaming, photos and a Twitter feed in interactive masthead ads to increase ad appeal. Publishers meanwhile are using demographic data and lookalike modeling to serve the right ad to the right user. But this is not enough. Websites need to do the same for content and that’s going to take a lot longer to affect as it is highly dependent on back-end processes and infrastructure.
3. Actionable – this one is obvious and something websites have been working on since the 90s. How do you get your target audience to the website using the right call to action, and how do you keep them coming back. Are users exiting the site because they have found what they were looking for (and by the way are they converting?) or are they exiting from frustration or lack of interest? And so it goes.

And that’s quite enough thinking for now. Hope you missed me while I was away, be back soon!

- Parneet

* Tweeting While Intoxicated