Facebook has just launched the timeline for brand pages – expect alot of noise on this over the next few weeks.  The new design and functionality has created a completely new user experience and raises a number of questions to boot.  Here are some of the key things you need to know about the new brand pages:

New cover photos – As with individual profiles, Facebook brand pages will run with a full width cover photo.  This gives brands more space for messaging and opens up more creative opportunities.  Think of a static version of a banner on a website homepage…

Where has the wall gone? – It’s all still there but now you will find it tucked away under a sub menu.  The initial view provides highlights from the wall.  The  new layout might be confusing for users to find and browse the “wall” in the usual fashion.

Where have the apps gone? - Again they are still here but concealed within the menu below the cover photo.  This menu features a blend of media content (photos, videos, likes etc.) as well as icons which represent applications and tabs of old.

This menu can be expanded to view all of the applications and content that you would expect to see from the tabs menu in the conventional page layout.

New canvas size - applications or “tabs” will now sit in a new canvas size.  An expanded Facebook canvas was phased in last year but now this has been cleaned up removing the app activity down the right hand side.  Original size page tabs fit within this canvas but look more like photos from a gallery on first glance.  Applications can be accessed from a new drop down menu along the top of the canvas.  This extra, cleaner canvas will certainly allow  more creativity for app designers and developers…

No more landing pages or ‘Fan Gating’- that’s right, the removal of landing pages from brand pages will prohibit page managers from gating entry to the page with a “Fan Gate”.  Equally page owners will not be able to set a default landing “tab” to their brand page –  instead they will need very effective sign posting from the new menu system.

Private Messaging - Facebook have introduced the ability to communicate directly with fans of the page via private message.  This is a change of policy for Facebook who until now, had prohibited direct contact.

New Admin Panel - Page owners, managers and admin’s beware! Preview of the new layout below…

For more questions around the new brand pages you can try visiting the FAQ section on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/help/pages/new-design

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From one-man-bands to global conglomerates, social media provides businesses with a wide open window into the thoughts, opinions and behaviours of customers. Whether it’s a simple keyword search in Google or the deployment of a sophisticated tool, social media monitoring can add value to everything from customer acquisition and product development, right through to crisis management and customer service. At the end of 2011 Radian6 drew up a list of 100 of the best uses of social media monitoring. We’ve pulled out our favourite five.

1) Brand monitoring

Listen to what is being said about your brand. The good and the bad. Run keyword searches within social media platforms to identify where and when the conversations are taking place and build a deeper understanding of who the brand detractors and advocates are.

2) Competitor intelligence

Follow the conversations surrounding key competitors and look for opportunities to poach. By using keyword searches that associate negative words with competitor brands, bad consumer experiences can be tracked and intervened, turning disgruntled competitor customers into the next customer acquisitions.

3) Customer service

Keep a watchful eye out for customer issues. Publicly engaging with customers in real-time might seem like a high-risk proposition, but the value-add of converting an angry customer into a brand advocate in such a public sphere is an insurmountable marketing tool.

4) Crisis communications

A crisis can spread like wildfire across social media and the brand can often be the last to know. Actively follow the conversation to locate the source, understand the volume and scale of negativity and work to put the fire out. As FedEx recently demonstrated, when a video circulating a careless courier emerged, honestly and openly addressing the crisis is an effective way of restoring brand perception.

5) Product development

Find out what the customer wants. And give it to them. Online customer conversations can provide deep insight into likes and loathes surrounding products, while offering a means of beta testing and potentially developing new products. A great example of this is Vitamin Water, who crowdsourced a new drink flavour, not only showing its fan-base that it was prepared to listen to them, but it was prepared to act.

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Engagement is of paramount importance when it comes to getting it right in social media. Your contributions on social networks form the outward representation of your brand or company online and define how you are viewed by others.

Which is why effective and compelling engagement requires scrupulous planning and calls for careful consolidation of your overall social media strategy and content plan.

Three simple recommendations for successful engagement include:

1. Decide your online persona
Your outputs must correspond with your company or brand persona, which should be carefully considered and agreed before launching into online communications. Those engaging on your behalf need to understand and embody your brand or company’s social media personality, so that they reflect this in their tweets, posts and blogs. Bear in mind that social media often requires a different, or slightly more relaxed tone of voice.

2. Establish clear etiquette and workflow guidelines
This should be given careful consideration during strategy planning, however, it’s important to make sure that these rules are maintained and translated in your engagement on social networks. Consistency is key, particularly when you have more than one employee participating on your brand or company’s behalf.

Establishing a clear workflow for handling detractors is also something that requires careful consideration. Your employees need clear guidelines for responding to defamers, general criticisms and social customer service issues in an appropriate manner.

3. Listen & ask questions
Listening to your community can provide you with insight into the kind of engagement that will get them participating. Your followers and fans won’t appreciate it if you bombard them with irrelevant content, which offers no means of getting involved. Social media isn’t about shouting with a megaphone, it’s about generating a conversation, asking questions. If you don’t offer your fans a two-way dialogue then you are failing from the outset.

For further ideas and inspiration for engagement, we recommend a report recently published by Radian6, titled ‘30 ideas for your 2012 social media plan’.

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Online content creation typically falls to the marketing division of a business. Look beyond the four walls of communications, however, and therein lies a treasure trove of ideas.

From customer services to sales, each function is filled with insights into every corner of the business. Whether it’s the questions on the tip of customers’ tongues, or the biggest barriers to purchase, those insights form the basis of a solid content plan that can break down communications silos and tie directly back to business objectives. We’ve taken a look at three divisions rich with content for the picking:

1) Customer services

The customer services team has the most intimate insight into a business’s customer base. They hear the questions, concerns, aggravations and praise for products and services every single day. A coffee with the team will quickly help to identify the most useful tips and advice to base content themes around.

2) Sales

More than any other stakeholders, the sales team have a clear picture of the biggest barriers to purchase. They know the features and benefits that get customers on board and they know the bottlenecks that prevent deals from being closed. It is well worth sitting down with the team to identify the messaging that should be brought to the fore in content.

3) Human resources

While content is largely designed to attract new customers, it is equally visible to employees and prospective employees, who are arguably the most important asset of a business. The human resources team know which aspects of a business have the biggest appeal to candidates and the biggest impact on staff retention. Getting a handle on this information can again help to ensure content captures the most impactful messaging.

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1. Take it personally

Responding in the heat of the moment may be a very human thing to do. But, when acting as the public persona of a brand or a client of such a response is a sure fire way to get your arse handed to you by the social media community. Just look at the fallout from the Duke Nukem game launch #FAIL. Don’t take a minute to consider the implications of every public post you create.

2. Try and hide the fact you’re selling something.

Woody Harrelson’s ‘ask me anything’ (AMA) on reddit went disastrously wrong. The notoriously cynical and savvy Reddit community, soon sniffed out that Woody was on the sell and swiftly made the most awkward crowdsourced questions the most visible by utilising upvotes.

3. Don’t research your community before you start engaging

The Woody incident also highlights the next key step in ruining your social reputation. Woody’s promotional team were obviously aware that the Reddit community could be hugely influential and had the innate ability to create memes and make them popular in the wider press, but did not recognise that an AMA means ‘Ask me Anything’ rather than ask me only about my latest movie project. Woody’s people raised the ire of the community and there was really no way back from there. In the words of Redditor SailorMoonCake ; “Please inform the rest of Hollywood that Reddit is not a publicity outlet and that Redditors don’t tolerate this kind of crap.”

4. Don’t have any social media staff guidelines

Asda chicken licker. I’ll just leave this here. The man’s obviously an imbecile, but it does highlight the dangers of employees on social media and how if clear dos and don’t aren’t communicated to the whole company you’re reputation can take a battering.

5. Leave your social media identity in the hands of one individual

Finally PhoneDog, a mobile news and reviews company, found themselves forced to sue former employee Noah Kravitz. Why? Well, when Noah left Phonedog in 2010 he took his 17,000 Twitter followers with him, he’d earned them on company time and built up a valuable @phonedog following. Phonedog bosses hadn’t thought ahead of time and allowed him to develop his ‘personal’ account as if it was the brand’s. The $340,000 trial could have been avoided, but as it is it threatens to overshadow the company’s social identity. Type Phonedog in a Google news search. See what pops up.

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Shortly after my last post on Pinterest this insightful infographic circulated giving further evidence that the platform could really become a big player in 2012 – check out “is Pinterest the next social commerce game changer“

After making such a huge splash in the US last year (with over 31 million visits) it is only a matter of time before the platform starts to attract UK brands.  Whilst Pinterest rose to number 7 in the Hitwise top 10 social networks of 2011, this was for the US and there may be some way to go before the platform makes a full impact on the UK social media scene.

I was within one short click of buying a new watch from Amazon after following a board called “cool watches” on Pinterest and clicking through the shop site.  What put me off?  I was directed to the US site, all in dollars and whilst I pondered shipping details the moment was lost and I clicked away.  This got me thinking about the UK and when brands will start to adopt the platform and seek to reap the clear social commerce benefits.

This infographic delves into the Pinterest users and provides some interesting initial insight into the UK user base.  Critically though, as of December 2011 there were an estimated 200,000 UK users compared with over 12 million in the US.  Is there enough of a lure for brands quite yet?  My advice to brands would be to get curating, it is only a matter of time.

Find out more about Pinterest’s rapid growth in the USA

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It’s Valentine’s Day? Oh yes, of course! It’s also Day Two of Social Media Week and the line up for the rest of the week is looking fantastic. SMW takes place all over the globe, but there is a host of great events taking place in London town on a wide variety of topics, such as social content, social customer service and the psychology of online influence, to name but a few.

We are delighted to announce that immediate future’s fabulous Managing Director, Katy Howell, will be sharing her expertise this Thursday. Katy will be speaking at Email and Social Media: The New Rules of Engagement, Panel Discussion hosted by Constant Contact. This event is taking place from 11am to 1pm at the main Hub for this year’s Social Media Week London, The Design Council.  The discussion will centre on the importance of email and social within the overall marketing mix and how the channels can both be best leveraged to develop businesses. Katy will be sharing and debating her views on these channels, alongside a host of other great speakers.

Other members of the immediate future team will also be milling around towards the latter end of SMW. We will certainly be at the Londata II: Taming the firehose – putting data to work in social media, so do pop along and say hello if you are about.

If you aren’t able to make a visit to the Capital, don’t panic! You can still catch the events via live stream and soak up the social media knowledge from the comfort of your office chair or couch at home.

You might also want to download the SMW Mobile App so you can favourite events, speakers and venues, register for events and connect to content and SMW realtime infographics. Enjoy the rest of the week and don’t forget to follow/use the #SMW12 hashtag!

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Subsequently, I discovered this brilliant infographic in an Econsultancy article, which looks at the future of customer service and social media. The standout statistic here is that 62% of customers have used social media for customer service issues.  Still not convinced that you need to consider your social service offering? We are!

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Following on from my recent post, ‘Embracing Social Customer Service’, I want to offer a closer inspection of the ‘social customer’. The growth of social media platforms has been accompanied by the evolution of this new type of customer. An understanding of your social customers is an important step towards effective customer service on social media estates.

Social customers’ interactions with brands and businesses online are fundamentally different to those of traditional customers. They are often impulsive, driven by the emotion that the customer is experiencing at the time of posting.

A categorisation of the different types of social customer can help to effectively manage and engage in social customer service. This post identifies three of the most commonly seen types of social customer:

The Ranter

This customer is simply out there to complain. Most of the time, they are not seeking help, they are purely seeking attention from their friends or followers. They have had a negative experience of your brand or business and they want to warn others for this reason. Be wary of responding to this customer’s outbursts, as engagement is likely to escalate the situation. An attempt to convert may end in tears.

A word of warning: properly assess the situation if you are considering engagement. Check to see if the customer has any previous contact history logged in your systems.

The Attention Seeker

This customer wants your attention! So give them it, and fast. This customer has taken to social media because they are seeking an immediate response. It’s likely that they have been frustrated by your traditional customer service channels and they are now vocalising their problem on social media as a last resort. This may also be a modern customer who has previously used social media as a customer service platform – they have high expectations and expect your brand and business to deliver through social media. Don’t be frightened by this customer’s complaints, there is an opportunity for you to deliver great service and in turn create a brand advocate.

It is essential to understand the difference between The Ranter and The Attention Seeker to avoid sticky situations.

The Promoter

Don’t worry, it’s not all bad. There is also a social customer who supports your brand or business and they use social media to let others know that they have been pleased with the product or service delivered. Be sure to say thank you to this customer for their kind words and think about potential opportunities to create a super-fan.

Take action and spend time understanding your social customers. Make sure that agents participating in social customer service, are also au fait with the different needs and motivations of customers who are vocal in the social space – it will result in more effective social customer service.

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The new UK Twitter brand pages have finally hit our shores for those companies that can afford it.

Let’s put this out there, brands on Twitter still don’t have the flexibility the Facebook API allows. Twitter will keep a tight rein on what users can and can’t do and maintains a standard look and feel for the site. So what do the new pages allow brands to do?

Space for a branded banner below company profiles;

Area for a permanent tweet containing rich media or a promotion;

…and that’s it.

Twitter says that, brand pages now round off its offering for business. But, then Twitter would say that wouldn’t it?

WHAT YOU GET (according to the Twitter ad blog)

• Own it

Your enhanced profile page is completely public, entirely yours to brand, and accessible to every viewer. In addition, no other companies’ advertisements will appear on your enhanced profile page.

• Deliver results

Drive traffic around your latest ad campaign, product launch, breaking news, or other timely content by using your enhanced profile page to focus followers and non-followers alike on the Tweets that are the most important to you right now.

• Connect the dots

Want to integrate Twitter into other media? Now you can use your @handle to guide users to a richer brand experience on your profile page.

WHAT WE SAY

I’m being facetious, because you also get £25k of media spend with Twitter. Now, promoted tweets don’t have exhaustive proof of ROI, and while EA appear pleased with the results of their recent trial the wider jury’s still out on their effectiveness. Personally, I feel that promoted tweets and the brand page should be taken as a cost whole, branded pages might justify the financial outlay for an ad product that is yet to prove itself to marketeers and advertisers.

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