1. 500 “Liked” Page Limit

If you are one of those people who feels you should “like” each page you are being shared, you will be soon disappointed.

You can “like” no more than 500 pages on Facebook – which means you should be really selective in your “liking” habits.
Now, this restriction seems really weird as Facebook claim they are using members’ liking stats as the way to analyze and categorize the members: so logically the more things they like, the better. I hope this restriction will be removed with time.

2. Group 5000 Limit

The hugest advantage of a Facebook group over a Facebook page is that you can stay in touch with your followers more effectively:

• You can message all members all at once and these messages will arrive in members’ Facebook inboxes (unlike Facebook “updates”) – which means much more visibility.
• Besides, you are able to invite all members to an event in bulk.

However this advantage is removed once your group gets popular enough: once your group has 5000 members, you will NOT be able to invite the members of a host Group to an Event and you will NOT be able to message all of them in bulk.

3. Page/Event Creator’s Restrictions

As the page creator you should have the whole control over it, right? Wrong! Ironically, to access all the page or even managing options you have to assign someone to be an administrator (You as creator AND administrator can’t access those features)

These managing tasks include:

   1. Message all the page event visitors: as the Event creator and the Admin of a Fan Page, you cannot message your Event guests. Instead, you are obligated to appoint someone else to be the Admin of the event and have them message your guests-to-be.
   2. Adding “favorite pages” to this page: If you administer other pages (or have friends who administer Facebook pages), you can add (or ask your friends to add) your page to that other page “Favorites”. However if you administer the page you created, you won’t have that ability. So if you want to use the page you created, ask one of your page administrators to do that:

Source: The Search Engine Journal

Every time customers interact with your company, they have some emotional reaction to the event. While there are many, many ways to look at an individual’s reaction to a situation, the Temkin Group’s Five As model offers one way to think about it.

The Five ‘A’s represent a spectrum of responses that customers have after an interaction:

• Angry: Customers feel wronged by the interaction and will look for opportunities to tell other people (a.k.a. vent) about the situation and will try and stay away from the organization.
• Agitated: Customers didn’t enjoy the interaction and will think twice about doing business with the organization in the future.
• Ambivalent: Customers had no significant emotional response and remain as loyalty as they were before the interaction.
• Appreciative: Customers feel that the organization outperformed their expectations and are more inclined to do business with the organization in the future.
• Adoring: Customers feel like company fully met their needs and will look for opportunities to tell other people about the situation and will try to interact more with the organization in the future.

Here are some ways that you can use the Five ‘A’s:

• Training. If you teach all employees this scale, then your organization will have a common vocabulary for discussing customer reactions. This framework will help trainees gauge how customers would likely respond to situations and discuss what they could do to improve the customer’s ultimate emotional response.

• Coaching. Supervisors can ask their employees a very simple question after an interaction: “how do you think the customer felt about the call?” This can work for anyone that has customer interactions: phone reps, retail salespeople, cashiers, insurance agents, bank tellers, etc.

• Customer delight scorecards. Every time employees interact with a customer or make a decision, they can give themselves a score based on what they believe is (or will be) the customers’ most likely emotional response to their action:

• Angry (-3)
• Agitated (-1)
• Ambivalent (0)
• Appreciative (+1)
• Advocating (+3)

The total across these interactions and decisions represents a customer delight score. Employees can calculate this score on a regular basis (daily, weekly) and track how they are doing over time.

The bottom line: Are you creating angry or adoring customers?

I get a lot of emails asking  me to review their sites, blogs and articles. Almost every time, I end up giving advice that brings their quality from a negative to a zero. Which means, I’m spending more time telling people about what they should do to make their masterpieces bearable, rather than make it great! Here are 5 things you should keep in mind before throwing content out there:

1. Write with an objective

9 out 10 people will start to write about their how to groom their dog and end up talking about what a b***h their neighbour is. I’m not saying ‘love thy neighbour’ – but people – please focus on the topic!

2. No big blocks of content

This just makes everything harder to read. Break it up into bullets, paragraphs. You’re not going to run out of web space!

3. Compelling headlines

This is key- this is the first thing people are going to look at. Hell, even I review articles that have interesting headlines first and then move on to the rest!

4. Clean design

Keep your content design clean – make it readable. Don’t over underline, over bold, over color, go for readability vs looks. Keep in mind, design is not just a logo or color, it’s the sum total of presentation, color and copy which creates compelling design.

5. Review. Review. Review.

I said this once, and I’ll say it a 1000 times, review your work before publishing. You might say, it’s not a deal breaker if you’re writing about your pet cat and it’s litter on a personal blog  – but it is – it’s a deal breaker for yourself, when you revisit that piece of content a few days later and realize the mistakes you’ve made. I’ve done this enough times to realize to review. Heck – case in point – this article has not been reviewed AT ALL!. So go through it and see the number of mistakes you can find – and just think if the entire WWW was like this?

Remember a thumb rule – always write keeping in mind you’re addressing someones question. Don’t put out half facts, don’t put out incomplete thoughts, if you have nothing to write about, don’t fabricate things.

I been laughing so hard…i think I need to have my smile surgically removed!

When most people come up to you and say “what’s the strategy?” – do you tend to rattle off something in a seemingly ‘intelligent’ fashion so as show that you know what you’re talking about? Yeah, we’ve all done it; but what I really want to address today is – What is Strategy?

I would define strategy as “Making the right choices and setting priorities amongst a host of options.” Yep..that’s it. That is strategy. Sounds simple? But in order for you and me to provide any form of strategic input, we have to know what those ‘options’ are – and this comes from understanding the following:

• Deep understanding of your business (or Client’s business)
• Understanding your customers
• Understanding the competition
• Understanding business limitations

It’s only when you gather all these together and tie them into a neat little bundle, you’re able to talk ‘Strategy’

Inspired at some level by the ‘card distribution’ to folks (‘not known to you’ family & friends) you’ve never met and never wanted to meet, but you still had to. But be honest, it also applies to boring colleagues , angry old people, ‘blade’ friends, declining conversations with people you’ve met after 10 years without so much of a 5 second conversation, unknown people who walk up to you and start talking, people being overly doting and overly advising, overly bearing and last but not least – folks talking about their grandmother’s cooking with coconut oil.

Whether you love or hate her…a lot is being said these days about Lady Gaga and her team’s marketing genius, as evidenced by her rapid ascend to the top of the charts, her incessantly played tunes, and her ability to license her brand (and videos) out. Whether this so called fame is just a passing phase is yet to be determined. Nonetheless, whatever your opinion of her music and sense of artistry, there is something to be learned from her marketing prowess, and specifically from her use of social media to truly engage with her audience:

• It’s your brand..take control – or at least know how to execute yourself before directing someone else on how to do it for you: According to AdAge, all parties who work with Lady Gaga on her label, management and marketing teams cite Gaga herself as the ultimate brains behind many of her creative and social-media ideas and tactics. She regularly Tweets to her audience from backstage.

• Be exclusive. it works -Utilize a phased approach in your content distribution strategy:  “Bad Romance” debuted last November on LadyGaga.com before MTV or any other outlet – resulting in a Universal Music server crash, a week-long Twitter trending topic and a cumulative 136 million (and counting) views on YouTube to date, more than any other past viral music video. (OK Go’s “This Too Shall Pass”, which premiered this past Tuesday, currently counts 3.5 million views).

• The people make you - Accept and embrace that your brand – and its success – is dependent upon your customers taking a stake in it:  As noted by ChurchofCustomer, while some artists  protect their image by prohibiting recording devices during performances, Gaga instead bars professional photographers from capturing her performances, including one in late 2009 in Las Vegas.  She prefers to allow fans to record and distribute videos of her live performances on YouTube.

If nothing but a social-cultural commentary or example of how quickly the marketing machine can be figured out, Lada Gaga is also a reminder that it can pay dividends to be fearless in how a brand directly engages with and grows to understand its customers – and learns from both the hits and misses.

AND…get this… about a month ago Lady Gaga was named the Creative Director of Polaroid for their specialty Products! Why? Because she shares such a close relationship with her fans. As the Lady herself says:

“I am so proud to announce my new partnership with Polaroid as the creative director and inventor of specialty projects,” said Lady Gaga. “The Haus of Gaga has been developing prototypes in the vein of fashion/technology/photography innovation–blending the iconic history of Polaroid and instant film with the digital era–and we are excited to collaborate on these ventures with the Polaroid brand. Lifestyle, music, art, fashion: I am so excited to extend myself behind the scenes as a designer, and to as my father puts it–finally, have a real job.”

All things said – we’ll have to wait and see how successful these statements will be.

Social Media measurement just got a solid boost of steroids!…and it starts with Facebook and Omniture. The biggest challenge that marketers faced earlier was the lack of strong  analytics on facebook. This just ended up frustrating most and kept them at arms length to do anything serious on Facebook.

Omniture is now expanding its existing search management solution, and its SearchCenter Plus customers will now be able to manage and compare their spend on search engines and on Facebook in a single tool. Online Marketing Suite 2.0, as its called… will include Facebook social media optimization, integrating Facebook ad management with Omniture® SearchCenter®. With Omniture now providing deeper drill downs and better demographic insights, it’s now possible for advertisers to really present their ad to the right audience and further optimize at the segment level, using the existing familiar interface of SearchCenter®.

This unified reporting will help marketers more efficiently understand and respond to ad ROI and perhaps move from tactical to strategic use of social media marketing. What this will also mean is that Facebook will now be poised as a more mainstream platform for both B2B and B2C  brands to start interacting on and adds serious legitimacy to it as a marketing channel.

I remember a time when ‘hard’ work meant you’re shoe-in for a promotion at the work place. But in today’s evolving world – what matters more – Hard work or smart work? The obvious choice is smart work – but when does ‘smart’ start becoming ‘no-so-smart’ before you realize you’re back again in the ‘hard’ work category?

Nearly a decade ago; when I was in sales, my job was to go out and meet potential customers to help them with their wealth management. The old system was – make cold calls, fix appointments, meet them and close the sale. This had a conversion ratio of 1:10 – 1 conversion for every 10 potential customers I met. This included driving around in the hot sun waiting outside the clients offices and feeling like hell at the end of the day. Trust me, this is pretty much the order of the day at most sales organizations.

The new system was to conduct events – create catchment areas where you could address peoples’ needs about what you’re trying to sell. This increased the conversion ratio to 4:10. Not bad, but still not good enough. It was crazy enough running around organizing these events and everything else to get it going for you.

The ‘different way’ back then; especially in field sales – was to have people come to you instead of you going to them. Think lead generation, emailers, auto responders etc. The conversation ratio moved to almost 90%. Lesser travel, laser focused communication and better client relationship building.

Today things have changed, I’m sure what I’ve just written above may not be the most ‘different’ way to do things anymore, but I’m hoping this will serve as an example to get things going if you know you’ve done everything you can and still not making progress. Turn things on its head and look at it differently. That almost, always works. Don’t ever be afraid to stand out just because you’re trying something different.

1. Let go of your old beliefs and move beyond your comfort zone?
2. Be willing and open to re-think how you reason or change the patterns of behavior that create the obstacles that hold you back?
3. Evaluate the distorted perceptions you have of your limitations and re-visit what you’re capable of?

“Change. Put something in motion. Don’t stagnate.” – Words that we tell ourselves mentally hundreds of times in a day and yet; there’s always something there holding us back. Certain things that are unavoidable and certain other things that we’ve gotten so used to, it’s become part of our eco-system just to mentally survive on a daily basis.

I’ll be honest – I get bored easily with almost anything I do. My true purpose at one point was to bring creative excellence to the masses, but due to a few circumstances, that’s a road I didn’t walk down. Today, after almost 10 years when I look back… there’s a part of me; a big part of me that regrets so many things that I could have done, not because I couldn’t do it…but because I just chose not to. And there’s another part of me that knows in the last 10 years a lot of things have changed…a lot of good things have happened and I’m now in a much better position to maybe finally make that walk. It may not be the very same road that I envisioned a decade ago, but it’s a road that I find filled with purpose and renewed enthusiasm. Here I go…

..To the future!