Facebook Commerce is, we suspect, going to be a serious growth area over the next five years; the ability to integrate ecommerce with social networks will enable brands to build better relations with customers and take better advantage of social recommendation.

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. We worked with our friends at We Explain to make a video that aims to help retailers and ecommerce managers understand the basics of Facebook Commerce:

 

 

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Social Media can provide a very high return on investment but it can go the other way if treated with contempt; the trick to getting it right generally comes down to having a good understanding of who the people you are talking to are and how they expect to be treated. Getting it wrong is however pretty easy; all you need to do is employ the following four techniques;

 

1. Censor Barbra Striesland really effectively used this technique to ensure that everyone knew what her house looked like by trying to sue the photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million, citing privacy concerns, in an attempt to have a photo of her mansion removed a collection of publicly available photos. In this one stroke of genius Barbara's actions managed to get over 400,000 people visiting the site to view the picture over the following month and mass propagation of the image and the story throughout online media. It was so remarkable that the effect of trying to censor something and creating further exposure has been coined ‘the Striesland effect’.

 

What made this so effective? Essentially thinking in an old fashioned way and assuming that by bringing out some big lawyers and some big scary numbers would be effective against a mass of unregulated publishers who love to write in defiance when people to try to censor them.

 

2. React aggressively (even if you are in the wrong) If you want to empower organisations campaigning to change your business’s practices a really great way is to aggressively react against them and cause a media storm around your methods of handing negative PR. Nestle have recently managed to do this very effectively following a GreenPeace campaign against the use of deforestation-friendly Palm Oil in their products. The result was 1.5m views of the campaign video and 200k emails sent. Nestle was pushed to a point where they felt it would be more damaging not to do change their purchasing policies to ‘rainforest-friendly’ Palm Oil and made a statement of their intent to do so shortly afterwards. What made Nestle’s strategy so effective?

 

Nestle did two things exceptionally well; firstly they forcibly removed a campaign video from YouTube creating a news-worthy story about their aggressive censorship practices' which generated lots of publicity for the video causing it to be quickly propagated across the web. Secondly, they created a Facebook page where people were able to vent their anger publicly, and when users used Modified Nestle logo’s as profile pictures they stated that they would censor these user’s posts causing even more negative PR. 3. Bribe Sometimes if you need to do some serious brand damage, especially if your not the world’s most loved brand already, a good trick is to attempt to 'bribe' writers to give your products good reviews. Microsoft gave this a shot when releasing Window’s Vista to influential bloggers and giving them a top of the range laptop to help them decide what to write, when this raised criticism they u-turned and asked for the lap-tops back. The attempt to…

Many companies will have used a Twitter feed system to pick up brand mentions and respond to them if necessary and, in the main, this is a good and highly accessible starting point for Social Media Management. The next question you should ask is how much of your brand's content is Twitter based, how influential it is, and how it is being managed?

To answer the first part you can do a simple representative sample for your brand by comparing the volume of Tweets and Blog posts generated for your brand in one day.

As an example we compared Google Blog Search result volume with the number of Tweets generated for ‘Vauxhall’ on the 1st of May 2010. Vauxhall was chosen as it has not had any significant news or PR issues recently and therefore should represent fairly normal brand-mention volumes.

The results are as follows; Google Blog Search: 2,479 Twitter Posts: 164

The result resoundingly shows that the volume of Blog posts for Vauxhall are significantly higher than Twitter; for which the majority of Tweets were second-hand car adverts. Just give it a try with your brand and see what sort of results you get, it only takes a few minutes.

Admittedly it’s a very simple test however, it does show that Twitter publications account for a relatively small slice of online publishing, and although Twitter does produce some viral spread due its social-network model; very often Tweets link to external content like blogs, forums, videos or news sites. Although valuable in itself, Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg, and so if you really want to get involved you need to start talking to the wider online community. This could include engaging bloggers, using online PR techniques, talking to journalists and developing an official presence in key forums. Because of Twitter's API that makes it easy to …

Before social media grew in to the machine that it is today, brands developed well-defined systems to get the message they wanted heard to the people who would be talking about them. These methods were typically through liaison with press contacts, press releases or the use of PR agencies. With the expansion of social media came a huge expansion of the sources from which people are able to get information about brands and their respective products or services; the narrow and manageable band of contacts becomes unmanageable, and methods of approach suddenly got a tad more complicated. For many companies, the only real response to these challenges was to ignore social media and carry on as they were before; and if concerning stories sprung up in blogs or forums they would crank out a good old Press Release in the hope that it would squash the story, sometimes having quite the opposite effect by drawing attention to the very issues that they are trying to minimise. What working with social media basically comes down to is recognising the people who are taking the time to write about you, engaging with them in a slightly more personal way than you might a more commercial publication and sharing information about products or services that they might be interested in writing about. The key difference here is recognition and sharing; as they don’t work for a large …