Photo by ToastyKen

A cursory glance at the web sites of these fan purveyors should offer a clue. They look like they were put together in about fifteen minutes. Here’s a direct quote from fansandinvites.com, whose tagline is ‘We deliver results’.

‘If you are looking for Facebook likes/fans from people who are of a certain age, gender, live in a specific state or have particular interests; our type of service is simply not for you.’ You have to love that. In other words, they deliver people who are, um, alive. Other than that – it’s anyone’s guess.

Facebook marketing is based on a certain fair equation: If you offer people something they’re legitimately interested in, they’ll ‘Like’ your brand in return. That might be your products, your green environmental record, your fun polls, contests and games on Facebook, the chance to express themselves, or any combination of these. You give something to get something. In return, you get an audience that will help grow your brand.

Even a Facebook ad is an offer that’s directed to you based on your own personal preferences. But when you buy fans, they could care less. They didn’t get there because they were interested – they were simply directed to your page. Does this sound like a smart way to build a real community to you?

There’s a line in a song that goes ‘He’s got the best friends money can buy.’ I guess that can apply to social media now as well, if you choose to go that route.

Photo by Addison Berry.

Beyond just Facebook and blogs, there are a growing number of paid products that let you dig about as deep as you like. Radian6, for example, offers real-time social listening. You can create brand profiles to view sentiment, share of voice and other data across the entire social web, including posts and comments in micromedia, online news sources and publicly searchable FB pages. If you like, you can even view individual Tweets.

The capabilities provided by these cutting-edge social listening tools to measure online engagement is impressive. New competitors like Scout Labs, BrandWatch, Meltwater Buzz, and even the venerable Webtrends are all worth looking into. Because if anything, social media has improved our ability to gain greater market intelligence.

Correlating social metrics with other marketing measurement need not be mysterious, once you’ve determine your specific goals. You may not see a 20th century ‘coupon code’ or URL track-back, but if you ask the right questions, you’ll be able to assess performance of your social investment in the same ways you evaluate other marketing tactics. This means not just ‘social return’ – more fans and followers – but also measuring against key objectives like lead generation, inquiry, revenue, and even market share.

Here’s the bottom line: Today ‘lack of ability to demonstrate ROI’ is no longer a reasonable excuse for not investing in social media marketing. And if you’re still making that excuse, your brand will soon have a hard time measuring up to the competition.

Photo by Casey Marshall

Thanks to Twitter and dozens of other online sources, news has become instantaneous. It’s no wonder newspapers and magazines are rapidly becoming irrelevant. Why should I wait until the next day (or week) to find out about what’s going on in the world right now? All I have to do is look online. This is why the SF Chronicle just offered me 52 weeks of Wednesday through Sunday home delivery – for $20. Call me a Luddite; I took it.

As the world turns to the web for information, community, research, shopping and more – brands are discovering that customers bring new expectations with them. At the core is this precept: if they have a question, they don’t expect to have to wait for an answer.

That means when someone posts a query on your brand’s Facebook or Twitter page, they expect a reply in very short order. The younger someone is, the more accustomed they are to instant response. So if you want to build a community including younger brand evangelists, you need to live in the same world they do.

Leading consumer brands have adapted to this brave new world quickly. They’ve created teams dedicated to social media that are very adept at posting ‘consumer friendly’ content, and rapid responses. They also understand that the line between marketing and customer service has blurred. Most brands, however, are still on the uphill side of the learning curve.

One thing’s for certain: The notion of getting back to a potential customer in a few days now means the customer won’t be there waiting.

Photo by James Cridland

As Facebook zooms past the half billion members mark, chances are this will only become an even wider ratio. For brands trying to do their best on Facebook, this can be somewhat daunting. There are almost always questions that arise when you’re constantly updating a page for your business there. And as everyone knows, trying to get hold of a real human being at Facebook is like trying to find a chicken that speaks Swahili.

So here’s my question: If you were Mark Zuckerberg, what would you do to improve customer service?

Photo by Brooks Elliott

Currently there are 4.7 million monthly active users of Android’s Facebook app and 56 million using the FB application for iPhone. But these numbers don’t reflect use of the numerous 3rd party social network apps available for mobile devices. Mobile browser use on Twitter and Facebook had triple digit increases in the past year.

So the real question is: Have brands caught up with the convenience and portability of social networks? A review of some of the Facebook pages for the brands I’ve ‘liked’ highlighted the need for thinking small when it comes to social marketing.

Regardless of brilliantly clear graphics and ease of use, social network pages on mobile devices are real-estate challenged. Users multi-tasking between email, games – and yes, even phone calls – are quickly distracted. So it’s critical that your brand’s Facebook, Twitter and other social pages look as good on mobile devices as they do on the big screen.

The mobile experience also underscores the fact every moment matters when brands step into social conversations with their fans. You have mere seconds to engage your audience. The discipline to ‘be brief, be bright and be gone’ is paramount. Because even if you’re working on a large screen right now, there’s a good chance your target audience is looking at something a lot smaller.

Photo by jasonlam

Recently, there’s been a good deal of news about companies paying bloggers to say positive things about their brands. Corporate Eye had this to say: ‘Sponsored reviews, paid blog posts, sponsored tweets and more are not new to the social web, and whether you like them or not, they can be a cost effective way to generate online buzz and word-of-mouth marketing.’

And now there’s a post on Mashable about Virgin America offering free airfare to Twitter influencers. Call me crazy, but this trend feels a lot like something that could eventually kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

The reason people read blogs posted by individuals – rather than those from corporations – is because they believe the opinions are independent. Like the old Billy Joel song says, it’s a matter of trust. In fact the entire social media premise is built on the idea that people are saying positive (and negative) things about products and brands – because they really feel that way about them.

If the equation is corrupted – if it becomes commonplace for influencers to be paid by brands – then the whole model loses credibility. And people will quickly catch on that there’s no reason to believe what you read on a blog or a Facebook page anymore, because it might simply be a paid endorsement.

Fortunately, the online world appears to be pretty good at evaluating honest content. Which means that shameless endorsements are often called out for being just that. It’s one thing to write a post and acknowledge that you’re being compensated. It’s quite another to leave that part out.

If ‘sponsored reviews’ are indeed here to stay, let’s hope that the authors have the good sense to offer full disclosure. Otherwise, people will start to view the entire social landscape as one great big piece of advertising.

How deeply has your company embraced change?

Apple began as a computer company. They made easy to use, elegantly-designed desktop and laptop models. They had incredibly passionate brand evangelists. They had an operating system that almost everyone recognized as superior. But in spite of all this, they never managed to get more than a very small percentage of market share.

So they changed their business model. They invented a new kind of portable music device. And they decided to get into the music business – because of the opportunity created by iPod sales. They sold over 250M of them, and they made a fortune on iTunes sales. But they didn’t stop there. Next up was a smart phone so advanced it took competitors years to catch up. And even the newest Android phones have trouble keeping up with the iPhone 4.

The point is, Apple could have always been a small, well-run, successful computer company. But instead they chose to move into other product and business lines. And as a result, Apple is now worth about $200 billion, and Microsoft is just behind that, at $197 billion.

In my own company, we decided in 2008 that there was more potential in social media marketing than in traditional advertising. So we decided to learn everything we possibly could about best practices in the social arena. We spent hundreds of hours Facebook, Twitter and other sites studying what works best, and what falls short. It’s an ongoing education, and we also learn something valuable with each new project.

We tell our clients – you have to give your brand evangelists what they want. Even if that isn’t exactly what you’re offering today. It worked for Apple, and it will work for your company, too. Innovation is the key to leaping right over your competitors. No matter how big they may appear right now.

How's this for brand allegiance?

It wasn’t very long before this page had well over… a million fans. So what did Coke do? The smartest thing of all. They made Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski part of their social marketing team. And today that same page for Coke has well over five million people who say they ‘like’ Coke on Facebook.

Your brand should be so lucky right? But I think there’s a larger lesson here. Every brand has devoted fans like Mike and Dusty out there. We sometimes call these people Super Evangelists. They constantly tell people they know about their passion for certain products. (Before the advent of social media, this was of course known as: word-of-mouth.)

But today, thanks to social networks, the vast majority of personal recommendations are no longer spoken – they happen online. And what’s remarkable is how many people there are just waiting to help promote your products and your brand.

All you have to do is provide the tools to do it. But, the amazing thing is, some brands still haven’t figured this out yet. They’re stuck trying to wait out the recession – as if some stroke of magic is just around the corner that will help move the bottom line. Meantime, all the leading consumer brands are practically falling over themselves to let their Super Evangelists do what the do best: promote their products on social media.

They figured out that today it’s more important to empower brand evangelists than it is to spend money on advertising. Why? Because someone will always listen to another consumer before they’d respond to something from the company itself.

The essence of marketing hasn’t really changed. It’s just the methodology that’s been revolutionized.

Photo by db*Photography

A fellow marketing professional stopped me in my tracks recently when he casually mentioned that he spends a lot of time these days talking clients out of social media.

After seeing my puzzled reaction, he quickly added that he understood just how important and effective it could be. However, his clients weren’t willing to put any real funding behind it. And when that’s the case, he felt no social media marketing was better than bad social media marketing.

The social channel is clearly one of the most effective new marketing tools to come along in recent history. As true believers, there’s the tendency to want everyone to jump on the bandwagon. But my friend makes a good point.

Devoting smart thinking, committing time, energy and, yes dollars, to a real program are required. Otherwise your efforts can be seen as an afterthought. In other words, you need to do more than slap a Facebook page together in order to build any kind of real, growing community. But is not doing anything really the best alternative?

There’s only so long that any brand can wait to develop a viable presence on social networks before they become notable for their absence. Of course, a half-baked, toe-in-the-water approach reflects poorly on any brand. There are only two reasons why that happens: The first is the aforementioned lack of financial support. The second is a lack of understanding about the category.

If you aren’t ready to dive into a professionally-executed social marketing program, you should at least invest the time and effort to become better educated.

Customized training for you and your team can help get your arms around social branding and answer the important questions: What are my competitors doing well here? What best practices are other brands using that can help my efforts? What kind of budget is needed for external development and internal support? How can I turn the fans who ‘like’ my brand into paying customers?

A small investment in solid training can help you develop a much better understand about why social marketing is as important as it truly is. And as that spreads through your organization, before you know it you’ll have a real budget and the opportunity to work with real pros as a result.

As a Russian proverb says: “There is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not finding out.”

Photo by Matt Lilek.

There have already been many reports of people finally saying ‘enough’ and deleting their Facebook accounts. Is this the beginning of a new trend? And what does it mean for brands devoting larger portions of their marketing budgets to social media?

One thing is certain: people aren’t going to be spending any less time online. So if they aren’t on Facebook, they’ll be somewhere else. Which is why creating a microsite devoted to fans of your brand makes so much sense today.

Take mystarbucksidea.com as an example. Stated mission: ‘To help us connect with our customers by co-creating the future with them.’ It has four basic components: Sharing – where community members post ideas for Starbucks. Voting – where you can vote for your favorite ideas. Discussion – community members interact with Starbucks employees. And finally, See (my favorite) – where everyone gets to see the best ideas ‘in action’.

This microsite received about 75,000 ideas from customers in its first six months of existence. And the Starbucks page on Facebook currently has over seven million people who ‘like’ the brand. That’s a lot of support, no matter how you take your coffee.

We like to call this kind of microsite a ‘clubhouse’ for fans of your brand. And what could be better than a clubhouse where everyone’s encouraged to contribute new ideas? Wouldn’t that make you feel better about almost any business you can think of? And isn’t that the essential point of social media marketing?

As Facebook becomes a bit too rigid (and commercial) for some, there will be a surge in branded microsites devoted to fans in the days to come. As always, the best ideas will win. No matter where they come from.