Life as a Facebook fan page master can be tough. Learning the functionality and navigating many application choices requires a great deal of patience and gumption because there’s no right or wrong way to manage your page.

There are tons of helpful blogs out there that list helpful apps and tips, but this is not one of them. Instead, I offer help in answering a tougher question that we face:

“If I’m the voice of my organization, what the heck do I post and say?”

The answer lies in:

1. Understanding your audience
2. Using your brand as a filter

Understanding your audience means you know what they like, don’t like and how to add value to them. What makes social media enticing is that it requires people to run it—it can’t be automated. Understanding their needs informs your interactions and builds a human connection behind the corporate entity. How to start? Just listen. Tap into the areas online where your customers and prospects are already hanging out and look for mentions of your org with free tools such as Google Alerts and Addict-o-matic. By listening, you can learn about relevant topics and turn what’s hot into ways people can connect with you.

Using your brand as a filter means that before posting or tagging anything, you weigh its content to make sure it aligns with the brand you’ve created offline. In an ideal world, you already know the whats, hows and whys behind your brand—this is your playbook. Capturing the spirit of your org consistently over time demonstrates your authenticity and builds relationships. An easy way to do this is to think of your org as a person. Does the tone or content match something she would post?

Good luck to all the Facebook fan page masters out there and if you need any help, leave a comment. And for an example, check out www.Facebook.com/ParkerLePla.

- Bianca Abate

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Social networking is, of course, the hot button topic in online marketing.  Low cost / high traffic platforms like Facebook are extremely attractive to brand owners after years of paying for search optimization or fancy media buys.  But Tweeting alone does not an online brand make.  Instead, look at social networking as a part of your larger strategy to acquire and retain customers.

Of course, the first step in social marketing (or really any pursuit) is knowledge:  know your company and how it interacts, and know your customers and how they buy.  If you sell hardware in a residential neighborhood, your networking strategies will be very different from an owner who sells vintage clothing near the university.  Both brick-and-mortars are seeking to drive sales and awareness but their customer demographics, technographics, and buying patterns are widely different.  Consider also that a vintage clothes enthusiast might be more likely than a hammer buyer to see their purchase as making them a part of the store’s community and thus be more inclined to include the business as a part of their online network.

Given that you know who you are and who you serve, the challenge is then to tailor your online presence to build and strengthen your customer relationships not only by providing an integrated brand experience to reiterate your key differentiators but also by creating and delivering greater value for the customer:

In the end, remember that today’s consumers demand authenticity.  Social networking adds an additional level of challenge to that requirement because, online, customers interact directly with your business as if it were one of their Friends.  They are not simply looking for a product or service but instead an experience – and only those businesses that provide such will succeed as social marketers.

– Dan Liska

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Most marketers have probably noticed that branding (what we want to say about ourselves) and search engine optimization (trying to figure out what people want us to say) are sometimes in opposition to one another. For instance, a client of ours that is a custom home and home remodeling company is developing their brand around the experience they provide, yet when people are searching for remodeling companies, they don’t search for “remodeling experience”. They search for kitchen remodeling, or bath remodeling or custom home builders.

So, how do these two seemingly different marketing approaches work together? Well, you wouldn’t want to throw your brand out the window when doing search marketing. You want to use it to inform a few key things:
- Keyword quality–if you are living your brand well, you probably know your audience well. Use what you know about your audience to inform the types of keywords you choose. In our client’s case, they are trying to reach professional women, age 35-55 who are looking for high end remodeling services and not just a contractor. Therefore, they want to choose keywords like DESIGN, LUXURY HOME BUILDERS, etc. rather than words like contractor or remodel, as a) these will be searched by many of the wrong types of audiences for them and therefore be too competitive to make it cost effective, and b) they don’t really reflect what the audience they are targeting will value.
- Ad language–if you are doing Google Adwords or other paid search marketing, you will want to make sure your ad language uses both the keywords you have established for your audience, as well as the brand benefit they will receive with your company specifically.
- Landing pages–when developing landing pages to pay off your keywords, use your brand to inform the language, imagery and design you use to set you apart and give the search user a reason to choose you over others. In this game, it’s not really about search volume, it’s about stickiness of your landing page with the right people (your targets).

–Jen Travis

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I’m speaking at ACHE (American College of Healthcare Executives) in Chicago in a couple of weeks with client Neighborcare Health, on the subject of branding and how it can help smooth the merger process. Our key message? You can’t do successful fundraising or service delivery if the various clinics aren’t bought into the larger promise of the umbrella organization. And a branding process is a great way to get newly acquired clinics to see they share culture: they are all providing the same value, for the same reasons. At Neighborcare, branding helped the staff work together in harmony, with the benefits of more efficiencies, increased donor engagement, and better teamwork.

-Lynn Parker

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Lynn Parker has been invited to speak at the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) 2010 Congress on Healthcare Leadership on March 25th at 10:45 AM.

This conference will be held in Chicago March 22-25, 2010. For more information, check out ACHE’s website.

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