Social Media

Facebook is rolling out an update to Facebook Pages which changes the layout to be more like the new Profile layout, along with other changes.  Most importantly for marketers and businesses, it now allows brands to interact with people and other pages as your brand (before you could only comment as a person on other pages or profiles). This allows a little more separation between personal and professional brands, but also gives brands an opportunity to interact and communicate more widely throughout Facebook.

There are pluses and minuses to this change. As a person, you may want to be more careful what pages you “like” since they’ll now be able to comment on your own profile. It may be strange to see Nike commenting on your own wall, for example. As a brand, it allows a more wider interaction throughout Facebook, but it also removes a bit of the person-to-person communication which we had before. However, the reason for brands are so a company can have (some) control over their image and reputation. If someone was communicating on a brand’s behalf on Facebook, and they leave the company, the brand would have lost all of those connections before. Now companies have more control over their own network.

What do you think about the change? Are you for it or against it and why?

(photo by Andrew Feinberg, on Flickr)

You may have heard about a few social media snafus that have happened recently: Kenneth Cole’s “joke” about the Egyptian uprising and HubSpot’s “joke” about Internet knowledge in Detroit (if not, just google them). Ever since news has been broadcast, back even to town criers and bards, what’s been said has been taken out of context and made into “sound bites”. It’s even more prevalent now with the 140 character limit on Twitter and the almost instantaneous distribution of news on the Internet. Not to mention the ability of the audience to actually respond and talk among themselves (also instantaneously). These cautionary tales may scare off the business hoping to enter the world of social media, but, not to worry, you can avoid the pitfalls of the 140 character sound bite with a little common sense. [Read more…] about Avoiding the Pitfalls of the 140 Character Sound Bite