Social media part 2: Facebook

How can Facebook benefit business?  Facebook is a social phenomenon and volumes have been written about it, including recently the feature film. For good or ill it is a major presence in the web world. I’m not going to repeat all that here. If you want to read the background, try the Wikipedia article.

So, what’s it all about?

At its simplest, Facebook allows groups of people to communicate with each other online, whether those people are part of a shared interest group such as wheelchair users or a school year group or whether it is an individual keeping up with their friends, it is all about communities of people.

I have heard it said “If I want to talk with my firends, I’ll call them on the phone” fair enough, but do you? I know I don’t, I’m really busy with my work, both the day job and private work, my family and at weekends, being a taxi driver for my children! So do I have time to keep up with what my friends are doing? No. And I guess you may not either. Facebook allows this.

The analogy here is like working in a big office. I do and I have lots of friendships, some strong and some more ad-hoc but no less friendly. I see the people I work with variously many times per day, a couple of times per day, week, month or less so for those who work abroad or who are field sales staff.  When I pass somebody in the corridor I’ll  say hello, ask how they are, share a joke or whatever, the normal pattern of social interraction.

Put that online and in effect you have Facebook. You can keep up with the minutiae of your friends lives in the way that you would if you saw them everyday. There is a couple of people I worked with for a few years who moved to Thailand for a year or so and are now in Mexico. It’s good to keep in touch and there is no way I could do that over the phone.

It’s not that simple however, Facebook has lots of applications built in, games, photo albums and so on to make what is an entertaining experience.  In order to experience all of this, you need to sign up and to see what your friends are doing, you have to send them a ‘friend request’, which is a request to allow you to see what they are doing. Once this is allowed, you’ll see everything they post.

How can it be used to benefit business?

What do you want for your business? More customers, more sales, more profit, however you express it, your organisation exists to achieve something. In order to achieve that something, you need exposure to more people. Take a look at these Facebook statistics, I think you’ll find them interesting. They key one is users. 624 million unique users worldwide. 151million in the USA and 28 Million in the UK. The demographics show the largest user group to be 18-25 and then declining by age group upwards. The fastest growing user group is middle aged women.

To me lots of users says lots of customers and lots of potential. I am aware that I haven’t actually answered the question.

There are loads of ways to use Facebook to benefit your business.

1. Paid for advertising. Facebooks advertising tools allow you to quite accurately target particular groups of users. This is especially useful if your products or services are aimed at particular groups. I know of one company that recruited a new worked using Facebook alone. They targetted 18-25 year old university graduates in marketing living in the Leicester (UK) area with an advert that directed them to a web page that had a YouTube video on of the girl who was leaving, talking about how great her job was. It cost them about £100 and they got loads of candidates inthe right target group with the right skills in no time at all.

2. Building a community. One of my case study clients – the restaurant, has a Facebook page to create a buzz about their business. They get parties of people in all having a good time, take photo’s and post them on Facebook where their friends can see them having a great meal. This is good publicity and spreads the word reinforcing the association of people having a good time at this restaurant.

Meryl. K. Evans on the Gigacom website has identified 32 ways to use Facebook in your business. The article was written in 2009

Domain name ‘sharp practice’ #2

You get an email or even a phone call from somebody claiming to be a domain registration agent and they may even ask for you by name. They tell you that one of their clients is wishing to register a domain name very similar to yours – or the same but with a different ending such as .cn, .tw etc but as the trademark owner you have first rights to refusal and would you like to act quickly to protect your intellectual property?

DO NOTHING

It’s a scam. What they are trying to do is to sell you a domain name that is of no use to you and in reality, there is no other company. They may try to put you under pressure and give you only minutes to make a decision. Don’t.

Lets just deconstruct this a little.

You have a company that operates solely in the UK, or the USA or wherever. Do you care that somebody in China wants to register a domain name the same as yours but with .cn on the end? I don’t think so. Does that infringe your intellectual property? No, you have in all probability not registered any trademarks in China. If this mythical company started trading in the UK under your name or a very similar name with a lookee-likee website and domain name, you could in all probability have them for passing-off, i.e. pretending to be you.

What would happen if they did register that domain name?
If they really wanted to, you wouldn’t be asked about it in the first place, they’d just do it. 

Conclusion:
Don’t allow yourself to be pressurised into protecting something that doesn’t need it
Don’t be fooled by scammers.

Domain name ‘sharp practice’

If you have a website, you need a domain name and for the most part this is fairly unexciting, however there are people who will try and exploit your lack of expertise.

You’ve got a designer or an agency to register your domain name, the site has been built and published and all is well. About a year later – or two, you get an official looking letter through the post reminding you that its nearly time to renew your domain and the company will do this for you and give you a really good deal if you commit for 3 years or more. Lucky you.

Well actually, no.

What’s going on here is that this company, and there are quite a few out there is actually breaking no laws – but only just. In offering to renew your domain name, you are actually transferring control to them and this may not be immediately obvious. Generally speaking, when you do this it then becomes very difficult or expensive or both to get control of your domain name back.

Not all correspondance about your domain name is fake or misleading. If you have a .co.uk domain, then Nominet is the UK body that controls [anything].uk.  And depending on the registrar, they can also get in touch legitimately to ensure that the details they have are correct.

How do you avoid getting ripped off?

1. Anything you get related to your domain name – check with your designer or design agency  BEFORE you do anything about it.  In the past I’ve been lucky and managed to prevent many of my clients from making what may be a costly mistake.
2. Check the details of your registration. its easy to do go you www.easywhois.com and enter your domain name.  You or your company should be shown as the registrant, your designer as the admin and billing contact and their phone number should also be shown, not yours.  For certain domain types and with certain registrars your private details can be hidden, there maybe a small cost for this but not always. This is good value.

Are you being charged too much for your domain name?
If you go to a domain registrar such as www.123-reg.co.uk you can check out how much it will cost to register a domain name like yours. You could expect that your designer will add a bit to cover admin costs or that such as with webmozaic.com, it is included in the hosting package so you never actually pay directly.

Social media Part 1: start here

In this series of articles I will be explaining all about social media and its implications for business as well as how you can start taking advantage of it if it is appropriate for your business. Before I get into the detail, lets take a few steps back and understand how it came about.

The first generation of the internet in broad terms was broadcast. I create a website and you look at it. You can send me an email or fill in a form which will do something. You could towards the end of this generation buy things through e-commerce.
You can see the previous generation of webmozaic here

This is where a lot of websites still are and probably will be for the foreseeable future. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The second generation of the internet or ‘web 2.0′ as it has been known is where website visitors can interact with websites. That is where this site is. For example. if you wish to comment on this article or ask me a question, you can and other people can comment on your comments. You do this directly on the page you’re looking at.

The ultimate example of this social aspect to the web is probably Facebook which for good or ill is about as social as you can get on the web. We’ll talk about Facebook in later articles.

Can business use social media?
Yes. There are many area where social media can help a business both in terms of sales, support as well as helping companies to interract with their customers in a way that has never been possible before. One issue that many businesses have is with engagement, the customers just don’t get excited about the products. Social media can help. Your customers may not get excited about the products, but how about what the products allow them to do?

Should every business use social media?
No. It isn’t appropriate for everyone. To do it ‘properly’ takes commitment, and resources, some cash and certainly time. It maybe that you just don’t have enough to say, or that you are very much business-to-business.

Hello world!

All change!

Webmozaic is getting an upgrade. After 10 years of a hand crafted website I’ve concluded that there are better options available and have changed to WordPress which started as a blogging tool but has grown up to a full website design system which with a huge community behind it is an ideal productivity tool.
From my point of view do I want to spend time designing a website or getting the benefit of the website.
What is my objective, the goal – to design a website or the goal of the goal which is to use the website to improve my business.
It’s a bit rough and ready right now but as I install, configure, change and so on, you’ll see that the layout and maybe the look changes from time to time. This is really exciting!