Facebook is one of my favorite places to recommend for businesses for a lot of reasons. The primary one is that Facebook offers almost of all the various social media tools that companies can apply to their brand.

Facebook allows you to participate without having to spend time or money on your own website. Still, few companies are using Facebook well. One example of a business doing it right is Ernst & Young Human Resources effort (brilliant).  But for every good Facebook presence there’s a brand page we like to call a “campground.” Not because lots of people hang out there, but because all you hear when you visit is crickets.

To give you a leg up on getting smart with Facebook, here are five facebook-only strategies for business success.

1. Drive Off-Line Engagement With Event Postings

Facebook event postings are not just whimsical little calendar items. If you use them correctly, you can drive a veritable viral wave around what your business is doing because people who RSVP, comment or add to the event conversation have their activity posted publicly to their friends.

Here’s an example of an event page on Facebook

The catch is making your events irresistible, making the headline, description and invitation irresistible, then delivering on the off-line experience.

2. Give People Virtual Keepsakes With Photo Tagging

Speaking of events, when you have them, take pictures to post on your fan page. Then create some post-event buzz by inviting attendees to tag themselves in the photos. You won’t be able to tag most people (unless they are Facebook friends with the brand page administrator) but encouraging your attendees to tag themselves and their friends gives you a fun reason to reach out to them after an event.

This serves as a long tail effect of your event, driving your fans back to your fan page or event posting to see their images and further engage with your brand. And as a courtesy, put signage up at the event informing people their pictures may appear on your Facebook page or website.

3. Turn Customer Service Up a Notch With Facebook Discussion Forums

This tip works wonders for companies that don’t have some sort of support forum on their own website. Drive customers to your Facebook forums (called “Discussions” on the brand page tabs) by letting them know they can get support there.

Here’s an example of Jeep’s discussion forum on Facebook

Open up a forum topic for customer support and have someone on your staff check the forum for new issues every hour or so (or more depending upon volume). You’ll immediately give confused or frustrated customers a direct connection to solutions without having to spend a lot of money on complex issue tracking software.

4. Promote Your Page With Super Targeting

While I do not have access to specific data, almost every company I’ve talked to that has placed ads on Facebook has been thrilled with the outcome. The click-through rates have been higher than normal display ads and have had immediate impacts on page traffic.

The great thing about Facebook ads is that when you set them up, you can hyper-target them to the exact audience you’re trying to reach. Age, location, interest… filter your targeting to the specific profile of your target consumer and let Facebook do the rest. Because the ads are served on Facebook pages only, Facebook knows the age, location and interests of the people they serve the ad to. It’s probably the most effective ad targeting system in the world. Take advantage of it.  Here’s 5 more ways to promote your Facebook fan page.

5. Collect Fan Photos and Videos at No Cost

Want your fans to take their picture with your product at various landmarks while traveling? Throw out a cool video contest or activity idea to engage your customers in some fun creativity. No need to hire a developer to pull together fancy code or pay YouTube thousands of dollars for a branded video contest.

Just ask your Facebook fans to upload their entries. Using the commenting tools provided, you can work up some guidelines for judging or just highlight and post the best stuff on your wall to promote the video makers. Even better, by posting appropriate policies and guidelines, you can get permission to use anything uploaded for company advertisements, projects and more. However, you should beware that Facebook has recently implemented some strict promotional rules.  See this post for more on that.

There are lots of other strategies you can use on Facebook to engage your customers and even drive them to your website or other calls to action. These will at least give you some Facebook-exclusive ideas for starters. But these are just my ideas. Please share what you’re doing or your ideas to drive your business on Facebook in the comments.

Are you using Facebook events, photos and discussion groups? How are they working for you? Add your voice to the discussion by commenting below.

Image via Wikipedia

But many brand and marketing managers responsible for social media don’t quite understand what social media monitoring is and why it’s important. Here’s a quick primer:

Social Media Monitoring Is Listening

Listening to online conversations is technically done without ears. Using search engine technology, social media monitoring tools scan the Internet looking for documents that contain keywords you select. They return those results in some sort of order that allows you to see where people have mentioned your brand, company, product or whatever you specified.

Seeing these results reveal which websites or blogs you should visit to either see what people are saying about you or actually participate in those conversations. Without monitoring, the conversations are happening without your knowledge.

Social Media Monitoring Can Be Free

The easiest way to start monitoring social media is to sign up for some free tools and services. Google Alerts allows you to search for a word or phrase just as you would in a regular search, and then notifies you when something new pops up on the web with that search term. You can subscribe to email updates of the new search results or add them to your RSS subscriptions. (If you don’t know what RSS is, watch “RSS in Plain English,” a video from CommonCraft.)

You can also search for your company or product name on Twitter to see real-time conversations that include mentions or discussions of your brand. Add Technorati to the list and your monitoring will cover the majority of blogs as well.

Paid Social Media Monitoring Solutions Are Often Worth the Investment

The one drawback to the free monitoring solutions is that manual work will be required to quantify the results for your executives or report your findings. Paid social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Techrigy pull all those conversations together into an organized, web-based dashboard and allow you to pull charts and graphs that explain the information with very little work on your part.

One big benefit to many (but not all) of the paid solutions is their ability to analyze sentiment and tone of the conversations through fancy computer algorithms using natural language processing. What this means is that you can log in to your service, see that there were 250 conversations mentioning your brand this week, and of those, 83 percent were positive, 10 percent were negative and the other 7 percent were neutral.

Paid monitoring solutions offer dashboard experiences like this one from Radian6 which makes monitoring your brand easier

Monitoring Is Only the First Step

Finding and cataloging the online conversations about your company is just the tip of the iceberg in social media monitoring. Once you know where conversations are taking place and what is being said about your company, you can then participate in the conversation. This is critically important for companies because today’s web-savvy consumer requires direct access to the people behind the products and services they buy or shop for.

Let’s say you find a customer upset about the service she received at your place of business earlier today. Letting the individual mouth off to her friends who have a natural predisposition to either agree or jump on the bandwagon of hate only guarantees your company will be thought of negatively by those involved in the conversation. However, social media case studies show time and time again that entering into similar conversations with a simple, “I’m sorry you had a bad experience. What can I do to help?” shows the disgruntled fan—and her bandwagon-jumping friends—that you’re truly interested in improving the situation. The customer response is almost always something like, “Wow. I didn’t know you were listening. Thanks for offering.”

Smart Monitoring Can Build Your Business

Please don’t think that social media monitoring is limited to mitigating online detractors. By analyzing the conversations around not just your company, but also your industry or even competitors, you can gain a significant market advantage and actually drive business.

Let’s say you’re monitoring mentions of your nearest competitor and uncover a trend that people are complaining that their product (say, a coffeepot) is great but not durable. You then change your advertising campaign to trumpet the fact your coffeepot lasts three times longer than the competitor’s.

For another example, suppose you have a national product that has inconsistent sales patterns from region to region. Your social media monitoring shows you what people in the Pacific Northwest say are the best and worst qualities of your product, but the answers are different in the South. This consumer intelligence helps you better market your product based on geographic and cultural specifics which can be the difference in customers choosing you or your competition.

Last but not least, sophisticated monitoring can even reveal individual customers who are at the point of making a purchase decision, enabling you to reach out and help them make a connection to your product at the absolute perfect time.

What Are You Waiting For?

Now that you have an idea of what social media monitoring is and what it can do for you, dive in. Start a Google Alert for your company or product. Add one for some general industry terms your customers might use when discussing your category. Add one for each of your competitors. As you feel comfortable, add Twitter and Technorati searches, then branch out and start exploring other social media monitoring tools. At the very least, you’ll have a better idea of what people are saying about you.

What social media monitoring tools are you using? What are your thoughts?  Please leave a comment below.

Social media is no more a one-off playground for brands than television advertising, direct mail campaigns or customer relationship management programs. It’s serious business and should be treated as such.

The following question then becomes relevant: “How do we think about social media strategically?” The good news is that it’s not that difficult, provided your planning team has an understanding of two things and a healthy grounding in another.

The two essential knowledge bases you’ll need are an understanding of the social media tools available (from blogs and social networks to wikis and beyond) and the philosophical foundations to be successful in social media (think share, not sell). The healthy grounding should be in the 5 essential pillars of a social media campaign.

This is the point in the post where most social media marketers would throw out a standard list of five things to guide your social media thinking that generally parallels the marketing mix variables you’re used to. Product, place, price, promotions and public relations can be a starting point. You can even define your product, your target audience, your competition, environmental factors and your metrics or measures of success.

But to take full advantage of your social media efforts and drive buzz, business or both, read on.

Social Media Examiner’s
5 Essential Pillars of a Social Media Campaign:

1. Connectivity

If you aren’t connected to your consumers, and conversely they are not connected to you, then social media success is impossible.

Whether you have customer service chat available on your website, a support forum, commenting enabled on the company blog or even a company presence on Twitter, you must have a connecting point for your customers to find you. Social media is about conversations. Conversations cannot be had if you’re nowhere to be found.

Being connected doesn’t just mean you throw up a form on your website, though. It means you have a person or persons monitoring conversations about your brand online, answering questions, even if the questions weren’t posed directly to them. Connectivity means not just being plugged in, but also being turned on.

2. Generosity

If you’ve read anything about social media on- or offline, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “Give to Get.”

Online social media is an almost identical environment to a social gathering offline. People gravitate to individuals, groups or conversations they feel they can get the most out of. By providing something of value to your customers, or potential customers, in your online activities, you earn trust. The more trust you earn, the more influence you’ll have.

Generosity requires a cultural shift, however, in the way most marketers think. You cannot be generous to others if your top priority is selling more stuff. That is selfish.

You have to approach the online consumer with the attitude that you have something of value to provide, free of charge. In exchange for that, you hope to build and strengthen relationships with others. Those relationships, over time, will equal a much higher return on investment than one-off, one-time customers.

3. Honesty

Have you ever heard a politician or professional athlete respond to a reporter’s question with, “No comment?” It appears as if they’re hiding something, doesn’t it?

If what you’re doing in social media is building relationships, you can’t build them without honesty.

If your product is made with a lesser material than your competitor’s, don’t hide it. Either get better material or find a positive reason it’s made that way (e.g., it’s cheaper, thus saves consumers money).

If the company makes a mistake and has to recall a product, simply say, “We made a mistake. We’re very sorry.” As long as you mean it, people will believe you.

And you don’t have to suddenly treat confidential company information with open records policies, either. The public is a lot smarter than you think. When sensitive information is in question, simply say, “I’m sorry. That’s information we don’t talk about outside the company for competitive reasons.” That answer is honest. “No comment?” Not so much.

4. Personality

If you had to boil successful communication in the social media realm down to an essence, it would be to be human. Consumers flocked to social networking sites and blogs to get away from one-way blasted marketing messages hurled at them all day.

By visiting only the websites they want to visit and finding like-minded consumers to share recommendations and conversations with in social networks, the public has created a new environment for communications—one that requires you, even as a company, to be human.

To put it simply, people want to talk to another human being when making buying decisions, discussing products and services and discovering new products and services. You cannot have a conversation with a logo, a building or a company. You have conversations with human beings.

5. Imagination

Social media is much like a social event. But after a while, social events or conversations with the same groups of people become stale and predictable. The conversations that last are those where at least one person always has something new to say, a never-ending stream of stories or jokes.

Approach your planning as if you’re the person who will keep the life in the party. Develop an editorial calendar for website or blog content and brainstorm a contest, promotion or game for customers and fans to engage with on a monthly or quarterly basis. Remember that you’re building relationships, but, like dating or even marriage, you have to be creative to keep the relationship fresh and invigorating.

Your Turn

If you think through the 5 Essential Pillars of a Social Media Campaign, you’ll at least be well on your way to success in social media. But these are meant to be guidelines, not rules. What other topics or areas have you found equally as important to social media success? How are you using your imagination to keep campaigns fresh and alive? Inspire your fellow readers with a comment.

“Photo Credit: ‘Supreme Court Pillars‘ (CC) by David Paul Ohmer on Flickr.”