Category Archives: digital media

March 27, 2019 · 3:31 pm

Inauthentic Behavior

I generally rip Facebook pretty hard in this space so, in the interest of fairness, I rise to give them a pat on the back. A number of outlets reported today that Facebook pulled down 2,632 bogus accounts and pages from their platform. They mostly came from Russian and Iran. The reason was that they were conducting “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” In other words, they were troll farms spreading lies and hatred. Lest you think that no one reads and/or believes that sort of vitriol, about 1.7 million people joined one or more of the Russia-linked groups, while roughly 1.4 million accounts followed one or more of the Iranian pages.

Back in January, Facebook took down more than 400 pages linked to operations in Russia. Obviously, this is not a problem that began and ended with the 2016 election and it’s going to get worse as 2020 approaches. Good on ya, Facebook. There is, however, a lesson in this for any business.

The internet has been weaponized and not always in a way that would constitute benign marketing by several companies. Destroying a brand’s reputation is just as easy as foreign governments found it to be in disrupting our elections. I suspect that many of the resources Facebook and others are deploying are focused on election interference and not on businesses. How hard would it be to start up a group or page that’s negative toward a brand? How difficult might it be to promote that page? In the January wave of takedowns, 364 pages and accounts spent approximately $135,000 on advertising and garnered 790,000 followers. $135,000 in marketing is a pittance to destroy a competitor’s brand, right?

If you don’t have a system in place to monitor brand reputation everywhere, you’re likely to be ambushed. Negative reviews on product and review sites, whisper campaigns on social media, and other weapons might be pointed at you right now. Do you know if that’s true? How?

I don’t mean to alarm anyone today. OK, maybe I do. The era of digital being used to connect people has passed. Now it’s being used to divide us, so negativity doesn’t stick out and falsehoods are more readily seen as truths. Pay attention!

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March 6, 2019 · 12:38 pm

Servers And Small Customers

I wasted some money the other day. I thought I was being smart and using my knowledge of social media marketing to promote my franchise consulting business. I was looking to acquire some new candidates who are ready to change their lives so I created an audience of folks whose demography matched that of most of the candidates with whom I’ve been working. What I found weren’t leads but I did get a great deal of information and I want to share some of that with you today.

One truism I’ve always sworn by is that you can tell someone’s character by how they treat people who can do absolutely nothing for them. Servers, for example. Oh sure, they can bring you your order but they’re not going to help your career along. Receptionists are another example. When you treat people who you perceive to be in a subordinate role like dirt, it shows an awful lot about your personality and character.

The same holds true for how big companies treat little customers. The big guys get all the attention because they have all the dough. What’s forgotten is that the big guys were once little guys, either in sum or in their spending with you. To cultivate budget growth you need to treat every customer as if they are the most valuable.

So why the rant? My lead campaign generated several leads from Facebook. The cost per lead was substantially better than I usually have to pay to generate a lead. The problem is that when I went to download the information from Facebook I received a file that contained digital garbage. I don’t mean bad leads; I mean unreadable digital garbage. I sent a note to support to ask if I’d done something wrong. Crickets. A few days later, I sent another note which is still unanswered, not even with an autoreply letting me know that my message was received. I’m assuming that if I were one of their big customers (the Russian Internet Agency maybe?) I’d have a dedicated rep who would get back to me immediately. As a self-serve slob, I’m pretty much on my own.

Any business can learn from this. Sure, millions of small customers can’t each have a personal rep, but you’re a tech platform, dammit. Put some of those technical smarts to work and figure out how to support the little guys. If you’re not a tech platform, find one that can help you and use the reporting it will offer to make sure you’re treating the little guys the same. After all, you’re nice to the person who serves you your meal, aren’t you?

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Filed under digital media, Helpful Hints, Huh?

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November 26, 2018 · 8:25 pm

More Fake News

It’s holiday time, and holiday time is shopping time. Now if you’re anything like most people, a fair amount of your shopping is done online. Even if you don’t actually buy from an online retailer, you probably do a fair amount of your research using online reviews and they are our topic today.

A marketing solution provider called Uberall released its “Customer Review Report,” which analyzed how consumers evaluate reviews online. They found that consumers think brands should be very active online responding to reviews. In fact, 65% of consumers think brands should respond to every online review every time, whether the review is positive or negative. Other observations from the study were that 18% of consumers believe brands should respond only when the review is negative, while 10% feel they should never respond, and 6% think they should only respond when the review is positive.

How do you feel about it? Personally, I think it’s critical that brands monitor the reviews of their products and not only should they respond but they should also verify. I’ve found that review verification sites such as Fakespot provide a wonderful service. I recognize that some brands actually pay for fake positive reviews in order to mask the crappy stuff they’re selling. That’s short-sighted since the revenues they make will be far offset by the costs of returns, customer service calls and maybe even lawsuits. Running an Amazon URL through Fakespot or ReviewMeta can save you a lot of trouble and also tell you a lot about how well a company curates its reputation.

There was a study a few years back that found that 20% or so of Yelp reviews were fake. You can spend $1 to get one written and you just might end up having to pay up to $40,654 to the FTC for having done so. Online reviews are a great source of, if not THE best, information for consumers and a generally accurate reflection of how your brand is perceived. You should influence that perception through positive interaction and not through creative writing. Most of all, you should respond, especially at this time of year when it’s a crucial sales period for most brands. Are you doing so?

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