You've Got To Have Friends
<h2>Carolyn Lawrence is now 'friends' with Jordan Banks, Managing
Director at Facebook Canada - after an engaging and educating chat on how
Facebook is essential to building your brand.</h2>
<div><em>By: Carolyn Lawrence</em> | <em>Photography by: Kourosh
Keshiri</em></div>
<div>Bette Midler wrote a song about it and Mark Zuckerberg created a
social network so everyone can ‘Find Friends’ because society is all about
relationships that enable people to benefit in ways that would not
otherwise be possible on an individual basis.</div>
<div>As of September 2011, Facebook had 800 million global members
with 18+ million in Canada, who have an average of 130 ‘friends’ per
member. Facebook is ultimately a communication channel that allows
people to connect. “With those connections you have huge, massive
amounts of behavioural influence,” Banks says. “We are a platform that
allows you to communicate the way you want, in the time you want, in the
voice you want, to the people that want to hear what you have to
say.”</div>
<div>The 21st century is about the social graph, the era of discovery, the
importance of eliminating the fear of technology; it’s about embracing
Facebook and taking advantage of social networking tools that are available
to achieve both personal and business goals.</div>
<blockquote> <strong>HOW DO INDIVIDUALS, CORPORATIONS, SMALL
BUSINESSES, LEADERS AND INFLUENCERS LEVERAGE FACEBOOK TO BUILD
THEIR BRANDS, GROW RELATIONSHIPS, EXPAND MARKETS AND INCREASE
RESULTS?</strong>
&nbsp;
<em>Number one, be yourself. It’s all about being genuine and authentic,
talking in a voice—as an individual or as a brand—that will resonate with
others.
&nbsp;
Number two is being interesting. Sharing pictures, videos or posts that you
find intellectually curious or fascinating with your friends is really important.
Women are awesome users and connectors, and they are incredibly social—
they post an incredible number of photos, share content with friends and
play games on Facebook. I talk to moms who say they actually have a very
rich social life because of Facebook. It’s a social experience and it feels
good.</em></blockquote>
<div>The take-away benefit of moving beyond talking face-to-face with
colleagues and customers at work, or with friends in a coffee shop, is
having those conversations and sharing those thoughts on a scale that has
never been done before. The power of social media is immense, and
subsequently, social media management is incredibly important. Building
personal and professional capacity with this in mind is essential to optimize
for success.</div>
<div>Today the web is organized around people. In the ’90s the focus was
on browsing. In the first 6+ years of the 21st century, the web was full of
anonymous and random one-dimensional information links. Now, it’s an
era of discovery. The web is influenced by people, and those people in turn
influence their friends and communities through pubic opinion, decisions
and actions. Banks confirms, “That is just the way it is, and so organizations
need to orient themselves over that reality.”</div>
<div class="blue-box">
<h2>FACEBOOK ESSENTIALS</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>CREATE A FACEBOOK PAGE</strong> Explore the tools
and how they can work for your needs and expectations.</li>
<li><strong> DEVELOP A VOICE</strong> Take how you communicate
seriously, what you communicate and the tone in which you
communicate.</li>
<li><strong>FIND FRIENDS.</strong> Build your social graph: the
digital connections to everybody and every connection that is important to
you. Include friend-of-friend additions and leverage the Facebook Subscribe
button for less familiar relationships with people to enhance mentoring and
peer-to-peer broadcasts. More connections mean a greater ability to
amplify your message.</li>
<li><strong>POST INTERESTING THINGS.</strong> Upload photos,
videos, provide links to groups, subscription interests, share your
curiosity.</li>
<li><strong>COMMUNICATE FREQUENTLY AND BUILD YOUR BRAND
PERSONALITY.</strong> Tag friends, confirm ‘likes,’ add comments, share
with others, check-in and let people know where you are and what you’re
doing. When disseminating information, link it to Facebook.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>“The power of Facebook is the amplification of the message to your
friends. Influencing friends is the way best brands get incredible masses of
fans, and engage those fans to do more,” Banks says. He identifies two
major gaps when it comes to organizations. Firstly, are the brands that
think about digital and social as segregated into a separate bucket. “This is
the wrong way to think,” says Banks. “It literally needs to permeate each
and every thing you do across each and every functional area.” It is a big
paradigm shift, he says. “It is a horizontal function.”</div>
&nbsp;
<div>The second gap is in the marketing benefit. “It’s really important to
acknowledge that social should amplify everything else you do—we should
be living it, says Banks. “If you do a really good job on Facebook and get
people to Subscribe to your post or fan your Page, that critical mass of
people you are connected to can only act as an amplifier.”</div>
<div class="blue-box">
<h2>FACEBOOK ESSENTIALS</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>CREATE A FACEBOOK PAGE.</strong> Explore the tools
and how they can work for your needs and expectations.</li>
<li><strong> DEVELOP A VOICE.</strong> Take how you
communicate seriously, what you communicate and the tone in which you
communicate.</li>
<li><strong>FIND FRIENDS.</strong> Build your social graph: the
digital connections to everybody and every connection that is important to
you. Include friend-of-friend additions and leverage the Facebook Subscribe
button for less familiar relationships with people to enhance mentoring and
peer-to-peer broadcasts. More connections mean a greater ability to
amplify your message.</li>
<li><strong>POST INTERESTING THINGS.</strong> Upload photos,
videos, provide links to groups, subscription interests, share your
curiosity.</li>
<li><strong>COMMUNICATE FREQUENTLY AND BUILD YOUR BRAND
PERSONALITY.</strong> Tag friends, confirm ‘likes,’ add comments, share
with others, check-in and let people know where you are and what you’re
doing. When disseminating information, link it to Facebook.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>We are living in an open world and conversations—good, bad and
indifferent—are happening every second of every day about brands. “Some
of the best insights that customers get, they get through Facebook and they
get it at 3:30 in the afternoon,” Jordan says. When asked about companies
that firewall Facebook he replies, “You’re telling your employees that it is
not important enough for me to know, in real time, that something is
happening with one of our customers.” Acknowledging relevant regulatory
issues, Jordan boldly says companies have two choices: “You can ignore
them to your peril as those customers go to your competitors and have
conversations with them, or you can embrace it and be part of the
conversations.” Those that decide on the latter will flourish, says Banks.
“It’s as simple as that.”</div>
<blockquote><strong>ORGANIZATIONALLY, WHAT MEASUREMENTS ARE
BRANDS THAT ARE DOING THE BEST ON FACEBOOK
UNDERTAKING?</strong>
&nbsp;
<em>They have a CEO mandate. People are talking common languages;
measurement frameworks are developed around the totality of a consumer,
not just one aspect of the consumer. Brands are developing products
because they have gotten feedback from a million people about what they
want.</em></blockquote>
<div>“Facebook does more than traditional marketing,” Banks says. “In
almost every functional area.” He offers the latest findings from Nielsen,
who did a comprehensive study around the importance of friends
influencing friends, investigating why it matters if a person sees a friend’s
name or picture on Facebook beside a brand.</div>
<div>Nielsen concluded that when a person sees social context such as a
friend’s name or face beside a brand, they are:
<ul>
<li>2 times more likely to recall the message;</li>
<li>3 times more likely to be aware of the message; and</li>
<li>4 times more likely to have purchase intent as it relates to that product
or service.</li>
</ul></div>
<div class="blue-box">
<h2>ESSENTIALS FOR BUSINESSES ON FACEBOOK</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>CONFIRM THE CEO MANDATE.</strong> Social needs to
be part of the corporate DNA.</li>
<li><strong> DEVELOP AN INTEGRATED SOCIAL NETWORK
STRATEGY.</strong> An operations plan for integrating brand
development, ongoing communications and marketing with real-time social
management across all functional areas.</li>
<li><strong>CREATE A FACEBOOK PAGE.</strong> Establish a
genuine, authentic brand personality, voice and multi-dimensional
communication platform.</li>
<li><strong>TEST THE FACEBOOK AD PRODUCTS AND INTEGRATE
FACEBOOK INTO YOUR OVERALL MARKETING STRATEGY.</strong> Target
demographically and psycho-graphically via interests using key words for
potential and existing customers.</li>
<li><strong>ESTABLISH AND NURTURE RELATIONSHIPS.</strong> Be
relevant in the minds and hearts of people, with the critical mass from
target ad information, communicate offers, contests, promotions, have
interesting conversations about innovation, experiences, products,
anything – interactions with someone who is a fan are published to all of
their friends.</li>
<li><strong>LEVERAGE GROUP FUNCTIONALITY.</strong> Determine
which segments of fans get to hear which things. Geo-target, and deliver
more personalized messages.</li>
<li><strong>USE SPONSORED STORIES.</strong> Create social
relevancy by showing users interacting with brands, through the
names/photos of people so their friends see them beside the brand
because people need to be the center of everything, including advertising.
Putting people in the center is more fun and it influences the behavior of
others.</li>
<li><strong>SOCIAL MANAGEMENT.</strong> Develop a 360-degree
picture of your customer. Customers expect to be heard in real time and
treated differently.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<blockquote><strong>WHAT IS SO EXCITING ABOUT FACEBOOK?</strong>
&nbsp;
<em>High performance delivers fun results. When you put people at the
center of anything—whether it be a business, or a functional area of a
business, or a group of women—it becomes a lot more fun and more
engaging. At Facebook, we want to empower you… it’s all about
personalization.</em></blockquote>
<div>Banks explains that Facebook has a horde of insight and data products
that are free for a brand to access. “All of these little tools allow you to be
very scientific when posting,” he says. “They’re on Facebook, they’re easy
to use, and they take the guesswork out of developing affinities.” He
reminds us that the best brands talk like real human beings, they talk in a
voice that resonates with existing and potential consumers and they don’t
skirt around issues. They address questions quickly and get right to the
point.</div>
<div class="blue-box">
<h2>SOCIAL NETWORK LEADERS USING FACEBOOK</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>TIM HORTONS.</strong> Uses Facebook to engage with
its over 1.7 million Canadian fans, and is a master at engaging the
community on a daily basis. Whether it is creating an application around a
seasonal campaign or simply asking people to guess a Tim Hortons’
locations from posted photos on Facebook, that affinity ultimately results
in more sales.</li>
<li><strong> VITAMIN WATER. </strong> Used Facebook to crowdsource a new product, asked the community what type of flavours they
want in their next Vitamin Water. Within a week, they had hundreds of
thousands of people imputing what they wanted, and ultimately launched
the new Vitamin Water created by the community. To no surprise, they
cannot keep that flavour in stock — everyone knows about it, feels like they
were part of it, and they have developed an incredible portfolio of fans who
are excited about product development.</li>
<li><strong> DOVE.</strong> Invites women to engage with them by
creating the Beautyography campaign, which asked people to post a video
on Facebook and be a part of the Dove Movement to build positive selfesteem.</li>
<li><strong> AMERICAN EXPRESS.</strong> In just two years, this
160-year-old brand has fundamentally changed the way they approach the
market to become an inherently social brand.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>When asked about the future, Jordan Banks expresses, “The most
exciting part about being on Facebook is the social graph, the digital imprint
of all these connections.” That social graph does not need to live on a
computer screen; it can live anywhere… on your phone, computer, in the
car, in a store, on a wall. “It’s the power of friends influencing friends
anywhere, in real time.” There is no such thing as one-dimensional
communication, he says. It is multi-dimensional and it is all affected by your
friends. “I think that is super exciting because it is happening.”</div>
<div>Facebook remains an incredible tool that connects people, minimizes
isolation, fosters socialization, and reminds everyone that, for better or
worse, we’re in it together and you’ve got to have friends.</div>
<div class="blue-box">
<h2>FACEBOOK MAKES IT EASY</h2>
<ul>
<li>Facebook.com/business/howitworks</li>
<li>Facebook.com/marketing</li>
<li>Facebook.com/influencers</li>
<li>Facebook.com/facebookads</li>
<li>Facebook.com/facebookpages</li>
</ul>
</div>