Given the audience for their email, Facebook was obviously upbeat on the benefits to businesses who put up fan pages (and buy ads to drive traffic to them). According to their internal data, users click “Like” links twice as often as “Fan” links. Using “like” makes it easier for someone to express their interest in a brand when “fan” may overstate their level of engagement. That sounds like a big opportunity to get a whole lot more fans.

It also sounds to me like an opportunity to breed ill will, especially if users are slow to realize the weaker wording doesn’t change the fact that they’re still giving the company permission to post updates to their news feed. Facebook optimistically projects that “users will understand the distinction through explicit social context, messaging and asthetic differences.”

I’m not so sure. Particularly when you look at the examples they give of the “Like” function in practice. It’s not a matter of just changing the link at the top of a fan page. There’s also a big change to Facebook ads. It’s now possible to “Like” an ad, which automatically enrolls you as a fan (in the old parlance) of the advertiser.

I’m all for friendlier wording. And I’d love to have more people receiving updates from the fan pages I administer. But I think it’s important to be transparent and honest. I’d prefer a term more like “follow.” It removes the “fan” label but still makes it clear what the result will be when you click that link.

The greatest strength of social media is inviting users to interact with you and share their experience with their friends. Replacing the old broadcasting model of shoving your message down the consumer’s throat is what’s so new, interesting and effective about it. Anything that seems disingenuous or makes the user feel tricked is destined to backfire.

This is the most tedious part of the business. And unlike many tedious tasks, it can’t really be delegated to the lowest levels of the organization. Someone who doesn’t have a full grasp of your communication goals can’t tell you if they’re being met. Fortunately, at Zacks, we’re able to divide the workload so each team member is responsible for two or three browser/OS configurations. Even so, a good chunk of time can be easily eaten up with creating test email accounts, logging in and out, deleting cookies and starting over again. When product or promotion launch deadlines are looming, it takes real discipline not to cut corners and actually go through all the steps.

Apparently, even the biggest companies with the largest marketing budgets have a struggle in this area. And mobile marketing opens a whole new frontier of possible platforms and formats. I was surprised recently to see the glaring neglect of testing in a mobile campaign for Coke Zero.

Checking scores in the excellent iPhone app SportsTap, I saw an ad headline that read "Join Facial Profiler." So far so good. It’s a mobile ad, so maybe this "Facial Profiler" does something cool using my phone’s camera. It got my attention and made me curious enough to tap the ad.
The landing page looks nice, and is obviously formatted for the iPhone. The imagery and typography are attractive and easy to read. Now I see that it’s a Coke Zero project. So now I think there’s an even better chance that it’s something cool, since they certainly have the budget to create something entertaining or engaging.
Scrolling down the page, there’s a video thumbnail. Whoever designed the campaign seems to have understood that I’m not going to keep reading forever, so here’s a video file to explain the promotion. Brilliant.
But that’s where the whole thing breaks. Somehow, they encoded or embedded the video in a way the iPhone didn’t like. This video is the only means I have to find out how the program works, so when it fails, the entire experience becomes a dead end. So now, whatever Coke spent on this campaign has been 100% wasted. Even worse, this experience lowers my opinion of the brand, so they’ve actually put their marketing budget to work in a way that damages their brand image.

It’s an excellent example of what can happen when you don’t commit to testing your entire campaign. And there are no shortcuts. Even when you duplicate an existing process and apply it to a new product or promotion, unforseen details almost always become obvious during testing.

If it can happen to a marketing powerhouse like Coca-Cola, on a closed platform like the iPhone, it can certainly happen to your email campaign or banner ad landing page. All the time, effort and money you spend promoting your product will be wasted if an overlooked error gets between your customer and the sale.

Update: Cheryl Gledhill at molt:n took the Facial Profiler application for a test drive and found that the actual feature was just as unsatisfying and poorly executed as the mobile campaign.

Of course, it’s undeniably brilliant to cultivate an audience for reading books on a handheld device, reaching people who have a history of buying expensive electronics. But as you’d expect from Amazon, their followup is also first rate.

Knowing that I’d downloaded the iPhone app, they sent me an email this morning announcing that their Kindle device is now on sale. At Zacks, we’re always looking for opportunities to target our email campaigns like this. There’s no better way to reach your customer than demonstrating that you’ve paid attention to his interaction with you. When you can credibly make the claim that you’re sending this message specifically because he might find it useful, you’ve greatly increased the chances that your customer will click through to the action page.

Actually, the Kindle app has made me a believer when it comes to reading text on my iPhone. Except the Kindle app isn’t my platform of choice. Instead, I’ve been using the much more versatile Stanza. Where the Kindle app concentrates on titles available from Amazon, Stanza and its companion (Mac or Windows) desktop application make it unbelievably easy to put any text on your phone in ebook form. Just open text files, word docs, pdfs or html pages in the desktop app and load them over wi-fi onto your iPhone.

Now any time I stumble upon a long but interesting blog post or article, I’ll load the URL in Stanza and take it with me to read whenever I find a spare minute on the go. The very legible and customizable display makes it much easier and more enjoyable to read than if I’d copied the bookmark and navigated there in the mobile browser. And the text is loaded on the phone itself, so I don’t have to worry about the availability or speed of my connection.

Of course, the retail giant took notice of how well Stanza works. In April, Amazon bought Stanza’s development company Lexcycle. So far, though, they have not disabled the Stanza app itself. Presumably, they’re working with the Lexcycle developers to morph all the extra features of Stanza into the next generation Kindle reader.

All groups had a significant number of participants who considered social networks “fun” and declared an interest in connecting with friends. However, a more pronounced difference between the generations was evident when it came to using these tools to connect with family members.

Just 27% of Generation Z (13-14 year-olds) saw family connections as a draw, where 51% of the over-65 group said keeping in touch with family was one of their reasons for joining.

Invitations also play a stronger role in the older age groups. 46% of Baby Boomers and 60% of the over-65 group said they joined because an invitation had been sent to them by someone they knew. Invitations played a much smaller role (under 30%) for users under 30.

Google’s Next Wave in Internet Communications

Google Wave is a highly collaborative mix of email, shared documents, instant messaging and more, with elements of blogging, social media, photo sharing, project management and issue tracking all thrown in.

The technical aspects of this new tool are very impressive. Not only has Google built its own interface for Wave, but they are releasing an extensive open API that allows developers to access Wave as a communication protocol within their own web-based applications.

If you’ve ever shared a document via Google Docs or a WIki, you’ll immediately grasp the workflow. But Wave starts as casually as an email. It then becomes easy to branch off into a multi-threaded conversation all bound together by the glue of the wave. Clicking individual paragraphs allows you to respond to only that point. Adding new users gives them access to the entire conversation.

Taming the Document History

Such a dynamic framework could easily become confusing, as conversations outgrow their original intent. Mike Elgan at Computerworld seems ready to dismiss the entire project for that reason.

After bouncing stuff back and forth, and after people comment on various parts of the thread, adding commentary at the top, bottom and middle of the original message, clarity about what’s old, new, moot or relevant seems unlikely.

Addressing that concern is where Google created one of the product’s most innovative features. By using the “Playback” function, users can see the entire history of the wave, step by step. Playback can show the progress of the entire conversation, or can be filtered to show only actions of a selected type or by selected users. If you’ve ever been added to an email thread after more than two people have chimed in, it’s not hard to imagine how much more quickly you’d be caught up if playback were available. It’s also a big step towards clarity when compared to most wikis’ “version history.”

Extending Wave’s Reach

The open, extensible nature of Wave means photos or text you attach there can be automatically published to your blog, and updates in either place are immediately reflected on the other. That immediacy translates when collaborating with others, too. As you make edits or type new information into a wave, anyone else who is sharing that document at the same time can see you typing even before you hit enter, for a high-speed workflow similar to instant messaging.

The product is still in its infancy, and won’t be released to the public for some time. Still, there’s considerable enthusiasm about the developer preview. TechCrunch gave a positively glowing review of its vision and ambition.

Opening Web 2.0 to Customers, Partners, and Even Machines

Without releasing Wave into the wild, it’s difficult to predict what forms it will take once real users begin to work with it. The demo video gives an excellent picture of the kind of interaction that’s possible between human users. But the potential for a revolutionary transformation of workflow comes in the ability to let non-human applications and processes join the conversation. Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet imagines Wave giving IT systems like personnel, customer and resource management a seat at the Web 2.0 table:

Literally while participants are busy typing and collaborating, a wave can be receiving support from back-end systems such as HRM, CRM, ERP, and so on to provide data, context, and other just-in-time support. Many businesses could benefit enormously from seamless business data integration such as customers, orders, and so on, never mind the deeper possibilities of contextual business processes leveraged directly in the collaborative activities of workers.

A Perfect Fit with Google’s Long Term Strategy

From a strategic standpoint, this gives Google the potential to claim an entirely new space in internet information sharing. Compared to search, maps and email, where they took existing systems and improved upon them, Wave represents an entirely new collaborative model.

Jordan Golson at Salon accuses Google of climbing to “new heights of arrogance” in what he sees as purely a vanity project.

I’m sure Mr. Golson thinks his pragmatic view is a better way to do business. But he ignores Wave’s contribution to Google’s overall goal to own all the information on the internet, and doesn’t see how powerfully Wave could contribute to that effort. Boiling Wave down to its potential for immediate revenue generation is short-sighted at best.

By providing free services like Gmail, Maps, Docs, Analytics and Earth, Google extends their reach into the way people think about Google’s integration into the internet. What’s more, they encourage users to load their servers with information which those users are then dependent upon Google to retrieve.

In each of these projects, Google opens new doorways for users to interact with information on the internet. And in each case, Google holds the keys to the door.

When that is the overarching goal, a few salaried workers’ time spent on a project like Wave is a minor expense. Finding a revenue model to make each project self-supporting is the kind of short-term business model that most other companies would use. That approach would stifle innovation and detract from the long term focus. That’s the reason most other companies are not Google.

Learn More About Google Wave

To learn more about Google Wave, the video of the Google i/o presentation is a great place to start. There’s also an excellent collection of articles at Mashable.

What do you think about Wave? Is this a tool you’re excited about trying? Do you think your answer reflects how entrenched you are in traditional email, or how comfortable you are with multiple points of presence, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others? I’d love to get your comments below.

It would be easy to say that offering eBooks to be read on the iPhone would cannibalize Kindle sales. You could also object that the iPhone’s screen is far too small for reading an entire book. Yet in my view, this is a brilliant move by Amazon.

Amazon’s core mission is to sell content. While the Kindle is a real physical product for which they make a very real profit, the ongoing revenue model for Amazon is to sell eBooks. Kindle’s primary role is as a vehicle for those sales. The iPhone app allows Amazon to open another channel for eBook sales which costs them virtually nothing and removes a $300 barrier to entry for new customers.

Releasing any high-profile application for the iPhone is a publicity triumph. Kindle has received its fair share of media coverage, but no device in recent memory can match the iPhone when it comes to media affection. Any significant move made by a large company which credibly includes the iPhone as a major character in the drama is sure to generate plenty of press.

One of the iPhone app’s most telling features is the ability to synchronize bookmarks across devices. This presents a clear statement that the iPhone app can live harmoniously with the user’s Kindle, meaning enjoyment of your eBook is not an either-or proposition.

That’s where it becomes clear what a victory this is for Amazon. For any iPhone user who has already bought a Kindle, this rewards their purchase with a free option to continue enjoying their eBook in situations where they don’t have their Kindle handy. Even more importantly, it makes an excellent pitch to iPhone users who haven’t bought a Kindle.

There couldn’t be a better target market for the Kindle than a class of consumers who have demonstrated their willingness to buy an electronic device for three figures. By letting iPhone users try Amazon’s eBooks for only the cost of the book itself, Amazon lets the user sell himself on the idea of reading electronic books. As he becomes addicted to the convenience of reading nearly any title anywhere and concurrently grows frustrated with the iPhone’s tiny screen, the Kindle looks more and more attractive.

Any iPhone user who downloads the app and doesn’t buy a Kindle probably wouldn’t have bought one anyway. This gives those users the opportunity to become eBook buyers that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. For those iPhone users who have considered the Kindle, but for one reason or another have not bought one, this app gives a significant nudge.

I applaud Amazon’s iPhone release, and wish them great success. Well done.

I use it to track what my competitors are saying about any topic I run into.

Competitive Search Bookmarklet Tutorial from Brent Billock on Vimeo.

Here’s the code you need. Watch the video to see how to use it.

javascript:q%20=%20″”%20+%20(window.getSelection%20?%20window.getSelection()%20:%20document.getSelection%20?%20document.getSelection()%20:%20document.selection.createRange().text);%20if%20(!q)%20q%20=%20prompt(“You%20didn’t%20select%20any%20text.%20%20Enter%20a%20search%20phrase:”,%20″”);%20if%20(q!=null)%20location=”LOCATION GOES HERE”%20+%20escape(q).replace(/%20/g,%20″+”);%20void%200

Special thanks to squarefree.com, whose google search bookmarklet I adapted for this tutorial.

I work for Zacks Investment Research in the internet marketing department. Fortunately, nobody relies on my stock analysis. We have highly trained professionals for that. I just sell our products online. And run a stock picking community site where anyone can write analysis.

But when Apple pulled out of Macworld, our chief editor actually did ask me to write up a short piece on it. You can see it here on this blog, but it also was linked off the front page of Zacks for a day in the “Special Coverage” section.

Zacks also syndicates content out to Yahoo Finance. It’s a great source of new members to us, because somebody who reads content that we produce and finds it useful is much more likely to click one of the three or four links that lead to one of our products or to our free newsletter registration.

The side benefit for me in this case is that it almost looks like I’m a writer for Yahoo Finance. That’s my byline just a few pixels below their logo.

I don’t know if I’d say there are any secrets contained in the article, but it is a well written common sense look at building relationships with your customers using Web 2.0. 

Here are the main points they make:

1) Don’t just talk at consumers– work with them.

Web 2.0 is about transcending the one-way flow of information. A company blog may put a human face on the brand, but it doesn’t engage the consumer in the same way that a real community can. Encouraging your customers to talk to each other about your products is a fast, cheap and honest source of feedback that goes beyond what a survey or focus group can provide.

2) Give consumers a reason to participate

Some companies provide actual rewards in cash or products, but often the community itself is sufficient incentive. The key is to make it useful, well-moderated and see that the best contributors are recognized for their efforts.

3) Join the conversation outside your site

Consumers will talk about  your brand and your products on other sites. Many successful companies monitor Digg, Del.icio.us and individual blogs for mentions of their products, and seek to engage users in conversations about their experiences and opinions. 

4) Resist the temptation to sell sell sell

Members of online communities participate with the expectation that their ideas and opinions will be heard, not to become recipients of a one-way sales pitch. Through their participation, they’ll affirm your brand’s value better than you could anyway.

5) Don’t try to control it

Communities won’t always speak of you the way you want them to, but if you listen, you’ll find valuable feedback. Try to shut down negative opinions or dissent and you’ll shut down the entire community.

The article seems short on recommendations for how to proceed with this information. They encourage organizations to find employees who have a strong background in social networking in addition to traditional marketing expertise. They also encourage experimentation since no one solution works for every company.

If you’re trying to steer your company into building relationships with your customers using social media, this article may provide a useful lever for discussions with management decision-makers. There may be more insightful articles on the topic, but the fact that this one appears in the WSJ gives its citation instant credibility in the board room. Their recommendations are mostly right on track, and the case examples may help your upper managers to visualize how it may work for your customers.

Read the whole article (free for a limited time) at WSJ.com