Instead, Facebook hopes to build the same sort of success with businesses that they have had with people’s personal pages. They want to be the one place where people go to look for, learn about, and engage with businesses. To accomplish this goal they need to encourage businesses to join Facebook, and that is why they created the Fan Page.

Facebook doesn’t even call them Fan Pages anymore. Instead, they are simply called Pages. Your page lets you build a presence on Facebook, engage with your audience, spread your message, connect with Facebook users on your website, and encourage conversations. Custom tabs can be created to feature coupons, promote specials, share videos, and set up events. It’s a full palette of features, and it’s just for businesses, brands, and non-profit agencies.

The dangerous side of your business presence comes in the way customers perceive your presence. When they are connecting with your business, they may think they are connecting with you. If they have a bad experience with one of your representatives, they may take their complaints to your Facebook Page because they expect this to be the online equivalent of asking to speak to the owner.

To add another complication, what if the person they are complaining about also happens to be one of your Facebook page administrators? That complaint could be deleted and you wouldn’t know about it unless there was an even bigger backlash because of it. Large businesses have marketing, public relations, or customer care groups to handle these situations. But for smaller businesses, there are only two courses I see to this situation. You either need to be your own Facebook Page administrator, or you need to bring in help from outside. This is where the social marketing experts come in.

Social marketing experts can set up your page for you, develop guidelines for Facebook engagement, monitor your presence, promote your brand, and provide a direct channel of communication to the top when there is a problem that needs your attention. This service isn’t free, but in the context of a marketing budget, you should be able to identify a level of service that suits any business.

How is Facebook going to make money with Pages? Nobody knows at this point, but you can be certain that once businesses are engaging with their customers on Facebook, they will not want to stop. In the future, a Facebook Page will likely come with a price tag. But for now, the time is right to add your business to the mix and start connecting with your customers.

The answer is simple. They knew it would be a touchdown. It had already run on YouTube for months prior to the Super Bowl, and garnered more than 1 million views. People liked it, and shared their feedback. Smart advertisers test before they spend their budget on placement. One million voices said “run it”.

The real genius behind Google’s Parisian Love commercial is that it’s incredibly easy to riff on. By this time next year, Parisian Love may prove to be the most parodied and imitated commercial of all time. You don’t need actors, animation chops, or even Photoshop. With a few basic software tools, wit, humor, and a tendency toward the subversive, you can create your own version of Parisian Love in an afternoon. And when you do, it will most likely end up on YouTube, another Google property. They really can’t lose.

Let’s see what delightfully deviant ideas spring out of Parisian Love, and see if we can measure the “viral-ness” of Google’s Super Bowl investment.

Driving to work yesterday I noticed a billboard that was hung upside-down. I glanced at it out of the corner of my eye and wondered if the outdoor advertising company hired idiots to hang their boards. Later that day, I saw the same billboard in another location, also upside-down. I felt sorry for the guys who had to hang it, because they probably have more sense than the people who told them how to do their job.

Advertising is effective when you send the right message to the right audience using the right method of delivery. The billboard in question is for a car dealer, and their message is OPEN SUNDAY. Outdoor advertising is the right medium because the signs are placed where people who drive will see them. The message was good, the delivery method matched the audience, yet they took a simple formula and screwed it up. They disrupted the delivery and damaged the message.

Outdoor advertisers struggle with the same problem that online advertisers face. How do you insure an ad gets noticed in an ad saturated landscape? Bright colors, drawing outside the lines, adding dimension, and yes, flipping things over are all effective ways of getting noticed. It is commonly recognized among the outdoor advertising community that turning a message upside-down increases its noticeability. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for the brand. In theory, everything you do contributes to brand resonance. If a device for getting noticed doesn’t also reinforce the message, it’s not resonant; it’s disruptive.

Online advertising is chock full of attention-grabbing opportunities. In the end, it’s not about being noticed, it’s about being heard. And if the message resonates, it will stay in the mind. I got the car dealer’s message, but it didn’t resonate with me. It wasn’t persuasive, it wasn’t clever. It might have even turned me off a little. Mostly, it was a squandered opportunity to make an enduring impression.

Do something resonant, and your impression will endure. At the very least, make sure the message you want your audience to hear isn’t tripped while walking down the aisle.

Advertising agencies love Flash sites because you can create a visually rich presentation experience that is unique and fresh. Many brands love Flash for the same reasons. But Flash has come under fire in recent years for a variety of reasons. From a workflow perspective, Flash is such a controlled environment that it is much more difficult to add content and new navigation items than is possible with a content managed HTML site. And from a search engine perspective, Flash doesn’t help your efforts to be discovered.

You can have your Flash and find it too, if your flash site is built with an understanding of what the search engines can and cannot read. For example, text that is embedded in your Flash files can be indexed by Google, but text that is pulled in from an external data source is not.

It is vital that your site’s search engine results create an optimized presentation of your content. You want each search result to link to a state within Flash that you determine. Also, each section of content should have its own URL, so that it appears in the search engine as a separate result.

If you build a Flash site, it’s very important to offer an alternative HTML content site so that users who do not have a Flash plug-in can still view your content. The experience won’t be the same, but it can still be good.

Finally, consider the option of using Flash judiciously as elements within a site. You can create rich, interactive experiences within a page, and offer alternative static images or javascript-energized code as a replacement for those who aren’t flash-ready. This is perhaps the most viable option, and certainly my favorite, because you can have the benefits of Flash while making the rest of your site easy to manage and update.

The state of Flash and Search is constantly changing. What is impossible today, might be trivial in another year. It’s important to keep up with the latest changes and adjust your online strategy to exploit the best opportunities. Everybody has a favorite Flash site. What’s yours?

They’re ubiquitous, obtrusive, and sometimes excruciatingly annoying, but banner ads have been the primary advertising vehicle of the web for more than a decade. Most are seen and ignored by the viewer. Some are as irritating as a carnival game hawker, trying as hard as they might to get your click-through. We’ve all learned, either from confirmed suspicions or experience, to avoid them at all cost, and as a result, they’re not the most effective vehicle for getting your message out.

But if you don’t advertise, you don’t get seen. Banner ads are one of the easiest ways to rent a piece of property on someone else’s high-traffic url. As a business model, it can be valued, tracked, and measured for success. If you don’t spend a dime on banner advertising, your internet marketing campaign may never get off the ground.

The first problem with a banner ad is that the viewer is usually interested in driving to their destination, and they see your banner advertisement as a distraction. The viewer has more interest in what they’re trying to accomplish than in what you’re trying to sell, so they don’t give the banner ad much value unless it appears to be a more direct route toward their intended destination. That doesn’t happen very often, which leads to the second problem. The result of clicking on a banner ad almost always leads to disappointment. It’s like someone changing the channel during your favorite television show to make you watch the commercial on another channel. Yuck.

The solution is simple–promise and deliver. Promise the viewer that when they click on your banner ad, they’re going to find exactly what you tell them is there, and when they click on it, give them exactly that, and exceed their expectations. Inform and delight them. Entertain them. Reward them. Make them glad they clicked on your banner ad. Be consistent in never failing to delight and reward the viewer. Do that, and people will look forward to finding your banner ads when they surf the web. Can you imagine that? An advertising campaign where people look forward to being distracted every time they see one of your banner ads?

Banner ads are an invitation to party. If you have a reputation for throwing the best parties in town, everyone will want to come. If you are known for the lamest parties, who’s going to bother? Banner ads without a pay-off are a waste of money, and they squander your credibility. If you can’t deliver the goods, stop spending your cash. Get your marketing campaign on track. Create an advertising vehicle that rewards the viewer when they visit your landing page. Then start advertising. The results will be slow at first, but once you gain a reputation for consistently rewarding your visitors for banner click-throughs, you will be astonished with the results, and the return from your investment in banner advertising will make you a winner.

You might love to write or perhaps you write because it’s a part of your job. Conversational writing has exploded in importance since the advent of blogs and the love that search engines show toward original content. Not everyone is a natural storyteller, but anyone can learn to write great articles. Follow these 8 steps and you will be well on your way to writing articles that people enjoy reading and learning from.

1. Focus on your Objectives. Every article should have a clear objective before you begin. Do you want to discuss the advantages of a product or service? Do you want to motivate your audience to take action? The objective will tell you which direction the article will move in, and will give you something to measure your success against. Objectives should be simple and direct. In this article, the objective is to give a sequential list of activities that will help you, the reader, write better articles. An objective does not need to be any more complex. The more complex you make your objective, the harder it is to achieve.

2. Know your Audience. Are you writing for junior high school students, or for pharmaceutical sales professionals? Is your audience primarily located in the USA or are they located in other countries? Your audience will determine the kind of language you use and the reading level you will target. The spelling of common words can be different, and some references, such as the grade level of students, is unique to different locations. It is best to choose words that are the least confusing when writing to a mixed audience. If you write at a slightly lower reading level than your intended audience, readers will thank you for your clarity and simplicity.

3. Determine your Message. What is the one idea you want your reader to walk away with? A message, like your objective, should be simple and direct. If your objective is to discuss how Duracell batteries are better than other batteries, your message might be “Duracell batteries are a better value because they consistently outlast similarly priced batteries by 25% or more.” With this message in the reader’s mind, they’re more likely to choose Duracell batteries when making a purchase decision, as long as they are priced the same as their competitors.

4. Choose your Delivery Style. You can be humorous, entertaining, factual, informative, persuasive, analytical, passionate, sarcastic, or a combination of styles. Your delivery style should suit the objective, audience, and message. By personalizing an article with style, it helps the readers connect with the writer. A distinctive delivery style may even become a writer’s brand and readers will expect every article from that author to have the same style. This is great for developing a following, but can also polarize readers into groups who love and groups who hate the writer’s style.

5. Prepare your Material. Assuming you are not writing a story based on personal experience or a fictional account, you will need to research your subject. Checking facts, finding expert accounts, gaining new insights is what attracts many writers to the process of writing articles. It is rewarding to discover information that most people don’t realize and then pass it along in the context of your article. The better you prepare your material, the more you will have to work with when it’s time to put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard.

6. Organize your Ideas. For many writers who are first starting out, organizing an article can be the most difficult challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. There are various ways of doing this, from making a simple list to creating mind-maps where ideas are organized around a central themes and sub-themes. In the end, you will finalize with a sequence of items that tell the story of your article, starting with the major themes or commonly held beliefs, and ending with the message you want to leave as the strongest impression on your reader’s mind.

7. Write your Article. Now that you’ve laid the groundwork, it will be easy to write your article. You know what you want to say, whom you want to say it to, how you want to say it, and where you want to end. You only need to guide your reader through the thought process that you have laid out for them, using the delivery style that you have chosen, or that your readers expect from you.

8. Edit and Publish. You should never publish an article immediately after writing it. Even seasoned writers will make mistakes and overlook them during a review. Ideally, you have someone who can read your article for you and catch any errors. More often than not, this is a luxury that writers cannot afford. In this case, it’s best to put down the article and do something else for an hour or more, then return to read as if you’re reading it for the first time. If you find mistakes, correct them and walk away again. Repeat this process until you can make two complete reat-throughs without any revisions. You will be surprised how many times you will catch simple errors.

Anyone can write memorable articles that people enjoy reading and learn from. Following these 8 steps, you can do it too!

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

It’s an idea so simple that you’ll wonder why it isn’t already used by everyone from your mom to your best friend. Go to a website, create a contact list, record a voice message, send it to all of your contacts in the list. You pay by the minute and the number of calls, but the service is not at all costly. Sending a one minute message to ten people costs less than a dollar. Sending a message to 150 people costs less than $10. Longer messages cost a little more, but not much.

ShoutNow is an Indianapolis-based start-up that is currently in beta, but will be launching soon. They are even developing an iPhone application which I find especially intriguing, because the service requires set-up through a web browser. This brings the portability and simplicity of Twitter to a voice application. For all of those people who use their phones to talk to people rather than as a way to send and receive messages, you now have a way to reach them.

It doesn’t take long to realize that you could use this service in so many interesting ways. Your wife is having a baby and you want to get the word out to everyone, but you really don’t want to make 50 phone calls, nor do you want to slight one relative or friend over another. Your contact list could be set up in advance, and you could take just a few minutes to blast your voice message out to everyone at once.

ShoutNow is scaled for individuals, but it can also be used for business applications as long as you follow the rules. That means you have an existing relationship with customers, have permission to call, or you are a not-for-profit institution. From a marketing perspective, ShoutNow provides a great way to cut through the clutter of email and get on someone’s radar. The negative side of this service is that some people will use it to pitch products, when in essence, ShoutNow is a relationship-building tool. Proceed with caution and use ShoutNow to start conversations, and you will make a wise investment. Use ShoutNow to generate spam, and you may find yourself blocked from calling a valued customer.

The Twilio web sevice api makes it relatively easy to integrate web apps with telephone services, enabling applications like ShoutNow to rapidly come to market. I will be keeping an eye out for ShoutNow and similar applications that bring Web 2.0 principles to the telephone, but I can use your help. Do you know about other applications like ShoutNow? I’d like to hear about them!

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

Anyone who builds a new website today quickly realizes that it’s nearly impossible to get noticed without making some substantial efforts. You can market your website using traditional marketing promotions, but these only work while the program is running. Using the web to grow your long tail visibility will increase your exposure long after the campaign has ended. Long tail marketing requires time and effort, but the lasting benefits provide great value to your web presence.

Web Directories
Web directories provide reference and contact information about your business. It is likely that your business is already listed in many popular web directories but those listings are incomplete. This is due to the way directories are initially created from public domain sources. Your job is to find the web directories where you are listed and enhance the listing with additional descriptive information, including a URL to your business website. You might not have a top-ranked site, but the web directory entry for your site might bring your customers one click closer to you.

Social Bookmarking Sites
While web directories are created from information that has been collected elsewhere, social bookmarking sites aggregate the personal web directories of many individuals. The idea behind social bookmarking is that I might share interests with you, and you might have sites bookmarked that I would like, so if you share your bookmarks, I can see which sites you think are important. Social bookmarking gives people an additional way to find your site.

Leveraging Content Aggregators
Sites like YouTube, Flickr, and DeviantArt are content aggregators because they offer unlimited space for anybody to upload and share their content. Often, people will upload to a content aggregator and then share a link to the content on their site, creating an outbound link. But within the sites themselves, you can create a user profile that includes a description of your business and a link to your website. Content aggregators will help you connect with different audiences and can increase awareness of your business.

Creating Original Content for High Authority Sites
The most valuable inbound links come from high traffic sites with a reputation for having high quality and authoritative content. If you establish yourself as an authority in your field by creating high quality content that is popular or informative with internet users, you can increase your visibility by offering to develop content for high profile sites to be published with a byline briefly describing your business and including your website address.

Encouraging RSS Subscriptions
When another website publishes an RSS feed of your website, each article of the feed will have an inbound link to your site. Every published RSS feed will evangelize your brand and increase your visibility. Optimize your blog format for RSS and you will more likely encourage others to publish your feed.

Blog and Forum Participation
This is perhaps the best way to increase visibility. There are literally millions of blogs and forums that you can participate with. Spend a few hours or days researching these resources to find the most active and relevant places for your participation. Develop a reputation on the sites as someone who is helpful and authoritative, and nobody will mind an occasional plug for your website. Just don’t overdo it. Community members recognize when someone is just there to push their products and they will be left with a negative impression rather than the positive one that you should cultivate.

This list is far from comprehensive, but it should give you a good start on your web marketing program. As the web continues to evolve, some of these approaches may lose favor, and others may appear that are not yet popular. What are you doing to build your long tail web presence?

Tim Piazza is the lead architect of social media and interactive marketing at Keller Crescent Advertising, Indiana’s largest independently owned advertising agency. You can read Tim’s blog at http://www.bzzmatters.com, follow Tim on Twitter @TimPiazza and learn more about Keller Crescent Advertising at http://www.kellercrescentadvertising.com

As I continue reading David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man”, I find well-constructed ideas that everyone involved in advertising should consider and several are especially suited to those engaged in social media. Here I have taken his 11 points on what makes a campaign great, and added my own abbreviated explanation of what Ogilvy means.

What you say is more important than how you say it. Ogilvy says large promise is the soul of advertising. The promise you make should not be left to chance. Testing and refinement with a qualified audience are essential to determining the most successful promise.

Unless your campaign is built around a great idea, it will flop. The trick is in having clients who recognize which ideas are the great ones, or rightly trust that you are capable of recognizing the great ideas for them.

Give the facts. The more information you give about your product, the more you depend on the consumer’s intelligence to decide for themselves whether your product is something they want. Armed with information, consumers are willing to spend more in order to get more benefit.

You cannot bore people into buying. We are all inundated with advertising throughout the day. If you want your advertising to be heard, it must be done with a unique voice. Create ads that people look forward to experiencing.

Be well-mannered, but don’t clown. People tend to respond best to trustworthy, respectful spokespersons.

Make your advertising contemporary. Use the lexicon of your audience and speak to their experience, A 25 year old and a 65 year old may share similar views, but they arrived at those views in vastly different ways.

Committees can criticize advertisements, but they cannot write them. As the number of people involved in creating an idea increases, the ability to express the idea with a personal voice diminishes. The most effective advertising is spoken in the voice of one individual.

If you are lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops pulling. A person buys a major appliance perhaps every 10 years, but appliances are sold every day because the audience is always changing. Stopping a successful advertisement simply because the advertisers are tired of seeing it is a poor reason.

Never write an advertisement that you wouldn’t want your own family to read. Be honest. Don’t lie to the consumer. You cannot sustain a brand through dishonest advertising.

The Image and the Brand. Every advertisement contributes to the brand image. A brand cannot be all things to all people. The image must be defined. A defined brand image is to the advertiser what a blueprint is to the architect. Changing a brand image, once acquired, is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming.

Don’t be a copycat. Every great advertising campaign is copied by someone. Those who copy are inferior to those who create original, successful campaigns.

Do you agree with David Ogilvy? What would you add or change? How would you apply these rules to your social media campaign?

I don’t subscribe to magazines or newspapers. I subscribe to cable but my television watching is less than 1 hour per week. I do record shows that I might watch eventually, or might just delete without watching. The only radio I listen to is a few hours of NPR per week. I don’t go to the mall. When not engaged in one of my hobbies or interests, my leisure time is spent on the internet, which is also where I do my shopping. You won’t reach me through traditional advertising. Although I cannot avoid billboards, I consider them an eyesore. You might think I dislike advertising, but that is not true. I really do enjoy great advertising, but most of the advertising I see isn’t targeting me, it’s for someone else. I dislike unnecessary distraction, and that is what “someone else’s advertising” is.

You want me for a customer. I have money and I spend it. I have strong brand awareness, especially for luxury and boutique items. Things I like are handcrafted, are good for me, or give me a great perceived value for my investment. Brands I buy include Apple, Canon, Sony, Denon, Gibson, Fender, Harley-Davidson, Indian, Columbia, Merrill, Tom’s of Maine, L.L. Bean, and Johnston & Murphy. To me, value rarely means cheap. I want quality, performance, and longevity from my purchases.

I am not necessarily brand loyal, nor do I always buy the best. I used to buy Canondale bicycles, but when I replaced my last mountain bike, a full suspension frame Canondale offered little real value to a recreational rider over an upper-end Mongoose with similar features at one-third the cost. I believe Nikon DSLR camera systems are superior to Canon DSLRs, but the difference in quality between #1 and #2 is not great enough to justify the difference in price.

If you want to sell a product to me, it better have a great reputation on the internet. I look for peer reviews. I compare products, features, and prices. I make an informed decision, and in the end, the decision I make is my own and for my own reasons. If you want to engage me, don’t pitch me. Develop a relationship, offer to help, occasionally remind me that you’ve got something I might be interested in. Harass me and you will quickly learn that I stop paying attention. Don’t tease me with deals that sound great until I read the fine print, because that will give you a bad reputation in my eyes–are you listening, eCost? And you better take care of your other customers, because they’re the ones who will support your reputation on the internet. Their experiences count and if I read that your product tends to break or that customerr support is terrible, you won’t win my business.

Who am I? I am the new consumer.