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 rumor mill is churning about an impending tablet computer from Apple. Referred to as the iSlate by those who like to step out on a limb, the device is supposed to have many iPhone-like features including gesture navigation and a touch-sensitive screen. If you have faith in Apple as a technology innovator, you may think it’s going to be the greatest gadget of 2010, or you might think that it will be just another tablet-PC flop. I think the former is true, and here’s why.

Tablet computers have been around for several years, but the current crop of tablets are little more than laptop computers retrofitted with touch screens and running a special version of Microsoft Windows. If you are looking at the potential of a slate device as another take on the tablet PC, you are missing the mark. The real potential comes clear when you consider other kinds of devices that have streamed into our lives and the potential to both replace them and make the user experience better.

Portable Video Players
We grew up in a television culture, and we still watch our favorite shows–we just don’t schedule our lives around the tv anymore. We Tivo, buy DVDs, and take our shows on the road. DVD players are limited by the number of discs you are willing to haul around and risk damaging. Portable players with their own storage are hampered by the difficulty in converting discs to something you can take with you. Apple has already solved this problem but Apple players are limited to iPods and iPhones. A portable device with a larger screen would be a perfect player for movies purchased through iTunes.

Ebook Readers
Reading a book on a computer isn’t an enjoyable experience, but the Amazon Kindle has proven that paper isn’t what makes books better, it’s portability and simplicity. The Kindle is a joy to use but it only works for text and simple graphics. Those gorgeous art books or magazines that use photography to tell a story lose their appeal on a Kindle. Apple technology raises the bar with a full color screen and page-turning gestures.

Netbooks
Not everyone needs a computer that does it all. Netbooks easily handle lightweight work like text editing and web surfing, but their greatest drawback is that they are just laptop computers with cut corners, encumbering users with slow speed, awkward screen dimensions and diminutive keyboards. Still, we buy them in huge numbers, proving there is a demand for light, portable web terminals. The only thing standing between Apple’s iPhone technology and a reinvention of the netbook is size. Make a bigger iPod Touch and you’ll have an awesome netbook.

Handheld Game Consoles
The Nintendo Game Boy has been around for 20 years and it continues to dominate the portable game niche. Apple’s iPhone has emerged as a next-generation game console with impressive results. A number of important game franchises have introduced iPhone versions of their games and sales have been through the roof. While the iPhone gaming experience compares favorably to the Nintendo DS, it doesn’t come close to the immersive experience of games on a desktop computer. An Apple gaming device with large screen, motion-sensing technology would redefine portable gaming with an immersive, augmented reality experience that, with the right game development, could be a great physical workout and a real game-changer for Apple’s next big thing.

It may be just rumors, but I can’t wait to learn what Apple has been hiding!

Websites are going through a transition, but when haven’t they? Sites used to be coded in HTML, then evolved through Flash applications, style sheet layouts, and Javascript interactivity. The best way to build changes almost as quickly as popular fashion. If your site is at least three years old, there’s a good chance that it’s out of fashion.

All of the cutting-edge sites today are sporting a content management system (CMS) behind that snappy interface. The CMS lets you add your own articles, pictures and menu items without enlisting a team of programmers. Once your site is built, you can furnish it the way you like, and keep furnishing it as often as you want.

When choosing a CMS you have four choices, commercial, open source, custom, or hosted solutions. Here are the fundamental advantages and disadvantages of each:

A commercial CMS is one that you purchase from a vendor. It typically comes with a licensing agreement and basic support, with higher levels of support available for a fee. For companies that want reliability and long term vendor support, this is a good choice. This is also the most expensive solution, and is not necessarily better than the other options.

Open source is a highly popular choice for many. The explosive growth of the internet can be largely attributed to open source software. The advantage is interoperability and a worldwide network of people who use open source platforms. The disadvantage is that you may still need experts to help track down bugs and add special features. You can find commercial support, though it’s not always local.

Custom solutions are an obvious choice for the programmers who know how to write the code. Because they understand what every line of code is for, they can troubleshoot every problem that arises, and they can make the site do whatever a customer wants. Custom solutions are far more flexible than other approaches. On the other hand, when the programmer makes a career change, the client might be left with a dead end.

Hosted solutions are increasingly popular for many types of applications, but the most popular example is a blog site. You can host your own open source WordPress blog on your server, or you can have a blog at WordPress.com at no cost. The difference is in support and flexibility. Hosted solutions tend to be focused on certain types of sites are much less flexible in terms of individual customization, but you also do not need any technical expertise whatsoever to support your site. You may have to give up some space for advertising, or pay a monthly fee for the services you use.

In the end, the right choice depends on your particular needs and everyone’s needs are different. It’s best to consult with someone who can assess your web development needs and help guide you toward a solution that fits your company. If you’d like help deciding, tell me about your business needs, and I’ll try to guide you toward the best solution.

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

There are now 183 million domain names registered around the world, a 17% increase over last year, but it is very likely that the web you experience is getting smaller and the reason is simple. The pace of internet growth has far out-scaled human proportions. It’s so big that without the familiarity of a consistent place, the internet would be overwhelming. Our natural response is to cull from the internet and make our individual experiences familiar and manageable. We find the places that we like, the sources that we trust, the communities that we feel affinity with, and we stick to those. This explains the fundamental reason for the success of Facebook and other social media sites.

Facebook is like an internet unto itself, but with a limited set of things you can do, and with a limited number of people you share the experience with. If the internet is worldwide, Facebook is your local coffee shop. You recognize people, you meet your friends there, you get introduced to their friends. You know what’s on the menu, and you have your favorite place to sit. While initially it feels like just another website, in a short time your friends find you and your experience becomes familiar, comfortable, personal, and participatory.

The Facebook experience can be so consuming that some web users have little time for anything else, and this is how the web gets smaller. As we cull, we limit ourselves to the familiar, where we read, watch, and participate. As our participation increases, we limit our experience of the larger web. The busier we get with our interests, the less time we have to introduce new ones. Social sites like Facebook make our experience feel complete, but manageable. This is their attraction, but potentially, also their Achilles Heel.

What would happen if your local coffee shop suddenly became immensely popular? It might become overcrowded and you wouldn’t be able to find a seat, or they could expand to accommodate their new customers. In either case, you experience would be disruptive, less accommodating, and more impersonal. This can also happen in the social web. You might realize one day that the Facebook network has grown so big that you no longer feel like it’s personal anymore. It has become like the web–and out-scaled its earlier human proportions. What then?

I believe the answer lies in micro-social communities, smaller, more focused, Facebook-like communities that connect people through some common interest, such as the community they live in, or a shared hobby or belief. Micro-social communities have the benefits of a social site, but are self-regulating in scale because of their narrow focus. By participating in a micro-social community that focuses on the place where you live, you can create connections that enhance your community experience as well as your online experience. Micro-social communities may still grow too big for comfort, it’s less likely because they are not trying to be all things to all people.

There are not many micro-social communities yet, but you can expect to see an explosion of them over the next few years as web applications for building social communities evolve. On the internet, the Next Big Thing is creating smaller, richer, more relevant experiences that connect you with your community, making the web increasingly personal.

What are your favorite micro-social communities? Tell me 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

In 1963, David Ogilvy published “Confessions of an Advertising Man. In his own voice and speaking from his uniquely experienced perspective, Ogilvy talks about how to manage an advertising agency, how to make great advertising, and how to manage great client relationships.

Given that agencies have propelled a half century forward from his “Mad Men” era, one would expect that much has changed, and it has. But there is ageless insight into the nature of business relationships that any reader can gain from Ogilvy’s tome. Take, for example, these 10 questions he suggests anyone ask before firing their current agency.

1. Procter & gamble and General Foods get superlative service out of their agencies, and they have never fired an agency. Why not?

2. Will the appointment of a new agency solve your problem, or merely sweep it under the rug? What are the real roots of your problem?

3. Has you product been made obsolete by your competitors?

4. Did you dictate the advertising for which you now blame your agency?

5. Have you been scaring your agency into a blue funk?

6. Is your advertising manager such a jackass that he would negate the best brains in any agency?

7. How do you feel about one of your competitors inheriting the secrets which your agency has acquired in your service?

8. Do you realize that a change in agencies may disrupt your marketing operation for twelve months or more?

9. Have you been candid with the head of your agency? If you told him of your dissatisfaction, he might well be able to wheel up guns with greater fire power than you could find in a new agency.

10. Have you faced the fact that when you dismiss an agency, you cause most of the men and women who work on your account to lose their jobs? Is there no way to avoid this human tragedy?

You may not agree to the letter with everything that Ogilvy says, and you can argue that things are different today, that the pace of change and the internet creates an entirely different forum. I disagree. Circumstances are different, but people are very much the same. At its essence, Ogilvy’s words are as true today as they were when written in the early 1960′s.

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.

I had never heard of EveryJoe.com until a few days ago and I was instantly curious. Here’s a brand new blog site clearly designed for men, only weeks old, and already tracking 64k monthly uniques. WTF? I needed to know more.

It didn’t take long to get the story. A Canadian blog network called b5media made the bold move of aggregating their hundreds of blog properties into a set of four web portals, each with a slightly different flavor. EveryJoe is a guy’s clubhouse. They cover sports, entertainment, games and gadgets. Splendicity is for the women. They’re about beauty and style, fashion and bargain-spotting. Blisstree is a little more down-to-earth, focusing on cooking, crafting, parenting, and raising healthy families. Then there’s Bizzia. It’s all about the career and building wealth. From a bird’s eye view, it’s easy to spot the trend. b5media has created 4 buckets, loosely based on the single guy, the career guy, the homemaker, and the career woman.

Each of the four sites launched during a one month period between February and March of this year. Each quickly gained traffic and in total have so far captured around 400k unique visitors in the past month. They’ve found a demographic sweet spot and I’m sure that’s no accident. Each of these media portals are targeting people with money or influence over purchases. b5media makes their money selling advertising. They’ve created a platform that simplifies the process of deciding where to put the ads.

While it is too soon to say whether this reshaping by b5media will make them a giant in the blogosphere. Their regular readers may disapprove of the new format. I’m predicting success. I believe they’ve made a brilliant move and that after some initial shake-out, all four sites will grow their readership as they are discovered through search and social media.

I’m a big believer in data, but I’m not sure what to believe about some of the data that is thrown around to measure the size of markets or count the number of eyeballs that will be exposed to an advertising campaign. This seems to be a problem for not only me, but for many customers who are trying to make intelligent decisions about where and how to market their products. Numbers that have been influenced by a vested interest only serve to undermine credibility. Let me offer two instances.

Magazine readership numbers are reported on the premise that for each issue in circulation, a multiple number of people read it. The x factor serves to improve audience value, thus increasing the value of ad space. This x factor is reported by the magazine, and then audited by a third party. Unfortunately, the auditors are not a consumer watchdog group. They are an organization funded by publishers, advertisers, and advertising agencies and exist for the sole purpose of lending credibility to magazine readership numbers. Bias is unavoidable. And while it’s reasonable to assume some percentage of magazines are passed-along to friends and family, the numbers often reported just don’t jibe with my experience. As an advertiser, I’m not supposed to question these numbers, but I can’t help it.

In another case I recently read two different social media impact reports. They both reported strong interest in social media marketing efforts by marketing professionals. The numbers were somewhat out of line with what I expected. A quick look at the audience who were surveyed showed that they were largely comprised of people who are already engaged in social media marketing. It makes perfect sense that they would have a high interest. If you pull your audience from those who visit social media websites, you’re going to get an abnormally large number of opinions that are favorable toward social media. Just like the magazine audit bureaus, there is a bias that is cognitively inseparable from the setting.

There are better ways to gather data. I favor data gathered through evaluating and measuring conversations within online communities. I believe unprompted discussions produce better insights. People share their opinions in a forum where they are comfortable, and therefore tend to be more honest and open. Unlike surveys, participants in these discussions are not influenced by the trajectory of questions. And because the data is publicly available, it can be independently verified, supported, or challenged.

Using conversation to gather data isn’t new. Carol Gilligan turned moral development theory on its ear by using open-ended dialog to develop an understanding of ethical relationships instead of the line of hypothetical questions used by Lawrence Kohlberg and others. By doing so, Gilligan was able to thwart a system of inquiry that generated a bias in the conclusions drawn by her predecessors. In the same way, new understandings about brands and product perceptions can be gained by looking at the conversations surrounding them. By following the threads of conversations, an overall impression of can be scored, the positive and negative traits identified, and trends over time can be measured and connected to events.

This process can be used to measure and track the public pulse of ethical questions such as how people feel about software piracy and what changes their attitudes, or to measure people’s like or dislike for consumer brands like Gibson musical instruments and Whirlpool appliances. It does requires skill and a great amount of time and effort to locate, analyze, and report on the data. Software tools certainly make the work easier, but ultimately it comes down to understanding natural language. Data points have to be hand selected and hand scored. And it is well worth the effort involved. We see consumers in a fresh perspective that isn’t readily apparent through other data. The results are often insightful, compelling, and sometimes assumption-shattering.

If you believe this is a service your brand can benefit from, please contact me through this blog, or at Keller Crescent Advertising.

In 1993, a group of us in Colorado were trying to figure out what this Internet thing was going to become. Wired magazine had just published their first issue. The very first web browser that could display both images and text in the same window, Mosaic, had just released to the world. The Aspen Institute hosted its first symposium on the subject of the internet and society. They were heady times. An honorable email address ended in .edu or .org. If your email address ended in .gov or .mil, you were treated with suspicion, and a .com address marked you as someone who might run roughshod over our new playground and ruin it for the rest of us.

We were all relatively naive, and eagerly chomping at our bits for this anti-Orwellian future where people had the power of the press, where public policy could be reviewed and responded to by the people, and where education reform meant everyone could attend the very best classes and learn from the greatest minds without tuition or relocation. When a high level manager from the marketing department at Comcast announced at the Aspen Institute that their carefully executed studies revealed that men wanted to use the internet to bet on sports and women wanted to shop, shop, shop, she was booed by the crowd. It wasn’t what we wanted to hear. We were the thought leaders, or so we thought. Money didn’t matter, or so we thought.

Time remains the greatest teacher of all. While Utopia didn’t arrive with our broadband connections, some of what we mused about at the Aspen Institute has come true. Our digital world is abound with great resources like the TED talks, podcasts from Harvard, Dartmouth, and Stanford, and well over 100 million blogs on every imaginable subject. The information age is truly upon us.
But our vision was too narrow. It didn’t say “and-also”. The internet expanded in every direction and with a particular bias toward commerce. What we have today far exceeds the imagination of anyone who attended that early winter symposium. The internet has become an economic engine and a .com address is nothing out of the ordinary. We have arrived at a point where the internet is the catalyst of influence, not yet under anyone’s control, but not entirely a free-for-all.

And the woman from Comcast was also right, though too narrow in her view as well. Men shop online. In fact, men out-spend women on the internet, say they are more comfortable shopping online, and are less apt to hold back on purchases during a down economy. It’s our shopping habits that have changed the most. For some, we view it as a way to save time. For others, it’s a way to make more informed purchases. And many of us are simply looking for the best deal. Whatever the reason, one out of every two American adults has made a purchase online.

Perhaps a greater shock to those pioneers of the mid-1990’s is the amount of detailed information available about internet users. The internet is a marketer’s panacea. For the first time we can watch an individual from their first exposure to a campaign, all the way through to the purchase of a product, even tracking the path they take through the store. The data is staggering, and we’re just starting to understand how we can use it. Marketing intelligence and its application to campaign execution is the new frontier of advertising and marketing.

The date for Orwell’s future has come and gone, but perhaps he too, was just too narrow in his view. You can see a little bit of Orwell in today’s internet, but you can also see empowerment. Consumers today are more informed, more price aware, have more choices, and ultimately, more influence over brands. Time will tell, but we may be at the beginning of a consumer revolution where it is the ultimate purchaser who shapes the product and the brand identity.