So, your Facebook contest was wildly successful. Congratulations! You have tons of new fans, a fresh audience for your product or service, thousands of potential leads—now what? After the contest wraps up, how do you keep all those folks coming back?The real challenge of running a Facebook contest isn’t handling the logistics of the contest itself, but rather, figuring out how to maintain a connection with all those Facebook followers once the hoopla dies down. Ideally, you want to make your Facebook page so chock full of relevant, entertaining or compelling information that it becomes worth your follower’s while to return again and again—whether or not you offer them an actual incentive to do so.

Providing that kind of value to your Facebook fans can be achieved using a variety of strategies. Here are a few of my favorites… Continue Reading…

It’s easy to understand the logic behind content marketing—that establishing yourself as a thought leader will build your brand and generate leads. But it’s one thing to appreciate the idea; it’s another to actually create a content marketing culture in a company to enable successful execution of the strategy.

The Content Challenge

Content marketing can take many forms—blogs, white papers, email newsletters, social media postings, You Tube videos, personal appearances, self-published print magazines, and so on. But where does all this content come from? According to a recent survey, this is clearly the biggest problem with implementation—with respondents saying that their greatest content marketing challenges are producing engaging content (36%), producing enough content (21%), and budget to produce content (20%). Continue Reading…

In a recent survey by the market research firm, Blue Research, nearly half of those surveyed (41 percent) said they would prefer using a social login such as Facebook Connect rather than registering at each individual website.

The survey also found that 77 percent believe it’s a good idea to offer social logins as a registration alternative, even if they might not use social logins themselves.

This data suggests that Facebook Connect usage is likely to continue growing. But is it the right CRM strategy? How does it compare to traditional website logins? Continue Reading…

I recently wrote about the amount of information that one can gather about users who register for or become members of your website using Facebook Connect. In continuing to read and contemplate writing on the subject I came across a nice article by Augie Ray in CRM magazine. Augie’s article points out that the majority of companies who are using Facebook Connect to allow consumers to connect to their website are doing so without telling the customer what information they are sharing or how the company will use it.

Customers are becoming wary and savvy about the fact that while connecting to a site using their Facebook ID may be high on the convenience side, they may also be unwittingly sharing more personal information and access to their data with that particular company than they would have if they would have signed up in a traditional manner. In a time where Social CRM is about as hot as any area of social software and where companies are beginning to want to capture and utilize the information available about customers and prospects on social networks it is amazing to me that so many companies would rely on Facebook to communicate what information is being shared through Facebook Connect. Let me explain… Continue Reading…