It’s a Violation To Run a Contest on Facebook

Earlier this week the good and noble Chuck Gose posted a link on Twitter to an article about things that many businesses do that are in violation of Facebook’s policy. The big one that jumped out at me is that Facebook prohibits running any contest where the method for entering is to take some action on Facebook.

I can’t count the number of contests I’ve seen where you enter by leaving a comment on a business’s Facebook page. It turns out that’s verboten. Uploading a photo to Facebook? That’s a no-no, too. If you read the rules strictly, even telling people to enter a contest by becoming your Fan (or clicking the Like button to use the new Facebook vernacular) is grounds for having your account deactivated.

Are these rules enforced?

No. Not based on what I see happening on Facebook. There are so many active accounts that it would be a monumental task to try to police all the “illegal” contests that are running, but the rules are officially on the books. So Facebook could drop the hammer any time without notice.

The good news is you can still promote a contest on Facebook as long as the action of entering the contest doesn’t occur on Facebook. So we’re running a contest right now where you leave a comment on our blog and you get a chance to win a free copy of Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. We had been considering allowing people to enter by leaving a comment on our Facebook wall, as well, but decided to comply with Facebook’s stated policy on contests.

So Facebook is useless for contests?

What we can do while still obeying the letter of Facebook’s policy is talk about the contest on our wall. We can invite visitors to click a link to our blog and leave comments over here. That let’s us still leverage our Facebook network and avoid the risk of offending the powers-that-be.

And of course our friends, clients, and business partners can talk about the contest on Facebook, too. ;)

Three blogs to put on your radar

I have been telling clients and contacts these last few weeks about three main blogs that I ready daily. To my surprise, none of the people have known about these blogs… but they should! This made me believe that maybe our readers aren’t aware either, so if you’re in to reading good marketing/technology/blogging blogs to help you with your own marketing, put these three at the the top of your read list.

  1. Problogger – This blog is for beginning bloggers, advid bloggers, money-making bloggers… you get the picture? If you’re looking to read up on how to improve your blog, this is IT! So check out the blog, get yourself subscribed and start working on your blog posts. If you’re really committed to improving your blog, consider his guide 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. I have looked through it and it has quality material.
  2. Mashable – This blog has a slant toward technology and social media, but it’s still a groundswell of amazing information. How-to guides, the latest news on the iPad, what Google is up to and what videos are trending on the Internet are just some of the topics you’ll find.
  3. Seth Godin’s blog – This is just another daily read on my list. He keeps his posts short and to the point, which makes it easy to keep up with yet adds a bit of zing to your marketing day. Typically inspiring, always informative.

Facebook Wants To Know If You Like This Post

The like button has left the confines of Facebook.com. Website owners can now place the soon-to-be ubiquitous blue and gray thumbs up directly on their own websites. If you’re reading this post on our website, you’ll notice the like button right below the title of this post. When you click on it, you’ve instantly liked this blog post in Facebook – without ever leaving our site.

To our RSS readers, here’s what you’re not seeing:

So now it’s easier than ever to let us know when you really like one of our blog posts. If you approve of what you’re reading – and you don’t have time to leave a comment – just hit the like button that shows up at the top of all of our blog posts.

This is actually only one of several changes Facebook has recently rolled out, but some of the other stuff gets a little heavy on the geek-speak. This is the new feature that you will probably be noticing the most as you browse your favorite websites in the coming months.

8 Slick Eventbrite Features

Raquel wrote a post earlier this week covering some of the reasons you might want to look at Eventbrite when you’re planning your next event. She left the door wide open for me to write a post about some of the unique features that make Eventbrite so useful when you are selling tickets and managing communication with your event attendees. So here we go.

  1. Discount codes. Special offers sell. When you want to fill a room, it’s incredibly helpful to be able to tell someone that you are giving them a unique code they can enter for a discount. It also gives influencers a reason to promote your event if they can offer their audience a unique discount. If all that wasn’t enough, it sends a message that you are big enough to be taken seriously.
  2. Different ticket types. You can easily create different types of tickets at different price points. If you have an event with balcony and orchestra seating, create different prices. You can offer an early bird discount by creating a less expensive ticket that is only available during a certain date range.
  3. Recurring events. If you have an event that happens each week or month, you don’t have to keep creating it over and over again. Create the event once, set the schedule (or even custom dates), and people can buy tickets for each date.
  4. Built-in waitlist. Eventbrite can manage your waitlist automatically for you. When your event is sold out, people who want to come get put on the waitlist instead. As people cancel (or you move to a bigger room) you can release tickets.
  5. Affiliate program. Although we’ve never used it, what I’ve seen of the affiliate program (where someone gets a cut for promoting your event through a unique link created for them) looks simple to use.
  6. Custom order confirmation. You can send someone an email automatically when they register. Edit the text that shows up on their confirmation page, or just send them to a custom thank you page on your website.
  7. Less paperwork at the event. Eventbrite also makes your job a little easier in those last rushed hours before the event. Since they already have all the attendee information stored, you can print out a check-in list and name badges.
  8. Description formatting. You also have a lot of flexibility in the description area. The same fomatting and image placement you find in most content management systems is built into Eventbrite. We are using Eventbrite for our next event, ReTHINKING Your Pipeline. Compare our landing page with the description in our Eventbrite registration page.

Beyond just making these features available, the Eventbrite interface makes it surprisingly easy to manage. The learning curve to find everything is relatively small – which is perhaps the slickest feature of all.

Sharing my love for Eventbrite

We use Eventbrite to help us look slick on our events, because that’s what this nice bit of software does!

Clay can share all the easy, wonderful programming things Eventbrite does (Ed: Clay’s take on Eventbrite here.), so I’ll stick with the marketing reasons I like…

  1. Look professional. It makes you look like you are running a professional event. You know what I mean. Often you want to have a workshop or hold a free session to help you prospect, but you just don’t have the skills or know-how to make your own website. This is where you’ll love Eventbrite because it will easily help you look organized, professional and help your attendees feel like they are headed toward a great session.
  2. Payment Processing. If you decide to charge a fee for this service, they doesn’t kill you with fees. You can easily hook it in to your pay pal account and  keep everything nice.
  3. Market your event. See all the social media icons up at the top of this event page below? Your attendee (or even you) can just easily click one of those and it connects to your profile, imports your contacts or posts on your profile exactly what you want to say about your event. It’s so easy! You can even set up your event to tweet once someone has decided to attend, or, let all attendees see who else is coming. It’s very social.
  4. Now for Non Profits. Gather for Good:  Eventbrite for Causes launched earlier this year. It helps non profits do all this stuff really well too.

Give Eventbrite a try or tell us why you like it, or don’t, in our comments section. Join us at our next event:  ReTHINK YOUR PIPELINE The marriage of marketing + sales.

A big picture marketing message for Facebook

I was asked to present on Facebook to the F. C. Tucker Company this morning. They were a great, energetic group! While this presentation was made specifically for their needs and time, I think it has some relevant information so I’m sharing it.

In real estate, you know there is that saying:  Location, location, location. In this presentation, you need to keep in mind the three “R”s…

  1. Be Real
  2. Be Regular (I typically use the word consistent, but as you know that word doesn’t start with an “R”!)
  3. Be Relevant

In your Facebook fan page marketing, actually any marketing, being real, being regular and being relevant is key. The presentation goes ahead and shares ideas that could help you be real, regular and relevant.

If you would like a specific presentation for your organization or business, just ask us. We would be glad to help. Browse our list of services and see if we fit your needs.

Lessons Learned in 10 Years of Business

April 1, 2010

I started Silver Square 10 years ago, and I’ve learned a lot about what makes a marketing piece work. I’ve always had hunches about which elements were making a dynamite piece work, but I didn’t have any hard data to back it up… until now. Clay Mabbitt has been crunching the numbers and boiled it down to a single element that is the key to maximizing the effectiveness of the logos, printed pieces, and websites we create for our clients.

I’ll let him share the secret with you in this video.

Update: Happy April Fool’s Day, everybody. Thanks for all the emails and warm responses to this video. If you liked it, don’t forget to give it a Digg or leave a comment over at YouTube.

Integrating social media in to your marketing

I had the pleasure of speaking to the Ft. Wayne Social Media Breakfast group yesterday morning. They were a sharp group with almost everyone in the room using, activly, social media. I love it! We talked about how social media is just part of the mix, that the basics of marketing apply and social media is like the little boost that helps communicate your message and/or assists with gaining ground on your goals. Here is the slide deck I promised to share. Let me know if you have any comments or questions.

Can You Digg It?

Earlier this week Raquel blogged about an extremely useful graphic that explains where you can get the most bang for your buck with social media. For the most part, there are no real surprises here. I already frequent the social media platforms that this graphic describes as particularly useful from a marketing perspective. Well, that’s not entirely true. There was one site that comes off smelling like a rose, and I spend almost no time there: Digg.

Digg has always been kind of a mystery to me. Sure the concept is simple enough. Everybody can give any page on the Internet a thumbs up. The pages that get a lot of thumbs up (referred to as being “dug”) are shown on the Digg home page. Those lucky pages get a massive surge of web traffic for a few days, crashing their previously obscure websites and driving their web hosting providers nuts.

Some very small percentage of the visitors from Digg stick around after the traffic spike, but for the most part they were just one-time visitors. I guess there’s a certain appeal to doing something like that, but I never viewed it as something to build a marketing strategy around. The social media graphic mentioned above, though, made me start to wonder.

Then I saw an article in Mashable talking about the new changes that Digg CEO Jay Adelson recently announced. Now there are a lot of changes discussed here. Integrating with Facebook and Twitter accounts is big. I think creating the means for a website owner to publish Digg comments right on their page sounds fascinating. But there was another change that really caught my eye.

It sounds like Digg is gravitating toward creating more niche communities of Digg users. Digg has some very broad categories, but nothing that could reasonably be described as niche. I love playing World of Warcraft. I don’t play other online role-playing games. I don’t even play many other computer games at all. I don’t own a traditional video game console. As I’m writing this the top dug page under the Gaming category is about Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I couldn’t care less. If I drill down to Gaming > PC Games the top site is another (different) page about Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I’m not even a little engaged in what’s going on here.

Now imagine that there was a category on Digg that was dedicated to World of Warcraft. Well, I would definitely be interested in the #1 page there. I’d also be interested in the second and third pages. In fact I could probably easily lose an hour checking out all the World of Warcraft pages that had been dug.

As a marketer this is exciting. Digg is embracing the long tail. I’ll be honest. I don’t know how to market a product or service to everyone on the Internet. That’s just too big of a group for me to get my arms around. What I can get a good, solid handle on is marketing to targeted groups of people with some similar interests.

And it sounds like that’s exactly what Digg is going to turn into over the next few months.

The Social Media Landscape – A Guide

I love this guide! I started following CMO.com just a few months ago, and I’m glad I have taken on this website as a source for my continuing education. This little gem alone is one item I have pulled out at least once a week to help guide me on a big picture view on what I would like for our clients to engage in for the social media portion of their marketing mix. So print this one off and put it somewhere you can see to help keep your social media marketing top of mind.

My new best friend.