Many people have written about Facebook ad click thru rates being quite low. Here’s a good (although somewhat old) article from Forbes explaining why. People go to Facebook to share information and communicate with their friends. Facebook users are not necessarily looking for anything like you would be when you search on Google.

If traditional online ads don’t work for Facebook, how can an advertiser engage this massive audience?

Have you clicked on any Facebook ads and followed through to buy anything?

My travel agent at STA Travel is embracing new media through her personal contacts, to build her own brand within the company. Like many other consumers, I book and research my flights online. Kara will answer questions and lets me organize tickets over Google chat. She can nearly always get me a cheaper deal on international tickets than I can find myself. Sometimes I have questions about more complicated trips. She knows the fare rules better than I do so asking questions via chat saves me time researching terms and conditions.

I have email introduced almost 10 people to Kara, of which many have led to sales. (I only introduced people who asked for a recommendation, I didn’t bombard my friends). She’s building her personal brand within her company. I’m helping friends with a really good service. I’m her product champion. My friends want good advice and convenience. Kara knows her stuff and she’s accessible. I’ve earned $75 for recommending a good service that I would have already recommended.

STA have created a framework that enables Kara and her colleagues to flourish. STA Travel are fostering word-of-mouth referrals by offering an incentive to past passengers to refer new business. It’s also an incentive for their travel agents to leverage their personal connections. After all, STA is an organization made up of many individuals.

Here’s Kara’s email f you want a travel agent who knows her stuff and is accessible via gchat: karalucchesi@gmail.com. If you like her service, please tell her I sent you so I can claim my $25 credit!

In its infancy, for the average user the web was hidden behind code that required developers. Social media has changed this and it is about to change faster. Rapid communication is now available to everyone who has access to a computer with internet access. You can change content on your Facebook page, blog and website without any knowledge of programming.

If you think this is a long way off, think again. We’re already offering this service to our clients. Think! helps clients to save time and become more social, more relevant and all in real-time. Website content doesn’t remain static, nor should it. Clients love not having to pay a web developer to make changes to text and images on their websites. Best of all, an increasingly user-friendly Internet means more information at our fingertips.

Everything has a place. Facebook is for sharing with your existing contacts. Twitter is great for regularly broadcasting to anyone who wants to listen. Blogs like this are ideal for more extensive information. LinkedIn is ideal for connecting and networking on a professional level.

Most importantly, all of these tools can be used to listen to your market and engage in 2-way communication. There’s a glaring difference between brands who are still trying to broadcast and those who share information. Think about your own social networks. You have people you trust, people you look to for information and people who you disregard. Think carefully about the tools you are using and how you are using them. Use social media to develop a relationship with your clients and build trust.

Users won’t necessarily visit your site just because you’ve branded it. Offer them something more. Make the content of each relevant to the product you are trying to sell, or at least relevant to your clients and industry. Help people to understand things. Let them talk to each other.

On each social platform, you need to build your brand. Be careful to maintain it or risk losing followers. Beware of saturation. Don’t post just for the sake of it. Keep them wanting more.

Remember that over-exposure generates immunity. I subscribe to blogs from Seth Godin and Chris Brogan. To do justice to my clients, I have to read all of their posts but it’s hard not to become immune when you receive an email every day. If you try to post too frequently, you’ll eventually run out of interesting things to say. No one is that interesting.

We all have (or had) contacts who’s forwarded emails we trash immediately. They’ve overwhelmed us with things we aren’t interested in. On the other hand, the thoughtful person who only sends things occasionally wins our attention. It’s the same concept when using blogs, Facebook and Twitter, except the stakes are higher. Overwhelm a user and you’ll lose them forever.

It’s the same with Facebook and Twitter. Don’t say something unless you have something interesting to say. Interesting means interesting to the audience you are trying to attract and maintain. If you don’t have something to tell them, something that’s relevant to the reason they’re following you, don’t waste their time. Don’t say something just because you think you have to. Twitter and Facebook are just like any other relationship, play hard to get, keep them wanting more.

Gary McCaffrey recommends that you post to twitter between 9am and 3pm for maximum effectiveness

Here’s a good how-to blog from Elance on the basics.

Here’s an example from one of our clients at Think! Social Media. If you run a kite boarding school like Exotikite, Tweet about Today’s wind forecast or the wind at the beach right now. Put photos of your students learning and the location of the school on Facebook. Tag your students in the photos for their friends to see on News Feeds. Maintain a blog on how to do the latest trick. Build a forum to allow people to review equipment.

Will it Blend? Making a YouTube video of an iPhone in a blender cost a few hundred bucks but at last count the video has received over 7.6 million views.  The video managed to piggy-back off other web traffic because ‘iPhone’ was a popular search term. Actually blending an iPhone was intriguing and entertaining. More importantly, the video showed that the product actually worked: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg1ckCkm8YI

Tourism Queensland’s Island Reef job was heavily rooted in social media.  The concept was genius; give away a job that seemed too good to be true on an island in Australia with a great pay check during a recession.  Contestants had to create a video to enter. The community that emerged could vote on the video. This was the first global initiative by an australian State DMO.  It cost $1.7 million and returned an estimated $400 million in media value and $8.6 million in web traffic.  Already a good deal but it gets better.  Now the winner writes a blog every day – you can see it here: http://www.islandreefjob.com/

The Photo-crashing Squirrel.  Banff’s DMO seized on an unlikely opportunity when a tourist took a self-timer photo that a squirrel popped into after it was drawn to the noise of the camera. The photo captured a unique experience that every tourist would like.  Banff wrote and distributed a press release at very little cost.  Combine that with some creative use of social media and you have very cost-effective attention from mainstream media channels across the world: http://www.canada.com/technology/Banff+squirrel+photo+gets+huge+attention/1889605/story.html

JK Wedding Intro. This is a YouTube video that just happened to take off and is now being used to solicit donations for violence prevention.  This one was catchy and the crowd loved it, this takes trial and error.  Over 36 million views and an interview on Today!  Not bad for a wedding video.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0  Better still, I like the genius behind a response that has received over 4.5 million views.  Find a video that’s going viral and post a creative response. Keep it relevant too, divorce is related to marriage.  What better way to promote a video production company: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbr2ao86ww0&feature=related

Skittles.com.  Visiting the rainbow online will make you think twice about your presence and whether it’s worth maintaining your own URL.  Why would you if you can do everything where there’s a built-in audience?  Here’s a great insight into the future of the online presence of tourism destinations: http://www.wilhelmus.ca/2009/10/the-end-of-the-dmocvb-website-europe-says-yes.html.

Ikea ran a very creative campaign that I wrote about previously: http://rodneypayne.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/14/

Lastly, here’s an excellent example of how to use Twitter properly.  Connect with your true customers (not just anyone who will listen) and then give them information that they actually want to hear from you.  If you’re a Korean BBQ Kart in Los Angeles, you’d use Twitter to tell your passionate customers (in realtime) where you’re going to be located today: http://kogibbq.com/

For every success there are many more attempts that didn’t go viral but it’s cost-effective to try.  The message from these examples is to stay relevant, choose the right social media tool and keep the information relevant. Find out what your competitive advantage is and exploit it.

Marketing through social media is not about crafting a single message for your audience like traditional media. Instead, you should aim to creating an environment that allows your customers to provide feedback and to communicate with each other. You can then use this environment as a forum for two-way communication.

The US Navy is an organization that has shown willingness to become open.  Charlene Li was one of 16 bloggers who were invited to report about the US Navy. You can read more about the expose in her blog of June 14 09 athttp://www.charleneli.com/. With all of its security protocols, its interesting to think about why the US Navy aren’t scared of open review. How can the Navy let bloggers talk to whoever they want about almost anything? Perhaps it’s because the Navy has the strongest organizational culture of almost any organization in the world. Much like any other company, it’s people are it’s brand. It trusts it’s people implicitly because they are well-trained. The US Navy has invested significant cost and years of time in training it’s people. People in the Navy inherently conform to the brand. They live the brand in every sense of the word. Adherence to a social media communications policy isn’t an issue that leaders are scared of because that policy permeates the entire organization.

Australia’s current Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, also relied heavily on social media as part of his electoral campaign in 2007. The Kevin 07 campaign showed similar success to that of President Obama’s.

To survive, you have to be open. Connect with your audience and partners online. That goes for large companies and small. Integrate or fall behind. .  However, after being elected Prime Minister Rudd banned his staff from using social media. Here’s a good article explaining why: http://apcmag.com/kevin_07_shifts_to_facebook_hate_08.htm

The difference between Rudd and Obama?  Obama’s team is still sending me messages. A year after he was elected, I’m still receiving emails from the Obama administration in attempts to further their political objectives. The latest asked me to pressure representatives to push through Health Reform legislation.  Mr. Rudd having abandoned social media could present a huge opportunity for the opposition in the election.  Openness through social media is an ongoing commitment and can’t just be forgotten after an election.

The lecture also revealed valuable feedback from the students who had already used our applications. Users and clients have good ideas for improving your products. Different customers (whether you’re involved in an online or offline business) have different experiences. In the past, organizations had to pay for market research to extract this kind of feedback.

Social media now lets us receive feedback without having to run expensive and sometimes imperfect surveys.  Many traditional managers see this as a threat.  Don’t be scared of negative reviews. With so many people blogging and reviewing services, you’re bound to receive negative reviews.  You can’t please everyone so focus on your target.  Embrace reviews and deal with negative feedback openly.  When you do that well, that’s impressive.

If one of our applications receives a negative review, I respond to the user who has taken time to review our product. Their feedback is invaluable for improving the user experience. You should do the same for your company.  You have found someone who is passionate enough about your product (one way or the other) to take time out of their day to let you know what they think.  Listen to your customers!   Embrace their opinions.  Use the information learned to refine your business. After all, you don’t really have a choice.

Many commentators have written about the benefits and challenges that have emerged presented by the social media revolution.  “Groundswell”, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff,     offers a comprehensive introduction if you’re looking for a starting point.

Take a look at Chris Brogan’s post on the emotions involved in removing  friends from your Facebook network.  Up until now, removing friends has been almost taboo (unless you weren’t careful who’s friend requests you accepted).  Burger King saw rapid success from a campaign that incentivized Facebook users to remove friends in return for a free burger.  Needless to say, Facebook shut that one down very quickly.

As the system matures, we’re inevitably going to see a lot more of this for a number of reasons. For many, it’ll be a case of; “Sorry friend, Farmville and Mob Wars are getting annoying”.  For others, it’ll be a limitation as they reach the 5000 friend limit.  For me, I think it’ll be a case of spring cleaning for relevance.

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-problems-with-friends-lists/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+chrisbrogandotcom+([chrisbrogan.com])

1. China: 1,334,450,000

2. India: 1,173,310,000

3. Facebook: 350,000,000

4. USA: 308,064,000

5. Indonesia: 231,369,500

That should give your marketing strategy some perspective if you want to market your products or services to people tech-savvy people in higher income brackets.  Ad campaigns through Facebook provide the ability to target your message by location and demographics.