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How many of you have fans on Facebook and Twitter and really have no idea who they actually are? The Social Media realm of the internet is one of the most interesting digital places in the world. In some ways I view social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as new countries where all nationalities have been merged together. This is primarily where a problem presents itself. The elements of culture in each of these nationalities collected into once space make it difficult for marketers to connect with its audience.
To not have a proper understanding of the cultural framework of your audience could be disastrous.
Not having an understanding of cultural context limits your capability to communicate. Effective communication in itself requires that both parties have a frame of reference or a context from which words are being expressed. For example: Let’s say you are from the United States promoting a fresh line of designer jeans to a new market in Britain. You decide one way to break into that specific demographic would be by using a Facebook fan page. A few months pass and you notice that a British girl is wearing your new pants and posts a picture of her on your fan page. So you thank your British friend for wearing your “pants”. But in England “pants” are what we would call “underwear”. The frame of reference for the understanding of the word pants from a British perspective is entirely different from the American perspective. Read the rest of this entry »
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Ok, maybe not all web design and no, I am not scared. But will it be the future for small businesses and start-ups just coming online?
So, how on earth do I draw the conclusion that Facebook could be the future of web design. A couple of points that I draw my crazy idea from:
1. Facebook’s traffic is rising at an extremely fast rate, check compete.com to see how it compares to Google (I also included an another in there for fun).
2. Optimizing for specific keywords on Google is only getting harder and is even more difficult for smaller businesses.
3. Domain names in particular, the .com tld, are harder and harder to come by. In fact there are over 88 million .com’s compared to a mere 13 million .net domains.
4. Facebook recently launched their “Pay with Facebook” feature, how long until there is a Facebook shopping cart for company pages?
5. People say they love choice, but in reality they choose convenience and value (Walmart vs. downtown America). This point is key. People are being bombarded with different search engines, advertisements and more of everything on the web. Facebook solves that problem.
I am not saying the day is here, Facebook has to make some changes for it to really become an option for small business. For example, Facebook needs to allow more customization of the company pages and the ability to remove ads. If Facebook does take this direction I think it will make sense for a lot of small businesses or new start-ups that would not be able to get the traffic elsewhere.
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We always tell our clients that social media and in our case, blogging, is a commitment. A commitment not to be taken lightly, and one that comes with consequences if broken.
There is a lot of irony in the fact that our last blog post was on commitment issues and social media and how to test yourself to make sure you are up to the challenge. Well, apparently we were not up to it.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the damage:
1. We had a good amount of traffic coming to the Inovator, and now it’s dropped, significantly.
2. People were talking with us via the blog, emails, tweets and yes even the good old phone. But we left that conversation and it’s cold now.
3. Lastly, I can only imagine how many people must have thought the worst had become us and we closed up shop. Quite the opposite I can assure you, but actions speak louder than words.
So why am I telling you all of this? For one, I am sorry, and secondly and most importantly, I don’t want you to make the same mistake.