Adding Custom Content to Facebook Pages

Maria Reyes-McDavis via Flickr

A few months ago Facebook officially did away with the idea of adding “boxes” of custom content to Facebook pages and instead forced users into adding “applications” as the primary way to add custom layouts, tabs and content.

While this change is old news and has been covered widely, Facebook continues to tinker with the interface and so I’ve been getting lots of questions again about the steps involved in adding custom content and thought I would do a quick tutorial.

Each Facebook page that you create comes with a standard set of tabs or pages. If you want to supplement the default set you simply locate and add applications. These can be Facebook applications like Video or Events or 3rd Party apps.

Some of these apps are free, some cost money. I hear great things about North Social set of apps and have used Involver apps for some time. I really like the service AppBistro provides as well. AppBistro can recommend apps based on your friends and activity.

If you want to create and add your own custom content such as a product, welcome or email newsletter sign-up page you’ll want to locate and add the Static FBML App. This application, once installed, allows you add up to 10 custom tabs with content using FBML (Facebook Markup Language) code that is somewhat like HTML, but for Facebook.

The video below shows the steps involved in locating, installing the Static FBML app and getting your page ready for custom content. In addition, the video shows you how to choose which tab is the default shown to visitors. Many people choose to have a welcome page shown as opposed to the default Wall tab.

Here are the steps for installing Static FBML App

• Login to you account
• Search for Static FBML app – you can find it here
• Click Add to My Page – left sidebar under picture (If you administer multiple pages you will need to pick the page in question)
• Go to the page you would like to edit and hit Edit My Page (Under you profile pic in left column)
• Locate the link in the left sidebar called Apps and click it
• Locate the listing that says FBML and click Edit Settings and hit Add if it has not been added already and hit Okay
• Click Go To App – this will open the blank canvas where you add your FBML code – the name you give it in the title is the tab name (Note also at the bottom of the page it says Add another FBML box – you only install the application once but go back here to add as many as 10 instances.)

Once you add your code and save your page you can make your new page the default by going back out of the editing screen to your fan page home screen and look for the small little Options link under the status update bar. Hit Options, Settings and them from the Default Landing Page Dropdown menu, choose the page you just made and all visitors will be shown that first.

What about that FBML code stuff?

Okay, I’ve gotten you to the place where you’ve set up the custom page and it’s ready for content, now what?

For the most part a great deal of what you might want to do, such at add images and content can be done if you know HTML or use a program like Dreamweaver to create web pages. If you use style sheets, you must link to them externally and not embed the style code. You can learn about some of FBML specific code that allows you to do things like embed video, audio and interact with users by studying blogs like HyperArts or getting a book on FBML like Jessy Stay’s FBML Essentials

One FBML tag that’s definitely worth understanding is reveal fan only content – fb:visible-to-connection – this tag allows you to hide content and only make it available to your fans. You can use this as a bit of an incentive to get folks to become fans.

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COMPELLING FACEBOOK FAN PAGES

I asked people to point out the most compelling Facebook fan pages they knew about. I was asking because I am interested in making something actually happen on Facebook. My efforts to market within Facebook haven’t gone especially well. I can move a lot of people around other parts of the web quite well. But inside Facebook? Where there are TONS of people? Nothing. I never seem to get motion. So, I asked the community who they liked. Here’s who they pointed me towards:

DEBT WISE

Debt Wise

SOCIAL RANK

Social Rank

LIVING IN PLEASANTON

Living in Pleasanton

DIESEL

Diesel

THE PAMPERED CHEF

The Pampered Chef

BIGELOW TEA

Bigelow Tea

LAKE NONA POOLS

Lake Nona Pools

PROLIFIC LIVING

Prolific Living, but the part I like is a bit further down:

She has an email marketing signup embedded in there.

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Integrating Sales and Marketing

It’s not easy. Successful integration of the sales and marketing functions is a difficult course. Salespeople often claim that marketers are out of touch with customers, while marketers argue that the sales force over-focuses on meeting the needs of an individual customer just to win the next deal. The balance between focusing on the overall market verses an individual customer is a difficult equilibrium to achieve.

It is a valid point that marketing tends to have a mountain top view, in contrast to the sales department’s ground-level view of the same marketplace. Generalizations are risky and it is important to note that both groups need to have at least a basic understanding of the overall marketplace as well as individual clients in order to make informed decisions.

Plus, even assuming that Corporate or Product Marketing has a high degree of accountability to revenue (which they don’t always have – at least not in the direct way that sales does), their decisions are made with quite a different time horizon than sales – before and after products are rolled out, while the sales time horizon is now. Naturally, this can cause some tension. Both parties are looking at the same set of facts, but assessing them quite differently – based on a different scope and scale.

Both views are critical for each function to do their jobs. Sharing views would be even more valuable to companies, most of which do not have successful integration policies for marketing and sales. To speak in metaphorical terms, marketing, with its high-level view, is able to see all that is unfolding on the battlefield below. Meanwhile, sales does battles every day on the front line, privy to a close up view of what’s going on at ground level.

Each group sees things the other cannot. There are things about customers and competitors visible at ground-level, that aren’t clear from a “bird’s eye” view. From the top, marketing sees clouds in the distance and the approaching competition that can change the way the marketplace will function in the near future. Prospects often tell salespeople how fierce or defeated the competition really is. Both have precious knowledge that becomes even more valuable when it is exchanged – and costly when the exchange does not take place.

Obviously, both marketing and sales professionals have the potential to see both sides of the coin and if these departments do communicate effectively, they will both have a much richer understanding of what is going on.

When successful integration and information exchange takes place, the sales “troops” at ground level know what is on the horizon and are better able to design solutions for customers. Likewise, marketing would be better able to support sales teams with what they need, when they know what is going on at ground level. Lastly, marketing can take advantage of the many thousands of hours their sales force is investing with clients in real conversations – an almost shameful loss of market intelligence in organization that don’t tap it, formally or informally. In your company, is that intel being used, or wasted?

Does sales share the details they can see from their “ground-level” perspective with marketing? Does marketing keep sales apprised of what’s happening in the larger market landscape?

What might help your marketers and salespeople understand each others’ perspectives, and feel like they’re playing for the same team? How can they work together to better meet both your customers’ needs and your company’s goals?

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Tips For Viral Marketing Campaigns: Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has changed the game for marketing strategy any product or service.  Especially using the Internet, the ability to create campaigns on a shoestring budget that get incredible exposure is powerful.  One of the most potent of the tools in a viral campaign is pass-along readership or viewership.  Having a friend recommend that you watch a 'commercial' may seem counter-intuitive for old school marketers, but it's the name of the game in this social media marketing environment.

Case in point, this video of an ABC new feature focuses on Orabrush, an upstart company marketing a product that was originally positioned through conventional channels, including infomercials, but did not begin to thrive until it was taken to a purely social and irreverant campaign.  A human tongue is the featured element, combined with a spokesperson, who was a friend of the marketing director. Their viral video campaign has received over 24 million views on YouTube.  Their Twitter account has over 3,500+  followers, and they almost 270 thousand Facebook fans!  The following video from ABC is an interview with the company that explains their strategy:

Contrast Orabrush with a true viral video. The slender man is a creation that keeps on growing. With over half a million viewers and increasing daily, this series of videos has yet to share how the saga will end.  Is this a new genre of seriel videos?

What do these two viral campaigns have in common?  What contributes to the success of sharing?

1. Intriguing content - not the expected sales talk for Orabrush, and an ongoing saga for the slender man.

2. More than one - each of the videos are part of a series.  If you saw one,  you probably want to catch up with the others you haven't seen.

3. Unexpected Element - The Orabrush content depends on humor and catches us offguard with some clever touches, like the iPhone app that detects bad breath. The slender man is unexpectedly eerie!

4. Visual surprise - Both viral series are quite visual in content.  The slender man has us watching for a glimpse of the figure and we watch to see what unfolds.  The human tongue in Orabrush shows up doing normal activities, which is funny considering the tongue-like shape.  There's a certain 'tongue-in-cheek' quality to these that keeps us watching.

5. Share-ability - Both of the videos are easily shared among an audience.  Pass-along viewership is encouraged. 

What other features do you think these viral videos have in common? 

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How To Effectively Use Social Media For Business

Social media marketing has become a necessary activity for

 business marketing.  It could not have been more apparent than last night, when during the State Of The Union Address, Barack Obama made the statement "We are a nation of Google and Facebook".  

The reality is bigger than that.  Although the US is heavily indoctrinated in technology, this is a world wide phenomena. Yet many businesses are still struggling with social media marketing and evaluating how to use social media effectively.

In reality, all of the activity and time we spend on social media marketing can be distilled into 3 steps.  These may seem simple, but each is important to create the dynamic of creating content that has impact. 

Three steps to mastering social media marketing:

1. Create Content

2. Publicize and make it easy to share

3. Monitor and respond

This makes it sound easy, doesn't it.  Yet there are so many companies who are hiring "gurus" who just don't get it and frankly are 'doing it wrong'.  

What does it mean to use social media incorrectly? Using social media wrong is trying to use it as a broadcast media instead of using it for interaction.  Brian Solis wrote a terrific book about this phenomenon called "Engage". (Brian shared with us during the A2SM podcast that he originally wanted to call it "Engage or Die", but was encouraged not to use that phrase!) Yet, instead of measuring success based on engagement, too many "social media marketers" are measuring success based on the number of followers they've accumulated.  They are relying on automated services to keep up a one-way dialogue.

That's not what "social" media is about.  It is, after all, supposed to be social.  It's about connecting and interacting and sharing. 

When social media is used 'correctly', it can be a powerful tool to engage with your audience and have powerful 'return on content'. When you have random acts of social re-tweet or re-peat of the message, that is when a marketing program becomes more than a broadcast.  It becomes a social message.  

Migrating a marketing program from traditional outbound marketing media such as television, radio, direct mail is a challenge. Yet the writing is on the wall. More and more, there are blocking mechanisms in place that make it more difficult to share your message.  Savvy marketers are adopting inbound marketing techniques, such as optimizing their web presence for keywords nd search engines, and utilizing social media not just to promote, but to connect with their customers.  

Understanding how to use the Internet was a winning strategy for the Presidential campaign. Do you feel that you are utilizing social media and the Internet effectively? Do you agree that we are a nation of Google and Facebook?  If so, how has that affected your marketing strategy and what plans have you made to improve your engagement with your customers?  

Your customers ARE speaking.  Are you listening? 

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What Every Organization Should Know About Engaging the People Who Matter Most

Don’t get me wrong.

It’s a fine idea to assume your people will engage if they know their work makes a difference to the organization.

But don’t fool yourself.

People don’t care about your organization as much as your organization thinks they do.

They care about themselves, their career, their bank account, their families and their future.

That’s why much of the existing material on engagement, while nice in principle, is myopic in practice.

It fails to address the issue of self-interest.
It refuses to stay sensitive to the needs of the human spirit.
It doesn’t focus on building people, rather, on building the organizational dream and exploiting people to do it.

As Scott Adams said it best a recent Dilbert cartoon:
“We need more of what management calls ‘Employee Engagement.’ I don’t know the details, but it has something to do with you idiots working harder for the same pay.”

The reality is:

People engage when the fruits of their engagement become transportable assets.

People engage when they know they’ll become better in all areas of their life – not just beef up the bottom line.

People engage when their work isn’t a set of tasks, but an opportunity to build a platform that pushes them to something bigger.

People engage when they know that they can recoup their discretionary effort when they leave, as opposed to surrendering years of emotional labor to the organization.

Today we’re going explore a collection of practices to help you engage the people who matter most:

1. Making people feel important is overrated. If you truly want people to engage, you need to make them feel essential. That word derives from the Latin essentia, which means, “essence.”

That’s what being an approachable leader is all about: Honoring, loving and acknowledging the essence of another person. And showing them how quickly the place would fall apart without their contribution.

Sure, telling a person how cute her shoes look makes her feel nice; but telling her how inspiring her energy is makes her feel essential. Try this: Before you start bootlicking, ask yourself:

What attributes of her core self do I admire?
What facets of his personhood are most attractive?
What could I say to honor this person’s uniqueness?

Pay compliments that matter – not just flatter. And if concerned that your comment will “go to their head,” don’t worry – it won’t. It will go to their heart. It will remain there forever. And they will be more engaged than a Midwestern farm girl on graduation day.

Remember: The interpersonal impact of a compliment is directly proportionate to the level of thought required to deliver it. Do your words make people feel important or essential? 

2. Make no restrictions on people’s testimony. Engaged organizations don’t need to spend millions on marketing – their people do it for them. They don’t need to sell the world on the quality of the springs; they just give others the chance to jump on the trampoline with them.

That’s what happens when people are fully engaged: They’re not just committed – they’re contagious. They’re living brochures of the organization’s awesomeness. And they voluntarily infect others with their experience in the hopes that those people will jump ship and join them.

Pastor Rob Bell wrote about this in his book, Velvet Elvis:

“I am far more interested in jumping than I am in arguing about whose trampoline is better. You rarely defend the things you love. You enjoy them and tell others about them and invite others to enjoy them with you.”

My suggestion is to put a system in place that removes the restriction of their expression. From blogs to message boards to meetup groups to online communities, the available tools – both online and offline – are endless.

The whole point is to give their river a voice, then give their voice a platform. And if you make it easy to spread the word, your most engaged people will make sure that everybody knows it. How are you letting your own people do your marketing for you?

3. Stop asking people to edit themselves. It’s one thing to edit a paper – it’s another to edit a person. Be very careful with this. Editing means correcting the core of something. And the moment you allow that to happen – to the work or to the person who authors it – is the moment of betrayal.

What’s more, editing renders creativity timid and impotent, and it’s not fair to people to let that happen.

My suggestion: Assure that people’s true identity is allowed to emerge. Enable regular expressions of eccentricity. And petition people to inject their personality into everything they do.

Otherwise their truth will feel jailed. And nothing disengages people quicker than interfering with the expression of their individuality. Ultimately, it’s about allowing them to walk their truth, breath their brand and stay loyal to themselves.

And while it’s probably safer to edit, for those who seek to turn their lives into remarkable portraits of brilliant creative expression, safe is a very dangerous place to be. Maybe it’s time to retire that big red pen you’ve been carrying around the office for five years. Whom are you asking to edit themselves?

4. Embed their passion into the pavement that leads the way. People engage when they’re consistently given the opportunity to do what they do best. When their work is united with their sense of life. And when what they do becomes a vehicle for living what is important to them.

The secret is to find out what’s under people’s fingernails. To identify the labor that stays with them wherever they go, becomes part of their language and merges with their very being.

This information is priceless. And it’s not something you create a field for in your customer database. It’s something you learn by listening to people’s hearts. It’s something yon learn by asking people passion finding questions like: “If you were the last human on Earth, what would you still do every day?"

The point is: Knowing what’s under people’s fingernails doesn’t just give you their hot button – it gives you their entire motherboard. Not to manipulate them – but to inspire them to motivate themselves. How quickly do you introduce passion into the engagement equation?

5. Help them develop a deeper sense of why. Knowing how is the path to education – but knowing why is the conduit to inspiration. If you want your people to be engaged every single day, you need to tap into (and reinforce) their why.

Otherwise, what the hell are they even doing there? Your mission is to help them see their work as more than just a job. Here’s how:

First, ask people to answer the question, “Why do you do what you do?” one hundred times. This exercise is hard, but it forces them to calculate their personal currency. (Don’t forget to have them send you a copy!)

Second: Invite them to plaster their workspace with tangible representations of the items on that list. This surrounds them with a monument to their why.

Finally: Encourage them to revisit both their list and their wall decorations any time the creeping feeling of disengagement enters their mindspace. In so doing, you’ll provide them with ongoing opportunities to inspire the hell out of themselves.

Remember: People want to live the dream – their dream. Are you helping them create a go-to space for self-motivation?

6. Accept that people aren’t bound to you. Peter Drucker famously suggested that all organizations treat their people as volunteers. This is a smart, strategic – and realistic approach. And it completely recolors the timbre of your encounters with people.

Volunteers, after all, do what they do because they want to – not because they need to. And if they don’t like the direction things are moving in, they’re gone. As I learned from Incentive Intelligence:

“Managing volunteers isn't about directing effort as much as it is about allowing effort to find it’s best path. You have to ask yourself what you would do differently if all your staff could just walk out tomorrow.”

This is especially applicable to the top producers and high achiever of your organization. Think about it: Recruiters are probably hounding them on a daily basis. And if you haven’t confronted the fact that people are loaning their talents to you until something better comes along, you’re in for one hell of a wake up call.

Considering the culture and economic shifts to a more entrepreneurial marketplace – and the fact that the median time a person stays in one job is four years – you should be grateful they’ve people have given up their most valuable resource to become part of your organization.

Never rest on your engagement laurels. Golden handcuffs notwithstanding, most people they can leave anytime they want. In the words of Chris Rock, “People are only as loyal as their options.” What are you pretending not to know?

REMEMBER: Nobody shows up disengaged.

If they did, you never would have hired them in the first place.

People become disengaged over time.

Which means, at some point between the day they started – and the day you caught them taking a nap under their desk in the middle of the day – something broke.

Go fix it.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Why do you think people engage?

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8 Engagement Strategies to Keep Your People from Walking Out the Door

If you don’t want people quitting you, you’ve got to figure out how to make love stay.

That was the central idea of Tom Robbins’ book,Still Life With Woodpecker.

“One day you wake up and find that the magic is gone. You hustle to get it back, but by then it's usually too late, you’ve used it up. What you have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start.

To make love stay, wake love up in the middle of the night and tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

That’s all engagement is: Making love stay.

Here’s a list of daily practices to keep your people from walking out the door.
1. Engagement is the new marketing. Brand perception hinges on the interactions between customers and employees. It’s got nothing to do with your logo. Or your clever direct mail campaign. Or your crummy commercial that aired during halftime of the Superbowl.

From human beings. From your people. Which means every interaction your employees have with the customer either adds to – or subtracts from – the overall perception of your brand. And since this principle colors every component of your organization’s engagement style, consider asking your team two questions:

*How do customers experience your people?
*How do customers experience themselves in relation to your people?

That’s the only thing the world can form an impression on: How interacting with your people makes them feel. That’s why engagement is so essential. Otherwise your engagement is a joke and your organization is the punch line. If your customers could give your company a hug, would they open their arms?

2. Know what emotion you’re selling. Because feelings determine actions, you’ve got to emotionally involve people. You’ve got to determine what experience you deliver, and how you can guarantee its consistent delivery.

One way to do so is by becoming an expert in memory creation. Practice planting moments in your daily interactions that give people something they’ll never forget. In fact: The smaller, the better. When you go out of your way to make the mundane memorable, you convert rare into remarkable. And that’s when you create a significant emotional event that tugs people by the heart.

Remember: Businesses that retain a strong emotional connection with their customers don’t go out of business. Leaving emotional memories to chance is too dangerous. How will you remind yourself to create a significant emotional event?

3. Consider people’s unique definitions of engagement. You don’t need to read another book on employee engagement – you need to get your ass out of the office and ask people what engagement feels like to them.

Not what they think engagement is – but what engagement feels like. Huge difference.

The secret is to use every listening post you can find. From offline to offline, from electronic to human, from walking the floors to monitoring tweet streams, whatever gives you insight into how your employees operate is a worthwhile endeavor.

Second, listen deeply. That means listening the facts along with what the facts point to. Third, listen for the right reasons. Not just enough to flip the answers for your own uses. Not just to boost your ego. And not just to confirm what you already think. Listen to learn how your people truly engage.

Remember: The longer you allow organizational fears to prevent you from pursuing the truth about the people who work there, the more shocked you’re going to be when they suddenly jet out the door. Are you listening to the sound of your own voice or the music of your employee’s voice?

4. Put a little blood into it. As a writer, I invest myself very personally in everything I publish. This is very risky – but that’s the whole point. The more naked my words are, the more engaged my readers become.

That’s the lesson: Self-disclosure earns trust. And people engage when they operate from a place of trust because they’re not wasting their energy protecting themselves. Your goal is to find a way to ship a small piece of who you are with everything that goes out the door, as my new crush Jeanne Bliss suggests.

That’s what earns you the right to be engaged with. That’s what earns your organization the right to have its story told. Because it’s not just how well you know your customer – it’s how well your customers know you.

It’s about how clear they are about what you’re committed to. Otherwise, hiding the true picture of who you are is a form of reputational risk you can’t afford to take.What are you using to make your identity more knowable?

5. Preserve freedom of mind. Nothing disengages a human being faster than the annihilation of independent thought. That’s how you activate someone’s built in pushback mechanism: By demanding homogeneity of beliefs.

Sadly, too many organizations turn mental settling into a silent epidemic. And as a result, their people become stripped of their humanness. Organizational consultant Dave Snowden addressed this issue in a recent article on Cognitive Edge:

“Forcing people to accept a common culture increases the tension between the way that people naturally behave and the way they now feel they have to. That means increasing alienation and inevitably suppressed conflict and increasingly levels of conflict.”

Instead, Snowden suggests creating boundaries around compatible but different cultures – even if a little healthy conflict arises. The point is: You have to make certain that people’s dearly held sense of individualism is honored. That their work unites with their own sense of life. And that they’re treated like individuals on the frontline – not integers on the company report.

Otherwise they’ll be out the door faster than you can say, "Tuesday is Soylent Green Day.” When does the feeling of formality keep your people from communicating freely?

6. Contribution can’t be mere blip on their radar screen. It has to become a legitimate, long-term trend. That’s what makes people engage: When their job makes use of their talent.

The challenge is, not everybody is comfortable being smart. Some people need permission to bring their brilliance to the table. And as their leader, your mission is to create a safe place where individual personality and creativity can shine.

To do so, ask each person the following question: What personal skills are you currently not using in your job?

Their answers might surprise you. Look: Nobody wants to spend their life at a second-hand task. And nothing shackles the human spirit more than a work life that’s prosaic and unmusical. If you want people to engage, the work they do has make a significant contribution to something they value. Do you provide opportunities to do meaningful work that helps others?

7. Don’t just get over yourself – stay over yourself. Here’s the reality: Your organization is one part of your people’s total life experience – not the sole focus.

Accept this. Stop operating out of the old school model that loyalty is an entitlement. It’s not.

You have to earn it and re-earn it daily. Instead, start adjusting your company to the rhythm of its constituents. And understand that work isn’t the only determining factor in how your people live their lives.

Especially younger generations. If you want them to engage, you have to show them that you respect their commitments outside of the organization. That’s part of the process of staying over yourself: Focusing less on getting people to join you and focusing more on trying to join them first.

Who knows? Maybe your people would engage more if they felt their lives were participated in too. Are you fitting them into your nice little plan or celebrating how you fit into their lives?

8. Be a value-adding machine. As much as I loathe reality television with all of my being, the sheer number of makeover shows on a typical evening of programming does indicate something reassuring: Most people want to get better.

Not all, but most.

And I’m not just talking about those grease balls on Jersey Shores who want calf implants. I’m talking about your employees, who would relish the possibility to become more valuable. Not just in the organization – but in all areas of their lives.

Why make it so hard for people to grow? Afraid they’ll get too successful and steal your job or find a better job? Come on. They're going to be gone in four years anyway. May as well show them you support their development. Rise above standard operating procedure and create room for people to become something different. Odds are, they’re eager to reinvent their work experience anyway.

Try asking what it will take to build something that they recognize themselves in. Try treating them as the people they want to become in order for them to know who they really are. Maybe then they’ll stop watching reality television and actually work a few nights a week. Does your organization move its people closer to, or farther away from where they want to be?

REMEMBER: It’s hard work to keep your people from walking out the door.

And odds are, you won’t retain everybody.

But if you make a conscious effort to engage people in the most human, most approachable and most respectful manner, your organization will greatly improve its chances of making love stay.

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