posted in 8 Sep, 2009 by Alejandro Catalan

Marketing company sells clients Facebook friends

On Facebook, most people make friends the old-fashioned way - by sending a request to be added to someone’s posse of pals. Now, an Australian marketing company hopes to save you time and energy by simply buying you a few thousand buddies.
The service from uSocial is mostly meant for businesses, celebrities and other individuals looking to expand on the social network, and Facebook isn’t happy about it.
Under the service, which launched this week, 1,000 new Facebook friends cost less than $200. For 5,000 Facebook friends - the maximum allowed by that site - uSocial charges $727, though through mid-September, the promotional rate is $654.30.
The service can also help companies accumulate fans - Facebook-speak for the users who acknowledge liking a person, business or idea on the site.
Leon Hill, the 24-year-old founder of Brisbane, Australia-based uSocial, said businesses and other clients are essentially buying a base of potential customers.

“We are getting, basically, targeted friends and fans who are saying, ‘Yes, I want information on this,’” Hill said in a phone interview, adding that friends and fans can always change their minds and sever ties whenever they want.
He said businesses are interested in his service because they are realizing that social media Web sites can help generate buzz more quickly, cheaply and effectively than online ads and more traditional types of advertising.
Hill said friends are all gathered manually.
USocial logs in to a client’s Facebook profile or creates a new one. It seeks out people who would be a good fit - like car buffs if uSocial is trying to promote a specialty auto-parts company - and sends them friends requests tailored to that business. The requests don’t mention that uSocial is working on behalf of the business.
The process for getting fans is similar, except uSocial does not need to log in to a client’s profile.
Because all that is done manually, Hill doesn’t consider it spamming. He also said potential friends aren’t getting anything in return for adding a client - he wants people interested in the company rather than a freebie.
Hill said that as far as he could tell, he’s not violating Facebook’s terms of service - something with which Facebook disagrees.
Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said that giving anyone else access to your Facebook account goes against the site’s policies, as it makes Facebook less secure. Sending out friend requests on behalf of others is also unacceptable, he said.
Beyond that, Schnitt said uSocial detracts from Facebook’s efforts to foster a culture of authenticity.
“Buying and selling of actions that are supposed to be taken by a user are certainly, we would argue, not authentic,” Schnitt said.
Palo Alto-based Facebook is investigating uSocial’s practices, and Schnitt said any Facebook users found sharing their passwords with third parties could have their accounts permanently disabled.
This is not the first time uSocial has tried to help businesses up their visibility on social Web sites. Four months ago, it began offering a similar service on the online-messaging site Twitter, which did not respond to multiple e-mail requests from The Associated Press for comment.
Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at research firm eMarketer, said uSocial’s practices seem part shady, part effective for companies to increase their social-media presence very quickly.
But she warns uSocial’s tactics could irritate a lot of Facebook users - and a company’s potential customers - if the targeting isn’t done properly.
Hill started uSocial in December 2008 by selling votes on news aggregator site Digg.com. For nearly $100, uSocial would vote 100 times on Digg’s site for any story chosen by the client, raising its position on the site and gaining exposure. Clients could pay up to about $700 for 1,000 votes, Hill said.
In this case, uSocial was using software to vote, Hill said.
He said Digg ultimately ordered him to stop, saying uSocial was breaching the site’s policies. He halted the Digg service a few months later, saying he had too many clients to keep up with demand. He said he will eventually relaunch it with better software for automated voting. Digg declined comment.
Hill would not name any clients currently using uSocial on Facebook or Twitter, but said Korea’s tourism department used its Digg services, as did a Mormon organization he couldn’t immediately name. A spokeswoman for the Korean consulate’s office in San Francisco had no immediate comment, while Morman church officials in Salt Lake City said they were not involved.
“I do understand that there are people that have a problem with what I’m doing,” he said.
But he justified the service by saying, “we’re really only doing for our clients what they could do in their own time if they put their minds to it.”

Source wn.com

Popularity: 21%

posted in 8 Jul, 2009 by Alejandro Catalan

How to improve your SEO clicks and conversions

Locking in a top-five spot in Google is where you want your site to be – front and center with targeted prospects. Of course, every other marketer is gunning for the same result.

Click here for more information and full Video.

Popularity: 24%

posted in 2 Jul, 2009 by Alejandro Catalan

What is Transactional and What is Marketing?

This question has been on my mind this past week as I worked with one of our banking clients on a new project. What entered my mind was not what they were doing, but what others deem the difference to be.

Now my understanding, and I would love your thoughts, is that a transactional email is one that:

1. Confirms an order or action that you need a confirmation email

2. An alert in a change in status or account

3. A change in relationship, privacy policy or access

Now there is a fine line in transactional emails where you can (using best practices) allocate 20% of the message to allow a marketing message. Apple does this well with iTunes transactional email receipts. They do not lead with it, nor does it interfere with the transactional email message. Subject lines are clear, copy is clear and the message can be easily scanned to know what is occurring.

But then this weekend I got this email from Technorati. I had to pause to understand if this was a transactional email OR a marketing email. My first thought was that it was alerting me to changes at Technorati in regard to features and my account. But as I read through it more, it seemed to be a straight marketing message.

So then why would they not add CAN SPAM compliance to this message? No unsubscribe, no address footer, nothing. I was a a total failure. The subject line was deceiving to me in that it made me think that it was a service message about Publishing Content on Technorati. Take a look and tell me your thoughts.

It was not unsolicited as I have an account and opted in, but the lack of Can Spam compliance leaves me wondering who was asleep at the wheel over there.

Messages like this make me question what is transactional and what is just plain old email marketing. You should consider this as you prepare messages for your users/subscribers.

Should all emails have a way to unsubscribe? Is it a best practice only in regard to transactional messages? Or is it just a good thing to do to always allow people to have a preference to the emails they get?

Back on the path of banking, I had to think it through this week about the transactional emails that they send about account notices, bank cards, or the alert of a possible account compromise. You would think that you would always want to get notices like these, but what if you don’t? Spam is in the end in the eyes of the receiver.

Popularity: 15%

posted in 2 Jul, 2009 by Alejandro Catalan

To Personalize OR Not to Personalize

I think that I have this discussion in some manner each and every week. The question is either should we personalize our emails and if so does personalization work? Well I can go either way on this depending on what you choose to do with personalization. At times personalization with a name seems almost spam-ish when it is done poorly or used as an afterthought of throwing it into a sentence or the greeting of an email.

But the examples I have to share actually do work IMHO. Now notice that these two email creatives are exactly the same. There is only ONE difference that I can find between the two and this is the subject line. As they arrived in my inbox back to back, the subject lines stood out. They did not use my name but they use eROI in the subject line and wrote the copy differently. They got me. It stopped me and made me want to open it more. It felt not personalized, but relevant. And I think that the discussion around personalization should actually be changed to one of relevance.

When data, copy or images are personalized in some manner that stands out and grabs your attention it is not a true factor of personalization but actually one of relevance with the subscriber. This leads me to challenge you to change the conversation you might be having with your team, vendors and in the end your email subscribers. Think about how you can use subtle changes to data to make an impact. Think about what you can do to make them stop, of only for a moment, in a cluttered inbox to take that next step of opening and clicking through to learn more about your offers.

It is time to change the questions in everything we have known this far in email and time to start talking to people in a way that will make them think about your emails.

Popularity: 15%

posted in 17 Jun, 2009 by Alejandro Catalan

5 ways to engage recession battered customers…

So what approaches can help you attract recession-battered customers?

5 Ways to Engage Customers In Recession

1. Remove your customers fears. Right now your customers are watching way too many recession news stories filled with doom. They’re hearing about giants of industry going under, or coming close, they’re afraid they may be next…. How do you encourage them to lift their head and help them understand that change is a constant in life—and this economic melt-down will pass.

2. Confirm their suspicions. Your customers see danger everywhere they look, and they wonder who is really there to watch over and protect their best interests, and who is there to fleece them of their shrinking income. Don’t deny the reality your customers perceive…. Recognise that the quickest way to bond and, most importantly, become an advocate on behalf of your customers is to first accept and validate (within reasonable limits) their viewpoint.

3. Justify their failures. Don’t make your customers feel like losers. If they’ve yet to reach their goals, pat them on the back and then show them why. Show them that many factors, often beyond their control, contributed to their failure. Show them how you can decrease the number of failures they will face, and how you will increase their odds of success.

4. Throw rocks at their obstacles. Identify the immediate threat or obstacle confronting your customer’s well-being, happiness and success. Join them in a justifiable hate fest. Heap scorn, ridicule and bad intentions on the perceived roadblock. And then quickly move on. Don’t wallow in that shallow pool, but splash there just long enough to gain your customer’s attention and confidence.

5. Encourage their dreams. The product or service you sell are not made of metal, wood, plastic, bits and bytes or some intangible service, they are dream-makers. Do not deceive your customer into believing they can accomplish the impossible, or that the impossible is achievable. But if your product or service can indeed make your customer’s intentions come true, do not hide the truth.

Popularity: 17%