Focus on Facebook: Interview with Kristin Foster, Digital Strategist
by Nicole Landguth
Category: Best Practices, Digital Influence, How-To, Measurement, Word of Mouth Marketing
Today’s interview comes from a conversation with Kristin Foster, a Digital Strategist at Ogilvy PR and the head of Facebook strategy for The Heart Truth Campaign.
As part of our Focus on Facebook series, we interviewed several Facebook experts and asked them the same four questions. Check out our previous interviews with Kevin Barenblat of Context Optional and Mike Hoefflinger of Facebook.
1. Facebook is all about connecting with friends. What should a brand do to ensure their personality and story comes through in their Facebook presence?
As with anything in social media, brands must be transparent on Facebook. Brands now have many opportunities to join in the conversations already existing on Facebook and can easily target their appropriate audiences - but it’s all about how they do it. Facebook users need to clearly understand the brand’s presence on Facebook, why they are there and, most importantly, what value the brand will bring to the Facebook user.
A brand page needs to get the group involved in conversation - ask questions, share stories and information that is relevant to the audience. There should also be a call to action, especially for cause-related campaigns. What should Facebook users be doing to get involved with the brand? For example, with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Heart Truth campaign, Facebook users are asked to join the Healthy Action community and share how you are reducing your risk of heart disease with others through the Healthy Action widget of their choice.
2. In your experience, what has been the biggest hurdle for brands to successfully use Facebook? How can smart brands overcome this hurdle?
With a Facebook group or fan page, comes the opportunity to send frequent messages to those who have joined. While this is a tempting way to keep Facebook users informed of new information and brand updates, it can often times be used too much. If members or fans are interested in the issue and the content on the brand page is constantly engaging, they will come back and look for updates from the brand on the page. But sending brand messages too frequently could result in users opting-out of updates, or worse, removing themselves from the group.
Instead, save the message updates for special occasions, like the announcement of a live event being featured on the page, or the kick-off of a new Facebook fundraiser. With fewer message updates, members/fans will be more inclined to not only read the message, but also to participate in the call to action.
3. How do you think brands can best measure their success on Facebook?
While the number of Facebook users that join a brand’s Fan page or group should be included in the metrics of success established prior to the launch of the campaign - it should not be the only thing, nor should it be the most heavily weighed. It’s about creating the loyal Facebook user - the one that is going to come back to the brand page again and again, and share the brand’s message with others.
After the users join, what are they doing? Are they going to come back to the page? How is the brand engaging the user to increase participation? With cause-related marketing, the brand must ask themselves what they want their members or fans to do in the long run. Is there need for advocates regarding a specific government issue? Or is there a need to spread the word and activate change to reduce the risk of heart disease among women? No matter the issue, what objectives can these members/fans help to meet? - This is where the metrics of success will come from.
4. Imagine you’re the marcom representing a high-end coffee/tea/beverage brand sold across country in most super markets. How do you convince the CEO that your brand should be on Facebook?
There are two options here:
1) The brand stands behind a cause or issue, creates an activity or campaign that engages customers (e.g. co-creation of a new flavor, recipe book, etc.). The brand page on Facebook then supports this, and drives customers to participate with the brand in supporting the issue or creating the new content.
2) The brand can spread awareness among the target Facebook audience through advertisements. With targeting based on the Facebook user’s profile, it is extremely easy and efficient to spread awareness to the right crowd.
What the brand should not do is simply have a brand page with branded messaging and information about the brand and product, and expect to draw a big fan or member base. There must be a call to action or reason for Facebook users to engage with the brand - there must be something remarkable.
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April 14th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
I like the fact you mention “but it’s all about how they do it. Facebook users need to clearly understand the brand’s presence on Facebook, why they are there and, most importantly, what value the brand will bring to the Facebook user.”
It’s important to also have a dedicated and relevant landing page in which the value proposition is clearly demonstrated. Otherwise you’ll make FB users click on a link one time, but not 2 if his/her experience is bad or non relevant.
April 14th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I agree with Kristin & Laurent about “it’s all about how they do it”. People think if they have a Facebook group or fan page on the internet, that is all they need to do.
Do they actually have to get involved and interact in all aspects. Yes it takes time and effort but having that interaction with members/fan/costumers.
Then around #3 we talk about the measurement. My previous post yesterday maybe relevant:
….tangible data of the # of fans, comments, likes, and other appropriate drivers.
However is this data appropriate for the client/company? Is it really driving more people to the website or buying their product?
Right now, there is no real way to measure that. Right?
So sometimes it is hard to explain to the company or client about how important it is to use Facebook, but you are not sure that it will increase the number of costumers or sales.
What do you think Laurent, Kristin, & Nicole?
April 14th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
You’re “damn right” Nick
An ad of FB is like a “hook”, but like a hook in real life: you only accept to be “hooked” if there’s something you’re looking for after that.
Nb of fans, yes, no, how to say, that’s not how you measure ROI: just imagine you’re Dell. If you have thousands of members compared to one thousand fans for the local typical restaurant, it won’t be a good result. As you mention, what’s more important is the nb of interactions, the nb of “free” discussions and contacts that happened “naturally” or “organically”. There are many non measurable and invisible interactions at first sight. What’s important is, whenever you can, the decision-making process :
Have you read that : http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=135940 it can probably be a first step towards finding proper ways to measure that.
I’d be happy to keep the discussion. Please contact me or dm me (all contacts on my blog!)
take care, and happy to have this conversation on this very special online space.
and thanks Kristin & Nicole for bringing this debate right here!
April 15th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
[...] following article by Kristin Foster, Digital Strategist at Ogilvy looks at some of the other issues facing brands considering using social networking sites such as [...]
April 15th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
As much as I love ruining my eyesight, could you please use a normal black-text-on-white-background for your articles, instead of camouflaging the text in nearly-white grey? Jeez…
April 15th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
While tapping into the ease of use for FB and other social networking sites that could extend your brands reach - IF a company is unclear about the scope of their objective - they run a risk of damaging their brand more than helping it. (Don’t we all agree that it takes more time to build a brand than it does to kill it.)
April 16th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Great point Jordan.
Facebook, more than any other social media presence, requires a longer term commitment. I get frustrated when my friends stop checking their Facebook or don’t respond to my messages and it would be the same frustration with a brand.
I was thinking maybe it would help brands to create an internal mission statement about why they are using Facebook and how they are going to interact with their fans. This must be at least a year commitment so brands need to assign someone authorized to keep content fresh and respond to inquiries.Not that things should drop off after a year but it shows a solid commitment.
What do you think?
April 16th, 2009 at 8:44 am
Tyler,
I wanted to let you know I passed your comment about the text color along to our blog guru. We just updated the design a couple of months back so you probably won’t see a switch soon, but we do appreciate your concern and will keep it in mind.
April 16th, 2009 at 10:34 am
[...] How brands should use Facebook (Via: @guykawasaki) [...]
April 17th, 2009 at 11:03 am
@tyler - thanks for your suggestion about changing our font color. As Nicole mentioned, we’re just coming out of a redesign and still working on a few kinks.
We are listening however, and your comment was the tipping point; we’ve increased the contrast to #505050 (near pure black) across the entire Ogilvy Blog network worldwide.
Our reader’s eyes surely thank you.
Best,
John Stauffer
360 Digital Influence
April 17th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
[...] The learning curve for electronic communications is still pretty steep for many corporations. I don’t know about you, but after the 83rd time I get an e-mail from JCrew touting a “THREE DAYS ONLY” sale, I get a little annoyed. Same goes for that local bike shop that sends me an e-mail every single day. Companies are still striving to understand what constitutes “compelling content” and are too often assuming that advertising is the same thing as news. It only stands to get worse when social networks become increasingly interconnected and it’s easier and easier for companies to find us, whether we like it or not. Ergo a new job title for the 21st century: Digital Strategist. [...]
April 17th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
[...] Kristin Foster, Digital Strategist, The Heart Truth Campaign [...]
November 23rd, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Amazing Article , I considered it remarkable
I look forward to more interesting postings like this one. Do you have a RSS I can subscribe to for anymore information from you?
March 5th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Really interesting, I’d have to say above all I like the structure of your article layout. It makes it very easy to read. Most people clump it all together and makes it intimidating.