Among the new features being rolled out this week from Facebook are the enhanced friends lists options which many feel was a response to Google Plus Circles, and the introduction of a Subscribe button with multiple implications and applications.

The subscribe button is, by far, the most radical of the changes and for the first time, allows people who are not your friends to see your personal profile updates if you enable the subscribe button.  So, Guy Kawasaki or Pete Cashmore haven’t accepted your friend request.  Bill Gates is ignoring your pokes and messages.  You can now subscribe to their personal profile posts if they decide to enable Facebook’s new Subscribe button.  Why should you or your brand care?  You should care because Facebook has just opened up an interesting option for celebrities, authors, entrepreneurs, speakers and other high profile public figures to create great reach for their posts, beyond their friendship circle.  However, this comes with some challenges, privacy concerns and the need for those users to understand exactly how this works and what they’ll be sharing.

What does this mean for brands, small businesses and entrepreneurs?

For business people who use their Facebook profile as yet another entry point to their brand, albeit a more casual one, you can now place a subscribe button on your profile.  This allows people who aren’t your friends access to those posts you mark as public. This will be useful to celebrities, speakers, authors or other very public Facebook users who have reached their 5,000 friend cut-off, but still want to allow new friends to see their posts.  If you use your profile strictly for personal communications with family and friends, you’ll want to skip implementing the subscribe button and continue to decline or ignore requests for friend connections with business contacts.

What does this mean for you, the user?

As a user, you can subscribe to the posts of industry leaders, celebrities or political figures who set their personal profiles to allow subscriptions and you can decide what types of posts you want to see.  For example, you can hide all posts related to games so that you’ll never know when Lady Gaga hits a new high score on Bejeweled, but you’ll always be notified when she posts a new photo.

Facebook provides more details and the link to add the Subscribe button to your Facebook profile here. The profile owner can choose to be notified when someone subscribes, too. This is one to watch as it evolves in use.

Will you enable the Subscribe button?  Why or why not?

Using digital marketing tools can help authors and publishers by-pass the network television gatekeeper and take book messages directly to the reader.  Digital tools help authors connect with potential readers wherever they spend time online, be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs or search engines. And, it is essential to remember that nearly half of all web users are accessing the web throughout the day via their mobile devices so creating digital content that plays nicely in mobile formats is key.

I recently spoke on the topic of digital tool kits at BookExpo America 2011 on the Digital Marketing Panel with Sally Dedecker, Fauzia Burke and Kathleen Schmidt. The panel consensus was that authors and publishers need to consider utilizing a wide variety of digital strategies to reach new readers. You can view my powerpoint presentation here. But many digital tools are expensive to create and not every author or publisher has the budget to develop and implement the more complicated and costly digital strategies used by major brands.

Here’s a list of my favorite low-cost digital tools authors and publishers can their book campaigns.

Blogsite or Website with a blog

This is the author’s home base.  Readers should be able to read more about the author, find  links to the current and previous works of the author, view a personal appearance schedule and read the author’s blog.  Readers should also be able to sign up for a continued relationship with the author, perhaps through a newsletter or to receive a sample chapter of a new book.  Whatever the offer, the author needs to capture the e-mail addresses of people who express an interest in hearing from them. Authors can create a free blog using WordPress or Blogger and an e-mail management system like MailChimp is free until the author has attracted 2,000 fans.  MailChimp automatically generates the HTML code needed for an Opt-in box, which the author can place on his or her blog.  By working with the publisher to offer a sample chapter as a digital download, authors can offer a sneak peek for new books for fans who sign up for the mailing list.

Social Media

Social media amplifies the authors website and blog messages and creates a connection to help readers feel as though they’re involved in the author’s world.  Authors can share tour information, preview books, give fans special content such as original stories on their website or blog and spread the word via social media. It’s easier and faster to amass a large following on Twitter and Facebook than to acquire a large subscription base on a website because millions of people are already gathered on social media sites.  Go to where the readers are already gathered.  Bring the author’s message to those readers instead of waiting for them to stumble upon that message on a website.  It’s free to sign up for accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.  There is no cost to use them.  However, investing a few hundred dollars in design and custom tabs will allow authors to sell books directly from their Facebook Fan page, offer that sneak peek free chapter through an opt in box right from Facebook, create the look and feel of their own television channel on YouTube and give readers a sense of their personality on Twitter.  For under $500, each of the author’s social media sites can be design to promote the others and ultimately to drive fans back to the author’s blog or home base.

Opt in

The theme for an author’s digital tool kit is “make it easy for the reader to find, follow, friend and like you.”  By developing an e-mail database of readers who have expressed an interest in what an author writes, authors and publishers will be able to easily and efficiently push updates and marketing messages to potential book buyers who have already identified themselves as being interested.  This permission based digital marketing is cost effective and can have a higher ROI than nearly any other book marketing.  Adding an Opt in box and an enticing sign up offer on both the author website and their Facebook Fan page is an easy, inexpensive digital marketing strategy.

Video

We’re living in a social world where Facebook is the Wal-Mart of digital platforms.  With nearly 700 million users now conditioned to expect to see a face attached to every brand, authors who use video effectively will have a competitive advantage in reaching readers.  Readers like seeing and hearing from the artists they admire.  In the past, meeting a favorite author or even a new author, was relegated to book signings and perhaps major events.  Now authors can create short home videos and talk directly to their potential readers, sharing their tour experiences, their creative process and even concepts from their books.  Readers enjoy authors who share a bit of their personality and their time by creating short video messages.  This, too, is an easy and inexpensive digital marketing concept.

Digital Assets

Authors can now  create digital badges, original digital content like blogs or articles, downloadable author photos and bios, digital press releases, quizzes, games and contests.  All of these digital assets can be used to create visibility for the author and his or her books online.  The more interesting and compelling the digital assets are, the more likely they will be referenced, shared and valued by potential readers.  Creating 5-10 original essays or blog posts that can be used as guest blogs on sites visited by an author’s ideal reader is a free way to use these digital assets to promote an author’s books.  The topic of the posts could be related to the topic of the new book and the author by-line can reference his or her latest work.  By providing desirable content to other websites, the author extends his or her own visibility and attracts new readers.  Sharing charts, graphs, photos, videos, quizzes or other interesting and relevant content on these high traffic websites is another strategic use of an author’s digital assets. Think about what digital assets you can create to support the launch of your books and prepare those assets so they’re ready and available at launch time.

Online Advertising

Facebook advertising campaigns can fit any budget.  Authors and publishers can set a daily or a lifetime cap to the dollar amount of the campaign. If an author already has several thousand fans, Facebook’s sponsored stories ads display an image of the author’s fan page to friends of that author’s fans with a subtle visual that implies “Your friends like this page.  You should too.”  Authors and publishers can try different types of ads, different images and different creative messages until they find one that drives new fans to press “like.”  Facebook ads can also be created to redirect Facebook users to the author’s blog or website.  Again, even a budget of $100 to $200 can have an impact, not just in new fans or readers, but in author and book visibility.  Hundreds of thousands of impressions can be achieved for a very modest budget.  This is a digital marketing strategy that is often overlooked because publishers and authors think advertising is expensive or that it’s difficult to measure the ROI.  With Facebook advertising, daily metrics will tell the tale of these ad campaign affects.

These are just a few of the digital marketing strategies authors and publishers can implement for little or no monetary outlay.  Are you using digital marketing strategies effectively?  We’d love to hear your ideas and success stories.

Brands can now post to Facebook as brands. This is huge.

1. Posting as a Brand: The most important change is that administrators can now post throughout Facebook, on both other pages and on profiles, as the brand. This means that if a brand could potentially comment on the Facebook page of a popular television show with millions of fans and gain visibility with those fans. Conversely, a magazine or television show could comment on the pages of their advertisers to thank them for their support and again, gain additional visibility. We’ll be watching for best practices in this area.  To use this feature, administrators can toggle between posting as themselves and as the brand simply by using a drop down menu at the top of the page under “account.”
2. Visuals: Just as on the new profile designs, business pages will now feature the panel of five most recent photos across the top of your page.  This means that brands must exercise particular care when uploading images.  When another brand or individual tags a company in a photo, that photo will now appear above their newstream, giving less control of the images a business wants to show and making it more essential to have someone monitor the page regularly.
3. Changing Categories: Many companies set up their fan pages using either the wrong category or one that no longer is a good fit for their growing brand.  For example, a business might have been local but has grown to be regional or national. Or, a speaker with national reach might have set himself up as a company but now wants to represent himself as a “person” and a consultant.  For the first time, business pages can now change their category.  This changes the fields under the info link.  If a person wants to be a local business, changing categories will allow him to enter store hours and location along with details on parking.  If a local business wants to become a consultant, the new fields will provide spaces to share product offerings and packages.
4. Featured Likes: A fan page can now, for the first time, “like” another fan page.  Companies can use this feature to associate themselves with sister companies, clients, like-minded organizations and industry leaders.  The pages a business page “likes” will show up on the left hand side of the brand’s page.  By clicking “Edit Info” to the right of a business page name, administrators can now select a feature called “Featured Likes” and choose the top pages they want to have shown on the left hand column of their page.  Again this will be useful for companies that include multiple brands and divisions.
5. Featured Page Owner: Under the “Edit Info” link, business pages may now designate one or more “Featured Page Owners” to be displayed in the left hand column. This can be useful for pages with multiple voices or owners posting.  This definitely gives a public and individual face to a business page, however, and for small business owners or others not wanting to share their personal profile link with the world, this is a feature to understand clearly before utilizing.
6. Filtered News: This is the feature that has people concerned today and hopefully Facebook will listen to the discontent and reverse this.  As of this morning, Facebook and Facebook alone controls the newsfeed of a business page, serving up posts they deem “most interesting.” This seems to create a feed where the posts with the most interactions show up first, leaving the brand without the ability to feature their newest updates first.  This one new feature is counter intuitive to encouraging brands to use Facebook to promote their businesses.  Without control over the order in which their messages appear to fans, a huge opportunity has opened up for outside developers to create something that better serves brands. (*UPDATE: March 5, 2011: Facebook has reverted back to allowing fan pages to post in reverse chronological order, after an uproar from users.)

Over the next week, there will be additional updates on the nuances of using Facebook fan pages to promote businesses.  We’d welcome the sharing of best practices here and feel free to include links to those pages as examples.  If you found this post useful, please let us know by leaving a comment.

Facebook makes micro-targeting custom tabs easy.

This is particularly exciting for businesses using a custom landing tab with a video welcoming message or a sweepstakes application or even an e-commerce application.  You have total control over exactly where your ad will lead people, without having to change your landing tab options for anyone finding your page for the first time through other means.

Additionally, you can now directly target friends of people who already like your page.  With repetition, this should reinforce your brand name with people who’s friends are already interacting with your page, a very important metric because people like to interact with pre-qualified or pre-approved pages. In other words, everyone wants to be friends with the popular kids.  The more often people see your ads and their friends interacting with your brand, the more likely they are to “like” the page themselves.

A successful ad campaign needs to be supported with content designed to make fans “stick.” When they give your brand a chance by clicking on your ad, they need to discover a fascinating, fun, engaging or information packed page that makes them whisper, “I like this.”  Running ads during periods in which you are very actively engaged on your page and be sure to offer your best stuff.  Think about this moment as a first date.  Be on your best behavior and show the potential new fan what a catch you are.  You won’t get a second chance.

Another new feature is called “Sponsored Stories.”  Sponsored stories have been around for a while and you’ve probably noticed them on the right hand side of your page when you see something promoted and underneath it says, “John Brown and three other friends like this page.”  But including Sponsored Stories on the ad creation page seems to indicate that you can now dictate which Facebook actions you’d like to promote to friends and followers.  This may have implications for affiliate marketers trying to lend their influence to a particular program.  I don’t have enough information yet on this aspect but will dig deeper and report back.

So, quickly, Facebook is adding some micro-targeting options to the ad platform that could lead to better, more cost efficient use of ad campaigns.  If you liked this story, please leave a comment.  If you have questions about Facebook ads, I’ll be happy to answer them.

Isn’t it time your brand reached out beyond your current base and joined the social mix?

1. Facebook: More than 500 million users. Enough said. You need to be here with a Profile, at the very least, and preferably with a Fan Page.
2. Twitter: Come on. It’s 120 character micro=blogging. You can find the time. Note: Each tweet can be 140 characters but keep it to 120 so others can Retweet you and help your info go viral. Set it up and commit to posting regularly to grow your social influence.
3. LinkedIn: You simply must be on LinkedIn. It’s the yellow pages of business professionals and it’s becoming more interactive and important every day. Resolve to sign up, build out your work history and information slowly and join the digital workforce.
4. Blog: Content is king and some sort of blog—be it WordPress (my favorite) or another solution—is a necessity. You need a platform to post interesting and useful information in more than 120/140 characters and in an open forum. You can link to your blog on Twitter and Facebook to drive additional interest in your content. Blogs can be short, long, written, audio or video. Whatever content delivery system fits your personality and brand is the right system.
5. Calendar: Keep a notepad of ideas that occur to you throughout your day.  These can be your posting or blogging inspirations. Whatever you do, or whatever product or service you provide will be of interest to your readers, fans, and followers.  Make an editorial calendar once a month and let this serve as your social media marketing checklist.
6. YouTube:  YouTube is the second largest search engine around. Habits are changing on line and people are flocking to YouTube with their “how-to” and “who is” questions. You don’t have to be a celebrity or even a polished professional to reap the benefits of being on YouTube.  Create slide shows, photo and message montages and video messages and house them on your own YouTube Channel to increase your social visibility.

Social media is like a megaphone to help you rapidly expand the reach of your branding and marketing message.  But you have to be there to use the power of this medium.

Your brand is what your customers think it is, not what you think it is. So listen, engage, and if the message you want is not the message they’re repeating, alter your strategy.

If a company stays away from social media so as to avoid negative online feedback they will accomplish two things:

1. They will be unaware of problems that might have been easily resolved but when left alone may become much bigger problems.
2. They will be miss a valuable opportunity to fix minor problems and turn cranky customers into happy evangelizers.

Mashable wrote an excellent post recently sharing three terrific examples of how major brands monitored, managed and resolved (or not) some important brand missteps and criticism.

Bottom line: The conversation about you is going on with or without you. You can only influence it if you are aware of it.  Every company should be active on Facebook and Twitter, at the very least, to monitor and influence their brand reputation.  Every company should have a google alert set for their key words and get that digest daily.  Every company should search their brand name or the name of their current campaign on Twitter daily.

I’m hearing a lot of talk from big advertising and PR agencies about social media technology. That sounds so much more impressive than the overused phrase social media marketing, doesn’t it. But in reality, they go hand in hand and one does not displace the other. Social media technology is the architecture and social media marketing is the message. It’s that simple.

Although the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan said, the message still needs to be crafted.

Your brand can have the most sophisticate social media technology available, yet not attain your goals if your social media marketing message is not clear.  Creating conversations with your clients about their wants, needs and how you can fulfill them is what social media marketing facilitates best.

So, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, ask yourselves the important questions:

1. What is my unique value to the consumer?
2. How will I communicate that both verbally and visually?

Then bring social media marketing and social media technology to the same table for a good long talk.

Adding a Twitter Button on the wall of your Facebook Business Page–not your personal profile–allows people to easily find and follow you on Twitter.  You want people to be able to interact with you on any social platform they frequent, so adding a convenient way to connect with you on Twitter is a key visibility strategy.  I’ve blogged about this in the past, but since Facebook has changed it’s face so many times in the last year, I thought people might need these updated step-by-step instructions.  Please feel free to post a comment here if anything is fuzzy and I’ll clarify or illuminate any issues you are having.

The blue Facebook Bar contains the white search window

Step One: Install the Static FBML (Facebook Mark-up  Language) Application to your page. To find this application, enter the words “Static FBML” in the search window on the blue bar at the top of your page.

Step Two:  When you get to the Application page, click “Add to My Page” which you’ll find directly underneath the Avatar image on the upper left hand side of the page.

Step Three:  An overlay screen will pop up and list the names of any pages associated with your profile that do not already have Static FBML installed.  You’ll click the “Add to Page” button next to the page on which you wish to install this application.

Static FMBL App

Step Four:  Go back to your profile and click  “Ads and Pages” on the left hand side of the page.

Locate the newly installed FBML app

Step Five:  Click Edit under the FBML application in your list of applications on your page.

Step Six: A box will appear that can be customized.  You’ll title it “Follow Me On Twitter” or “Tweet with Me” or something that invites people to follow you there.

Name Your New Tab

Step Seven:  Enter your HTML coding into the FBML box for your custom designed Twitter button or you can use google to find a variety of sites that offer free Twitter images.  I like  Twitter Buttons where you can enter your Twitter name into the automatic code generator and they provide you with the HTML code you need to create a button.

Once you’ve entered your desired code, press “Save Changes.”

Step Eight: Go back to your page and click the + sign on your tabs bar. Locate your new “Follow Me On Twitter” FBML app and click on it.

You’ll see that the phrase “Follow Me on Twitter” has now become a custom tab on your screen.

Your image  is now a live link, under this custom tab.

Make sure you post about your new tab to alert your followers.

Mrs. P's photo by Jacqueline Veissid

While businesses, public figures, celebrities and authors know the importance of adding social media to their outreach strategy in order to bring their message and brand to the more than 500 million users of various social platforms, the age limitation for participating on some social media platforms has made it challenging to use them to reach children directly.  One team understands that reaching the influencers and the parents is more important than speaking directly to children in a marketing campaign.  The creators of MrsP.com mastered the art of the conversation and are demonstrating the importance of relationships and partnerships when it comes to growing their brand and spreading their message.

The face of MrsP.com is Kathy Kinney, best known for her nearly decade long portrayal of the role of Mimi Bobeck on The Drew Carey Show.  She is well on her way to creating another iconic character in Mrs. P, the fantastically quirky ambassador of reading who shares her love of books through an engaging and interactive website for children.

A cross between Mr. Rogers and Pee Wee Herman, Kathy Kinney’s Mrs. P brings books to life as she reads classic children’s stories in a series of webisodes.

Her talking fireplace, magical bookshelves and games are designed to appeal to emergent readers up through tweens (the scary book room will particularly appeal to this age group).  Mrs. P, herself, graciously agreed to be our guest this week for “Five Questions with the Expert” and share a few of her thoughts about using social media to spread her love of reading. In fact, she was so delightful, she answered a bonus question!

RATZLAFF:

You have a fabulously interactive destination website for children. How are you using social media to reach young readers?

MRS. P:

I’m not trying to reach my young readers directly since most are under the age of 12, but rather their parents and the other adult influencers in their lives — teachers, librarians, literacy advocates and organizations. I have found blogs to be a very effective way to spread the word about Mrs. P, whether as a guest blogger or by enlisting their sites to announce events like my annual writing contest. I’ve been using Twitter to meet these bloggers and fans. But I’m not really interested in showing up Shaquille O’Neal and getting the most Twitter followers in the world, but prefer to connect with people who share my same passion for literacy. I try to have personal and meaningful conversations with my followers and love to share articles about the tremendous importance of reading to children. As much as I’m tempted, because I love to talk about myself, I try not to make it only about me. I’m also proud of the give-and-take on my website. If someone posts news about Mrs. P on their site, we will re-post their story on my site, introducing them to our audience.

RATZLAFF:

How do you separate your Mrs. P persona from the business side of running a website?

MRS. P:

I like to keep focused on my mission as Mrs. P, which is to spread the joy of books and reading. When I receive invitations for interviews, appearances, and business relationships, I ask them to contact my business partner, Dana, who handles that side of the house. She considers the validity of the inquiries and deals with the technical details so that my online presence can just be about Mrs. P’s mission – and having fun!

RATZLAFF:

Can you describe a day in the social media world for Mrs. P?

MRS. P:

I try and ensure that there is something new and fun on my Facebook site several times a week. I have a much smaller audience there than on Twitter, where I make an effort to engage with my followers every morning and evening. I also coordinate with my “elves” to make sure my website has fresh news and engaging messages on my “Did you hear…” page. I’m lucky because there seems to be so much good news lately about my site that I can share with my audience.

RATZLAFF:

Is there any one social platform that performs better than others to help you connect with the influencers who help you spread your literacy message?

MRS. P:

While Mrs. P has very active Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and You-Tube accounts, I do think that Twitter has been the most effective. For example, Everybody Wins! USA, a literacy organization for which I am an honorary board member, will occasionally build Tweet campaigns with us, and together, we grow our audiences and spread news about the importance of literacy.

RATZLAFF:

Have you incorporated video or audio into your social media strategy?

MRS. P:

Video has been a key element in our social media strategy. The team at Mrs. P created a fun music video called “Listen Up, Kids” to get young people excited about reading. We made it available as a free download on iTunes. I asked our fans to post it on their blogs and Tweet about it, and in the first day, we had 25,000 downloads! We also posted it on YouTube to let people know it was free. We had a similar experience with the winning entries from my writing contest. Again, we had over 22,000 downloads the first day by using social networking to spread the word. I think if you have a strong mission and are also willing to give something meaningful away for free, it’s a powerful combination. It’s certainly worked well for Santa Clause over the years, and it’s also built a great deal of awareness for the Mrs. P brand.

RATZLAFF:

I heard a rumor that Mrs. P has plans to create mobile apps.  Any truth to that rumor?

MRS. P:

Oh, yes. The mobile world is a wave I really need to be riding! So in September I will launch a free (there’s that wonderful word again!) Reading Challenge app for the iPhone. It will be a fun and engaging way to test reading comprehension. And it’s yet one more way to bring awareness to literacy and to my website.

Parents, librarians, grandparents and teachers can find Mrs. P on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and of course children can visit her magical library, choose a book from her shelves and have Mrs. P read them a classic.

Facebook is effectively, in addition to being a micro-blogging and communication platform, a search engine. One of the reasons an author needs to be on Facebook is to increase his or her visibility and therefore, help readers find his/her work. Facebook provides three different types of pages to choose from and each has rules, advantages and disadvantages.

Personal Profile
A personal profile is, by Facebook’s own terms of use, a page for people to list themselves by their real name and interact with friends of their choosing. People who connect to a personal profile are referred to as “Friends.” It is against Facebook’s rules to set up a personal profile for your business, your book, your dog or a dead saint. Facebook can, if it chooses, close fraudulent profiles and all the work you’ve done to create that page will be lost along with all of your friends. I recommend that you set up a personal profile, adhering to all of the rules before setting up a Facebook Fan Page (see below). Having a personal profile and setting up a Facebook page from that profile will allow authors to utilize more custom application on the Fan Page. A Fan Page can be created without first creating a personal profile, but doing so limits the customization options available. If the Facebook rules don’t convince you to do this properly, there’s another good reason. A personal profile can only accept 5,000 people as friends. At 5,001, new friends will start receiving a message from Facebook stating that you are over your friend limit and cannot accept any new friends. Trust me and set up your personal profile first.

Facebook Fan Page

Fan Pages are best option that Facebook provides for creating a branded social media presence for you the writer.

This is best option that Facebook provides for creating a branded social media presence for you the writer, for your book, and for your career. People who connect to a Facebook Fan Page must click the “Like” button in order to receive updates from the Page. Once they “Like” a page, they are still referred to by most people as Fans. Because you followed my advice and set up a personal profile first, you can now create custom tabs for your Facebook Fan Page such as “About the Book,” “More about the Author,” “Tour Schedule,” or whatever custom information you’d like to make available to fans. Facebook allows a Fan Page to have an unlimited number of Fans. This is good news for an author or speaker who is working to amass the largest possible list of followers and spread the word about a new book, appearance or project far and wide. Authors can even create an opt-in box and invite fans to subscribe to an e-newsletter, all from a Facebook Fan Page. Facebook Fan Pages are indexed by Google and therefore, they increase an author’s search engine ranking by putting out new, original content regularly.

Facebook Groups
People who join a Facebook Group are called Members. One advantage of Facebook Groups is that they can be made public or kept private. At this writing Facebook Groups are not indexed by Google and that is the single biggest reason for author’s to create a Fan Page over a Group. Unlike pages, groups allow to send out “bulk invites” so you can invite all your friends to join the group. With Pages, you’ll have to invite people individually. Groups are good for spreading a message or brand name through viral marketing, because any group member can also send bulk invites to his or her complete list of friends. But, and this is a big but, Groups are not indexed by search engines yet and that is my number one reason for recommending Pages over Groups to promote an author and his or her work.

I hope this look at Facebook options helps authors, speakers and entrepreneurs start right and maximize their promotional efforts on Facebook. I strongly recommend that all authors create profiles and pages for their work and look forward to answering any questions about the use of Facebook to promote books.