Close and Go Back
  • Carrot Creative
  • Carrot Blog
  • Carrot Labs
  • Zoo Venture Group
    • paperclip

    Your online identity—add to it!

    May 5th, 2009 · Comments · Insight

    Written by: Kristin Maverick

    Everyone has their online identity. You have a website. You have your blog. Your LinkedIn. Twitter. Facebook. You build these networks and pages out to form “Who you are.” But, having one of these “things” does not classify who you are as a person. If you’re on Twitter, it doesn’t mean you necessarily have “quick thoughts”, if you’re on LinkedIn it doesn’t necessarily mean you are all about networking for your career. Or, at least I hope it doesn’t.

    There are more ways to bringing out your personality within your online profile. Facebook Fan Pages are a GREAT start to this. We love Facebook Fan Pages here at >carrot creative and I can promise you there will be more posts about this topic.

    If you check out my Facebook page, you can tell that I like sushi, baseball, chardonnay and Dave Matthews Band. Sure, there are many OTHER things I like, but you already know  a little more about me than “she has a blog and a Twitter.”

    Looking at this from a marketers perspective, brands need to have a strong presence on these Facebook Fan Pages. If I have a favorite type of perfume that I use every day, what’s stopping me from showing that off and adding that to my Facebook page? In fact, from writing this post I found that Burberry London is ON Facebook and I can become a fan of the brand. Now people know that I like this type of perfume.(And yes, that’s why I smell so good.)

    When Facebook rolled out the new Fan Page redesign, PR people everywhere did a happy dance. An integrated place to push out a brand and everything that goes into it? Here we go! Mashable wrote up a great outline on these pages and how marketers will need to get involved when designing these out. We’ve had the opportunity to work with this for a bunch of brands already and the opportunity to really engage with your brands fans on these are amazing. The easy ways to share the content (there is a SUGGEST PAGE button—easy!) and have the content show up immediately in your news feed provides for a quick jumpstart to your viral campaign. There’s no reason to not be doing this.

    So, brands—make sure you’re out there on these Fan Pages. Users are looking to add a bit more personality to their online identity. People are proud to say they eat Carl’s Jr. hamburgers any chance they get. They enjoy saying they watch Lost or wear Nike sneakers. Make it available for them and start bringing these fans to a place where you can interact with them directly.

    What do you think? Do you build out your online presence on Facebook? Are you a fan of brands and objects?

    filed in:
    Insight

    tags:
    · · · · ·

    Comments

    ← Reach your fans with what THEY need Someday Your Browser Might Be Your Best Friend →
    • To Maury's point, I think that Facebook's implementation of the "Like" button on shared items, statuses and wall posts was incredibly smart on their part. I would love to see the engagement numbers behind this feature. Saying how you feel about a brand - whether you like it, love it, hate it, or crave it - would add another layer of depth that users would enjoy and brands could capitalize on (given the capabilities by Facebook).

      People love to share what they're passionate about, and Facebook Fan Pages enable users to do just that around a specific brand. All brands should have a presence on Facebook.
    • Great point Kristin. I also think by introducing a set of words to let people describe how they feel about a certain brand or object is key to gauging consumer interest right off the bat. Something to the effect of like and love would help bring successful elements of the social web full circle and serve to standardize specific user actions.
    • Maury,
      That's really interesting thought - enabling a user to identify why they are a fan of brand x. There's probably a number of ways to make that happen, but just using that as a thought starter could take you to some cool places as far as the relationship goes.
    • I think FB Fan pages definitely enable brands to engage with certain "types" of fans, but it should not replace (or become an easy way out of) engaging your die hard fans as well. A way to define a "die hard" might be someone who is already part of a community that has formed around an associated passion or your brand itself. Some who, might actually, wouldn't be caught dead joining your FB Fan page b/c they are such a huge fan (does that make sense?). It's also important to note that not all brands have "die-hards". And for which case, FB Fan pages are a really nice opportunity for the non-die hards to show their fandom by basically putting a virtual badge on their virtual-self.

      Point is, it's not easy to truly engage your fans in a meaningfully by participating in a credible way and adding value to whatever community or experience they are engaging in. So while FB Fan pages are a nice start/option, don't let you clients just check the box. Make sure they use that first step as way to learn more about their fans, what they react to, what they care about, what they want more or less of, to find out who the real die-hards are and where they are connecting without them, to then go out and use those insights to deliver better services and products.
    • Absolutely. I think FAN is the wrong word and maybe Facebook should have described it a bit differently. When I think FAN, I think Yankees, Red Sox---not chicken parm sandwiches and "lazy summers"--it should be more of a "Like" feature. Fan is such a strong word. That said, Facebook is the only one doing anything remotely like this to fill out your online profile with content versus just the basics. By developing a basic start for this, we can only go up and add more to it. Then, maybe we can describe how we can break away through the clutter for the die hard fans.
    blog comments powered by Disqus