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You’ve Got To Have Friends

Carolyn Lawrence is now ‘friends’ with Jordan Banks, Managing Director at Facebook Canada – after an engaging and educating chat on how Facebook is essential to building your brand.

By: Carolyn Lawrence | Photography by: Kourosh Keshiri


Bette Midler wrote a song about it and Mark Zuckerberg created a social network so everyone can ‘Find Friends’ because society is all about relationships that enable people to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis.

As of September 2011, Facebook had 800 million global members with 18+ million in Canada, who have an average of 130 ‘friends’ per member. Facebook is ultimately a communication channel that allows people to connect. “With those connections you have huge, massive amounts of behavioural influence,” Banks says. “We are a platform that allows you to communicate the way you want, in the time you want, in the voice you want, to the people that want to hear what you have to say.”

The 21st century is about the social graph, the era of discovery, the importance of eliminating the fear of technology; it’s about embracing Facebook and taking advantage of social networking tools that are available to achieve both personal and business goals.


HOW DO INDIVIDUALS, CORPORATIONS, SMALL BUSINESSES, LEADERS AND INFLUENCERS LEVERAGE FACEBOOK TO BUILD THEIR BRANDS, GROW RELATIONSHIPS, EXPAND MARKETS AND INCREASE RESULTS?

Number one, be yourself. It’s all about being genuine and authentic, talking in a voice—as an individual or as a brand—that will resonate with others.

Number two is being interesting. Sharing pictures, videos or posts that you find intellectually curious or fascinating with your friends is really important. Women are awesome users and connectors, and they are incredibly social—they post an incredible number of photos, share content with friends and play games on Facebook. I talk to moms who say they actually have a very rich social life because of Facebook. It’s a social experience and it feels good.

The take-away benefit of moving beyond talking face-to-face with colleagues and customers at work, or with friends in a coffee shop, is having those conversations and sharing those thoughts on a scale that has never been done before. The power of social media is immense, and subsequently, social media management is incredibly important. Building personal and professional capacity with this in mind is essential to optimize for success.

Today the web is organized around people. In the ’90s the focus was on browsing. In the first 6+ years of the 21st century, the web was full of anonymous and random one-dimensional information links. Now, it’s an era of discovery. The web is influenced by people, and those people in turn influence their friends and communities through pubic opinion, decisions and actions. Banks confirms, “That is just the way it is, and so organizations need to orient themselves over that reality.”

FACEBOOK ESSENTIALS

CREATE A FACEBOOK PAGE. Explore the tools and how they can work for your needs and expectations.
DEVELOP A VOICE. Take how you communicate seriously, what you communicate and the tone in which you communicate.
FIND FRIENDS. Build your social graph: the digital connections to everybody and every connection that is important to you. Include friend-of-friend additions and leverage the Facebook Subscribe button for less familiar relationships with people to enhance mentoring and peer-to-peer broadcasts. More connections mean a greater ability to amplify your message.
POST INTERESTING THINGS. Upload photos, videos, provide links to groups, subscription interests, share your curiosity.
COMMUNICATE FREQUENTLY AND BUILD YOUR BRAND PERSONALITY. Tag friends, confirm ‘likes,’ add comments, share with others, check-in and let people know where you are and what you’re doing. When disseminating information, link it to Facebook.

“The power of Facebook is the amplification of the message to your friends. Influencing friends is the way best brands get incredible masses of fans, and engage those fans to do more,” Banks says. He identifies two major gaps when it comes to organizations. Firstly, are the brands that think about digital and social as segregated into a separate bucket. “This is the wrong way to think,” says Banks. “It literally needs to permeate each and every thing you do across each and every functional area.” It is a big paradigm shift, he says. “It is a horizontal function.”

The second gap is in the marketing benefit. “It’s really important to acknowledge that social should amplify everything else you do—we should be living it, says Banks. “If you do a really good job on Facebook and get people to Subscribe to your post or fan your Page, that critical mass of people you are connected to can only act as an amplifier.”

We are living in an open world and conversations—good, bad and indifferent—are happening every second of every day about brands. “Some of the best insights that customers get, they get through Facebook and they get it at 3:30 in the afternoon,” Jordan says. When asked about companies that firewall Facebook he replies, “You’re telling your employees that it is not important enough for me to know, in real time, that something is happening with one of our customers.” Acknowledging relevant regulatory issues, Jordan boldly says companies have two choices: “You can ignore them to your peril as those customers go to your competitors and have conversations with them, or you can embrace it and be part of the conversations.” Those that decide on the latter will flourish, says Banks. “It’s as simple as that.”

The power of Facebook is the amplification of the message to your friends. Influencing friends is the way best brands get incredible masses of fans, and engage those fans to do more.

ESSENTIALS FOR BUSINESSES ON FACEBOOK

CONFIRM THE CEO MANDATE. Social needs to be part of the corporate DNA.
DEVELOP AN INTEGRATED SOCIAL NETWORK STRATEGY. An operations plan for integrating brand development, ongoing communications and marketing with real-time social management across all functional areas.
CREATE A FACEBOOK PAGE. Establish a genuine, authentic brand personality, voice and multi-dimensional communication platform.
TEST THE FACEBOOK AD PRODUCTS AND INTEGRATE FACEBOOK INTO YOUR OVERALL MARKETING STRATEGY. Target demographically and psycho-graphically via interests using key words for potential and existing customers.
ESTABLISH AND NURTURE RELATIONSHIPS. Be relevant in the minds and hearts of people, with the critical mass from target ad information, communicate offers, contests, promotions, have interesting conversations about innovation, experiences, products, anything – interactions with someone who is a fan are published to all of their friends.
LEVERAGE GROUP FUNCTIONALITY. Determine which segments of fans get to hear which things. Geo-target, and deliver more personalized messages.
USE SPONSORED STORIES. Create social relevancy by showing users interacting with brands, through the names/photos of people so their friends see them beside the brand because people need to be the center of everything, including advertising. Putting people in the center is more fun and it influences the behavior of others.
SOCIAL MANAGEMENT. Develop a 360-degree picture of your customer. Customers expect to be heard in real time and treated differently.

ORGANIZATIONALLY, WHAT MEASUREMENTS ARE BRANDS THAT ARE DOING THE BEST ON FACEBOOK UNDERTAKING?

They have a CEO mandate. People are talking common languages; measurement frameworks are developed around the totality of a consumer, not just one aspect of the consumer. Brands are developing products because they have gotten feedback from a million people about what they want.

“Facebook does more than traditional marketing,” Banks says. “In almost every functional area.” He offers the latest findings from Nielsen, who did a comprehensive study around the importance of friends influencing friends, investigating why it matters if a person sees a friend’s name or picture on Facebook beside a brand.

Nielsen concluded that when a person sees social context such as a friend’s name or face beside a brand, they are: two times more likely to recall the message; three times more likely to be aware of the message; and four times more likely to have purchase intent as it relates to that product or service.

WHAT IS SO EXCITING ABOUT FACEBOOK?
High performance delivers fun results. When you put people at the center of anything—whether it be a business, or a functional area of a business, or a group of women—it becomes a lot more fun and more engaging. At Facebook, we want to empower you… it’s all about personalization.

Banks explains that Facebook has a horde of insight and data products that are free for a brand to access. “All of these little tools allow you to be very scientific when posting,” he says. “They’re on Facebook, they’re easy to use, and they take the guesswork out of developing affinities.” He reminds us that the best brands talk like real human beings, they talk in a voice that resonates with existing and potential consumers and they don’t skirt around issues. They address questions quickly and get right to the point.

SOCIAL NETWORK LEADERS USING FACEBOOK

TIM HORTONS. Uses Facebook to engage with its over 1.7 million Canadian fans, and is a master at engaging the community on a daily basis. Whether it is creating an application around a seasonal campaign or simply asking people to guess a Tim Hortons’ locations from posted photos on Facebook, that affinity ultimately results in more sales.
VITAMIN WATER. Used Facebook to crowd-source a new product, asked the community what type of flavours they want in their next Vitamin Water. Within a week, they had hundreds of thousands of people imputing what they wanted, and ultimately launched the new Vitamin Water created by the community. To no surprise, they cannot keep that flavour in stock — everyone knows about it, feels like they were part of it, and they have developed an incredible portfolio of fans who are excited about product development.
DOVE. Invites women to engage with them by creating the Beautyography campaign, which asked people to post a video on Facebook and be a part of the Dove Movement to build positive self-esteem.
AMERICAN EXPRESS. In just two years, this 160-year-old brand has fundamentally changed the way they approach the market to become an inherently social brand.

When asked about the future, Jordan Banks expresses, “The most exciting part about being on Facebook is the social graph, the digital imprint of all these connections.” That social graph does not need to live on a computer screen; it can live anywhere… on your phone, computer, in the car, in a store, on a wall. “It’s the power of friends influencing friends anywhere, in real time.” There is no such thing as one-dimensional communication, he says. It is multi-dimensional and it is all affected by your friends. “I think that is super exciting because it is happening.”

Facebook remains an incredible tool that connects people, minimizes isolation, fosters socialization, and reminds everyone that, for better or worse, we’re in it together and you’ve got to have friends.

FACEBOOK MAKES IT EASY

Facebook.com/business/howitworks
Facebook.com/marketing
Facebook.com/influencers
Facebook.com/facebookads
Facebook.com/facebookpages

*Editor’s Note: Don’t forget to like Women of Influence on Facebook for updates on events, interesting facts from our speakers, lively debates and so much more… on what matters to you!