Two-Faced: The Promise and Pitfalls of Facebook

With 250 million members and growing, Facebook is a siren’s song for marketers and business owners. Its allure lies in its promise of instantaneous access to legions of followers, but therein also lies the danger. With all the hype surrounding social media, misconceptions about Facebook’s capabilities as a marketing tool are rampant. It’s easy to latch on to the seemingly obvious benefits while overlooking the hidden perils. Before you steer your brand on a course to social media suicide, let’s take a closer look at some of the nefarious half-truths that permeate the buzz about Facebook and sort out perception from possibility.

Facebook is free advertising.

This much is true: It doesn’t cost one dime to create an account or set up a fan page on Facebook. But that’s where the free ride ends. In fact, Facebook is neither free nor advertising. Advertising in the most traditional sense of the word implies one-way communication. It represents a carefully polished, thoroughly sanitized version of a company’s image that is presented to a statistically favorable audience through structured media outlets. Social media by definition demands interaction. As a result, using any social media platform as a tool to grow your business requires a significant investment of time and effort – precious resources of which many companies today have little to spare – to nurture relationships and cultivate a following. You can’t approach Facebook as you would an advertising campaign with tidy short-term objectives and a finite lifespan. Instead, you must be willing to make a long-term commitment and have the patience to let the return on your investment develop over time. Furthermore, unlike traditional advertising, Facebook is not simply a vehicle for self-promotion. Creating a Facebook page is like standing on a soapbox. You can gather a crowd and take the stage, but if you do nothing but talk endlessly about yourself, your products and your achievements, everyone will quickly leave and go elsewhere.

Facebook is an easy way to connect with your customers.

Yes, your 10-year-old son and your 85-year old grandmother can set up a Facebook page. The developers behind Facebook invested untold hours and resources in a simple, user-friendly interface in order to ensure just that. Facebook is not the ends; it's the means. However, the act of creating a page is not the point. It’s not the same as putting up a billboard on the side of the road where the end goal is to gain attention by the simple fact of existing in the space. You must do more than establish a presence; you must commit yourself to being fully present on the site. The gift that Facebook and other social media sites have given to marketers and business owners is removing the middlemen of print and broadcast media that were once your only lines of communication with your customers. However, having the ability to communicate directly does no good if you do not use it to your advantage by actively engaging your followers. How do you do this? Offer them something of value, start a conversation, provide a forum for meaningful interaction, post diverse kinds of content. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about what you would respond to. Think about what all of your fans might have in common and build your following around that. Your Facebook page might not even focus on your business or industry at all. That’s fine, as long as what’s there is entertaining or thought provoking or relatable – something that people can latch onto and encourage others to do the same. In short, Facebook is not the ends; it's the means.

There’s no harm in trying Facebook.

You’ve heard all the chatter about Facebook, and you’ve decided to take the plunge, thinking you’ll figure it out as you go. Stop right there. The problem with taking a trial-and-error approach is that there are no take-backs in the world of social media. Your mistakes are on display for all to see and can be unearthed again and again. Post content that is poorly conceived or badly executed, and you take a chance at being the Internet’s next viral sensation (and not in a good way). Of course, that’s the worst-case scenario. But the indisputable truth of the matter is that your efforts can backfire if you don’t come out of the gate with a strong, clearly defined strategy and commit to sustaining your efforts over time. There are no take-backs in the world of social media. As a marketer or business owner, you can’t afford to enter into Facebook lightly. Lackluster communication will damage your brand. Just as easily as you can update your status, your fans can hide you from their feed. The more eagerly you flood your followers with content that’s not relevant or lacks creativity, the more you risk alienating your once loyal customers. Take a step back and think about how your activity on Facebook reflects on you and what it reveals to your customers about your motives. For example, focusing on self-promotion sends a clear message to your fans that you have no interest in them or desire to forge a meaningful connection. Remember, everything that you broadcast over Facebook becomes part of your brand legacy.

The more fans, the better.

As is the case in most areas of business, there is strength in numbers on Facebook. Or is there? Without question, Facebook has the numbers. Over 50 million new users joined in the past three months alone, leaving marketers who cling to the traditional media metrics of reach and demographics salivating. However, Facebook’s true strength is not in the exposure it offers to this vast sea of humanity. It’s in the platform’s strength as a channel of unobstructed communication between you and your customers as well as between your customers and their network of friends. The number of fans you have on Facebook is meaningless in and of itself. Just as it takes next to no effort on your part to create your page, it requires nothing but the click of a mouse for someone to “fan” you. But if that is the last interaction you have with them, then it does nothing to improve your bottom line. What you really need are loyal fans who are passionate about you and who are actively spreading the word about what you have to offer. You need to develop a following of people who are personally invested in your success. It’s not about quantity; it’s about quality.Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly describes on his blog the importance of what he calls “True Fans,” defined as “someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce.” Once you have committed yourself to Facebook, it is imperative that you seek out these types of fans and feed them meaningful content that they can spread like wildfire throughout their various networks of family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. When it comes to fans and Facebook, it’s not about quantity; it’s about quality. All of this is not to say that you shouldn’t view Facebook as a powerful grassroots marketing tool or that the challenges outweigh the benefits. However, it is to say that you shouldn’t blindly follow the masses to Facebook because you think it’s cheap, easy and free of risk. Instead, be realistic about the investment of time and effort required, cultivate a loyal group of real fans and communicate with them in a way that is really engaging. As always, if you’re not sure where to start and need help making sense of it all, please feel free to call us. We can help you separate Facebook fact from fiction and put you on the right track to using social media as a tool for building meaningful customer relationships.

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Survival of the Fittest: Conquering Responsive Website Design

With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets today, serving the needs of mobile browsers is no longer acondary consideration when it comes to designing (or redesigning) your website. From the ground up, it’s critically important to ensure that you are building a platform that will look beautiful and perform elegantly no matter where or how a user might access it. While you can create a dedicated mobile site or app, responsive design offers a smarter, more flexible, more agile solution that will ultimately deliver a greater long-term return for your investment.

Defining responsive design

Responsive design is the concept of building a website so that the layout of the site adapts and changes according to the resolution of the user’s browser. Using this approach, you can build a single site that will look just as good on a monitor that’s 2048 pixels by 1080 pixels as it will on an iPhone that’s 320 pixels by 480 pixels and all browser sizes in between without the need to build a separate dedicated mobile version of your website. Ethan Marcotte, the forerunner in the field, identifies the three key ingredients of responsive design as follows:

• Fluid grids
• Flexible images
• Media queries

Wait, fluid what? Media what? Let’s take a step back and define these terms in plain English. Every website is developed based on a grid that governs the scale of and relative position of objects (such as navigation menus, images and text) to one another. A fluid grid has the ability to shift and reposition select elements of the site based on certain conditions in order to preserve the properly defined scale for layout, size and spacing. “Flexible images” mean that the images contained within the site’s design should scale in size and shift in position according to the dimensions of the device being used to access the site (larger images on large displays, smaller ones on phone screens, etc.) And media queries? Media queries are used to intelligently detect the size of the browser window and the device being used to access the site and bring back the correct layout for optimal viewing and navigation according to those parameters. But these technical elements only govern the mechanics of the site. What ultimately determines the success of a website that’s built on a responsive design framework is its ability to provide a user interface that’s both visually pleasing and easy to use. After all, responsive design isn't only about resizing stuff to fit within different screen resolutions; it’s about presenting users with a the best possible experience, both in terms of layout and content. With that in mind, here are five key UX/UI factors that must be taken into consideration in order to maintain the integrity of the user interface and protect the quality of the user experience when employing a responsive design framework.

Catering to the needs of visitors

Users accessing your website from different devices have different needs. For example, if someone visits your website from their iPad during their daily commute on the train, they’re only going to dig so deep. For example, while they’ll likely be interested in perusing your latest blog post, they’re not going to be looking for the bios of your board of directors or your privacy policy. You must think about each type of user that will be visiting your site and let their needs and interests dictate the way your site molds and conforms itself to the size of their browser or device.

Intuitiveness

Being innovative is a good thing; being too innovative is not. If, for instance, you decide to change the color of hyperlinks to an indistinguishable shade of black or invent new navigational conventions that perplex your visitors, you’ll send them running in the opposite direction,and the design will be a total failure. The purpose of responsive web design is to empower users to visit your website and browse freely and according to the conventions that are most natural and familiar to them, irrespective of the device they are using.

Touchability

Who can refute the fact that touchscreens are growing more popular with every passing day? Almost all major smartphones and tablets use touchscreen interfaces, and even certain laptops and desktops are being offered with touch functionality. Touchscreens needs to be treated differently. For example, in the world of the touchscreen, there is no such thing as a hover state. If, for example, you have “previous” and “next” buttons that would normally appear only when a mouse rolls over them, those elements would be unavailable to your touchscreen users. For finger-friendly navigation, all elements must be big, bold and obvious. Buttons that require users to mouse over them to get a sense of action must be replaced with style enhancements that draw attention to their “pressability.” It’s also a good idea when catering to touchscreen users to keep the navigation or sub-navigation menu to the right. Why? Because the majority of your users will be right-handed, so the menus will be more conveniently accessible if they’re on the right rather than on the top or left.

Images

While layouts, structural elements and text can be made flexible, images require special attention. Improper alignment of images can ruin even the greatest of designs. Images need to be automatically adjusted to ensure that the website looks awesome in either portrait or landscape mode (remember: most portable devices nowadays can switch instantaneously between views, depending on the user's whims and wishes). Also, when resizing images on the basis of the screen resolution of the device, care needs to be taken so that the images do not lose their quality. If a given image contains the logo or the name of the website, it needs to be given prominence, whereas footer images can take a back seat. The best is to load the images in their original size, unless the viewing area becomes too narrow for the purpose. When that happens, it means the user is on a mobile device, and the image needs to be narrowed in accordance with the screen width. This is the very essence of how smart responsive web design works.

What to show (and what to hide)

With responsive design, we have the ability to rearrange web elements and make every thing fit on the screen, no matter how small it is. However, making every single aspect of a normal web page available to mobile users is not only unnecessary but it can render your site practically unusable on smaller screens. For mobile devices, navigation, content and functionality must be pared down significantly to focus on those features that are most useful to users while on the go. For example, while mobile users frequently comparison shop on their phones, they might not be as likely to actually go through the entire purchase process on their handheld device. Therefore, while product information and pricing is key, e-commerce options should be extremely streamlined.

A Showcase of Responsive Design

To demonstrate just how effective responsive can be, let’s take a look at a few examples of companies that have embraced this new approach in building their sites. In each example, the full version of the site is show first, followed by a version as it appears on a mobile device.

Hicksdesign

Art Equals Work

City Crawlers: Berlin

8Faces

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