By Nicole Fletcher

In a mad dash to get ‘with the times’, people seem to be flocking to their designers and agencies in a desperate attempt to ‘get social’. Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare icons in addition to the newer QR Codes are popping up in print collateral everywhere…but are they working? Clearly there’s a line between brands who ‘get it’ and those who don’t, as if you just took a moment to think about marketing from the consumer side, you would clearly realize the short comings of the majority of this ‘new age’ marketing.

Clear calls to action are the name of the game. You want to give people as few ‘jobs’ as possible, eliminating as many obstacles between them and their transaction (whatever that may be) with your brand. That said, if you’re trying to drive traffic through your doors, you’re not going to say “Look for us San Diego” – you’re going to give your address to them. Eliminate the obstacles. Similarly, you wouldn’t say ‘Find us on the Internet’ – You’re going to provide your website address. Social should be no different. Don’t slap a Facebook icon on a flier and call it a day. Provide the url. Facebook search is an imperfect place and with duplicate page names, people, etc, you want to be as clear as possible. “But my url is full of numbers, letters and gibberish”, you say. Fair enough. Set your custom Facebook url (provided you have at least 25 likes) by visiting facebook.com/username. BEWARE: Once you set this puppy, consider it stone so be sure to spell everything correctly and avoid a rebrand in the near future.

What not to do:

As you see above, they tell me to go to Facebook. Ok. That’s vague. You don’t know my level of tech savoir faire- break it down.

What to do:

This one’s better. Foursquare is geo location based so you’re not going to provide a url necessarily but Facebook is clear and ready to go.

Moving onto QR Codes, if you have a QR Code, make sure you use it right. Since they’re newly popular, you might want to include the name of the app to download and a brief how to with respect to QR Code Scanning. Drive traffic to a mobile friendly site…NOT your full website..especially if it’s built in Flash (flash is NOT mobile friendly). That can be overwhelming and you’ll lose your prospect right then and there. Ideally you’ll send them to a mobile landing page with a simplified version of your website catered to the mobile market. For example, if you’re a fast food joint, I don’t want to see your full site. I might want to see a simplified menu, a location based restaurant finder, a coupon or a new commercial or funny video to name a few. Always keep your user in mind. Make the transaction as easy as possible.

In sum, think about your user. Think about what you want them to do – ultimately - and what channels you can use to get them where you want them to go and to do what you want them to do. Ease is the name of the game.

By Nicole Fletcher

You avid Facebookers may have noticed that you can no longer tag one of your friends..or anyone for that matter…when posting as your fan page. While many of you I’m sure hoped this was just a glitch…much like when Facebook killed the suggest your page to friends feature,..it’s not. Facebook has killed it.

Their reasoning is based upon the idea that if a popular page tags a person in a post, that person may get large volumes of unwanted friend requests.  Pages can of course still tag other pages, which is definitely a nice feature though it’s been acting weird for me in the past week or so, most likely due to the updates Facebook has been making.

In September of 2009, Facebook introduced the ability to tag friends, pages, events, places and even groups. Even more recently, they allowed for tagging within comments making the wide world of social, even more social. Finally, pages could even be tagged in pictures and now one of these gifts has been taken away. There is though one exception to this tagging change. If Page admins click on the “Share” link on their news feed or the stories that appear on their wall, they can select to publish it to their Page. Within this repost, the admin can tag his or her friends in that post. Impressed that was discovered aren’t you? You should be. While it’s a pretty cool loop hole my guess is that it’s probably a glitch and will not be available much longer.

In the mean time, sorry pages. You can’t tag your friends anymore. Facebook is constantly trying to bridge the experience between users and brands and these functionality changes will not stop here. Especially with the beta launch of Google+, I think we’ll see a few more tricks to say the least from Facebook.

The 27-year-old founder of Facebook and youngest billionaire in Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg sets a goal for self-improvement every year. Last year he committed to learn Mandarin Chinese. This year? He decided to only eat meat from an animal that he has killed himself.

This announcement, which he appropriately made on his Facebook page, led to mixed feelings from the community. Some were disgusted with he post that read, “I just killed a pig and a goat” while other were very supportive of his decision. Zuckerberg later responded to his 847 friend’s comments with this explanation:

“Every year I have a yearly personal challenge. It’s a good way to explore different things I wouldn’t normally do and challenge myself. Towards the end of last year I reflected a bunch of how thankful I was that we were building so many good things and things have gone well so far and I decided to make this year’s challenge around being more thankful for what I have. I struggled for a while about how to implement this, but eventually decided that forcing myself to get personally involved and thank the animals whose lives I take in order to eat them was the best day-to-day way to remind myself to be thankful. So every day when I can’t eat meat I am reminded of why not and how lucky I am, and when I do get the chance to eat meat it’s especially good. This challenge also has the benefit of making me generally healthier, and I’m also learning a lot about sustainable living.”

As reported by Fortune, many of Zuckerberg’s fans were impressed with this statement, one of them even saying “he found a way to feel really grateful for something as simple as his food again.” Not to mention, Zuckerberg has put himself on an organic, sustainable diet, free of hormones or antibiotics that can be found in meat from conventional farms, leading to a much healthier lifestyle.

What do you think about the Facebook founder’s decision to eat only animals that he himself has slaughtered? He certainly knows where his food comes from. Not everyone can say that…

As posted on Fittingintoyou.com

By Nicole Fletcher

The tech world is a-buzz today as Facebook creeps into the shadows with its tail between its legs. Reports indicate that Facebook paid Burson-Marsteller, a high end PR Firm to push Google bashing stories to the press. While the story did indeed get out…the jokes on Facebook..shock, gasp…as it wasn’t the story they were hoping to push.

Here’s a quote from Dan Lyons from a story he wrote in The Daily Beast:

“For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”

See the leaked emails here.

Bad Move Facebook, but as we all know, Black Hats Never Prosper. Facebook’s goal in this was to expose the idea that Google may not be following user privacy regulations when they ’scrape’ Facebook content. Talk about a backfire though as the spotlight is where? NOT on Google and wholly on the good ol’ Book of Faces.

I mean seriously? Where was Zuck when all this was going down? Hiring a PR firm to bash Google, even going so far as to assist in the writing of the stories is, in the words of TechCrunch, “not just offensive, but dishonest and cowardly. It’s also really, really dumb.” Seiously…what were you thinking Facebook?

Again according to TechCrunch, this idiotic stunt shows a number of things:

1. Facebook’s fear of the Google giant. Facebook DOMINATES and should not be intimidated by anything or anyone. They practically control the world and this backhanded slap shows THE Social Network’s first glimmer of weakness.

2. Talk about going for the Achilles. This poor move shows that Facebook is ready and willing to engage in ‘cowardly behavior in battle’. Trust in a company who’s willing to partake in these schemes may be an issue in the future.

3. Some of these Google jabs are probably valid, but what Facebook has done deems those null and void . From here on out, the spotlight will only be on Facebook, their black hat tattle on Google, and that they got caught.

That’s all for now folks and remember, White Hat Rules.