Earlier this week, Facebook threw a curveball to companies using fan pages to promote their business. Up until now, an integral part of attracting fans and encouraging participation, on a large number of fan pages, has been creating fun contests and promotions for fans to participate in. Facebook has now made this a nearly impossible task.

According to new guidelines posted on November 4^th, the following are the basic dos and don’ts of Facebook contests:

• You cannot:  Condition entry in the promotion upon a user providing content on Facebook, such as making a post on a profile or Page, status comment or photo upload.
• You can:  Use a third party application to condition entry to the promotion upon a user providing content. For example, you may administer a photo contest whereby a user uploads a photo through a third-party application to enter the contest.
• You cannot:  Administer a promotion that users automatically enter by becoming a fan of your Page.
• You can:  Only allow fans of your Page to access the tab that contains the third-party application for the promotion.
• You cannot:  Notify winners through Facebook, such as through Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles or Pages.
• You can:  Collect an address or email through the third-party application for the promotion in order to contact the winner by email or standard mail.
• You cannot: Instruct people (in the rules or elsewhere) to sign up for a Facebook account before they enter the promotion.
• You can:  Instruct users to visit the third-party application to enter the promotion  Since users must have a Facebook account in order to access an application on the Facebook Platform, if you give this instruction, they will be prompted to sign up for a Facebook account if they do not already have one.

As you can see, these new regulations significantly hinder companies, especially small businesses, from taking full advantage of the Facebook platform. We are currently trying to get to the root of these changes and figure out Facebook’s motivation behind them. In the mean-time, please leave your thoughts and comments about the changes and what it could mean for businesses.

-Rusty
@RussWalters

News Flash: Your employees are using social media during work hours.

Today, more than 300 million people are using Facebook, and believe us, much of their online activity happens while they’re sitting at work.  Even if they wait til they get home to log on, they’re probably still complaining talking about their lives at the office.

With that being said, MGH believes its key for any organization to clearly communicate its opinions on social web usage to all of its employees. Instituting a social media policy in your workplace will not only protect your brand, but it will also allow you to leverage your employees as true extensions of your brand.

Below are some basic things to consider when drafting a social media policy for your workplace:

1)      Remind employees to fine tune their public vs. private lives online. Encourage them to be proactive in their social networking privacy settings, and to be aware of what info is searchable by the public. We here at MGH like to say “Keep your Facebook private, but let your tweets be seen by the world.”

2)      Don’t try to control every message that is posted by your employees. This will breed a negative relationship between your senior administration and your ground level folks.

You should, however, remind them of the importance of company confidentiality and maintaining a competitive advantage.  You want them to be able to talk freely and openly about your company, but with the goal in mind of furthering your business - not ruffling feathers.

Of course people are going to complain about their days at the office. It’s inevitable. But make sure that they’re doing it with a level of respect.

3)      Encourage your employees to network. We here at MGH believe this is absolutely critical for the success of most businesses today. Your employees should serve as your natural ambassadors online. Their social networks present opportunities to procure new clients, develop vendor relationships, and to even learn from the competition.

At the end of the day, trust your employees’ judgment. You hired them for a reason; don’t be afraid to let them act as an ambassador for your company. If you can’t trust what they’re doing online, you should reconsider if you want them as a part of your organization.

Also, don’t forget to get feedback from your employees about your policies, and allow the policies to evolve over time. Chances are something new will pop up next week and force rules to be changed.

To get you started, you can also take a look at some of the policies other companies have put into place: IBM, Intel and Dell

As you may have seen, Nielsen recently released a survey surrounding Twitter’s latest user stats. Not surprisingly (to us at least), they cited a 1,382% visitor growth in the past year and touted the average user’s age to be between 35-49 years old. So what does this mean for you and your brand? It’s simple…

Just like our boy @garyvee said in this video, it’s become necessary for companies to constantly search what is being said about their brand on Twitter. He gave the example of a soup company searching the term “soup” to see the real-time conversations occurring, and we 100% agree that companies need to be regularly searching Twitter to keep abreast of current conversations.

By having full access to these conversations, companies can now watch and respond to comments that are being said about their brand. This is quite a shift in the normal brand-to-consumer paradigm, and Twitter is single-handedly leading the charge with this new way of looking at customer interaction.

Related Articles

• The Future of Twitter:  Social CRM
• Using Social Media as a Brand Management Tool

We recently wrote about the controversy surrounding online ratings site, Yelp. Well, San Francisco pizza shop, Pizzeria Delfina is taking their own approach to dealing with negative reviews from the site. The pizzeria has recently changed its employee’s uniforms to t-shirts featuring some of the most memorable one-star ratings from Yelp about the restaurant (”This place sucks!”, for example).

Self-deprecation always seems to make the bad things people are saying about you seem not as harsh. By choosing to face these negative reviews head first, Pizzeria Delfina is making a commitment to their customers and generating some positive buzz on the back-end.

Think about it, they wouldn’t wear a shirt that talks about how greasy and gross the pizza is if it really was greasy and gross, right? They are really making a stand to address their negative feedback on the most direct level possible - how’s that for honesty?

We at MGH WOM love this tactic, and the buzz that it has created has not only helped me decide what I am having for lunch today, but has also guaranteed one new customer next time I’m in SF.

By the way, Pizzeria Delfina does not receive many negative reviews, in fact they have a four-star rating consisting of over 600 customer reviews on Yelp.

A client passed this along to us, and it was too good not to share.  My question is: how many companies out there are abusing online reviews by encouraging employees to either post positive reviews or bash the competition?  I’d like to think that the number is slim, but who knows.

Every now and then a brand will come out with a “brilliant” ad that seems to ruffle a few more feathers than they bargained for. Without fail, the brand will release a socially responsible apology statement and position themselves back in good graces with the majority of their consumers.

Most recently, we can look at the Motrin “Mommy” ads and last weeks Pepsi Max’s “One Lonely Calorie” advertisements. It’s plain to see how both sets of ads were sure to strike a nerve with a particular group of consumers, and in today’s super connected world, there is no way to isolate who sees and who doesn’t see your ads.

Without question, we can all applaud these companies use of social media outlets to rapidly respond. Both companies saw the overflow of negative conversations happening on Twitter and YouTube. Both companies also rapidly responded and apologized for the insensitive nature of their ads.

To me, I think that companies are intelligent enough to realize which advertisements cause a commotion, but are relying more on the age-old saying that ‘no press is bad press’.

With the power of social media, and the millions of conversations always occurring, a off-color ad is sure to cause commotion and get people talking about the brand - cue thoughtful apology. The apology creates even more conversation about the brands, conversation, which largely includes “look how well the brand responded”.

I am not encouraging brands to produce offensive material just to garner attention, but I think its important to acknowledge how negative conversations provide great opportunity for brands to position themselves as “in touch with their consumers”