Social Networking Sites

Branding Facebook Pages

When you grow as fast as Facebook, you are constantly tweaking “things” to improve them. The same thing happened (and is still happening) with us at Outskirts Press. Not that I’m comparing our growth to Facebook’s (I wish!) – but we have had quite a few “versions” of our website since it launched in 2002, and to this day we are constantly improving it.

For Facebook, every change they make has the potential to upset 500 million people. That’s a lot of pressure. Generally, people don’t like “change” very much. Even if, in the long run, a change is for the better, people are just more comfortable with the familiar. When transitioning to a new Facebook Pages layout, the Facebook folks offered an opportunity for people to proactively opt-in to the new design before enforcing the transition. Frankly, I’m not even sure when that “deadline” is, but we actively opted-in to the new design as soon as we could, and then started tweaking our Facebook Page layout to take advantage of some of the changes.

Aesthetically, the most noticeable difference is that the Facebook Pages now look nearly identical to Facebook Profiles. Some comment filters have been added (profanity filters, for example), and new dimensions are set for logos and other branding opportunities. While these variables are not yet as robust as those offered by YouTube (more on that in the near future), the new Facebook page does provide some branding opportunities for the creatively-minded.

The first thing you should do to “brand” your company page on Facebook is shorten the URL for it by creating a custom url (for example, www.facebook.com/OutskirtsPress, instead of facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789)

When this functionality first launched in 2009, Facebook required companies to have at least 1000 fans in order to create a custom URL. But now it appears to be available for Pages with as little as 25 fans. If you have that many fans, you can set a custom URL in your Settings.

The next thing to do is customize the logo box along the left-hand side. The profile image dimensions used to be 200 x 600 and are now 185 x 540. Yes, that means there is a chance you will need to resize or recreate your “old” graphic to optimize it for the new layout once that change is enforced.

At Outskirts Press, we’re in the process of branding all our social networks (or at least the four main ones we use: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and our blog on WordPress). This includes uploading graphics, logos, and summary statements that look the same and communicate the same message across all channels. For Facebook, this meant uploading a new profile image to take advantage of the new size dimensions offered by Facebook. This new graphic matches the front page of our website as well as online and offline advertisements we run. We call it our “Write Anything, Publish Everything, Market Everywhere” creative, or “write.publish.market” for short, which is our new tagline we introduced with the lauch of our new logo and new Version 4 website in 2010.

Facebook allows you to select a square portion of the new profile picture to create your “Avatar” so consideration has to be made to “kill two birds with one stone” so to speak, since successful Avatar images often are not the same as successful branding images. That is why our profile image contains both our new name treatment logo at the top and our “older” circular logo at the bottom – the latter being an element I wouldn’t otherwise have included in the profile graphic; but it is the Avatar we have built our social presence around and I’m not inclined to change it (at least, not now).

If you look closely at that screen shot above you’ll notice the cover image for Fandemonium (our Facebook anthology), which just published today, and it seemed fitting that we should announce that publication to our Facebook fans first. It’s not even available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble yet, but only through our bookstore at Outskirts Press (at a 10% discount, by the way).

And you’ll also notice images of our book publishing package icons (the gems) along the top of our new Facebook Page (another branding opportunity available on Facebook through “manipulation” of the images functionality). And I’ll discuss those topics next time…

branding, self publishing, Social Networking Sites

Adding Facebook Plug-ins to your Author Website

Last time I suggested that having an author website, webpage, or blog was the single most important aspect of promoting a book after it is published. This was also the consensus of the “Promote Your Book” panel I was on during the recent Writer’s Digest conference in New York. This next suggestion is admittedly further along the “promotion tactic timeline” but is worth mentioning now for a number of reasons. For one, this is also a suggestion I made while at the conference, albeit to the attendees of the other panel I was on, involving social networking. And secondly, we just recently performed this enhancement to our site at Outskirts Press.

In fact, as you surf the Internet, you may notice this specific functionality cropping up more and more, on a wide variety of sites, both informational and commercial in nature. What functionality am I talking about? The Facebook “Like” button. By adding a Facebook “Like” button to your own web presence you give your visitors an opportunity to interact with your site in a “fun” easy way that they are already accustomed to. Additionally, their act of “liking” your site is reported on their Facebook account to their friends, which theoretically helps increase your exposure.

We recently added “Like” buttons on our site for all our products and services. We haven’t yet invited our Facebook community to visit our site and tell us which services or products they like, but that is a recommended course of action once you add the “Like” functionality. After all, the benefit of adding this functionality is so that people recognize that a large number of other people “like” what you have to offer. And, of course, when you first add the functionality, the number of “Likes” is zero. So you want to take steps to increase that number.

The good news is that Facebook makes adding this functionality very easy. They offer a variety of “plug-ins” that are easy to add to your site. Just go to developers.facebook.com and see if any of their plug-ins will help you. Of course, gettting a large and growing number of people to “like” what you offer is a different challenge entirely. If only Facebook offered a plug-in for that…

marketing, Social Networking Sites

Why is Facebook so Popular?

I’m becoming a believer in this “Facebook phenomenon.” Only recently has Outskirts Press actively engaged the “social community” in terms of Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest. Even though it sounds like I’m mindlessly jumping on the bandwagon when I say this, I’ll say it anyway: It has shown immediate dividends.

Sure, we’ve been “blogging” for a number of years; but to successfully engage the promise of “Web 2.0,” companies need to embrace the multiple platforms and entertwine them.

Yes, we as a company have a long way to go on all those platforms. It’s an on-going exercise that requires quite a lot of effort, actually. For example, thanks to our Kindle giveaway in December and our Facebook Anthology project in January, we are seeing large increases to our Facebook Community, and we will continue to offer our community more promotions and incentives to become involved. It is wonderful that these people are all supportive of each other and positive in general.

And perhaps that is one of the main reasons Facebook is so popular. People there are nice and respectful. Isn’t that a refreshing change of pace from other “locales” on the internet where anonymity allows people to be rude, spiteful, argumentative, and sometimes downright jerks? Amazingly even those who aren’t anonymous often choose to show their true colors daily, a la Russell Hantz on the TV show Survivor. Every comment to a Yahoo article ridicules something; many bloggers seem to believe the only opinion they’re allowed to have is a negative one; and forums are filled with such pervasive confrontation they’ve actually coined a term for it: flame war.

And yet on Facebook, people are supportive of one another, kind, giving of their time and knowledge, and respectful. This never became more obvious to me than it did a few days ago on my birthday (January 19th). Current friends, old high school and college friends, relatives, Outskirts associates, and Outskirts authors all took a moment to wish me “Happy Birthday” on Facebook. So did my wife, since I was on a business trip that day.

Why is Facebook popular? Because Facebook makes people feel good. It makes them feel liked, popular, and as if they are a part of something bigger than themselves.

This doesn’t seem to be a happy accident, either. Facebook appears to have been designed with that specific purpose. Unlike other “voting” mechanisms on other sites (“thumbs up vs thumbs down” on many sites or the 1 star thru 5 star rating on Amazon, for example), Facebook only has a “Like” option. It doesn’t give you the opportunity to dislike something or to be mean, even if that is your intent. The “meanest” thing you can do is NOT vote . And that’s probably not very satisfying for mean people. As a result, they don’t get involved. Facebook stays a happy place while the rest of the Internet continues to revel in its own misery. Win-win.

It just so happens I’ll be talking more about Facebook and other social networking opportunities for writers the day after tomorrow at the Writer’s Digest Conference in Manhattan. But I thought I’d give another sneak peek here first. And I’ll be discussing more about Facebook in upcoming posts, too.

branding, ceo, publicity, self publishing a book, Social Networking Sites

Cause marketing, philanthropy, and charitable donations from book royalties

In past postings I have discussed Outskirts Press’ donations to organizations like Children’s Hospital, Make a Wish Foundation, the Education & Literacy Foundation, and others. And in the last posting I discussed more specifically our specific donations to the Colorado Humanities, and the publication of their Anthology, the royalties from which go in support of Colorado Humanities and the Center for the Book.

And this brings us to another way in which Outskirts Press seeks opportunities to give back to the community. Outside of purely philanthropic pursuits, or cause marketing tactics, donating the royalties of a book can serve two purposes: good will and good marketing. In our case, we will donate the royalties of book sales that come from the sale of our first Facebook Anthology, which is a collection of short stories, poems, and excerpts from our many Facebook Fans. We have been collecting contributions and submissions to the anthology since the first of the year on our Facebook page.

Then, on January 1oth we invited all our Facebook fans and blog readers to vote on the title of the book. Then, on January 12th, we opened the voting to determine the Charity that would receive the royalties. I still don’t know who “won.” It was our hope that by giving writers the opportunity to get published for free AND give to a worthwhile cause at the same time, interest in our Facebook Anthology would be high. That philosophy turned out to be correct. Our Facebook fan base shot past 1,000 fans almost literally overnight and continues to build.

Good deeds can become good marketing, or even, in this case, good marketing can turn into good deeds. We thank all our Facebook fans for their support. And I’m sure the “winning” charity will thank them as well.

blogging, branding, marketing, self publishing, Social Networking Sites

Outskirts Press has its sights set on social network publishing this January as we launch our first ever “Facebook Anthology” set for publication this quarter. This is an opportunity for our Facebook Fans to submit material for free publication, just for being an Outskirts Press Facebook Fan. In my last posting I referred to this as an “experiment” and it is one. In fact, any social networking initiative or engagement is something of an experiment because it evolves in real time, with real participation by real people. It’s impossible to duplicate that in advance within a “testing environment.”

Engaging in social networking sites was one of my New Year’s Resolutions last year and it continues to be equally important this year.

So we are launching our Facebook Anthology experiment this month and we don’t know how successful it will be, or how engaged we can get our Facebook Fans to be. But it looks promising so far. Since announcing the Anthology on January 1, our Facebook Fan base has increased by 10%. Now it remains to be seen how many fans actually submit material for the anthology. Of course, it doesn’t help that Facebook makes the submission process somewhat convoluted. You see, in an effort to engage the “social” part of this anthology, we wanted to encourage our fans to submit their material directly through Facebook (as opposed to submitting it to us via email, for example). But, as a result, submissions are victimized by Facebook’s character limitations:

A “Wall Posting” has a character limitation of 1,000 while a “Status Posting” has a character limitation of 420. Since our fans are only allowed to post “Status Updates” on our wall, that means their submission is limited to 420 characters — not very many at all.

So the solution to this was to encourage them to Post a “Status Update” announcing their submission, and then Comment on their own Status Update to submit their actual creative content. You see, for some reason, Facebook allows 8,000 characters in the comments section, even though the status posts are limited to 420. Why? That’s a question for Mark Zuckerberg. While this is relatively easy to do in practice, it sounds overly complicated when just reading about it on a blog posting. It’s my hope we can encourage our fans to participate by stressing the “free publication” part and the fun social aspects of this anthology. It’s a fun, free, fast way to get published by Outskirts Press — and perhaps will allow new authors the chance to “dip their toe” into the self-publishing pool to see how it feels.

It is also my hope that many of our Facebook fans will appreciate the opportunity to donate to a worthwhile charity. You see, the royalties of this Facebook Anthology are going toward a charity that our Facebook fans themselves will vote on. And more on that next time….