Mike Flacy

Part of my job is to manage a handful of company brand pages, some more successful than others due to the demographic of the readership.  As I work with Facebook brand pages all day, it has become very obvious to me that the majority of brand / fan pages are clueless when it comes to attracting more fans effectively and efficiently.  Here are 5 reasons why those pages aren’t as successful as they could be.

Are you familiar with Ping.fm?  It’s a service that allows you to update all your social networks with one click of a mouse.  I thought this was a brilliant idea when I signed up a year ago, but it’s becoming more evident each day that my “lifestream” is molded differently for every social network I belong to.  Occasionally there’s a smidgen of overlap, but I’m typically writing to very different audiences.

It’s been about a week since I arrived in Los Angeles and I’m slowly starting to become acclimated to my new, frantic environment.  There’s a strange element of peaceful bliss about getting lost in the chaos of this city.  I’m getting a better idea of the city layout and have starting ditching the GPS just to see if I can find my way around the city.

All the grocery stores are completely different on this side of the country.  I’ve switched from the Publix, Bi-Lo, Ingles and Food Lions of the east coast to the Ralph’s, Vons, Trader Joes and Bristol Farms of the west coast.  The only constant was Whole Foods, but I’d have to sell a kidney to shop there on a regular basis.  Ralphs is the most similar to the east coast stores and there is a great one about a half mile away.  Definitely caters to the UCLA crowd.

I’ve taken some pictures that need to get up on Facebook and Flickr soon.  I’ll try to upload those this week.  I haven’t been keeping up with TV and iPhone apps lately, but I have really enjoyed the new Sunny in Philly

season.  It’s pretty incredible when a show can consistently stay hilarious season after season.  I’m also digging the new version of the Facebook app for the iPhone.  I can finally post to walls and return messages without logging into my computer.  Yay!

Digsby just keeps better and better.  They recently added LinkedIn support to the social networks.  I’m not interested in status updates so much, but it’s interesting to see the updates when people change their job.  Plus I never have to type in my log-in info anymore.

I don’t typically read Mark Cuban’s blog, but he made a great common sense post about building wealth this weekend.  There are too many people living beyond their financial means in this country.  I’d love to eat at Whole Foods and drink Starbucks everyday, but I don’t based on the same principles that he discussed.

I saw a man pushing a baby stroller with a toddler down the road today with his left hand and carrying a running weed trimmer in his right hand. He was either nuts or some sort of Nanny / Landscaper hybrid. Crazy or not, I drove away blissfully indifferent of the Cabbage Patch Kidnapper.

I tend to embrace my apathy. It’s especially fun to invoke during conversations. I’ve noticed that people automatically assume that you are of a differing opinion when clamming up; political and religious conversations in particular. For instance some liberal co-workers at my previous job thought I was a staunch conservative; all from adopting an apathetic stance. Truthfully I’m probably somewhere in the middle, but I don’t see the point in talking about something that I’d have to pretend I had the ability to change.

That’s the real beauty of apathy.  I don’t have to lie to myself about how much I should care about matters of supposed importance.  I get to focus on stuff that’s important to my little egocentric mind instead; work and play perhaps.  Everything else gets deleted from my brain after conversations end.  But on to more social topics…

I added a LinkedIn profile recently for networking purposes.  Seeing how my previous jobs weren’t exactly tech-related, I couldn’t beef up my contact list.  I strapped on my creativity hat and sent a mass-mailing to VGT contacts about adding me.  It will help me keep track of their job-hopping movements anyway.  I got about 60% to add me.  Not too shabby!

I also got in on the Ping.fm beta finally.  For those that don’t know, Ping.fm allows you to send the same status up to mutliple accounts.  For instance, I have it setup to send my status update to Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn.  It works with tons of other services as well (FriendFeed, Xanga, Livejournal, Blogger, WordPress, Pownce, etc…).  I have a beta code if anyone wants to sign up.

I’ve may have fallen into a Mobius Strip of writing endlessly until it’s time to sleep again.  I’m content to repeat that cycle over and over while my bank account gleefully greets the array of dead presidents being added every day.  The lucrative lifestyle makes me want to move again, perhaps up north for a few months.

I’ve been receiving an inordinate amount of Facebook friend requests lately; many from complete strangers.  No matter how many times I passively hit Ignore, they keep firing pleas at me.  Facebook desperately needs to add more options for my possible response.  Speaking of Facebook, the new look absolutely stinks.  It’s slow to load and I have to browse those stupid tabs to read someone’s page.

I’ve been playing around with the Flip Mino for a week now.  The video and sound quality is really excellent for the size of the camera.  It’s about the height of my iPhone, but skinnier in width.  I wish I had the camera when my sister and I filmed our Rock Band session a couple weeks ago.  Unfortunately Mikey and Gerbil broke up after our three day World Tour in Rome, London and Paris.

I was chatting with a friend about the upcoming 3G iPhone and we got stuck on the topic of GPS for a while. Obviously GPS isn’t a new idea. Plenty of people are perfectly happy with their in-car GPS systems or even the current capabilities of their GPS enabled phones. There’s no real added value for current GPS owners to switch over to the iPhone specifically based on the hardware.

Apple’s strategic advantage will be in the applications that are created with live tracking GPS in mind. Apple already demoed Loopt.com; an app that tells you your friend’s exact location, recent pictures, little messages and alerts you when they are nearby.

The possibilities are so ridiculously intriguing. For instance, imagine twittering, blogging, or updating your Facebook / Myspace status with not only a message, but also your current location automatically.

Locating nearby restaurants is nothing new for GPS, but imagine a one click Yelp.com application that automatically recommends the top 3 nearby Italian restaurants based on user reviews and according to your GPS location.

Imagine a music application that offers a list of upcoming, nearby concerts based on the type of music you keep on your iPhone (or your Pandora.com likes / dislikes) and your current GPS location.

Imagine being in an unfamiliar city and desperately needing to find a public restroom. One button click on the iPhone, your GPS location could be sent to Mizpee.com and a list of the closest toilets (along with reviews if you are a clean freak) would pop up along with directions to each.

Imagine not only all of your pictures being geo-tagged with locations due to GPS, but also tossed into a map-like trip diary documenting vacations as you travel or even the mundane details of your life; all via a one click social networking app on the iPhone.

Imagine sitting at work and hitting a one click Craigslist search that allows you to find nearby apartments (obviously to save on $4 a gallon gas) based on your current GPS location.

The point I’m trying to make is that the iPhone is going to make this type of techy GPS stuff incredibly easy to do. Blackberry already has plenty of GPS apps, but they aren’t for the casual phone user; they are mostly for the tech-heads. Ideally, iPhone users will just load up the App store with one click, download & install a GPS application within a few seconds and away they go. The streamlined process will ultimately increase the number of users and bring these sort of live tracking applications into the mainstream very quickly.

Digsby added Facebook Chat as a supported client last week, frankly shocking considering Facebook Chat only went live for the entire Facebook community a week previous. I’ve been evaluating the service for a week and have grown to prefer it over the Facebook in-browser chat screen. Using the Digsby interface is easier on the eyes and messages pop up instantly. I often miss messages from the in-browser screen due to lack of attention. It also seems to update friend status faster than the Facebook Chat window in addition to providing notification windows.

Digsby’s blog indicates they will eventually add the ability to move FB Chat users into groups as well as syncing IM status to FB status. Very cool moves for the IM / Social Network power users. Digsby just keeps getting better.

While I have always found American politics to be incredibly tiresome and out of touch with my interests, the internet’s collective latching onto Barack Obama’s campaign fascinates me from a social networking standpoint. It’s blatantly apparent on community-based news sites such as Digg, carries over financially to benevolent sites like DonorsChoose and grows exponentially faster on social networks like Facebook. Why have the majority of internet-savvy users latched onto the young senator from Illinois? The most obvious clue is the difference in technological understanding in the Obama / Clinton camps, most well defined by their web presence.

Social Networking Integration:

While Cinton’s campaign finally emerged from their social networking slumber to add links to official Myspace, Facebook, & Twitter groups this year, Obama has had 16 web relevant social links on his page including links to Digg, LinkedIn, and Eventful. He also has the clear edge when it comes to number of supporters within social networks. 600,000 more on Facebook, 150,000 more on Myspace, 35,000 more subscribers on Youtube, 22,000 more followers on Twitter, etc…

Additionally, Obama’s site launched a built-in social network to join people on a local level. It essentially organizes the most passionate Obama supporters to handle volunteer projects like phone banks, rallies, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Clinton added a similar system on her site at a later date, but it feels isolated in terms of communication and building relationships on a social level. The design of Obama’s network encourages online communication on an internal basis as well as self-designed organization of events with newfound, politically like-minded friends.

Neither candidate uses their site blog to personally write about each day’s events, but rather the campaign staffers handle it. Obama’s blog is more rapidly updated by comparison and offers more content on a daily basis. It also has an edge on number of commentors. There are slight differences to their social sharing choices of blog posts as well. Both sites include sharing links to Digg and del.icio.us, but Obama’s blog includes sharing links to Stumbleupon, Facebook & Newsvine. Clinton’s blog only extra link is to Technorati search which is a really strange choice and doesn’t seem to be used by her comment contributors.

Candidate Branding:

Obama’s web site is very much designed to brand his candidacy. Note the soft white light emanating from the background to reflect a feeling of hope in coordination with his message. The “Gotham” typeface as the graphical font default is clean, understated and well defined. The font also matches every single piece of Obama campaign swag that’s distributed; pretty damn impressive from a large-scale standpoint. Highlighted graphical links light up as if they were alive and full of energy. The color scheme, while predominantly blue, has light undertones of white & red to subtly create a feeling of patriotism.

Strangely Clinton’s site is oddly similar in format to McCain’s web presence, both of which look like free web templates. The sites are static, utilitarian and lack any uniform artistic design elements. Clinton’s web admins keep adding features similar to Obama’s site, but they don’t cohesively contribute to any type of branding for Senator Clinton. What’s left is a stale website that distracts or confuses the viewer with a link-crammed home page rather then engaging them with proper design.

I find Obama’s branding to be similar to companies like Apple and Target who entered the market as underdogs. These companies are very accessible to the American public, but with tremendous elements of heavy design involved. They target consumers by creating a feeling of stylish comfort with their products and market their design choices as an important purchasing decision. Similarly, Obama’s web presence, among other things, shaped a politician with less political experience than his rivals into a well designed brand, more effectively selling the possibility of change than Senator Clinton.

Regardless of my opinion on Obama’s politics, there is something comforting in the fact that he, or at least the people within his campaign, understands the Web 2.0 generation. It’s reflected in his website, his position on net neutrality as well as his relationship to young voters. In turn, that creates hope that he will surround himself with tech-savvy opinions on policy, assuming he wins the nomination and becomes President. That’s the most identifiable reason that social networking internet users seem to be attracted to his candidacy.