“I’m taking a break from Facebook. I just can’t handle the negativity.” I’ve seen more posts like that in the past two weeks than in the last year, and it’s easy to see why. Many of the political posts are coming from a different direction than they were until the election. It’s the nature of things. […]
It’s not the label you wear that matters. It’s how you act.
By Carl Carter, APR When I was just starting my career, I knew a guy who was such a devout Christian he would read his Bible and “share his faith” regularly on company time. After several warnings, he got fired, and he declared himself a martyr who was “fired for being a Christian.” He wasn’t. […]
Are you insulting people who can help you succeed?
This definition of public relations is written on the back of my business card: “Public relations is the management function that identifies, establishes and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and the publics on whom its success or failure depends.” Most of us would rather have a larger base of customers than […]
Loving Facebook Live and Periscope? Why free, easy features may be poison for your brand
By Carl Carter, APR, AMM This summer’s shiny new toy seems to be streaming video. Twitter’s Periscope and Facebook’s Live video have made it easy for anybody to broadcast whatever they’re doing live – and to get it in social media feeds where a lot of people will see it. Almost overnight, we all started […]
Why you should keep your private disputes off Facebook
Sometimes, bad things happen between people. It doesn’t matter whether it happened in a bedroom or a boardroom. Things escalate, and before you know it, the whole matter spills out onto Facebook. This kind of thing rarely happened before the internet took over, because there just wasn’t a tempting, free way to broadcast to the […]
After years of self-appointed experts, it comes to this. (Name that Social Media guru.)
Upshot of Facebook changes: Create more content
Ever since Facebook rolled out its last set of tweaks in early December, folks have been trying to figure out how those changes affect marketing strategies. This has led to a lot of hand-wringing about how Facebook is trying to force marketers to start spending money on paid ads. Get over it. You had a […]
You may be endorsing products on Facebook you don’t like or never heard of.
This is how your “liked” pages are now being used as Facebook ads. I’ve called these the attention of the people being used in the ad, and neither “liked” the page in question at all. (Whether they’d clicked on it is another matter.) We’ve all “liked” pages as favors to friends, or whatever, but did […]
Surveys show skepticism, declining use of Facebook
An Ipsos poll last released this week shows that people are spending less time on Facebook. And another poll, conducted just before the recent Facebook IPO, found that 46% regard it as a “fad” that will fade in time. Of the 1,032 Americans surveyed in a poll for Thomson Reuters May 31-June 4, 2012, […]
Flooding Facebook with trivia? Your audience is probably shrinking
I’ve been saying for years that the rules of Social Media are pretty much the same as those in the rest of life: If you talk nonstop about yourself, or about stuff that doesn’t interest people, they quit listening. We’ve been seeing this with brand pages on Facebook (aka “fan pages”) for a while now. […]