Citizen Marketer 2.1

Aaron Strout

Think(ing) Like Zuck: 5 Facebook Marketing Tips

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Originally posted on WCG’s blog on 1/15/2013.

When I agreed to review Ekaterina Walter’s new book, Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg, I immediately tried to think of a way to make the book review special. After all, Ekaterina is not only a friend (and client) but more importantly, she’s a very smart woman who has achieved quite a bit at a young age. In addition to being a regular contributor to Mashable, Fast Company, and Huffington Post, she has also been featured in Forbes. If that wasn’t enough, she also sits on the Board of Directors for the prestigious Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA).
The problem is that unless one regularly writes book reviews, they can be a little boring and probably not as informative as one would like. And while I’ve done a few in my day including Josh Bernoff’s book Empowered for AdAge, Clay Shirky’s, Cognitive Surplus and most recently, Chade-Meng Tan of Google’s, Search Inside Yourself, I still don’t have the swing of it. Fortunately for me (and you) Ekaterina not only learned some important business lessons from Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerburg over the last several years, she also knows how to share a few herself.
To that end, before get into a quick synopsis of Ekaterina’s book I am going to give you five of her best Facebook marketing tips. Note that these aren’t just tips that she picked up while managing her own personal page. In fact, these are tips that she’s learned from helping to manage Intel’s Facebook page which happens to have north of 16 million fans as of this writing. Here goes:
  1. Humanize your voice.
    Though you need to be mindful of the consistency of your brand voice, it doesn’t mean that it has to sound “corporate”. This is the community of people, not a platform for broadcasting the PR messages, so address your fans as they were your friends. Remember, the biggest ROI of Facebook is in humanizing your brand. So humanize your voice as well.
  2. Adjust your content strategy as you go.
    Besides being a part of the community and hoping to get discounts on your products, information is one of the most important reasons why your customers become your fans on Facebook. So add stickiness to your page through great content. Use 80/20 rule: 80% of status updates should provide value to the fan and 20% can be around your products or services.
  3. Keep your status updates short.
    Even though Facebook increased the maximum number of characters for the original post from 420 to 63,206, you shouldn’t by any means try to use all of them. A study by Buddy Media showed that posts 80 characters or less in length receive 27% higher engagement rates. Besides, if you ever want to use Sponsored Story products, only the first 90 characters of your status update will be visible in the ad.
  4. Post frequency and timing.
    Every brand is different, but normally posting once a day 5-7 times a week works rather well. By posting too much you risk alienating your fans, but not posting enough, you lose your reach. The study by comScore and Facebook found that each incremental day of publishing increases the reach among fans by approximately 2.5%. So my recommendation is to post 7 days a week.
  5. Moderation guidelines.
    Ensure that your Facebook community has clear House Rules or moderation guidelines. You should specify how you will manage your community, what to expect and which posts you will absolutely not tolerate (abusive, insulting, illegal, etc). Always be prepared in case you’ll have to refer your rowdy fans back to your guidelines. Also, specify what your response timing is, so your customers are not upset if you not able to address inquiries immediately.

Now that we have Ekaterina’s five tips, let’s move onto a quick synopsis of the book.

What I like about the book is that Ekaterina starts off with a few examples of how Facebook is changing our society by connecting us in ways like never before. She follows that up with a few pages of mind blowing statistics (hint: Facebook would be the third largest country on earth). But that’s just the appetizer. It’s the main course — her five secrets — that really start the creative juices flowing.

With too many authors, there is a tendency to get wrapped around the axle with too much detail. Not in Ekaterina’s case. In fact, arguably the best thing about “Think Like Zuck” is the simplicity of the construct she uses to convey the CEO savant’s five life lessons: the 5 Ps.

The 5 Ps described in the book are:

  • Passion — Keep your energy and commitment fully charged at all times by pursuing something you believe in.
  • Purpose — Don’t just create a great product, drive a meaningful movement.
  • People — Build powerful teams that can execute your vision.
  • Product — Create a product that is innovative, that breaks all the rules, that changes everything.
  • Partnerships — Build powerful partnerships with people who fuel imagination and energize execution.

In addition to her five secrets (the 5 Ps), the other thing that caught my eye were the use of pithy but powerful quotes throughout the book. I’m not sure if this was intentional but these quotes (a few of my favorites are cited below) are similar to the “keep your status updates short” mantra in the five tips above:

  • Transparency and empowerment breed dedication, loyalty and trust. Trust is the unleashed imagination and unlimited innovation (p. 101)
  • A company’s success is serious business. But introducing a little fun into the workplace makes for a happy and highly motivated employee base (p. 110)
  • Make innovation personal! Involve your employees and give them freedom to create (p. 151)

The thing that I appreciated the most about the book? It was only 184 pages (minus the notes/appendix). To be honest, that’s about all the attention span anyone has these days for a business book. And considering the fact that Ekaterina was able to sum up the five things that make Mark Zuckerberg a great (even if improbable) leader in such an efficient fashion, I can feel good telling you that you should buy a copy, even if you aren’t destined to be the next CEO of the largest and most successful social network in the world.

Getting Started with Twitter: A Smart Newbie’s Perspective

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As you know, I’m a big fan of serendipity. This morning, it struck again as I invited folks in the great city of Austin, TX to join me for coffee at one of my favorite spots, the Hideout. I had low expectations given the fact that I gave people less than 18 hours notice AND the fact that it was two days before Christmas. While we didn’t get quantity, I got quality in spades with my friend, Michael Pearson and new friend, David Patton.


Why I mentioned “serendipity” is that David happens to be quite an interesting fellow. What intrigued me the most was the fact that he had just started on his Twitter adventure about six weeks ago so this was my opportunity to relive those early moments of “holy shit, this thing is a game changer” of Twitter. Since I didn’t have an audio recorder, I went the old fashioned route and sent David six questions via e-mail to answer. Being a good doobie, he turned them around within a few hours.

For anyone that’s new to Twitter, I REALLY like the way David is approaching the space. If I were to have a do over, I’d likely take an approach to Twitter that’s similar to his.

1) Talk a little bit about your role at Hush and the jobs/paths that led you up to your current position.
My association with Hush began in late ’90s as an initial investor, and subsequently, after helping secure several rounds of funding, as a director.

Starting and growing a real estate development company in Austin during the malaise of the savings and loan crisis, and a securities/investment firm in the latter part of the decade, provided much of the experience necessary to help guide Hush through the dot com meltdown.

More importantly, very early on we decided it was important to gain credibility with encryption experts, by publishing our source code, and with our customers, by offering swift, honest and detailed
customer service, often provided by our CTO, Brian Smith. This was completely uncharacteristic of the industry at the time, and it built a high level of trust between the company, our industry peers and our subscribers. And this trust is the foundation of our business, because without it the technology means nothing.

2) When did you get started on Twitter? What was the impetus for joining?
Uncharacteristically, the early phase passed passed me by. But the Twitterstorms which erupted during the Hudson River plane crash, and after the Iranian election voter uprising, got me to take notice that something had changed in the way we communicate as a society. News procurement and provision would never be the same.

3) What has been your greatest “aha” moment on Twitter?
There were two. The first was replacing decade old website habits with my real-time Twitter timeline. It didn’t take long to realize Google is a horrible search engine for up to the minute news. And
even once cutting edge sites, updated daily, began to appear stale. If it’s happening now, it’s streaming on Twitter.

The second was the realization that the Cluetrain had picked up steam and was making speed right down Madison Avenue. This was a game changer. Who buys anything anymore without reading customer reviews? Who went to see Bruno? James Cameron should pay a portion of Avatar’s box office receipts to Robert Scoble and [Mike] Arrington.


4) What do you find most annoying about Twitter?

Not much. It’s all pretty fascinating to me. Democracy can be messy. Democratization of industries can be downright ugly, and that’s what we’re seeing. But like the dust, sweat and noise of travel, it’s all part of reaching a better place!

5) Talk a little bit about your follow strategy.
This can be tricky.  To get right to the crux of any matter you have to go where the action is, so I right off the bat I followed almost all of the employees at Twitter, listened to the buzz, followed who they followed and who followed them, and gradually got a better feel for the etiquette and protocols of the Titterverse. Scoble followed me then you followed me, so I said, wow, anyone can engage anyone else here, and that was key. I made it a point to follow, and to be followed by, anyone who genuinely wanted to engage in a conversation that was meaningful to both of us.

6) Words of wisdom (this is the freeform section)

  • Listen. It takes a lot of patience, but you can learn so much more by paying attention to what’s going on around you than by interrupting a conversation.
  • Give. Link people who may gain something by knowing each other, without expecting anything in return. It will come back around (The twizzang effect!).
  • Say “Yes” to hyper-caffeinated, outgoing marketing types who randomly arrange early morning coffee tweetups 😉

What about you? Do you remember your first few weeks on Twitter? Please feel free to share in the comments section below.

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