At one minute past midnight tonight EDT, brands (and individual users) can choose Facebook username URLs on a first-come, first-serve basis. Rather than a randomly assigned number, users can select vanity URLs. For example:

www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789
vs
www.facebook.com/name

In short, if you already have a fan page, have over 1000 followers by May 31, and you have a relatively unique brand name, this is not “break your Friday night plans” type of news – but there are actions you can take today.

Why is this relevant?

Part of Facebook’s success is based on authenticity and a perceived trusted environment. This is largely shaped by the fact that most people use their real names and pictures. This paradigm is broken when people refer to URLs that look like code, rather than real names.

Just like brands commonly publicize their web page URL in marketing, a brand may choose to promote their Facebook fan page. Because a custom URL is easier to remember than random numbers, the effectiveness of a promotion can be increased.

Perhaps more interestingly, Facebook user names will be cataloged by search engines, so fan pages will be automatically promoted when a user performs a search. For instance, when doing a search on Google for a brand name, a Facebook fan page will be prominently features in the results, assuming there is one.

What should you do?

Tonight there will be a ‘land grab’ of sorts while people register usernames (most will be individual users claiming their personal names). This will not, however, be the domain name issue of a decade ago.

A few notes that help mitigate the urgency:

• The Facebook fan page must meet two requirements: it must be live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have a minimum 1,000 fans as of May 31, 2009.
• Generic usernames are not being offered at this time… ie you can not register “facebook.com/sneakers”
• You can only register one user name per Facebook page
• Usernames are not transferable

Today you should go to this Facebook page to prevent others from registering your trademarked name. If you meet the criteria, you should log in as an administrator after 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13 to create your user name.

If you do not meet the criteria, consumer oriented brands should be actively building fan pages! Because of the search engine twist, this is yet another way to build engagement with your brand.

Where can you find more information?

• Facebook Blog about Usernames
• Facebook FAQ for administrators
• cnet User Guide

“Working a Room” Through Social Media

Social Media personality, Gary Vaynerchuk, created an excellent video about “giving a presentation versus working a room”.

My summary of the premise:
Old school brands that only use display ads are limiting themselves. Traditional advertising allows only one direction – from the advertiser to the consumer. It’s analogous to giving a presentation and then not allowing for questions, getting in your car and leaving. There is no opportunity for feedback. There is little recognition if your audience understood what you were talking about, and no ability to learn from the audience to further craft your message for the future.

Social media, however, encourages interaction. By leveraging multiple tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many more, you can converse with your audience. It’s analogous to working a room. You can have intimate conversations with constituents, learn from them, and address questions. The point is to be available and engage.

Lastly, social media is inexpensive. Many of these tools are free, and it only requires passionate people to interact with the constituents.

But Don’t Act too Quickly!
While Gary discussed the concept of working a room, it is critical to not act too quickly. New messages often need to be absorbed. People may be confused at first, and that may be OK.

For instance: The first time I saw the Budweiser frogs commercial, I laughed, but was confused. Why are frogs in a swamp, hardly an appetizing thought, saying “bud” “weis” “er”? If I had access to social media in 1995, I may have commented about their poor choice of spokesmen. Many others may have commented as well – and if Budweiser reacted, they would have not created one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.

How do brands achieve success?

• Join the communities and understand how they work. Each one is unique and each has its own utility.
• Develop a strategy on how to leverage the online world and how you will address your constituents
• Integrate your offline marketing with online efforts and track results
• Strive to achieve balance between experimenting and staying the course
• Lastly, start NOW. Your competitors are.

“The worst financial crisis since the great depression” seems to be the headlines these days. What should financial services companies do? Communicate, communicate, communicate!

Many of the top financial services sites still have no mention, nor even a link, to their thoughts about the crisis. The media is consistently peppering the public about the state of the economy, yet clients are finding that the place that they entrust their money to, is silent!

Hey financial services companies: Clients and investors want to know what YOU think! They want to understand your company’s views of the markets, your investments, and what you think is going to happen. Even if there is no news, or bad news, keep people informed.
Don’t wait for the whitepaper to come out, or the official press release. Start the conversation early. Here are some ways this can be accomplished:

• Place some content on your home page: optionsXpress has a short paragraph with the title “A Safe Haven” to help bring confidence as clients log in
• Provide a link that builds confidence: Wells Fargo has a link to a CEO letter saying that they are “staying the course”.
• Start utilizing your corporate blog:
  • Allow an output for your experts to talk about the market – it allows clients to perceive they have access to the experts
  • Highlight discussions your executives are having with policy makers – it shows that you are in control and helping guide the US and the world
• Start monitoring twitter: it’s a great way to see how a segment of the market is talking about your brand

Overall, show empathy. People are nervous, frustrated, and annoyed. Being quiet only increases frustration. Start utilizing the tools that you have already invested in, and start communicating with your constituents.

What is your financial services company doing? What should they do to help you feel more informed, or confident?

Lehman Brothers filing for chapter 11. Merrill Lynch sold. AIG receives a lifeline from the Fed. Washington Mutual having issues. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under government control. Bear Sterns sold.

In any radically changing market, opportunities can be found. While bad credit policies and poor oversight are the common blames for the current financial crisis, the Internet will help foster and grow innovation.

Major financial institutions, which previously only focused on the end retail customer, are now broadening their online profile to include the entire buy-side and sell-side supply chains. Spending on increasing communication, building relationships, and creating conviction are common themes.

Conviction is the confidence necessary to convert a prospective client into an actual client, and the critical assurance to keep clients from defecting. Personal relationships between asset managers and prospects (from institutional gatekeepers to broker/dealer producers) are the main conduit to creating this conviction.

Without this perceived relationship, prospects cannot “bet” on the portfolio manager. But personal relationships can’t scale. With over 650,000 registered securities representatives in the US alone, asset managers need additional tools.

How are companies augmenting relationships and creating conviction in financial services? The internet is assisting by providing content and managing perceptions. The following rules are being followed:

• Deliver Results: This is the most important aspect, and the web can only help display and explain performance. During times of unexpected results, however, communication is essential. Are you fostering a conversation effectively?
• Provide Information: Speed and inclusivity of information is essential. Without it, decision makers can’t perform their job. The faster the information is delivered, the greater the opportunity to create conviction. How are you informing your constituency? How are you shaping their knowledge? Who else is shaping their knowledge before you?
• Supply Education: We are all looking to excel and become better at what we do. We need people to inform us, show us alternative views, and stimulate us intellectually. How are you helping your clients get better at their jobs and partnering with them for success?
• Allow Access: Decision makers need to know they can get information from accountable and informed people. Whether this is in person, phone, email, or indirect, decision makers need to know why decision were made. How are you enabling access, without overwhelming your staff?
• Exhibit Transparency: Without it, trust is in jeopardy. Given compliance and corporate scandals, people are naturally cynical and assume the whole story is not being told. Are you exhibiting transparency or creating a veil of secrecy?

Over the next few weeks, I will be touching on each one of these points. I welcome your comments, insights, and additions at eric.karofsky@molecular.com.

Much has been discussed about the availability of new socially oriented financial products for the retail audience, however even the very traditional institutional audience is beginning to tread into the area.

The retail world offers many examples of best practices. From great sites such as Mint.com, which can organize an individual’s financial accounts, to crowd-sourced investment ideas at the Motley Fool, there are a host of opportunities to gain from the wisdom of the crowd. Recently, Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester listed many retail examples.

Now the institutional side, more traditional and conservative, is beginning to adopt social media practices. No, I don’t expect Facebook and Myspace to have a many buy-side friend groups, however there is a deep interest in more meaningful interactions between investment managers and their institutional clientele.

Advisors and investors are looking for more contact with portfolio managers and members of the investment team. For example, the typical earnings call offers minimal capabilities beyond listening and getting in queue to ask a a question. Feedback is that they are typically too structured, too scripted, and question and answer sessions require too much time, or are of little value.

Research has shown us that analysts and decision makers want to interact beyond phone calls. They want to ask tough questions and physically see how the manager reacts. They want to be able to view it on their own time, and their own devices. They want to understand and learn from other people’s questions. They want to rank questions to make the most of their valuable time. They want to search for specific comments. Some want to offer feedback on the answers and others want to create an evolving dialogue.

In order to be successful, web-based interactions need to delicately balance corporate and legal compliance concerns with the vast opportunities that technology affords. Investment managers that don’t evolve their interactions risk perceptions of transparency and risk providing the conviction that investors need to recommend or purchase a product.

We often think of Facebook, MySpace, and other online sites when discussing “Social Media”. But there are other examples too. One that recently caught my attention is a sound-art-installation called “ROUND” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

Through a wireless, hand-held device, ROUND combines real-time feedback from visitors as they walk around the museum. Combined with light background music and robust software, it becomes a living piece of art in-itself.

The artist, Halsey Burgund, has created something important. Just as blogs are becoming a valuable source of news, and as ratings allow people to offer feedback to manufacturers, ROUND allows everyone to become an art critic.

For more, see:

• A New York Times review of ROUND
• Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
• And visit the artist’s page

Over the past few months I’ve noticed a disturbing trend, sites are becoming less usable — only appealing to a specific segment of their audience. Marketers are so consumed with creating “brand” and “experience” that they risk creating a frustrating experience for those not considered. While tools such as Flash and Silverlight allow designers and marketers a seemingly unrestricted canvas, unfortunately usability often becomes a secondary concern.

Case in point: I recently went to Spalding.com to search for a basketball hoop. I saw some great Flash animation – it was interesting and helped emphasize their brand attributes. When clicking through to their residential portable systems though, I was presented with only “The Beast” – their $1200 system. Interesting, but what about their other products? They don’t list them. Looking for a search box, I couldn’t find that either. There is no way to learn more about their products. I left frustrated.

What is the solution?

• Understand who is coming to your site, their goals, needs and behaviors, and build usable experiences for those constituents

How?

• Research the market by conducting qualitative interviews with key constituents and follow up with a robust quantitative survey
• Statistically segment the market into the constituents’ behavioral patterns
• Define primary and secondary personas to articulate the human qualities evident within the segments
• Create experiences for each primary persona

Done properly, this type of process takes approximately 15-25 weeks. It’s an investment that will pay dividends both in the short run and long run.

For Spalding, simply considering that some people want to research products beyond retailer’s descriptions may be important. Or perhaps you want to learn more about the company, key executives, etc. Or maybe you want a job. I couldn’t find any of these. [For full disclosure, they may be there, but it took too long to try to figure it out, so I stopped.]

Who should create the news? How should it be consumed?

These are questions every newspaper and news organization should be asking. It was the title of a recent presentation that I gave to several international newspaper executives where opportunities were outlined, and followed by rich discussion.

Defensive postures are occurring – ones that foreshadow an inevitable demise. The most recent indication that the newsmedia is changing is today’s announcement that Gannett Co., Hearst Corp., the New York Times Co. and Tribune Co. are creating an advertising network called quadrantOne. The intent is to allow national advertisers to buy space in the companies’ local properties.

Being forced into a network with your competitors is a defensive posture. (The offensive version is called collusion, which is highly illegal). The papers are doing this because advertising is flat. From the Wall St. Journal:

“The formation of the partnership comes as the newspaper industry is struggling with falling advertising revenue, a result both of advertisers defecting to the Web and the weak economy. Difficult industry conditions sparked a new wave of cost-cutting this week.”

Newspapers need to find a way to become relevant again. And there are many options to:

Present news in a new format; invite interaction; benefit from the wisdom of users; allowing the users to create the news; and ultimately create a new definition of “news”.

To discuss further, I welcome comments or insight on how you think the newspaper industry should change.

Our collective job of creating emotional bonds with our clients through a digital medium was trumped by a game that lasts 5 minutes. Developed by Jason Rohrerfor, “Passage” redefines the cliché “plain and simple”, as it portrays a pixilated avatar through the maze of life.

Here is Jason’s insight on the game.

And here is the free, tiny download.

Why is it so effective? It addresses our deepest human passions, and touches multiple senses through its simplistic use of visuals, music and interaction.

I urge you to download and play it, and then play it again.

What do you think?