As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Steve Jobs passed away this week. While there are many sites, videos and blog posts talking about his accomplishments, those who loved him and admired him were able to sum up their feelings on the homepage of Apple.com. The file name for the image of Mr. Jobs is simply “images/t_hero.png.” I just thought that was neat, in a nerdy sort of way.
And now, on to the Digital Influence Weekly...
How are you liking Facebook’s new changes? Have you gotten a Timeline yet? Are you utilizing the Share option? Something else that’s interesting is the metric displaying the number of people talking about your brand. How do they know if people are talking about you? According to
All Facebook, the Talking About You metric measures the following:
• Liking a page;
• Posting to a page’s wall;
• Liking, commenting or sharing a page’s status update, photo, video or other content;
• Answering a question posted by a page;
• RSVPing to an event hosted by the page;
• Mentioning the page (users must formally tag the page);
• Tagging a page in a photo;
• Liking or sharing a check-in deal, and
• Checking in at a place.
However, I’m already seeing missed opportunities making this an unreliable metric. I see brand names everywhere being misspelled or not being properly tagged. Those mentions do not get counted. This is a huge issue because it relies on the casual user to know how to search for and tag a company or brand. They also have to know the difference between a Community Page that Facebook can create on its own, an official Fan Page and a fake, old or unused Fan Page possibly created by someone outside the communication’s department.
If I had designed this, you would be able to include relevant terms related to the main topic. For example, if someone said “I just saw Nancy Sims at the Candidate Forum last night,” or “Chris Wailes and Clint Woods sure know a thing or two about crisis communications,” that should be included in the Talking About Pierpont metric. In reality, they must tag Pierpont Communications in the post which is probably unlikely to happen all the time, every time.
So in the meantime, I recommend good old-fashioned monitoring services and manual searches of your industry online. You should be able to spot more conversations on Facebook that relate to you than Facebook can accurately track.
Have a great weekend!