Below the Line

Six examples of Facebook "like" landing pages

Many brands are asking "how can I get more people to like me on Facebook"? Did you know that you can create a custom tab and use that as the default landing page for anyone who is not already a fan (e.g. anyone who does not "like" your page yet)?

Here are six examples of brands who have used custom Facebook tabs as their landing page to encourage more people to "like" them.

Red Bull: this is a clever and straightforward page and in keeping with their brand in terms of look and feel. I like how it creates some movement on the page while still featuring the product prominently.

Elance security breach: a failure to communicate

Elance's customer data has been compromised. While this is harmful to any brand, trust can be restored in the way the brand communicates with their customers about the situation.

Elance is a service that connects businesses and independent service providers or contractors. I think I used the site only once to hire someone to do microfiche research in a New York library. Here is their security alert e-mail:

 

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The message is way too vague and does nothing to help restore trust in their service or their ability to prevent a future security breach. While they have further details on their web site, the e-mail leaves the reader wondering "Who has my data?", "What did Elance do to remedy the situation?," "How long have they known about this?," "When was the breach?" and importantly "What does this mean to me?". They should have been more specific within the e-mail about what they are doing to prevent this from happening again.

The call-to-action on this e-mail is entirely too weak. The e-mail reads "For information on re-setting your password..." when in fact it should say something along the lines of "We strongly recommend that you change your password immediately. Upon your next log in, you will be required to change it."

Finally, given that they admit on their web site that their users may receive spam e-mail and unwanted SMS solicitations, their apology seems limp.  

This security breach is a major failure for their tech team and their marketing communications team.

Related post:

Oops! Sending the apology e-mail

The importance of tone of voice

Guest post by Kate Stendahl

“Yes, Peaches, who’s a bad girl?  Who peed on the carpet?  Who did it?  Was it you?”

Ever notice how you can speak to a dog in a happy, sing-song tone, but tell them something horrible, and they will still be really happy you’re talking with them?  Tone of voice is often more important in communication than we realize. The way we send the message is often just as important as the content of the message itself, even to those of us with opposable thumbs and the ability to understand more than a few words of language.

When training animals, consistency is key. Similarly, in order to "train" one's customers about one's brand, a company needs to have a consistent message to all customers in every interaction with every part of the business. Dealing with a company that is always changing its look, sound, and values can be confusing. If part of a business’s marketing materials are very serious, and part of it is surfer talk or chatty girl-talk, it can create accessibility problems for current and potential patrons and partners. How can you trust the company, or trust that it knows who it is and what it is doing, if it doesn’t have a consistent message? The tone of voice should communicate your brand’s values and qualities. A company needs to decide not only the message it wants to get across, but the best way to deliver that message.

Tone should be appropriate to the brand, and needs to be consistent in all communications to be effective. If you are a banker, you probably don’t want to sign your formal documents with pink ink and a heart dotting the “I”s. On the other hand, if you sell stationery to pre-teen girls, having pink lettering with sparkles on your website may be exactly what you want. This is where tone of voice and brand guidelines come in. If the rules for how to communicate with the outside world are set out, then despite having multiple authors write about the brand, the brand will retain its integrity. Another benefit of unified communications is that the company is much more agile in PR situations. It can be much easier and quicker to use language to differentiate the brand or ensure certain points are made.

The most important part is that the tone of your website, newsletters, blogs, networking websites and press releases all have the same look, feel, and message. This includes the tone used on your social media marketing. Often these documents are kept inside a company and never see the light of day.  However, we were able to locate a few online.

Canada

That’s right, Canada is not just a country, but also a brand. Rather than dealing with a government entity, they want potential tourists to feel like they’re chatting with other travellers. They want people, especially “high yield visitors” to explore, be themselves, and experience Canada in a personal way.

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easyGroup

easyGroup also knows the value of a good brand manual. In a larger corporation that includes multiple businesses, such as easyJet, easyMobile and easyCruise, it is important that the look and content of the messages coming from all of these businesses is cohesive and pointed in the same direction. It gives eight brand values, the mission statement, a strategy and even sets out rules for visual media. The tone of voice easyGroup aims for is simple, direct, fun and irreverent. They are a young company and they want to promote the idea of their great value and entrepreneurial, innovative spirit.

   

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British Airways

BA also posted its brand guide online. BA aims for a tone of voice that is straight forward, sophisticated, progressive and empathetic, and its brand guide reflects that. The BA brand is focused on quality, safety, responsibility, and even “Britishness”. BA uses a much more serious tone than easyGroup, for example. BA’s brand guide also lists professionalism as one of their core brand values. However, a misspelling on the “Our business” page lets them down. The typo is an “award-wining” (sic) example of how outside professional marketing help can help prevent future issues. 

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Need help with your brand manual?

Should your company need a new or improved brand manual that really gets to the heart of your business and unifies your tone of voice (or if you would like us to review it to make sure you don’t have any typos!), DevonInspiration would be happy to help you. We can also provide training materials to help you explain the brand manual and why using a uniform tone of voice is so very important. If you would rather, we would also be happy to conduct that training for your company as a whole or for key employees such as those responsible for customer communications.

Can your web site damage your brand?

Is it possible for a web site to be so bad, it damages the brand? I asked around for some examples of brand-damaging web sites...

Nobody home: Don't start publicizing your web site if you don't even have a holding page up. One woman told me she went to a bridal show and received a promotional pen from one of the exhibitors. Although the pen featured their web site, it was still not up six months later!

No content hierarchy: Judy Pokras, the founder of Raw Foods News Magazine offered her own web site as an example of a brand-damaging site. There is no organization to the content, so the user doesn't even know where to start. In fact, I don't even know where to start to help this one! My best advice would be to employ an information architect and start from scratch. 

User unfriendly: Another person said she was frustrated by a volunteer web site "people go there to find volunteer opportunities yet trying to find where to find them isn’t that obvious and then when you look, there aren't many searchable parameters and those that they do have don’t seem to work well so in the end, you really don’t find what you are looking for and are too frustrated to bother."

Outsourcing gone wrong: Hari Karam Singh said Carry On Clothing's web site damages an otherwise fine brand. "They have fantastic macs of the utmost style and quality, but the most tacky web site I’ve ever seen. Including a ridiculous introduction with script and animations that could only be the result of an excessive budget combined with third-world outsourcing."

Too flashy: A pretty well-known "don't" when it comes to SEO is to build a site in Flash. But one person I asked thinks that "any 100% Flash-built site, especially those with an 'intro' and music that I'm forced to sit through" can damage the brand. "Don't you dare use your 'back' button on a Flash site or the whole darn thing will start over. Flash is what I call 'animation masturbation' because all it does is satisfy the ego of the animator. It does nothing to help visitors get to what they want quickly and easily. Worse yet, Flash is a beast for Google because their spiders cannot read and catalogue the content. So there you have it. A terrible user experience ... and a terrible Google rank. What a disaster for any business."

If you recognize your web site in any of these scenarios, do yourself a favor -- take down your web site until you have the budget to do it properly. Put up a well-designed holding page in the meantime.

The ultimate re-brand

Is your web site re-launch as important as this? The White House updated their web site as soon as Obama became president. Kudos to the team that made this happen with impeccable timing.

Cupcake: ingredients for a strong brand

Cupcake, the private members’ club and spa for mums and mums-to-be, opened its first location this week. It has already been deemed the most exciting news to hit the mummy market by The Sunday Times.

Karen Hastings, Cupcake’s founder (and a client) has had a strong vision for the brand from Day 1. Everything about Cupcake has been built with mums and mums-to-be in mind, from the class schedules, to the spa treatments, to chairs that are easy to get out of – even when heavily pregnant.

Cupcake asked for input from mums along every step of the way through informal focus groups. This was combined with rigorous research into the target market to create a luxury brand that fills a gap in the market. Cupcake spent time at the outset developing a clear definition of their target audience (besides the obvious) and invested in the creation of branding guidelines to ensure consistency with everything from on-site signage to their indulgent spa menu.

I'm thrilled to have played a small part in the building of the brand by developing The Icing on the Cupcake. This e-newsletter helped Cupcake establish itself in the marketplace and build a substantial customer database before construction even began.

This is a brand to watch in the next five years. You heard it here first!

YourBrandSucks.com

Many companies are throwing around buzzwords like "customer journeys" and "the customer experience". But that experience encompasses more than outbound communications and how customers navigate through a web site. For long-term success, and to create brand evangelists, companies need to focus on customer service. This means facing up to the fact that some people may have a negative experience with your brand.

Today, there is more dialogue between brands and consumers than ever. That's why it surprises me that so many brands are missing an opportunity to re-engage with disaffected customers. I'm talking about domains like [yourcompanyname]sucks.com.

[Yourcompanyname]sucks.com has become a convention for disaffected customers who are looking for a place to vent, along with other clever domain names such as untied.com for disgruntled United Airlines customers. I must admit, I recently had an epic struggle with Tiscali, and after four months with no broadband service, I looked to the web for a place to vent on www.tiscalisucks.com. To my surprise, this URL linked directly to the Tiscali home page. So, they acknowledge that some customers would be unhappy with their service, yet rather than putting up a landing page addressing these customers, they choose to ignore them and treat them like everyone else. (Bizarrely, tiscalisucks.com now links to Tiscali's Belgian business site.)

A better option would be to create a landing page with a customer service focus, and to be honest and humble about the fact that your company may not be meeting customers' expectations. Then direct them to FAQs or provide a place for customers to give feedback -- ensuring that it will be read and dealt with promptly.

Then hopefully, contrary to the goals of most web sites, you can decrease traffic to your sucks.com customer reengagement page.