Spotlight: Our Jackson Home

Our Jackson Home Logo

This month’s customer spot light is on Our Jackson Home a project recently launched by Luke Pruett and Jim Wilhelm. Our Jackson Home is here to help tell the story of Jackson and let everyone know about the cool things happening in our city everyday. I reached out to Luke and Jim after hearing a few of their podcasts and we agreed that I could be an asset to the team. I set out to design a logo that would make this new organization look like it has been around a while but that also focused on its primary story telling medium: podcasts.

Our Jackson Home Logo

 

We also launched a website recently to hold all of the stories that the writers for OJH are finding. You can check it out here: www.ourjacksonhome.com You can sign up for their weekly email newsletter on the website to get all their latest stories to your inbox. They also interviewed me and my wife for a podcast, you can listen to it here: 

A few less Beliebers

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/justin-bieber-arrest-cnn-sets-673508
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/justin-bieber-arrest-cnn-sets-673508

Scrolling through CNN this morning before heading out to play football I saw a headline that grabbed my attention.

“Justin Bieber just lost 3.5 million Instagram followers”

Now just to be clear, I am not a Belieber and generally try to avoid anything talking about Justin Bieber but this one caught my eye: Link to Article.  (h/t @AaronSmithCNN)

The summary of the article is this: Instagram in something people are calling the “Instagram Rapture” (I think would be better named: Instagram Purge), Instagram has purged fake profiles and the Biebs has lost 3.5 million followers. Crazy. But it almost makes me feel better about my small amount of followers.

As far back as the days when MySpace was popular I remember having to deal with robotic accounts. You would recieve friend requests from random people with clearly photoshopped pictures and the temptation was to accept the request. Why? Because having that one more like, even if it was fake, might make your numbers look better. Businesses can do the same thing: it is tempting to get one more email or facebook like for the sake of having the number. The quality of emails and facebook likes is important. If you are building a tribe of dedicated fans you ought not dilute them with fakes or people who you have tricked or forced into liking your page. If dilutes your numbers and does not allow you to measure your marketing strength or market reach effectively.

But with facebook you have to do more than worry about people who dont really like your service but with robots check out this amazing video about facebook click farms over seas (h/t to @veritasium)

So how to prevent this? I start with really specific targeting of your Facebook ads and a realization that numbers are not everything.

Facebook gets less free.

Dont Just stand there!

Dont Just stand there!

Facebook is getting less free. I blogged about this previously but now Facebook is going to further push for paid ads. I am not sure how much further this can go but it may eventually get to where no one that likes your Facebook page unless you pay for the ad. It will become more comparable to TV. You may have  TV commercial and people maybe a fan of your business but unless you pay the station your ad will not running!

Check out the Wall Street Journal article on Facebook restricting reach: New Facebook Rules will Sting Entrepreneurs.

So what do you do instead? Well don’t just stand there,  build non rented marketing channels. Get permission from your fans to communicate to them. Try using email and I like to use MailChimp.