Matrix Group International

Month: March 2012

  • Cook’s Illustrated

    Cook’s Illustrated

    The best of the best recipes, techniques and kitchen tools. They improve on classics, debunk myths and make it easy to cook like a chef.

  • The Facebook Timeline is Coming on March 30 – Is Your Organization Ready?

    The Facebook Timeline is Coming on March 30 – Is Your Organization Ready?

    The much awaited Facebook timeline for brands is coming. On March 30, whether you like it or not, your organization’s Facebook page will convert to the new timeline format. Here’s what’s new:

    • It’s All About the Timeline. Facebook says the big, huge deal is the timeline. Facebook will automatically show a timeline on the right side of your page that shows previous months and years. Your fans will be able to click on a month or year and see updates and posts from that time period. Here’s the HUGE DEAL: you can customize the timeline to show events in your organization’s history pre-Facebook. For example, the New York Times’ timeline goes all the way to the 1800s!
    • Brand Image. Your new brand page will have a large cover photo at the top of the page. Instead of a tiny logo and a few photos, your brand page can and will feature a large branding image that you can design yourself. Coca-Cola’s brand image has images from their current advertising campaign, showing happy people of course.
    • Posts and Conversations. The rest of the page is divided into 2 columns to represent the passage of time AND separate your posts from conversations and messages. In the right column, you’ll see messages to your company, posts about you, etc.
    • No More Left Navigation. Many brand pages had multiple tabs along the left rail for their various apps like photos, videos, donation, yada, yada. In the new timeline page, your top 4 tabs will be visible; visitors will have to click to see all of your apps.
    • Messages Between Brands and Users. Finally! Brands and their fans can now have private conversations!
    • Featured Content. The old Facebook pages displayed all posts equally – you had an image, a title and a blurb. The new timeline page lets you feature content at the top of the page. Featured content is bigger and takes up 2 columns for added impact.

    Screen shot of the new Matrix Group Facebook Timeline Page

    So how can you prepare for the new Facebook timeline? Here are our recommendations:

    • Preview your new Facebook page NOW. Don’t wait until March 29 to figure out what your new page will look like. Start looking at it now and making adjustments.
    • Create a cover photo that communicates your brand.  Use the period between now and March 30 to create the image and test it. You may need to make some adjustments. You can test how your cover photo looks by clicking the preview tab at the top of your page. BTW, only admins can see the preview.
    • Review your Facebook strategy. What kinds of posts will you feature? Which apps will be prominent? How will you communicate with your fans?
    • Start featuring posts. Highlight recent posts by hovering over the right hand corner of the post and clicking on the star. You can also remove it by clicking on the star.  If you want to promote a past post, you can actually move it up by hovering on the right hand corner of the post, clicking on the pencil tab in and selecting pin to top.
    • Check your insights page regularly. As a marketer, the Facebook insights leave me wanting for more, but there is more and better data now available, including who recently “liked” the page and recent comments.

    Are you ready for the new Facebook timeline pages? What’s your strategy for taking advantage of the new format and features?

  • Draw Something for iOS

    Draw Something for iOS

    Draw something on your iPhone or iPad and invite a friend to guess what you just drew. Cool videos of your work. Totally addicting.

  • Making Our Webinars More Social

    Matrix Group hosts two webinar series each year, one in the Spring and one in the Fall. Topics for this season’s series are Google Analytics, Integrating your CMS with your AMS (association management system), Advanced Twitter and Creating Content-Rich Mash-up Pages. Here’s the issue: although our webinars are pretty well attended and clients tell us that they love them, we weren’t getting many questions during the webinars nor were we getting many responses to the survey that we sent out after each webinar.

    So I challenged my marketing team to come with ways to make the webinars more interactive, more social. Here are some of the ideas that we recently tested during our most recent webinar on Google Analytics (GA):

    • A couple of days before the webinar, we sent out a survey to find out why people registered for this specific webinar and get questions in advance. Half of the attendees filled out the survey. We got great information that we used to customize the webinar.
    • Instead of the usual powerpoint presentation, we decided to use a case study/Q&A format. We compiled a list of most frequently asked questions about GA from the survey and from our recent calls and meetings with clients. The webinar became a conversation between me and my co-presenter, Eric Fair, the resident GA guru at Matrix Group. Instead of talking about what you can do with GA, Eric did a deep dive into the Matrix Group GA reports and showed attendees exactly how we are using campaigns, creating customized dashboards, driving traffic to our site through search and our blogs, yada, yada.
    • During the webinar, a marketing staff person was assigned to monitor the Webex chat and be on the lookout for questions. As a presenter, it’s too confusing to present, run the slides and monitor for questions, so it was helpful to have someone else monitoring the chat window. We got more questions during this webinar and I think the Q&A format made the difference.
    • At the end of the webinar, we announced that Eric Fair would take follow-up questions about GA on our Facebook page. This way, attendees who have a question after the webinar still get a chance to ask it AND we get more interactions on our Facebook page.

    These were small changes but I believe they made our webinar more engaging for attendees.

    How about you? What are you doing to make your events more social? What’s working?

  • Words With Friends

    Words With Friends

    Matrix staff can’t get enough of this app. There is often complete silence in the kitchen at lunch time, as everyone is engrossed in the game!