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Within Indiana’s Tourism Industry, I’ve noticed that most organizations have created Fan Pages, while a handful have decided to instead create Groups or even a Personal Profile for their organization. Hopefully this post will clear the air about the differences between the ways you can reach out to potential and current customers on Facebook.

Whether you decide to use a Fan Page or a Group for your organization depends on your goals for Facebook. One thing you should not do, however, is create a personal profile for your organization. Beyond being against Facebook’s Terms of Service, your organizational goals will be much better met by setting up a Group or a Fan Page.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups started out as the only way to interact with organizations and other groups of people. My college class has a Facebook group that is used to update members when reunions are happening or when something big is happening at my Alma Mater. A Facebook Group is a great way to keep a small group of people updated on what’s going on with your organization.

A great example of an effective group in the tourism industry is Travel Michigan’s. They recently shifted their industry communications from the standard email newsletter to a Facebook Group – Travel Michigan Industry News. This has the potential to be a great change for Travel Michigan, as they now can reach industry members in a medium they prefer. Also, by creating a group for the dissemination of Michigan tourism industry news, they’re also providing a place for industry members to have conversations and participate. A standard email newsletter doesn’t allow for this level of interaction.

That being said, the Facebook Group works great for groups like a college alumni class or an industry group, but it might not be the best fit for a true business to consumer (B2C) communication.

Facebook Fan Pages (AKA Public Profiles)

Facebook Pages were created as a way for companies, organizations, politicians, celebrities, non-profits  and others (basically, anything that isn’t an individual person) to have a profile on Facebook. Several years ago, before the advent of the Fan Page, the only way for organizations to interact with their customers on Facebook was through a group. Luckily, Facebook realized they needed to give organizations, celebrities, etc, a more robust and customizable way to interact with their fans. Thus was born the Facebook Fan Page.

At Visit Indiana, we use a Facebook Fan Page (also known as a Public Profile) to connect with our fans. Pages give you all the flexibility of a personal profile and (most importantly) provide you with in-depth statistics on your page and demographic information about your fans.

Pages also allow you to install different applications, like the FBML application I talked about in my last post, Flickr applications and many more.

One more great thing about a Fan Page. Once you have more than 25 fans, point your browser to http://www.facebook.com/usernames and you can create a vanity URL for your Fan Page. The Visit Indiana Fan Page URL used to be: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Visit-Indiana-Indiana-State-Tourism/42785429080; quite the headache to remember. Now that we’ve created a vanity URL for the page, you can find it at http://www.facebook.com/VisitIndiana.

All in all, there is a lot more flexibility available through a Facebook Fan Page than through a Group. In the end, you can decide what’s best for your organization, but here’s a quick comparison chart so you can see, at a glance, the differences between Facebook’s Fan Pages and Groups.

Facebook Groups Vs. Fan Pages

Now that you’ve seen the differences between Facebook’s Groups and Fan Pages, you can make an informed decision about which will best serve the needs of your organization. Let me know which one you’re using and how you came to that decision.

Click here to get started with your organization’s Facebook Fan Page.

Or click here to get started creating a Facebook Group for your organization.

One of the best ways to engage your Facebook Fans is to provide some “Fans Only” deals or content. Einstein Bros. Bagels gave away a free bagel coupon to all of their fans and they offer members-only discounts on a regular basis. This certainly creates good will with your fans and gives them the feeling that they are appreciated.

With a little bit of HTML knowledge, you can easily create “Fans Only” content and deals on your Facebook page. Your first step is to install the Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) application on your Fan Page (see image below). This will allow you to create a new tab or box where you can display your Fans Only content.

Search for "Static FBML" and add this app to your page.

Once you’ve added this application, you can modify the name of the tab/box and customize it with your content. I’ve included a short example below to show you how to get started. You can put links, images, printable coupons or any number of things in the FBML box using standard HTML. In fact, many of the big name Facebook pages, like Honda and Einstein Bros. Bagels use HTML and FBML to spice up their pages.

Fans Only Coding on Facebook

Everything between the two highlighted bits of code is only viewable by your page’s Fans. Now you can really thank your fans and give them special content or deals. You can place images in the Fans Only portion in addition to standard text and links so you can truly customize your page for fans.

The image above shows what your fans will see when they view your page. If someone who isn’t yet a fan, they won’t see the “$119 – Sundaes & Smiles Hotel Indigo – Columbus, IN” link.

Special thanks to John Haydon’s How To Create an Incentive for Visitors to Fan your Facebook Page post for the inspiration to write this one.

On February 9, Google released Buzz to the masses. If you have a Gmail account, you’ve probably seen a splash page about Buzz in the past couple of days. I turned on Buzz for my account a few days ago and here’s a rundown of what Buzz can do for you.

• Buzz can be used as an aggregator for your Google-owned social media accounts (Google Reader — check out this post and this one for more on RSS and Google Reader –, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa) as well as a few others (Twitter, Flickr & FriendFeed).
• Buzz automatically suggests people you should follow. This list is culled from the people you email most often.
• Underneath your Inbox button in Gmail, a Buzz button appears. This allows you to view all recently Buzzed items.
• Buzz intelligently selects the most interesting buzzes for you to view. You can always click on the Buzz button to see all recent buzzes, but you’ll be notified when an interesting piece appears.

There are a few things that Google needs to do to improve Buzz, but since it just launched last week, Google is bound to do what they need to do to make Buzz more usable. Here are a few things Buzz is missing.

• Integration with Facebook – As the most popular social networking site in the world, Google really needs to add Facebook soon. Ironically enough, Facebook owns Friendfeed, which is currently supported by Google Buzz.
• Buzz posts should also feed out to accounts that are hooked up to it (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc) rather than just pulling the posts into Buzz.
  • A great example of this would be for Buzz to function more like Hootsuite (discussed in my last post), but still live within Gmail.
• Allow users to filter and view only the Buzzes they want to see.
  • Just like Facebook allows you to view updates in specific groups, Buzz should allow this. There are sometimes you just don’t want to see every one of someone’s Foursquare updates.

In short, with some work and slight tweaks, Google Buzz has the potential to radically change the way social media is consumed. By building Buzz right into Gmail, Google was able to ensure its immediate adoption by millions of people, unlike Google’s much hyped but less loved Wave, which launched in the Fall of  ’09. Wave turned out to be much more complicated and much less thought-out than Buzz seems to be, on top of the fact that you needed a separate login to Google Wave, which reduces the number of users drastically.

Here’s a quick video from Google all about Buzz.

Have you used Buzz yet? Check me out on buzz: Jeremy A Williams

If you’ve already created a Twitter account, a Facebook Fan Page and a Wordpress blog for your organization, you’re on the right track. Now that you have accounts at a handful of social media sites, how do you manage them all?

There are dozens of social media management platforms out there, including some great ones like TweetDeck and Seesmic. Both are great applications, but they need to be installed on your computer. One of the many great things about Hootsuite is it’s 100% web-based. You simply visit Hootsuite.com, log in and you can manage your social media initiatives from any computer with an internet connection.

Hootsuite Screenshot

Hootsuite originally launched in late 2008 as a dedicated Twitter client. As you can see from this screenshot, it’s evolved into a powerful social media management platform. In addition to Twitter, you can now manage Facebook (including Facebook Fan Pages), LinkedIn, Wordpress and the lesser-used Ping.FM.

Do you want to post the same message to your Facebook page and your Twitter account? Do you want to set up your blog to feed through to your Twitter and Facebook accounts? Do you want to set up multiple accounts so different people at your organization can help manage your social media strategy? Hootsuite lets you do all this and more.

Hootsuite Stats Screenshot

Hootsuite also automatically shortens links using their Ow.ly URL shortener and gives you detailed stats about each links posted through Hootsuite. You can look at link stats from the past 24 hours, past week, past month or any other timeframe.

I’ve been using Hootsuite as my primary social media management tool for the past several months and I’ve been extremely impressed. There is a Hootsuite App available for iPhone and I’m waiting for the Blackberry app that will hopefully follow.

Have you used Hootsuite?

You may or may not know that Facebook was created back in 2004 as a social network for Harvard students. In the 5 short years since Facebook started it has become the 2nd most visited website in the world for the past 3 months, with visits from more than 25% of all internet users all over the globe.

Facebook is one of the reasons that social media has become so pervasive in our society today. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is actually users 35 and older. Even though it seems that everyone is on Facebook now, it’s nice to see an Indiana college bringing Facebook back to its roots and using it and other social media utilities (such as Twitter) in a new initiative called Hotseat.

Hotseat, a social networking-powered mobile Web application, creates a collaborative classroom, allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class and enabling professors to adjust the course content and improve the learning experience. Students can post messages to Hotseat using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, sending text messages, or logging in to the Hotseat Web site. – Purdue University’s Hotseat website

Students can log onto the Hotseat system from their laptops or mobile phones and can ask questions in real time as a lecture is being given. This is especially helpful in large classrooms where students might be intimidated asking questions. Since Hotseat is displayed on a screen at the front of the classroom, the professor and students alike can see the questions as they are asked. This enables the professor to address questions immediately and tailor his or her instruction to the class.

Watch the video below for a more in-depth explanation of what Hotseat is and can offer to students and professors.

Hotseat is in its pilot semester now and the University hopes to eventually use Hotseat in every class on campus. What kinds of uses could you see with an application like Hotseat in your job? Would you be interested in using an application like Hotseat at the next conference you attend?

One of the most important things you can do online today is tracking your web traffic with some type of robust web analytics package. At the Indiana Office of Tourism Development, we primarily use Google Analytics. It’s free, relatively easy to set up and enables us to track just about everything we need for our website and blogs. By analyzing the data culled from Google Analytics, we’re able to see whether some of our new marketing in initiatives are driving people to our website, whether a redesigned homepage had an effect on website visitors and whether our social media efforts are enticing users to visit our website.

The bottom line is if you have a website, you NEED to be tracking it.

Luckily, Google Analytics is in the process of launching two new features that will help make their service even more usable and robust.

A few weeks ago, Google unveiled their “Intelligence” feature and it’s a great addition to Google Analytics. As you can see in the video below, Intelligence looks at all of your web data and automatically flags data it considers important.

For example, during our recent Leaf Cam campaign we sent out our Big Idea Email (sign up to receive it here!) and experienced a 52% increase in website traffic from the day before. Google Intelligence noticed that along with 36 other alerts. Some of those alerts were a 75% increase in visitors from Kentucky, a 62% increase in entries to one of our Leaf Cam Contests and a 90% increase in visits to our Leaf Cam page (click on the image below for a larger version).

Google automatically creates alerts for many things, but if you specifically want an alert every time something specific happens, you can set up custom alerts as well. The custom alerts can even be emailed to you as they occur. These alerts are great for pinpointing changes in visitor’s actions on your website, but what if you want to know what factors contributed to those changes in your webstats? That’s where Google Analytics’ second great feature comes into play.

Google is still rolling this feature out to all GA accounts, but it will allow for you to make annotations on any data. For example. We launched our redesigned homepage on May 4th, 2009. There are 80 Intelligence Alerts for May 4, 2009 ranging from a 15% drop in new visitors to the site to a 30% increase in the average Time On Site per visitor. All I have to do is create a notation on May 4th so we can always know that we’re seeing those changes due to the redesign of our homepage. I can also set up notations for days that we send out our consumer or industry emails, note days when we’ve begun a new PR push or ad campaign or days when a news story came out that pushed traffic to our site.

Check out the video on Google Analytics Annotations below:

All in all, these two new features on Google Analytics give users a tremendous amount of flexibility with their web data.