So what is it?

Facebook places allows you to connect with friends and people around you – in real time via your smart phone.

How Do You Use It? Example – At a bar with friends.

At the bar, you open up Facebook mobile on your smart phone, tap ‘Places’ and Facebook plucks and saves your location via GPS – you’ve officially ‘checked in’. Then you can checkin tag your friends to that ‘Place’, the bar, and those Facebook users get added to the ‘Place’ group.

How is that useful?

I haven’t really figured out why you’d want to do that, other than feeding the Facebook database with more personal information.

Ok, so how about for advertisers?

Ah… Well, its a gold mine for advertisers. With this new addition to highly targeted local, real time advertising expect to see adverts when you start using Facebook Places.

For Example…

You are at the bar and your group of friends are all checked into Places. Now, as an advertiser, imagine you own a pizza restaurant 100 yards from the bar. The pizza restaurant owner can send an advert for extra an large pizza (enough for a group of friends) a few hours after you made the Facebook Places check in.

We all know what happens after a few hours drinking beer, and I’m sure there is an optimal time to send that advert out based on when you checked in to Places.

Think I’m joking and it won’t happen?

Advertisers are set to spend $3.3 billion on social networking websites in 2010, with Facebook’s revenue to hit $1.2 billion in this year alone. This stuff is real – and advertisers value your ‘Really smashed with Johnboy in town’ updates.

Privacy

As with most Facebook developments, Facebook have set all Facebook accounts to default into the privacy settings they (and more importantly their advertisers) want, which in a nutshell is open and willing to accept anything. So make sure you review your privacy settings following the launch of Places in the UK, in particular:

‘Customise Settings’ > ‘Things other share’
‘Customise Settings’ > ‘Include me in People Here now after I check in’

When you check in, your location is visible to your friends and another Facebook user around – people you don’t know. That weird girl at the bar with one eye and a strange twitch could know all about your favourite music and what you did last weekend.

If you’d rather be more private, you’ll have to opt out of this setting – or Facebook Places altogether.

So what happened on Facebook?

A wave a Greenpeace supporters and Facebook users changed their profile pictures to anti-Nestle slogans, and started leaving comments – lots of negative comments.

How did Nestle react?

Badly. The Nestle PR team couldn’t cope with the influx of negative comments, leaving responses such as ‘Oh please… it’s like we’re censoring everything to allow only positive comments’…Just click here to visit the page to get the idea, everything they post gets slated.

Probably not the best reaction to concerned customers. Nestle eventually had to apologise for how they reacted; “We’ve stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude”. They have been true to their word, and there are still thousands of negative comments on the fan page.

What can we learn?

Personally, I don’t think this sort of PR horror story could have been avoided for Nestle. I’m no Eco warrior, but Nestle are cutting down lots of trees and killing orang-utan’s to make KitKats, I can see how that would annoy people – Social media just whipped it up into an angry storm.

That said, it could’ve been managed and responded to better. Nestle should have admitted to the problems, and listened to the concerns of their customers and responded with solutions. Not just deleted comments and started being rude.

Should I avoid Facebook fan pages for my business forever?

Definitely not. Granted, this is an extreme ‘bad case’ of what could happen, but only because Nestle are in the wrong to start out with. If your business has good core values, good customer service and a good product… then I still believe a fan page is great to connect with existing and future customers.

But before you jump on the social media bandwagon – ask yourself how your business would react if you had a negative comment on your fan page. Are you prepared – or would you delete it?

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I can’t thank Andrew enough for his continued work on my new website. He took my original ideas and previous website stat data to build a user friendly and ‘findable’ website in the search engines.

Andrew has got me top of the search results, and I’m so busy as a result of new work and leads through the website, Andrew is slowing down his pace with the Google optimisation!

Highly recommended.

David Parnell
Pest Control Hertfordshire

David has seen a huge rise in website visits as a result of the new keyword researched website – and he now ranks top of Yahoo, top of Bing and is on the 1st page (at the time of writing 3rd on Google.com) of Google!

Enter Mike Whittaker. He was looking to sell his clapped out old washing machine, and listed it with no reserve and a starting bid of $1. Here’s how he described it:

Scary washing machine. No really, its terrifying!

It’s the loudest most violent sounding washing machine I have ever encountered. It makes guests scared and children cry. I’ve lived with it like that for almost a year and it still scares me…

…If your in a fix and need a cheap washing machine and are either completely deaf or hate your neighbours this baby is for you.

So what happened as a result of this?

• The washing machine sold for $5160.
• TV and international press coverage
• 800,000 views on the auction
• 800 comments on the auction
• The video went viral on YouTube
• A new website and online business was born for Mike.

Pretty amazing. He grabbed the viewers attention, gave them some plain talking, informal, amusing copy to read through and the result took his scary washing machine global…

This Blog post updating my web design hertfordshire Google challenge has been a long time coming, so apologies to all those who have been tracking my progress!

So to recap – we had a less than perfect ranking of 180 on page 18. Good progress considering the scale of this experiment, but room for improvement. So, here’s the latest: Page 4, rank 33. Now we are getting some results! Here’s the screenshot:

Here’s a neat graphic which displays the pros and cons of each, click the image for the larger version: