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By JeffreyRomano, June 12, 2009 6:18 pm

In less than a day, Facebook (FB) will allow its users to choose a username for their profile. There has been quite a bit of fuss about this development, even though it might not seem significant to the average joe. To use a cliche’,  what’s in a (user)name, right?

Well in this case, the username FB users choose will help simplify the URL that points to their FB profile. To take my profile as an example, my current URL is http://en-gb.facebook.com/people/Jeffrey-Romano/563707463, quite a handful for my liking. Using the new username system the whole thing would look much simpler. To give an example, this is the profile page URL of the White House (they get a username before us normal people) www.facebook.com/whitehouse. 

This change in profile URLs is pretty significant because it means that when somebody types in your name in Google, Yahoo, Bing or wherever, there is a better chance of your FB coming up. This can be a good thing, especially for businesses.

However, if in your profile you have loads of fun pictures and videos you posted when you were at one of those end of exam bashes last year, then I’d suggest thinking twice about making your FB profile more visible. Considering that the people who normally look up other people in search engines are future employers, prospective clients, etc., then it is hard to justify why you’d want to show them how much fun you can be after you downed an x number of beers.

In all honesty though, regardless of your name, you can pinpoint a lot of people on FB if you know their name and where they live.  If you do not want your private information to be visible, then go through your privacy settings and set everything so that only your friends can see your details. After this, I would still be careful about what I post on FB.  Mainly because you and not Facebook are responsable to what happens to the content you post, and yes this includes deleted information. Check this for more info.

Does this change my attitude towards Facebook?

Well in a way, this move has made me more aware that FB wants to make it easier for people to get to specific profiles more directly. I’m not totally for this because I prefer it when people access my profile through the news feed or something. It somehow feels less like someone is stalking me. After all, why should someone want to know my profile URL?  If the answer is ‘no reason’, then there is exactly ‘no reason’ why I would want my profile URL to be easy to remember. If the answer is ‘to know more about me’, then people can visit my LinkedIn profile. 

When I started using Facebook, it was never my intention to share information with people unknown to me. I encourage people who see FB like me to think twice about Facebook URL vanity.

My advice, unless you want to be found, don’t make it easy for other people to find you. According to FB, using your nickname as your username is completely legit (hint hint).

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By JeffreyRomano, June 8, 2009 1:22 pm

Recently, I had a bad experience with a company selling training material. I had ordered a particular product and had mistakenly been provided and charged for another more expensive one. Naturally, I was not too happy about this, especially since I was not sure what the benefits of the more expensive product included.

So I opened a ticket with customer support complaining. I also complained on Twitter. After a few hours, to my complete surprise, I receive an email from customer support titled something like ‘Follow up on Twtiter complaint.’  The company apologised, gave me the correct product and provided me with an explanation of what the benefits of the more expensive product were.  

Turns out both products are pretty cool and I won’t be asking for my money back again. I might even buy something else from them in the near future. Customer Support managed to turn an angry customer into a satisfied one. Mission accomplised. Naturally, they also earned some Twitter praise too.

Conversations on Twitter are very often ‘branded’ in the sense that a very high percentage of conversations (if not Tweets) center around brands and what they are doing. This fact is very important to customer support departments in particular, who are now increasingly listening in on what their customers are saying in contrast to simply acting on direct complaints they receive.

My personal definiton of customer support is “the way in which the brand meets its customers’ needs after a purchase has been completed.” Taking this into consideration, brands can benefit a lot by seeing what their customers are saying via Twitter’s search function. In my case, a recognition of my complaint and one email turned me from this to this

Another useful tool is the Google feature allowing you to see what new online content related to your brand has been generated within the last day, week or any other time period.  This can be a very helpful tool not only for reputation management but also to spot unhappy customers. It is a more time-consuming process than just following Tweets, though it can be very effective and impressive on the customer.

This creative use of the expanding social aspect of the web is increasingly becoming expected by customers. When I complained on Twitter I half expected some kind of recognition of my complaint and this is partly because more and more companies are using Twitter for customer support. For more information on companies which use Twitter for this purpose, check out this article by Sarah Perez. If you are interested in implementing Twitter in your company’s customer support, read this How To article on Mashable.

If you have valuable insights or links on this topic, feel free to contribute via the comments section.

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By JeffreyRomano, June 1, 2009 10:35 am

Often, when I speak to people about optimizing their online web presence, they have a very vague comprehension of the process this involves. Unfortunately, many businesses are still under the impression that because they already have a website, then they do not need to do much more in terms of online promotion.

In reality, developing a website is only an early step. What businesses must understand is that, just like traditional marketing, Internet marketing also needs to begin with a plan. Therefore, the first step is defining the business objectives. What does the business hope to achieve by investing in online promotion? Setting short term targets like generating x amount of sales or visits is very helpful.

When this has been done, a website can be developed that takes these goals into consideration. For example, developing an e-commerce website is different from developing an educational website.

After the website is done and it is published online, the process of generating a return from it begins. I call this the Online Promotion Process, which is made up of four steps:

• Attraction – Making people come over and visit
• Analytics – Seeing how poeple are interacting with your website
• Conversion – Getting them to do what you want on your website
• Retention – Strengthening the relationship with customers increasing their lifetime value

Keeping the process in mind is helpful when seeing how to increase the return from your website, be it more demand for advertisiing space or simply more subscriptions to your online service. In other words, the process helps you better understand and serve your target market.

I shall be writinng in more detail on the above steps in the near future. In the meantime, if you can add value to this article, please share your thoughts in the comments section.