Walden Pond Design

Facebook Advertising Slammed on Eve of IPO

waldo — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:00:39 +0000

Timing is everything. It’s been a rough week for Facebook: a new report shows that Google leads Facebook in number of advertising-related areas and GM announced that it will be stopping its $10 million Facebook campaign, because it their opinion it doesn’t work. Read the complete article.

Friday is Facebook’s IPO day

waldo — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:32:33 +0000

Friday will be the day that Facebook becomes a publicly traded company. I was surprised to learn that 83% of people say that they hardly or never click on ads. Click here to watch a good video overview from MSNBC and reactions from the average Facebook user.

waldo — Tue, 08 May 2012 05:25:40 +0000

So far this hasn’t crossed the Pond yet, but some bouncers in England have been demanding people hand over their smartphones so they can check Facebook accounts.

It’s claimed that it is to make sure the person is who they say they are and isn’t using fake identification. Read the complete story.

Get Things Done

waldo — Sat, 05 May 2012 16:59:56 +0000

Benjamin Franklin was a man of action. Over his lifetime, his curiosity and passion fueled a diverse range of interests. He was a writer (often using a pseudonym), publisher, diplomat, inventor and one of the Founding Fathers. We know his classic quote “Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.”

This man of action and accomplishment has many more great quotes. My favorite is “Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.”

Click here for the other 12 great Ben Franklin quotes.

Facebook offers

waldo — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:24:54 +0000

Facebook has a great way to increase sales and it doesn’t cost you a cent. You can easily create offers on your Facebook page, Facebook handles the rest. Example you can post a 50% discount on a product, add restrictions and even limit the number of people that claim the discount. Facebook handles the rest. Click here to watch a video and learn more.

What a 9-Year-Old Can Teach You About Selling

waldo — Thu, 03 May 2012 13:32:48 +0000

If you want your conversations to have a real impact, you need to simplify your message.

I recently read a study that confirmed my suspicion that most people don’t remember what we present to them in a sales call. The data suggested that the average buyer in a meeting will only remember one thing–one!–a week after your meeting.

Oh, and by the way: You don’t get to choose what that one thing is. Sigh.

So what have sales professionals done about this? They have worked on “honing the message,” developing a “compelling unique advantage” and, of course, the ultimate silver bullet: a surefire elevator pitch.

But here’s what you’re fighting: A world cluttered with information, schedules, packed with more meetings and work than a person can handle. A decision-making process with more people involved in every choice–many of whom know little about your product or service. No wonder so little is remembered; often your audience doesn’t even understand much about what you’re offering.

What Kids Want to Know

I have a 9-year-old daughter with spring freckles, long brown hair and blue eyes the size of silver dollars. She asks the kinds of questions that on the surface seem so simple:

Daddy, what do you do?
Why do people decide to hire you?
Why don’t they hire somebody else or do it themselves?

One of the great things about 9-year-olds: Like many buyers these days, they lack context. Any answer that you provide has to be in a language that they can understand.

What does a procurement specialist know about what you sell–or the IT person, or the finance person? The challenge is this: Can you answer the three questions my 9-year-old asked, for your own business?

Hint: There are right and wrong answers for both.

Daddy, What Do You Do?

Right answer: ”I help companies to grow really fast by teaching them how to sell bigger companies much larger orders.”
Wrong answer: ”Our company helps develop inside of our clients a replicable and scalable process for them to land large accounts.”

Why Do People Decide to Hire You?

Right answer: “We have helped lots of companies do this before, so we are really good at it as long as they are the right type of companies.”
Wrong answer: ”We have a proven process for implementation that allows organizations to tailor the model to their market, business offering and company’s growth goals.”

Why Don’t They Do It Themselves?

Right answer: “Just like when you learned to play the piano: Mommy and I could teach a little, but we don’t know as much as your teacher, and teaching you ourselves would take a long time and be very frustrating. Daddy is a really good teacher of how to make bigger sales, and people want to learn how to do this as fast as they can.”
Wrong answer: “We are the foremost expert in this field with over $5 billion in business that our clients have closed using this system. Usually our clients have tried a number of things on their own before we work together and have wanted outside help to get better results.”

In these cases, both answers are accurate, but that doesn’t make them right. In a world in which more decisions are made with less information and context, our responsibility is to get to as clear and memorable an answer as possible for all of the buyers to understand.

Author, speaker and consultant Tom Searcy is the foremost expert in large account sales.

Facebook ‘Likes’ Could Get You Fired, and Legal Options are a Challenge

waldo — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:17:49 +0000

We have all heard of horror stories about personal Facebook postings. But this is serious.

Facebook “likes” can possibly get you fired, and if you take your employer to court over the punishment you may have an uphill legal battle.

That’s what several plaintiffs found when they took the matter to the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia. Click here for full story.

Facebook to change size of Profile Picture

waldo — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:42:03 +0000

I was so excited to experiment with the new large timeline photo. Here’s something we did for one of our pro bono clients, Hope Water Foundation.

Now we learn that Facebook will be changing the size of the profile picture. Hmm, seems like they are following Google+ profiles which recently enlarged their photo.

Previously, a photo measured 130 x 125 pixels, overlaying a user’s Timeline Cover image. However, on April 26 Facebook’s profile images will be enlarged to 166 x 160 pixels. Guess we will need to resize the photo to work as a larger image.

Copywriting: How to improve headlines on landing pages and blog posts

waldo — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:02:01 +0000

Headlines are tricky little devils. Whether you’re writing them for an article or a PPC landing page, they can carry your campaign to glory or bury it forever.

We gathered some theory on writing great headlines from our sister company, MarketingExperiments, and capped it off with five tips from our editors and a useful process for improving results.

Before we get to all that, keep this in mind:

The goal of a headline is to seize readers’ attention and convince them to continue

Are you ready for Facebook’s new Timeline ?

waldo — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:19:29 +0000

Facebook will be converting all Facebook business pages to the new Timeline look and feel at the end of March. Are you ready to take advantage of this huge change. Perhaps the most obvious change is the new larger timeline photo.

Timeline Cover photos size will be 850 px wide by 315 px tall. These images can be changed or updated as often as you like.

However, please not there are some Facebook rules governing this new image. According to Facebook, cover images may not contain:

Price or purchase information, such as “60% off” or “Download it at our website”.

Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section.

References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features.

Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”.

I am still working on my new image.

Here some examples of how others have used the new size to project their identity.