A little while ago, I wrote that I was reading Paul Dunay’s book “Facebook Marketing For Dummies” after catching up with Paul at the ITSMA Leadership Forum in May. After some deliberation and investigation (about what Xerox, our new subsidiary ACS, and our competitors do on Facebook), the senior marketing leadership team for Xerox Global Services (i.e. where I work) decided to launch a Facebook page and see where it goes.
Actually, it’s not quite as simple as saying “let’s do this”. We used the POST methodology to address key questions about audience and purpose. Here’s what we decided:
1) People/audience: Who do we want to attract to the page? Business professionals responsible for or involved with production printing, central print operations, the management of office copy/fax/scanner fleets, or any document-centric processes at large companies. Also any CFO, controller, or finance person at the same large firms interested in saving money and cutting operating costs. We know this is a narrow scope, but we are curious to see how many fans we can attract from this audience. We will get a lot of Xerox employees to “like” our page, probably. That’s ok. But the primary target is our current clients, prospects, and even competitor customers.
2) Objective: We focused on two initially – build awareness and start to build community. We would like to develop an online destination where like-minded professionals willing to dialogue about managing print can share ideas and best practices. Where folks can discuss all the clever, mundane, arcane, or common ways to use document management technology and good business process to drive costs out and boost efficiency up. To get there, we think we need to start by drawing attention to the content we’ve published previously — what we do, how we operate, and how our clients succeed. Let’s face it, some of that great stuff gets a bit buried on our corporate site.
3) Strategy. Create a Facebook page about managing print and load it up with content. Create an editorial calendar of the Facebook Notes we plan to publish twice a week. Include a link to previously published content in each Note related to Xerox Services capabilities or clients. Publish a steady cadence of content that people (and search engines) will find and use. Let the page readership grow organically. Promote it through a couple of links on Xerox.com, as a link in email signatures, Twitter tweets, and on internal sites used by our field sales and delivery people.
4) Tactics. Include documents, slides, videos, podcasts, and photos. We may also throw in a trivia question, or announce an event or two. As readership grows, we plan to add discussion questions to understand what the community is thinking about and what we should do next. In time, we may look at syndicating content or commenting on other pages, blogs, sites to expose our page to a broader audience.
That’s the plan so far. Let me know what you think and if we missed anything key. I’m looking forward to sharing the results with you later on.
