For the time being at least, Facebook is the 800 pound gorilla of online social media outside of China.

Over 400 million users and growing,
most distributed in the US and Europe,
the average user spending a hefty 55 minutes per day on the site,
half of all users logging in per day,
the average user having 130 friends and memberships in 12 groups. Facebook now arguably drives more traffic than Google.

Of course, the majority of social interaction time no doubt is spent between a few close family members and friends (and increasingly so on iPhones), but if you want access to where people are, Facebook is the place.

Of course, you have to play the game according to the rules. No commercial pitches are allowed to interfere with social interaction. If they did, Facebook’s popularity would suffer.

But there are ways. On Facebook fan pages, commercial content is allowed. And fans see fan page status updates. If fans interact positively with fan pages, they are more likely to be or become loyal customers.

The content must ideally be fresh, frequent, and interesting to fans. Contests, videos, quick polls, open-ended questions, comment sections, and games or puzzles may add spice to engage and increase the viewer’s attention. Ever been to a family-style sit-down restaurant with paper place mats? See a crossword puzzle on the back for kids?

You can also cross-pollinate on (or link to and from) other social media sites like Twitter or blogs, forums, or whatever is most appropriate to your business. And although one can put autoresponder widgets on fan pages, there would have to be good reasons to divert the viewer’s attention away from where-they’re-at on Facebook to busy email in-boxes.

Specials and sales can be for Facebook fans only, so there is usually no need to redirect to emails for those reasons. Become an affiliate of different products and services that may be of use to your niche or target market so that products and services complement each other and your product(s), if any, in particular.

Google Analytics and Paypal is now available on Facebook with obvious benefit to businesses with fan pages; Facebook is planning to have its own conversion tracking software and see Webtrends Facebook Analytics.

This statement is most famously attributed to Jesus, but he in turn was citing one of the books of Moses from centuries earlier.

In other words, the ideal isn’t new. Neither is business.

So this shepherd swapped a certain weight of clean raw wool for a farmer’s three bags of wheat. In this deal, did the farmer and the shepherd love the other as each loved him/herself?

Ideally, yes. In fact, ideally both are better off because of the trade: the shepherd needed wheat and the farmer needed wool. The shepherd couldn’t grow wheat as well as the farmer, or at least could not do both tasks as well as one, and conversely for the farmer.

What may come to mind, however, is when the deal goes sour. The sales profession, for example, has a reputation (earned or not) for giving a little less love that is expected in return.

Whether for seller or for buyer, the saying, “Love your neighbor as yourself” assumes self-love. You already love yourself.

And marketers have uncovered the fact that you buy things for your perceived best interest, not mine.

Marketers have uncovered the fact that all buyers (and sellers) are profoundly self-loving, self-interested, self-centered. Self-love is not always a problem, but usually it is when the deal goes sour.

Of course all that is needed for a business transaction to take place is for each party (shepherd and farmer) to perceive the deal is in his or her best interest. No love needed.

But in the long run, pure self-interest in business leads … well, if you want to go there, you won’t read this, will you? Nor will you make the effort to find out what people want to buy so that you can provide it for them. You won’t care about marketing or marketing research.

In the long run it is best to love your neighbor as yourself. In the case of marketing, find a need and meet it, with the customer’s best interests sincerely in mind. In the long run, even loving your neighbor may be in your own best interest … though it is a risk.

Such business ethics have helped the world go ’round for a very long time.

Peter Rubel

Something like ten percent of Twitter users produce ninety percent of the tweets (per a Harvard study), and something like sixty percent of users never return after their first thirty days. These two factors alone suggest the numerical impact of Twitter is far less than in the media hype.

Further, Twitter’s business-friendly policy and strong showing in peak earning-year age brackets have lent themselves to business-oriented tweets. Twitter policy and automation by users has led to a more liberal use of self-serving or business-oriented tweets than the non-tweeting majority may care to digest.

I generally assume that users who merely view tweets without engaging themselves further will soon lose interest or their commitment will be haphazard.

Of course, many do happily use Twitter socially or for specific and limited purposes, and the business uses of Twitter have proven to be an economic boon in these hard times. One-time users may return, and layoffs may drive more to the kinds of self-employment in which Twitter is helpful. But I expect the gross number of users will decline in coming months to some more realistic level, and perhaps more so when Google Wave arrives.

Twitter is a great tool, but it may be advisable not to make it one’s only marketing tool.

Peter Rubel

P.S. If Twitter is merged with Facebook or Google Wave, its attractiveness may be greater or more secure.

The importance of headlines can hardly be underestimated in the communications world. More people by far see your headlines than read what you wrote or published. Your content often either reaches an audience or is dropped into oblivion based on your headline.

Headlines are an opportunity to address the central theme that ties the whole together. Of the principles of rhetoric used today and stretching back thousands of years, one of the most powerful and accepted is this: “Say one thing.” Books, essays, speeches–all are most powerful and best remembered if organized and unified under one banner, one central theme.

But it would be a mistake to say that the headline must always be a statement of the theme. Rather, the wording of the headline is based on its purposes, among which are these:

1) It answers the question, “Why should the reader dig deeper?” (Or in the case of videos, the viewer–but we will generalize as “reader” henceforth.) The headline should always address the perceived self-interest of the reader. In some way, the headline should always promise a benefit.

2) It fairly represents the whole that follows. Hence the relationship between the headline and the central theme must usually be a close one. If there is a disconnect between the headline and the content, the reader will quickly become disillusioned by the lie … and move on. If the headline promises, the content must deliver.

3) It should qualify the reader. You are not writing for everybody in the world, but only for those with a felt need for your product/service (and money to buy it) or those who a looking for the information you have or those with whom you can develop some sort of relationship.

How you write your headline follows from its purposes.

1) Thus the headline should not be vague, but rather specific and concise.

Think of people scanning lists of email subject lines. If the first three to five words don’t grip the attention, the whole will be ignored. So don’t waste the first three words on qualifiers, fluff, prepositions, “a,” or “the” without good reason.

And beware of words and phrases with two meanings. Persons searching for the historical character “Bloody Mary” may be annoyed when they land on your article about “Bloody Mary,” the alcoholic beverage.

2) Use keyword search tools to match your headline with what people are searching for. Slight changes from “leave” to “leaving” can sometimes make a big difference in the volume of searches. Examples of such tools include adwords.google and wordpot (for free), tools.seobook and wordtracker (for a subscription).

And if your headline uses phrasing that is highly competitive, how will you stand out in the crowd? Keyword research can help identify similar wording that is not as competitive.

3) Work at the headline, and make necessary changes after you are finished editing the content. Prefer simple, short words over long, unusual words that convey the same meaning. Prefer words that strike at the emotional reasons behind what you are saying. Prefer the vivid to the mundane, the gripping to the bland, the visual to the abstract, the personal to the formal, the plain to the alliterative or to the obscure.

Your marketing results will be better if you understand the purposes of headlines and how to write them.

Peter Rubel

P.S. Since I wrote the above, I came across a little something on the topic that is too good not to include! Thank you Vicki Berry!