Did you get your free bagel on Facebook? A few weeks ago, Einstein Bros. Bagels offered a coupon for a free bagel to Facebook users who became a fan. All you had to do was become a fan of Einstein Bros. Bagels, print out the coupon, and take it to a store location to get your free bagel. The promotion received a lot of buzz and the Einstein Bros. Fan Page went from around 4,000 fans to well over 300,000 fans during this bagel giveaway.

Fast Company has a good article recapping the details of the promotion. According to the article, Einstein’s had “done extensive homework to ensure that this promotion is a success.” Just looking at the numbers it does look like it’s a successful promotion, but after looking a little closer I’m not so sure. Below are 3 reasons as to why I think this promotion was not entirely a success:

1. Several fans had difficulty printing the coupon (and I was one of them). It looks like they tried to reach out to most of the fans having trouble with the coupon, but I noticed several fans who never got help. The Discussion tab on their page had several entries where fans needed help.

2.  Some store locations weren’t accepting the coupons.

3.  Now that I’m a fan, what do I do now? Post giveaway, you’ve got the attention of 300,000 fans who are looking for some engagement and I’ve yet to see any communication from Einstein’s on how they plan on engaging the fans.

I’m an advocate of promotions that grow a fan base, but I think a crucial piece that is often overlooked is the “now what” factor once the promotion is over.  You’ve got to have a plan in place to interact and respond to fans or they could drop off or worse, turn on you. Social media is a commitment and not just a campaign.

I didn’t notice this until about halfway through the Super Bowl when Gary Vaynerchuk pointed it out. It seemed despite the millions of dollars big brands spent on Super Bowl ads this year, not one (at least that I saw) specifically directed people to their Facebook pages. Maybe it’s because my “day job” is now mostly consumed by social media, but this strikes me as incredibly obtuse. And possibly downright irresponsible on the part of their agencies.

At some point someone should’ve mentioned to Dennys, “Hey, you know you could probably spike your fan count by a couple MILLION in one night. Sound good?” That they didn’t either means a) nobody brought it up, or b) it was shot down by someone with no appreciation of the impact of such things. Or maybe they just don’t care about Facebook. I think a big factor in this is that “traditional” agencies still haven’t the first clue how to advise their clients on social media. This even includes a lot of digital agencies that only want to sell a client a website.

Throughout the game, I was reminded of when I first got into this gig. Around 1998 I built a website for a prominent local real estate agency in my town of Marietta, Ohio. At the time, I wasn’t doing anything very advanced, and the realty listings were powered by a third-party Perl script. I think I got a couple grand from the whole shebang, but it was 10 times better than what I was replacing.

Once the site launched, I made a lot of recommendations to them about how to promote the site. I pitched the usual stuff, but what I really hammered on was that they were insane if they didn’t put their web address on every single “for sale” sign on every property they had listed. They’d nod and acknowledge it was a good idea, but they never ever did it. I left Ohio in 2006, but my gut says they probably still haven’t taken my advice.

And here we are in 2010, the future, for pete’s sake, and clients are still compartmentalizing their media. This is our website and this is our broadcast ad, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Stunning.

It should be pointed out (as was pointed out to me), a couple spots included Facebook and/or Twitter logos. That’s great, but they were small and in the last tenth of a second of the commercial. Notice all Sears ads now have social media logos? WTF? Do you expect people to touch their television screen and go to your Facebook page?

What Denny’s (and others) should have done was had a clear social media call to action. Yes, we’re doing free breakfasts, but you have to become a fan on Facebook to get it. Or, tack on something extra, like become a fan and get a free cappuccino to go with that free breakfast. As of this writing, the Denny’s Facebook fan page only has 25,000 fans. In my experience with Facebook-based promotions (where Engauge helped take a brand from 900 fans to 100,000+), I’m sure they could’ve multiplied that by a factor of ten or more tonight, easy.

Not sure when these agencies (or brands) will get with the program. As much as Facebook makes me roll my eyes sometimes, I cannot deny it’s become a force to be reckoned with. And it won’t be long before no brand can afford to leave it out of their strategy.

That said, as long as there are agencies bungling through this, firms like Engauge will continue to show them up.

Back in December, I blogged about how Facebook was planning to have a major redesign to their website and it looks as though that day is finally here. According to Facebook, they started rolling out the the new design changes to 80 million users last night. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the lucky 80 million users (but somehow Jeff Hilimire was one of them). I got to take a look at his Facebook page, and although it will be a shock to most of the Facebook community at first, these changes will make “Facebooking” much easier.

Below are my top 3 things I like most about the new redesign:

1. Email Message Inbox – now you can check your messages and send messages without having to leave the homepage
2. Instant Messaging – your IM contact list will no longer be hidden in a popup menu in the bottom right corner of the page and has been moved to the left sidebar
3. Search – larger and more prominently placed search bar

What are your thoughts on the changes? Do you think it will improve your experience on Facebook?

It seems that every day that goes by, another one of the user interface developers that I work with talks about how Internet Explorer 6 must die. Granted, they have plenty of justification for why this browser should go away. For example, Internet Explorer (aka, IE6) is “ancient” — it was released in late 2001 (source). It has serious security flaws (source) and Microsoft has moved on to release IE7 and IE8.

And while plenty of social networking destinations, including Facebook, have stopped supporting IE6, the majority of users unfortunately can’t upgrade/replace IE6 because they have insufficient privileges on their machines/their company won’t let them upgrade (source). That’s a major “yikes” in my book.

Last week, six solid punches in one swing were taken at IE6. I am speaking about the announcement from Google that they’re planning to phase out support for IE6 (source). Google indicated that key functionality in Google Docs and [international] Google Sites will be disrupted starting on March 1, 2010. I applaud Google which owns 6 of the top 20 destination on the web and welcome them to the movement (source).

And while we really needed Google, the internet community can’t (for a second) think that we’ve won the fight. We need to convince several US-based companies, such as Microsoft (thank you @cubanx!), Yahoo! and Amazon, and Chinese companies, including Baidu, QQ.com and Sina.com.cn, to jumped on board. While it may feel like we’ve made progress, the short list below demonstrates that we still have a long road ahead of us.

Top 20 Companies that don’t support the IE must die movement:

1. Google (starting 1-Mar-2010)
   
2. Facebook (as of 24-Jul-2008)
   
3. YouTube (starting 1-Mar-2010)
4. Yahoo!
5. Windows Live
6. Wikipedia
7. Blogger.com (starting 1-Mar-2010)
8. Baidu.com
9. MSN.com
10. QQ.com
11. Yahoo! Japan
12. Twitter
13. Google India (starting 1-Mar-2010)
14. Google China (starting 1-Mar-2010)
15. Sina.com.cn
16. MySpace
17. Google Germany (starting 1-Mar-2010)
18. WordPress.com
19. Microsoft
20. Amazon.com

Over the past few months, I’ve been using FourSquare more regularly. FourSquare is a social networking service/game that you can use to track your whereabouts. It is typically accessed via an app on a mobile smartphone (Droid, BlackBerry or iPhone). The idea is that you earn points each time you arrive at a location and “check-in.” You earn more points for new places that you discover/visit vs. returning to your usual spots. But the points are virtual — they’re only a valuable way to tell who gets out who doesn’t. From my point of view, FourSquare is the perfect global economic stimulus solution — it encourages users to spend time exploring new places and money. What government or marketer wouldn’t love this thing?!

Well over the weekend, FourSquare sent me an alert that one my friends was at the Nike Factory Store, a nearby discount outlet. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to send him a note and ask him if there are any good deals on Nike running gear (I think that their Dri-FIT products are the ultimate but that’s a topic for another blog). While I could have called or sent him an email, I wanted to send him a text and ask but that feature wasn’t available. I swear that I looked EVERYWHERE and came up empty handed.

While FourSquare is a great tool that allows you to keep up with your friends, it is missing a texting feature that allows you to quickly “chat” with them. Text messaging is the preferred mode to communicate, especially when you’re mobile (source). If it was there, I would have another reason to get out and stimulate the economy.