Knowmad Blog

As Facebook and social media have become more prominent in our daily lives, businesses have been moving into the social media arena in search of customers. At Knowmad, we’ve explored Facebook and decided it’s not the ideal avenue for us but it’s not to be ignored.

Why? Customers and prospects typically don’t look for us on Facebook because we sell to businesses (B2B), not consumers. However, a company or individual could create brand confusion by presenting themselves as Knowmad on Facebook. In addition, we might later find a use for Facebook in our marketing and we don’t want to lose the opportunity to claim our brand name.

How did we decide on the use of Facebook for our brand? I’ve included a few questions in this post that helped us evaluate if Facebook is right for our business. Hopefully, these questions can help you start the conversation for your business.

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Last week, Kmart and Sears Holding Co. came up in my news reader, announcing kmartdesign.com and other web initiatives by Sears Holding Co. to boost the Kmart brand performance and sales.

Kmart isn’t a place I shop, which isn’t saying a lot because I’m not a big in-store shopper. I can’t say I’ve even been on the Kmart website until reading this news nugget. The brand doesn’t strike me as modern, so it made me curious about how the company is using the web and what results they might achieve.

After a quick search, I found that Kmart has several initiatives on the web including a mobile app (kmart2go), mygofer.com and kmartdesign.com. Business strategy and the web are two of my favorite topics so I began to wonder…

What can we learn from Kmart?

Here’s what stands out to me about Kmart’s web strategy, none of which is surprising and gives us a great example to look at for web strategy.

• Clearly define business goals
• Segment and target specific audiences.
• Offer presentation formats specific to the target audience
• Use Social Media to augment existing marketing, PR and sales strategies

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You might have seen a privacy alert message recently when logging into Facebook, as new privacy controls were released this past Thursday.

Once you click ‘Continue’ you’re presented with a slightly confusing screen to configure new privacy settings. Your old defaults are unselected by default.

Upon seeing the new screen, I found myself just accepting the new settings and then refining the privacy controls using the ‘Settings’ link. Several settings were set to ‘Friends of a Friend’ and ‘Everyone’ where I didn’t want this type of access. I found the most important settings under the ‘Profile’ and ‘Search’ link.

Rafe Needleman has written an easy to read article on refining Facebook privacy settings on his CNET blog.