Bank of America's Google+ Page

The bank America loves to hate got another slap in the face, although this time it wasn’t over debit card fees.

Shortly after Google announced that businesses could have a Google+ page, which is the equivalent of a Facebook Business Page, some scallywag jumped Bank of America’s claim and created an unflattering – yet amusing – page.

Funny pictures of former CEO Ken Lewis, a tagline proclaiming that “We took your bailout money and your mortgage rates are going up,” and a post about a company foreclosure party in house #2340087 could be found on the page before it was taken down.

Screen shots of the page showed that it already had 550 followers and 342 +1′s.

Whether you have sympathy for Bank of America or not, you have to admit that whoever did this was pretty damn creative. And sneaky, for apparently they even caught the almighty Google by surprise.

The question needs to be asked, “Why didn’t Bank of America claim their Google+ page as soon as the announcement was made that they were available?” Now I’ll ask you a similar question, “Did you claim your company’s Google+ page yet?”

About a year ago I wrote a post about a friend of mine who found out that the .co variant of their domain name was hijacked by a competitor. Sadly, she wasn’t aware this was happening and after I alerted her of it, a few phone calls to lawyers resolved the issue. But how many sales were lost because of this? It’s pretty easy to be typing in a domain name and accidentally leaving off the “m” in .com. The unscrupulous use this to their advantage, as was done here.

If you’re doing business online, it’s important that you protect your brand by not only registering the different domain name extensions for your business, but claiming your company name in Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other social media sites.

Bank of America isn’t going to suffer any damage due to the bogus Google+ page, but a small business like yours could. Imagine what a disgruntled customer could do if given the opportunity. The time you spend running your business is way too important to be spent running defense because of a simple oversight on your part.

So, did you claim your company’s Google+ page yet?

If you haven’t registered all the available domain name extensions for your business, what are you waiting for? Don’t get caught off guard when you find out that someone is squatting on a domain that is rightfully yours. Network Solutions is offering big savings on domain registrations, click here for the deals.

If your business doesn’t have a custom Facebook Business Page, web.com will build you one for free. Click here to learn more about this promotion.

Take 350 million Facebook users and combine them with a promotion to give away one-million-dollars worth of American Express Gift Cards then stand back and watch the latest promotional train-wreck.

The package delivery company, FedEx, teamed up with American Express to promote “Small Business Saturday” – a day set aside to encourage people to drop the big-box stores for a day and shop at their local small businesses.

To get the word out about “Small Business Saturday,” FedEx offered their Facebook fans the opportunity to score one of one-million $25 American Express Gift Cards. All someone needed to do was visit FedEx’s Facebook page at 1pm ET today (November 1) and register for the free card.

Sounds simple enough, right?

1pm came and went. No gift cards but plenty of complaints.

“FedEx please post help! Been trying since this went live and still blank page…help!!”

“Rather disappointing!! I have been on here for 51 minutes and could never get the form to load, it just keeps giving me a blank page “

“SCAM! Cause this actually makes me want to never use FedEx again.. Shame they are a big corporation and can’t get someone to run their web system and not cause such a mess up..”

“In all fairness, why don’t you just give up, let us go back to work, and try again same time tomorrow?”

“Congrats to the ones who say they got one…It will not load after 22 billion page refreshes. I could have used the gift card, but its not worth wasting more of my time trying to get thru. Way to go FedEx…:(“

“Well i have to go now.  Been at it for 50 min. I got the page but would not load. Oh well thank you anyway FedEx. It’s like iIsay it’s like playing the lottery you just might win, be thankfull they gave us a chance to even try!!!”

“FedEx just LOST a shipper – Im going to use UPS now…. False advertising is messed UP !!!”

Shortly after 1pm FedEx posted a note which said, “Hi all – we’re loading the registration for the Amex gift cards now – you will see the form very shortly – sorry for the delay!”

Then around 1:30pm signs of the promotion began to appear and several people responded with glee that they were finally able to claim their free gift card.

“I finally got it! Don’t give up!!”

“I finally got one…. alot of refreshing….”

“Mines on its way already,, woohoo….. lol”

By 2:10pm FedEx posted another update to their wall, “We are still working through technical difficulty in loading the American Express gift card form. We are working to resolve this issue and hope to have the registration form up and running soon.”

Finally at 2:19pm, one-hour and nineteen minutes late, FedEx posted that the technical issues were fixed and the promotion is live. “We’re very sorry for the delay, but the Small Business Saturday $25 Amex Shop Small Gift Card registration is live now!

Then within minutes, like a Priority Overnight package zipping down a shipping belt in Memphis, the promotion was over.

“That stinks, by the time the page was up, after trying for an hour, the cards were all gone! Unlike…”

“Ran out seconds after it went live? Not good…”

“I am more than disappointed. I struggled for 3 hours just to get a form to load and when I did, they were all gone. This was my one chance to buy gifts as I am still unemployed. I feel like the butt of a practical joke. “

“You have got to be kidding me. The system was down more that it was up. Now it seems that they are all out when I did get the tab to show.”

So what went wrong?

Much like the horror stores of websites going down on Cyber Monday, it seems FedEx and/or American Express did not anticipate the amount of web traffic this promotion would bring. I find that hard to believe, but certainly plausible. While waiting for the page to load, my browser seemed to be having problems connecting to http://amexgiftcards.stuzo.com/ a site managed by the Philadelphia advertising agency – Stuzo – who lists American Express as one of their case studies.

A high-profile promotion like this should have started on-time and the technology behind it should have been more than able to accommodate the demand that a million-dollars worth of gift cards would bring.

Unfortunately, for FedEx, the damage is done.

Pull a boner like this on a social media site and you’re bound to be doing damage control for a long time.

Of course there is a lesson to be learned here. Never underestimate the power of social media and the technological power needed to pull off a successful promotion.

I got my gift card. Maybe I should send it back with a note, “Use this to upgrade your webserver.”

FAIL!

FAIL!

30 Minutes Later

Score!

With the launch of Google+ I got to thinking.

Will this be the Facebook killer that many are waiting for?

Will it leave the social-sphere quicker than a church full of Catholics before the second collection?

Or will it hang around on life support just to piss off Zuckerberg?

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that I’m feeling cluttered.

Let’s take a look at my social meanderings:

Twitter – Like many I’ve been there, done that and have moved on. The 140-character universe quickly turned into a dumping ground full of get-rich-quick tweets, religious quotations, celebrity droppings and other assorted dung. It’s still popular and the folks in charge keep trying to make it more attractive, but isn’t it all just like putting lipstick on Sarah Palin?

Foursquare – My mayorships are plenty, but my reign is coming to an end. Foursquare was the hip way to “check-in” to your favorite places, earn useless badges, and become top-dog at places you frequent the most. The aforementioned Facebook, more or less knocked these guys down a peg by releasing their own version of the “check-in” which I quickly moved over to.

Classmates.com – That was so 1999. Do I really want to connect with people I haven’t seen, or care to see, since high school and college? Nope. Next!

Google Buzz – The big G’s first attempt at social networking. I never got into it, and apparently it wasn’t just me. Those that remember the Buzz recall it for being somewhat of a failure.

LinkedIn – Who doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile? Guess you have to if you’re among the ranks of the employed and want to show off all your fancy degrees and letters after your name which don’t amount to a whole heck-of-a-lot. I have a LinkedIn profile. I’m connected to a bunch of people I don’t even know and log-in about once a month. This attempt at social networking is more about job hunting. If I want to be bored I’ll watch a golf game on TV or log on to LinkedIn.

MySpace – Ok, I admit it. I was on MySpace once or twice. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I’m just not hip. I didn’t get it years ago, and I still don’t get it today. Unless I’m 16, like the singer Pink and have more holes in my body than nature intended, this ain’t for me.

So what about Facebook? To me, Facebook is to social media as Amazon.com is to eCommerce. When the dust settles and the only two living things left on planet Earth are Cher and a cockroach, Facebook and Amazon.com will be there for them.

Google+ may get some adoption, but Facebook users aren’t going to jump ship. As humans we tend to stick with things we’re comfortable with. Facebook is like a hot bowl of chicken soup Mrs. Goldberg dropped off when she heard I was sick. Google+ is like horrible tasting cough syrup the doctor sent over.

I was excited to get a Google+ invite, but after a few days of poking and prodding, I’m sticking with what I like and know best. After all, when I want to thank Mrs. Goldberg for the soup, chances are she’s on Facebook.

I’m at Starbucks on 45th Street.

I’m at McDonalds on Main Avenue.

I’m at the Rental Car Center at LAX.

These are examples of Tweets and Facebook posts from dedicated users who like to share their every second of being with their friends and fans.

I used to be one of them. That was until a colleague said to me one day, “you’re crazy for letting everyone know where you are, what if someone…” that’s when I stopped her. I didn’t want to hear how the sentence finished, but I got the point.

I used BrightKite on my iPhone to “check-in” at different locations and my “check-in” would then be plastered on my Twitter and Facebook pages. The purpose was to alert others in my circle of friends where I was in an attempt to meet up or meet new friends. After all, this is what the “social” in social media is all about, right?

Jeff Stolarcyk, a member of the Solid Cactus Internet Marketing team did a blog post about a relative newcomer on the social media scene, foursquare.com. Foursquare is one of these “check-in” type sites which bills itself as “a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things.” Quite a concept if you understand it, right?

In a nut-shell, you load foursquare on your phone, you check-in at these various locations, meet friends and fellow foursquare-ers, and climb the social media ladder in foursquare as you visit new places or return to ones previously visited. An interesting and fun concept. If you’re a business owner, you can offer incentives for foursquare users to visit your location and capitalize on this new and emerging market segment.

While those of us who are into this kind of stuff become more and more connected, privacy becomes an issue. If you don’t mind letting people know that you’re at Mel’s Diner five nights a week for dinner, go for it. If you’re somewhat hesitant about sharing your location with your friends, you can always either not “check-in” or do so in “stealth mode.” Then if you’re completely freaked out by the openness of social media, this stuff just isn’t for you.

It’s interesting to see just how transparent people are willing to let their lives become. I can see some things happening that could prove to be interesting:

Diane: Hey Jack, what did you do last night?

Jack: Oh, nothing. I sat at home and watched “Dancing with the Stars”.

Diane: Really? Then why did your Facebook page say you were at the night club?

Jack: Um, yeah, well. Gotta go!

Social media is changing the way we go about our lives, we’re becoming more interactive. Whether that’s good or bad is yet to be determined, but one thing is for sure, as we open our every move to more and more eyes, we have to be more and more cautious about our surroundings.

Jeff Chirico from WBRE TV called me early Monday morning. He was doing a story on the biggest shopping day of the year for online merchants – Cyber Monday.

While Black Friday may be the big one for brick-and-mortars, Cyber Monday has gained a reputation as the holy grail for eCommerce store owners and it gains in popularity each year. Jeff turned to Donna Talarico and myself to get the skinny on how social media is being used by both consumers and businesses alike.

Granted not everyone has embraced social media to the extent that you and I have (right!!!), but those who did got to take advantage of some great Twitter, Facebook and MySpace only deals! I hope you were one of them.

Thanks to Jeff and the WBRE crew for thinking of us!

Jeff Chirico from WBRE

SHAVERTOWN, LUZERNE COUNTY –The internet was also very busy with shoppers. Today is Cyber Monday. Tonight, consumer reporter Jeff Chirico tells us how bargain hunters can score by using social media.

If you’re shopping online this Cyber Monday, you’ll find deals on almost every retailers website. But to find some of the best sales this year –you may have to go social. Scott Sanfilippo, co-founder of Solid Cactus says “social media has taken on a whole new dimension in marketing. Years ago it was print ads, radio, email marketing. Now it’s all changed.”

Solid Cactus is an ecommerce developer. Sanfilippo says retailers are jumping on the social media bandwagon because it reaches hundreds of millions of potential customers for relatively little money. A lot of retailers are taking advantage of Facebook, they’re using twitter to promote deals and offers.” Donna Talarico, Solid Cactus interactive media specialist, says “they’ll put links to Cyber Monday deals, coupon codes that are exclusive to Twitter. Toshiba for instance is giving away three free laptops on Cyber Monday only on Twitter. It’s a way to boost its base of followers. Even small retailers like Blair’s Candy from Altoona, is tweeting its holiday discounts.

So if you’ve never used social media, where do you start? Sanfilippo says the quickest and easiest site is Twitter. It takes just a minute to create a username and password and another few seconds to follow your favorite retailers.” Talarico says one of the biggest things on twitter is people using hash tag, the number sign and Cyber Monday, so if you do that search on Twitter you can find real time Cyber Monday deals.”

And experts agree –this new form of marketing to holiday shoppers won’t disappear once Santa returns to the North Pole.