Photo of WorldLink88 call center I managed

Many people have asked me for advise on setting up and operating a small business call center. That’s been my niche – always the small business advocate even with call centers. The industry has many descriptions of how many seats a small call center has to have. In my personal opinion based on experience, small means no greater than 100 seats. It’s a number that’s easy to manage even by yourself. Beyond that, I call it mid-sized all the way up to 999 seats where you now start setting up a more formal management team.

From the various informal Q&A sessions I’ve conducted over the past years, I decided to write down some of them in short snippets as my young and agile mind could recall.

Q: How much does it take to set up a call center?

This is always the first question asked when I’m with a group of entrepreneurs interested in operating a call center. There are two ways of setting up a small business call center: (1) buy, build and operate, and (2) lease everything and operate. The major difference is the amount of money you need to shell out. It’s like buying a house to live in and furnishing it with the fixtures you like; or renting one fully-furnished and making-do with what you have. So, if you have the cash to stay in business for more than year despite the usual income cycles of a startup business, then go for the “build and operate” model; this way, you spread your ROI which doesn’t force you to generate a high revenue. However, if you are not 100 percent sure of being in business for more than year, lease as much as everything you can. You can plan to move out in a year’s time to your newly built call center after accumulating enough cash from your income.

The frugal set up cost is about $1,500 per seat (or workstation), inclusive of every machine, furniture, fixture, painting, construction, etc. It costs more if you decide to use expensive but aesthetically good-looking materials. For leasing, expect to spend about $200 per seat, per month, but this not only includes everything you need to set up a seat but also operating expenses like rent and all utilities.

Q: How many seats should I set up or begin with?

Many people think that starting small and building or getting more seats later on is the ideal way to operate a call center. In fact, the magic number I’ve heard is five seats. This is actually unproductive and may pin down your hopes of growing in the long run. Many foreign clients want to outsource part of their business operations with no less than 10 seats. If you only had 5 or 10 seats, how would you determine if a new, prospective client’s program or campaign is better than the one you’re currently running? However, if you had 20 seats and was looking into a new campaign that required an initial requirement of 10 seats, you could test the new campaign with, say, 3 or 5 seats for a few days or a week to see if it fits the skill-set of your workforce and your revenue projections; and you can do this without any major effect on your existing client’s campaign. After a week, if the new campaign proves to be a whole lot better than the existing one, you’ve got a great problem: which do you choose? That scenario differs a lot if you only had 5 seats. With that little, it won’t make you grow – you might just get stuck where you are because you have no room to test and in effect grow your income stream to build or lease more seats.

The other opportunity when having the capacity to add more seats that in about 2 or 3 years time you’ve accumulated hundreds of seats performing beautifully, there’s a bigger chance for a foreign player to buy you out at a substantial amount. Many mid-sized call centers have been bought out in the past not only because of the operating size but the skill-set of the workforce and the types of campaigns and clients you maintain fit well into the foreign buyer’s business model.

Q: What kind of program or campaign should I get?

Most small business call centers run performance-based telemarketing campaigns. Though people always think that fixed-income, inbound-oriented campaigns like customer service and technical support are better, the reality is you have a better chance of making more money in performance-based campaigns. What people don’t realize is that inbound-oriented campaigns have more metrics that the call center must achieve; if you don’t hit your client’s metrics, you actually don’t get paid for those failures. Therefore, inbound-oriented campaigns are also performance-based. The major difference with inbound-orietned campaigns is you don’t get more money if you do better than the metrics. For telemarketing-oriented campaigns, the more you perform (i.e. selling a product), the more you earn. Whether the campaigns are easy lead generation or a full cycle, cold-calling up to closing the sale type, managing a call center that’s running sales-oriented campaigns is akin to operating a direct selling agency or group – it’s fun, involves lots of cheerleading and sales activities, employee tenure is based on pure numbers (no subjective evaluations required), and so on. And ordinary business-people and entrepreneurs understand selling a whole lot better than the intracies of inbound campaigns (what the heck is an AHT?)

Q: Where do I get campaigns?

One of your roles as a small business call center owner, delegated or done by yourself, is to keep looking for campaigns even if you’re happy running the current one – on a daily basis. Call center clients and campaigns come and go, much like any kind of business client who will favor you today but not for eternity. You have to be ready for that inevitable time when your client suddenly bolts out for varying good or bad reasons. So, business development is an ongoing, 54-week job for you; and the internet is aswarm with brokers and direct clients always looking for the right call centers to run their campaigns. A huge number of them cater to the outbound-base, sales-oriented campaigns.

When you find a prospect in the internet, establish the initial e-mail correspondence but find a way to talk to each other. Don’t e-mail each other to death. Verbal communication is always a great way of getting your gut to tell you “This is great!” or “Something’s wrong here.” You can find prospective clients and brokers in social networks like LinkedIn and its many industry-related groups, Yahoo! Groups, Google-ing specific clients and making the pitch, and so on. Like a good salesperson, ask your happy clients if they can refer you to their peers without sounding like it’s going to affect your current business relationship with them. Also market the past campaign experiences of your workforce even if they’re newly hired – these kinds of information give you tremendous weight in the type of campaigns you can get your hands on. For past and current clients, ask their permission to post their company names, logos and short testimonials on your website (yes, you definitely need one.) Alliances such as technology providers are also a good public relations items to post in your website, i.e. Dell for your computers, Cisco for your network, Microsoft for your O/S, etc. Whatever it takes to build credibility as immediate as possible for your startup call center.

Q: How do I recruit good people for my startup call center?

The fastest way to recruit is by advertising in the dailies but that’s way too expensive to do for a small business call center. Online job boards like Jobstreet.com and JobsDB.com provide less expensive ways (the last I paid for Jobstreet.com’s service was 5,000 Pesos per position). However, one online place I go to to recruit experienced agents, team leaders and supervisors is Friendster.com, not Facebook.com. Friendster.com allows me to search specific call center companies written in user profiles and message each of these people invidivually using Friendster.com’s messaging system. However, before you attempt to do this, make sure you complete your Friendster.com profile as expansive and detailed as possible because your recruits will first look at your Friendster.com profile before they answer you back. Don’t recruit blindly – place your full name, company name, full addrress, landline and mobile phone numbers, and e-mail address (for the latter, get a company domain name – only costs $11/year at GoDaddy.com and getting GMail to host your @domain.com e-mail account is free). There are hardly any agent in LinkedIn.com and way too many managers and expats who you don’t need for a small business call center. Facebook.com isn’t recruitment-friendly. Some Yahoo! Groups where call center agents congregate can also help you recruit good people.

Q: How much should I pay my new recruits?

I’ve managed telemarketing-oriented call centers and here’s my commonsense answer to this question. For me, the reason I pay someone a basic salary is for that person to hit his or her quota or functional objectives. Anything beyond that is commissionable, so to say. Now, remember that the Filipino culture has always been employee-oriented and fixed-income salary-based. So, the higher the basic pay, the more enticing you are to them. Match your breakeven levels and margins to the basic pay of your workforce. For example, if a basic pay of 13,000 Pesos equates to $30 per day, per seat, a breakeven level that includes everything from leases and amortization, up to the salaries of your supervisors and manager, add no less than 50% margin or $45 per day, per seat, that’s not bad considering that many telemarketing campaigns pay a lot more commissions than $45 on a per sale basis of their products and services. Your agents might think P 13,000 is low but the amount of sales they need to generate is also pretty low. Then, incentivize their pay with commissions beyond their quota. I usually reserve no less than 25% of margins above my $45 mark for workforce commissions; giving more becomes enticing for them. If you can show them exactly what you’re talking about on paper during the final interview of your selected few, I’m pretty sure you’ll be a great call center to work with. The bottom-line is not to be greedy and your workforce will reward you for doing so.

Now, if your call center is in the boondocks far away from the nearest 711 convenience store and accessible public transportation, you have to increase your basic pay to entice experienced people to come join you despite the location. To arrive at how much should higher pay be, go back to the equation above and determine your breakeven level, margins and the rest of the projections.

Q: Should I set up beside existing call centers or somewhere where I am the only call center in that area?

There are two things you need to consider when choosing your location: (1) available internet bandwidth, and (2) access to experienced people. For the second part, I think I’ve answered the solution to that if you are locating yourself away from major thoroughfares of public transportation (see “How much should I pay my new recruits?”) In addition, I made sure to write “experienced” because you will not have the time, money and patience to teach newbies how to sell. For the first consideration, you need to make sure that your internet service provider (ISP) in that area can bring you to the internet cloud in the smallest amount of hops as possible and in the most stable way it can. Try testing your ISP’s connectivity by using SpeedTest.net and connecting to a server in Los Angeles. If you have access to a VisualRoute software or a similar solution, the better for you to determine everything you need for your voice-oriented internet connectivity. Lastly, it’s inevitable that you provide the expected basic amenities of a call center office: unlimited hot and cold drinking water, microwave oven, a place to wash and store their eating utensils, clean restrooms, bright lighting, comfortable workstations, and a host of many minor things that make a difference.

So, location is dependent on internet access and access to experienced employees. Everything else is replaceable with something similar.

Q: What kind of technology should I get?

Technology here means the kind of tools your workforce will be using when calling or receiving calls. It is what makes your entire call center productive or otherwise. It only means that besides the skills of your workforce and the nice campaigns you’re able to get, technology is the third important piece of the trilogy of major factors that will make or break your small business call center.

Here’s where I become biased. I’ve experienced hands-on installation, implementation and operation of enterprise call center solutions, those that physically resides inside your call center network (also called “premise-based),” and I’ve used hosted call center solutions or technologies that are not residing inside your network but are accessible through the web. For a startup small business call center, I recommend going for the hosted solution because it is subscription-based – you lease the service rather than having to buy the software (which is usually expensive) and the required server-hardware (also expensive) plus the telecommunications costs of calling landline and mobile phones in the country to which you are subcontracted to call. As you work your way up to the comfort level of the day-to-day grind of call center operations, you begin to realize what it takes to make it successful and falling in love with what you do – or not. Leasing is an easy get-away solution just in case your call center operations withers away due to many reasons. Buying software and hardware is like buying a car – only after a few months, the purchase price depreciates plus the next buyer has to acquire the same maintenance agreement with the software and hardware providers you bought them from without any discounts.

Between the few players I’ve encountered in the market like Five-9, Drishti, Touchstar and many others, I’ve found Kunnect to be the most cost-effective solution that gives me about 80% to 90% of what I want (and need). Kunnect is also very user-friendly, meaning I didn’t have to hire expensive IT experts or engineers to manage it (like VicciDial and other Linux-based systems which are usually free but takes several IT people to manage it; and you can’t afford these people to be late or absent – so, you hire more as idle backup). It takes a 3-hour remote training session to learn administration and 5-minutes for the agents to understand it. With Kunnect, I was able to hire home-based Quality Assurance (QA) analysts; that’s less seats to pay for. I didn’t need a report analyst to generate half-day, end-of-day, end-of-week (and so on) reports I’m required to submit to my clients. Because Kunnect was simple to use, I sat down with my team leaders and supervisors for an hour and taught them how to manage the dialer and create the Excel-based client reports on a daily basis. If I was sick at home or vacationing in Boracay, all I need is internet access to monitor the call center, because it’s web-based. I can go on and on – the point is, it fit my bill. After 3 years of using it, Kunnect offered me to represent them in the Philippines and Asia. I accepted only because I knew how effective it was for a small business call center, I knew how to use it (even knew the shortcuts on an operational standpoint) and I just loved their solution. So, there – that’s why I wrote “Here’s where I become biased.”

If you have any further questions related to this post, please go to my Contact Page to write down your thoughts and I will try to answer it as soon as I can.

Photo by fbouly at Flickr.com

Everybody’s gotten into the social media bug. Even grandparents have asked help to be taught and grandchildren painstakingly trying their best. Moms and Dads have gone awry on the social media bug. What was once the private realm of teens and yuppies has now been invaded by their parents, Uncles and Aunts. If e-mails and websites successfully made the world a smaller place a decade ago, social media networking sites have compounded it o a two-block radius.

I asked the once-dominant Friendster people, a lot of who I talked to belong to the call center industry, if they had a Facebook account. “Of course, I have” was the common answer, succeeded by “Who doesn’t?” But the answer to my next question surprised me. When I asked which social media website were they spending more time interacting, and not playing games, they blushingly quipped “Friendster.” Why is that, I asked. “Because Mom and Dad are in Facebook!” came their funny reply. However, others also mentioned that they already created a great network in Friendster and it would just take too much time building the same network in Facebook. Yet, a resounding reason were the pictures – tons of it uploaded through the years that many have no idea how to move or copy it to Facebook that doesn’t require too much time and effort; not to mention the testimonials. Kids! Haha!

Of course, I only talked to a few who represents a few hundred thousand or so people working in the industry (versus 92 million population figure) whose “investment” of time and effort in perfecting their profile pages, posting their hundreds of pictures and keeping intact their (inbox) messages with Friendster is tantamount to building and maintaining a three story house through the years – you can’t easily sell and transfer all your treasured belongings to a new abode overnight. I looked at Merriam-Webster for the synonyms of investment and I found beleaguerment, leaguer, siege, baptism, inaugural, inauguration, induction, initiation, installment (also instalment) and investiture. I also found related words such as containment, confinement, segregation, enlistment and enrollment. So much for the dictionary.

As we invest money in our home and family, transportation, career, probably our own business, education of the kids and more, so have we also started to invest time and effort in our preferred social media websites. I’m talking about our personal knowledgebase of interests, notes, shared items like links and pictures, likes, messages and comments, social groups and many more in Facebook. If you began building your Facebook social profile in 2006 like I did, you must have accumulated close to 5 years of so much “stuff” (and I can’t find any better word to describe it) inside that now-popular online community. You dread moving out of it and into a different one because it will take so much of your time or the next big thing in social media networking is something so enticing you can’t resist just moving into it and just leaving everything in Facebook.

Here’s my million Dollar yet generally-speaking observation to social media investment of my friends, family and acquaintances: the way they invest their time and effort into Facebook is almost the same way they value money and how they invest it. Think about it – If you’re a miser, you probably don’t have that much friends in your online social network and are cautious posting and sharing stuff. If you’re a spendthrift or worse, a squanderer, chances are you have tons of friends in Facebook and post, play games so much and share stuff without thinking about future repercussions. Though “character” also flows naturally in the way you use Facebook – who you are in real life or imagine yourself to be in real life is who you personify in Facebook – but that’s another story. (In fact, character is the main reason why some of you are not even using Facebook – LOL!.) What I’m expressing is putting financial investment and social media investment in a similar or equal reaction to how you conduct yourself with one and the other.

Photo by dborman2 at Flickr.com

Now, I wrote “generally speaking.” The paragraph above is not an absolute statement. There are exceptions to my generalization like celebrities, politicians, and every person who is widely known to a mid-sized or large community or the general public, and are always much talked about. There are always exceptions to many rules in life and this is one of them in my topic.

But it’s funny to note the parallelism of investing your money and investing your stuff in Facebook; and notice I only touched on the extremes: the miser and the spendthrift. I know many of us consider ourselves in the middle – not a cheapskate or extravagant. Just about right. If that’s the case, then good for you! You may be doing a good job in both your personal finance and your investment in Facebook without going to the extreme of things. And if your character is about as good as the good cop on television goes, then that added factor makes you use Facebook more wisely than many others. Lucky you!

“What’s the point in all these?” Simply, realize it; then, adjust and change the way you do things to your liking. Plan how you’re going to use Facebook the way you plan (or want to plan) to use your money. If impulse buying is a hard habit to break, then impulse posting, impulse sharing, impulse uploading of photos and everything else you do in Facebook follows your style when you go shopping. If you spend too much money on big ticket items that you can’t even afford, chances are you’re spending too much time on Facebook, too; time that has been allotted and should be devoted to your profession and your family. It’s “sky’s the limit” on many other parallelisms to how you invest your money and the same way you use Facebook.

The good changes you do in the way you invest and use your money will most definitely trickle down to the way you invest and use your time – and stuff – in your online social networking. If you need to schedule your expenses, then so must you schedule using and the way you use Facebook. Real life and virtual life do mix a lot today, and they’re one and the same – like it or not. It’s your life; and with your God-given “free will” and your faith in Him and your family’s support, you can “realize it and change it.”

Money and Facebook – how we (generally) use one is (usually) the same for the other.

Whoda thunk it?

Many people say that online social networking sites like Facebook are not for them. From the many similar remarks I’ve heard, either they’re happy with their current networking site or they think they’re too old or busy to enter social networks. On the latter response, I remember a TV episode of “NUMB3RS” where the dad of Charles Eppes asked his son for his help in creating a profile in Facebook. He realized some of his (old) friends were in Facebook and wanted to join in. The following day, he was having coffee with a long, lost buddy.

But long before I discovered online social networks, I started my web-based networking with a bunch of high school batchmates using e-Groups. In its heyday, Yahoo bought the company and incorporated it into the Yahoo portal as Yahoo Groups, which continues to exist until today. Since its inception, I’ve joined about 50 online groups and also created 8 groups with 5 still very active until now. Then and until now, this was one of the best online social networking using the web as the medium to create conversations (more about “conversations” below). In those days, every article I read said that about 90% of the people who go online use it for reading and writing e-mails (and 10% also surf the net.) Up to now, many have still maintained the group conversations in Yahoo Groups because some who use the internet in the workplace cannot access the popular online social networking sites. Many corporate servers block these sites.

I remember joining Ryze, one of the first online business networking sites before creating a Friendster account in 2002. By 2006, I joined Facebook at the behest of my daughter because I wouldn’t create an account in MySpace which was the first online social network site she joined at age 11. I was also a Plaxo member long before it reinvented itself to a social-cum-business networking site using the brand name “Pulse“. I loved Plaxo because it incorporated an e-Card system, allowing me to be reminded of birthdays and use Plaxo to send them online birthday cards. (Part of my personal motto was “B.M.W.” which means “Birthdays, Marriages and Wakes.” These are the three important dates in a person’s life. When you remember these or are even physically present, that person will usually make you a friend for life.) With much convenience, Plaxo also sent e-mail messages to people I added in my address book to confirm their contact information and which also invited everyone to join Plaxo, which many did. The last good thing about Plaxo was when my Microsoft Outlook crashed, wiping out all my contact data. Through Plaxo, I was able to recover all of them. Then, the last online networking site I registered with was Linked In. In all, I’ve been maintaining only three online social networks — Friendster, Facebook and Linked In. Let me tell you why…

Friendster – www.Friendster.com.

Friendster.com

From the many articles I’ve read about Friendster, they’ve become very popular in Asia, particularly the Philippines and Filipinos around the world. When I was working for a call center in South America, I created one under the name “Ralph Pearson” thinking that I would be using it to network with the U.S. (because it was created in Mountain View, CA and its inital market was North America). Eventually, I shifted to my own name and have been using it since.

I started using Friendster as a networking tool with many of my friends and acquaintances. However, if I were to use this for business networking, I needed to create a profile that depicted who I really was. I also made sure that pictures also depicted my family (to show a semblance of family and balance in life) and some corporate event (lunch meetings or so). My written profile also had to be complete. The important thing was adding stuff in the interests and hobbies portion — you’ve got to be consistent to what you write and who you really are when they do meet me. If you golf, make sure it’s true. If you love New Wave as a genre of music, you’ve got to be prepared to have a conversation solely on that topic. So, make sure your profile is as honest as possible, not just “make believe.”

Going to the Philippines (from Canada) to start my entrepreneurial stint in the call center industry, I was able to recruit hundreds of prospective call center representatives or agents using Friendster. I would search using company names I knew that employed the same profile of agents as I was seeking or using keywords associated to the industry or interests that was common to my search. Mind you, Friendster only allows 50 messages per 24-hour day. So, I would continue recruiting in Friendster everyday for about 3 to 4 weeks and get to hire 20 or so agents. One thing you should be careful is what you type in the text of your private message. Knowing that I was recruiting, I made sure I mentioned details of the compensation and benefits package, company name, location of the call center, if it was a start-up, a sentence about the vision-mission phrase (not statement) and a complete cadre of contact information that allows them to call or personally visit the center. The shorter but very detailed and straight to the point your message is, the better it is.

I would guess about 70% of those who I sent Friendster private messages replied back, even negatively but thanked me nonetheless for inviting them. Like I expected, many referred back to my profile page (which was not set in Private mode and thus allowed anybody to look at it and message me), checking out to see if I was legitimate and, most importantly, if I were the real thing. In the end, I also became online social friends with some people I messaged with.

I used to ask all the call center people I met or worked with if they had a Friendster account. 99% of them resoundingly affirmed my question. This only means Friendster is one of the best “free” medium to recruit people. The huge percentage of its global demographics belongs to the 18-35 yeras of age, the prime, young age of entering the corporate world and going up the business ladder. So, besides recruiting agents, I also invited supervisors and managers, too. This is where I invited, met, interviewed and eventually hired my Operations Manager, Clarice Estrella, for Workspresso Inc. in June of 2008. She still works with us up to now.

Linked In -www.linkedin.com.

Though I was with Ryze for some time, I moved to Linked In because it had better GUI (graphical user interface) and was far easier to use. Within my network, Linked In would allow me the basic activities (adding people in their networks) and that of the groups I belonged to. Like many, I started linking with friends and acquaintances before I trekked to new ones.

Linked In is not my free recruitment tool for entry level or supervisor-level professionals because many that I’ve networked with are managers, entrepreneurs and professionals. Statistically, Linked In’s demographic data rate 49% belonging to the 26-35 years old and 24% in the 36-45 years old range, as compared to the younger crowd in Friendster, with 39% in the 18-25 years old bracket and 36% among the 26-35 years of age.

Leaving a marketing phrase in your Linked In “Status” isn’t going to work. I’ve tried that. You’ve got to go out of your way and find those likely candidates one at a time. There are good search parameters in Linked In that you can use for free, more powerful than the social networking sites. You may leave marketing messages within the groups that you join but many of them do not accept such types of text. If ever they do, my thinking is it wouldn’t even make a dent in interest, readership or eyeballs.

I got many messages from people who were inviting me to resell or market their products or services. The norm was to disregard these messages but, being the networker that I am, I responded cordially even if I was turning them down, but opened the door to other products or services they would have in the future that will be a match to what I did and, of course, letting them also know what I do. There have been plenty near misses on the course of these interactions but a few networks are now on the drawing board pending contracts and agreements between us.

I was also surprised to get positive responses from people who worked with venture capital companies when I peddled the idea (yes, it was only an idea) of a business and I needed seed money to make it work. I probably sent around 30 private messages and got 10 positive responses and 5 asking for more detailed information. Wow! But mind you, it’s still about the good basics of positive correspondence. You’ve got to edit and re-edit your message to perfection.

I created my first group in Linked In called “Call Center Directory Philippines” which now has 164 members since August 10, 2008 — without marketing this group to anyone in my offline and online social or business networks, not a single e-mail to join the group. So, that’s about 18 people joining the group per month on their own accord. Good or bad? I really can’t answer you there. I haven’t done anything other than manually accept the registrations to the group, adding each one to my own Linked In network and welcoming them to the group. I know in time I will find the right idea to use this channel but for now, it remains an open group for anyone with common interests in the call center industry in the Philippines.

Facebook -www.facebook.com.

Statistically, Facebook boasts 185 million subscribers worldwide. The United States has 58 million, Canada has 11 million and the Philippines with 1.17 million. With the latter, 61.3% are female, 40.6% are 18-24 years old, 32.2% are 25-34 years old, 10.9% are 35-44 years old and (surprise) 10.5% are 14-17 years old.

My daughter was 11 years old when she told me to create a Facebook account. At her behest, I did and since I knew the general functions of an online social networking site, I created a profile using the settings and texts that came from my Friendster and Linked In accounts. At first, I was just socializing with many of the people I added to my network belonging to those I met every week or so. I probably logged into Facebook once a week as Frienster was still more popular with the people I worked with.

A few months after I started Workspresso Inc., I went back to Facebook and looked around, wondering how I could use the site as a way to market my company and the things we did. At first, I only sent private messages, much like what I did with Friendster and Linked In. Lo and behold — I usually got no reply. “Hmmm… what’s up with Facebook?” I wondered.

I looked at “Groups” and “Pages” and created my first groups, “JustGo Philippines” and “The Travel Outlet Philippines”, as I was part of both companies — the former as a Project Director and the latter as a Consultant. JustGo Philippines has 189 members and Travel Outlet Philippines with 274. It was probably easier for others to invite their friends to the Travel Outlet since it was also easy to understand that it was a travel agency company promoting itself in Facebook; while JustGo Philippines, a travel portal still in the works, was harder to understand.

However, this March or April, Facebook reengineered its Pages to look more like a wall of streaming messages from its members — or “Fans” as they called it — and I’ve seen many groups trying to switch its members to its page. Egad! Asking people to transfer or move is not going to be easy. I haven’t done so with the groups I created as I do not know how to ask the members and why should they move or transfer. Until I get a “blinding glimpse of the obvious” (famous line from the book “Barbarians at the Gates”) will I attempt to do so.

Which only means that if you intend to do marketing in Facebook by inviting people to be part of your group, “Pages” is a more productive way of doing so than “Groups.” I just hope Facebook has some undercover plan to reinvent “Groups” to something equal or better than “Pages.”

I experimented with “The Travel Outlet Philippines” and sent two global messages on travel packages. For one, I got about 20% inquiring more about it and 3% purchasing for the product. The other package wasn’t that all enticing and I didn’t get a single customer.

I’ve also joined (and unjoined) several groups and pages in Facebook that provide me with information of my interest (and disinterest). There are social groups like “Barangay Merville” which represents 440 people who used to or still live in the gated subdivision I grew up and are now scattered all over the globe. Target, the retail company, is another group and page I belong to and just read how Target hired an experienced Facebook marketer named “AKQA” to help them re-do the things they were doing (see Article).

I’ve created 4 “Pages” in Facebook but have not yet marketed these pages. I also linked my blog to one of the pages that allowed an automatic way of creating content (called “Notes”) in the page and informed the members of the page that a new “Update” was available for viewing at the page. So far, I’m not at the 100 mark of members for that page.

In Summary

So, besides your usual e-mail and existing website, the online social networking does work to a certain degree. Of course, overdoing things (messaging your members everyday) will likely be a downfall to you honest intent of good information and knowledge about you, your organization and the things you do (or sell). You’ve got to be careful in how you present and market yourself in online social networks.

It's all about "conversations."

I remember reading about the internet and know that the idea of the market in the olden times as the best description to how people and organizations should treat it. Historically, markets (as in wet markets or dry markets) were the center stage of a region where people come to buy and sell. However, the other thing about markets during those times were the travelers who would come by and visit the market to tell people of their stories from regions afar, besides selling or trading their wares. In that era and the concept of the internet today which no one in the world owns (just like a public market), what makes it exist and profit are the “conversations” and “interactions” of people among themselves. By definition, a conversation is an oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas between two or more people. The moment you kill the conversation, you lose the people who may one day buy or sell with you.

Most corporate websites desist from allowing visitors (and even members) to have a conversation with them like leaving a remark or comment on the web page, thinking that many would just curse, cuss or humiliate them. So, they create their websites looking exactly like a catalog. It’s like allowing your prospective market to come in to your store but putting packaging tape on their mouths before they enter. Some may actually buy or transact with you because they need you and your product or service and there’s no one around to provide them the same thing. However, a big percentage would simply move on.

Think about it! Do you think 80% of mankind are evil? Which means everything that you do is under that impression? Don’t penalize the many because of what a few will do. Allow people to have a selection of ways (not just a toll free number) to have a conversation with you through your online storefront. Respond and reply back all the time, even if they cuss. You can opt to remove the bad messages anytime. You can also screen remarks but make sure it’s posted on your site immediately, not days later.

Online social networks and websites are all about “conversations.” And the thing about it is they also must be “Free, Fast and Forever.” To remove one’s ability to start a conversation on the web means killing the only means your site will succeed. The market is “people” and people want to have a meaningful conversation.