SCUBA Marketing Review #1

For my first review on the site here, I have decided to indulge in one of my pet peeves. Today, I’ll be reviewing The DEMA Show’s Facebook presence.

I love the DEMA Show, don’t get me wrong, I really wish I could attend this year. This is not intended as malice or ill-will, just an example that we can all learn more from, since I see the DEMA Show as a learning experience.

The DEMA Show

1. Here’s my pet peeve: this is a Profile, not a Page. On Facebook, Pages are for businesses and organizations. Profiles are for individual people. According to Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, “You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).” DEMA’s updates are advertisements because they’re promoting the DEMA Show, which is a commercial event. So technically, Facebook could suspend DEMA’s account, which would be bad.
2. This is a question, not necessarily a problem, but why did they pick “officialdemashowsite” as their vanity username? Usability experts have suggested for years going with the shortest, easiest to remember URL’s as possible so people remember them when they get home to their computer. I see that “dema” is taken, but “demashow” isn’t. “Officialdemashowsite” is both long and misleading, since some people may think that this is now the official DEMA show site and they should ignore the regular homepage.
3. Why is this party private? If you want people to know about what you’re talking about, let them see what you’re talking about. Because this is a Profile and not a Page, I have no access to see what DEMA is talking about unless I become their friend. I don’t mind doing that, but it makes the process slow (they have to approve me).

So what is the DEMA Show doing right on Facebook? I’m not sure yet, I haven’t been approved as a friend. As soon as they approve me, I’ll be able to share what the DEMA Show is doing correctly.

Reputation Management

This article is partially written as an experiment and an example of online reputation management. If managed correctly, you can know what people are saying about you as well as picking up business by paying attention to consumers out there. I know if I had mentioned Zillow in this blog post (my day job is in the real estate industry), David Gibbons would be by here within a few minutes to respond in the comments.  I’ll show you how to do this soon.