In my recent article, Facebook’s Timeline: Seductive and Dangerous?, I criticized Facebook’s forced march to Timeline and, in particular, the way in which Facebook is seducing consumers to use Facebook apps that will log their (and their friends’) every action. I have no interest in switching my personal Facebook page over to the Timeline view and I dread the day when I will be “Timelined.” However, it’s part of the human condition to enjoy reminiscing and “strutting our stuff,” so, when the time comes that I have to create a Facebook Timeline, I may find myself getting carried away.
However, I can report that using Timeline to “tell the story” of a business is a lot of fun, and I think it can be quite an effective marketing/communication tool. I can report that it is also an incredible time sink! Don’t tackle this unless you’re prepared to lose a week out of your life!
Updating our “Customers.com Company” Facebook Page
Our company is officially 27 years old, but it existed before that as a department within my father’s company, Seybold Publications, which was founded in 1971. So there’s quite a bit of history to chronicle. Our history is also the history of the evolution of technology—as we all moved from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to LANs to open systems to distributed computing to internet computing and to mobile. It’s also interesting to see how customer experience and customer co-design have permeated our consulting projects throughout the years.
Why Customers.com? We chose to use the Customers.com brand name a few years ago in creating our Facebook page as part of our overall brand strategy. Right now, we’re Patricia Seybold Group, “the customers.com company.” Soon we’ll become Customers.com “brought to you by” The Patricia Seybold Group. We probably SHOULD have a Patricia Seybold Group Facebook page, too, but if we do, we’ll just redirect folks to this main page.
We’re not Facebook application developers, nor Facebook experts, so we decided to keep it simple. We are taking a very straightforward chronological approach and just filling in our Timeline. We’re adding the major milestones in our company’s history, which has been kind of fun, trying to remember and reconstruct.
Two types of milestones bring me special pleasure:
1. Employee Milestones. Since we’re a small company, I decided to add the date that each employee joined the company as a milestone. That gives us all the opportunity to reconnect and for clients to see the faces they remember interacting with. (It has been fun tracking down all our alumni!)
2. Consulting Client Milestones. Again, as a small company, each year, we take on a handful of major consulting projects. It’s fun to remember whom we worked with, what we did together, and some of the more interesting challenges. For us, many of our customer relationships revolve around our consulting projects. That’s how we got to know many of you. Of course, we’re not divulging any confidential information—just saying that we worked together. But, if you’re not comfortable being listed as a client, let us know.
What Kinds of Posts? Since we publish new articles and blog posts each week, we have no trouble coming up with posts. Each article/blog post is a “status” update on our Timeline.
Our history is also YOUR history—throughout these three decades, we’ve had the opportunity to work with many of you. So, as we retrace our past, we remember whom we met and interacted with that year, which causes us to stop and track people down. We’ve been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn, which I’ve found to be the place that most of us seem to keep our professional whereabouts and goings on reasonably up-to-date.
Please click over to our new Facebook page and tell us what you think. If you don’t find yourself on the Timeline yet, please feel free to post a comment or a milestone and a photo.
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