All Posts By

Marijean

Marijean Oldham (Jaggers), a social media specialist and public relations professional, is president and CEO of Jaggers Communications LLC, a strategic communications firm based in Charlottesville, Va.

Aug 08
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Two Great Options for Running Promotions and Contests on Facebook the Right Way

By Marketing, Social Media

I know, I know; I’ve been railing on the many businesses violating Facebook terms of service for some time. I’m done. I’m trying to be more positive here and in doing so, want to share two GREAT options we all have for running contests and promotions on Facebook the right way.

Offerpop is a great option — free up to 100 fans/followers and very low priced for larger audiences, this tool gives you a great selection of ways to market your business.

Promotions like photo contests, quizzes, deals, fan profiles and more can be easily run from the Offerpop dashboard.

For more advanced users there’s ShortStack. It’s more complex and easier for the experienced user to navigate, but if you’re starting out with fewer than 2,000 likes on a Facebook page (that’s a lot) it’s a good, free option.

We have clients who have used Offerpop happily and recommend it — if you launch a trial campaign let us know — we’d love to get your feedback on these tools.

Jul 31
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Facebook Promotional Guidelines: Are you breaking the rules?

By Social Media

In our business, if you care about your clients — really care about them– you don’t lead them down a primrose path. You don’t tell them it will be OK to do something even if “everyone else” is doing it. You don’t encourage them to break rules or laws; you don’t ask them to look the other way while you do so on their behalf. Facebook has very specific guidelines about promotions and contests. They are explicit. They do not want the liability of being in the middle of a contest, promotion or other rewards system. If you’re confused about what Facebook promotions are, read this page thoroughly: https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php

Let me quote:

iv.    You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.

Over and over again we see violations of this guideline.

What does Facebook say?

We reserve the right to reject or remove Pages for any reason. These terms are subject to change at any time.

That’s right. They can reject or remove Pages at any time, for any reason. Do you really want to be the consultant whose client pages are taken down due to an infraction?

 

Jul 27
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Facebook’s Policy Protects Fan Pages for James Holmes, Colorado Shooter

By Social Media

TV3 Winchester Streaming Video –

Freedom of speech is one of the may valuable benefits of being an American. But when that speech or action is offensive or perceived as damaging, it’s difficult to stomach. After the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado, a small contingent decided to create Facebook pages for James Holmes as a “public figure.” Other Facebook users chose to “like” those pages. Thus far, Facebook has stood behind its policy and has not taken down the pages, despite dozens and perhaps even hundreds of people reporting the pages as offensive.

In the video above from TV3 Winchester, I provided my thoughts on the situation.

What do you think? Should Facebook disable these kinds of pages? Where should they draw the line?

Jul 26
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Digital Citizenship: Best Practices for Navigating Social Media as a Student

By Social Media

At Jaggers Communications, we’re all pretty big fans of education. It doesn’t hurt that we’re all parents, a few of us with teenagers (and older — oh my!). We’re committed to excellent education for our kids and in our community. We support it in a variety of ways, through contributions to scholarship foundations and in our work. We’ve supported communications efforts for educational programs, tools and schools at all levels from preschools to graduate schools!

Today we launched a pilot program, courtesy of friend of the firm Coy Barefoot. Coy was teaching a class on leadership to area high school students and invited me to speak. I have been working on a program for students on digital citizenship and thought this would be the best place to roll it out with a good test audience.

The program doesn’t dwell on all the safety and guidance parents and schools have offered to kids using social media (although some of that is reiterated as a reminder). Rather, this program helps by providing guidance to students as they begin to transition from solely personal use of social media, to professional use as college students, graduates and employees.

We spent a lot of time talking about managing your personal online reputation and what that means for people getting ready to go off to college, applying to schools or for jobs. General awareness of the tools that exist (besides Facebook; teenagers know a lot about Facebook) and how they could and should be using them, is important.

You’d have to attend a Digital Citizen workshop to get the full gist of what was taught and the conversation that takes place in class, but the students were interested in access to the full presentation, and I thought the rest of you might be curious, as well.

 

Jul 19
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Jaggers Communications on CBS-19: More about the Reinstatement of UVA President Teresa Sullivan

By Communications, Crisis Communications, Media, Public Relations

Did you catch Rusty Speidel on CBS-19? So much of the ousting and reinstatement of UVa President Teresa Sullivan has been about the public relations efforts that accompanied the story. Rusty provides commentary on the story as the Newsplex shares the latest poll confirming Sullivan’s approval rating. Watch here.