They do a great job of bringing together the most wince-inducing examples of Facebook marketing, proving the old adage that the road to corporate embarrassment is paved with a desperate need for Likes.*

Painful though they may be, most of the posts highlighted are just extreme forms of techniques that many businesses use, to some extent, and some definite themes emerge over time.

So just for you, here is our roundup of the top five Facebook  Cheap Trick techniques.

*you’ve not heard that one? Yeah, it’s old as the hills. Honest.

1: The Lowest Common Denominator

This is the Facebook equivalent of those ridiculous phone “quizzes” at the end of TV shows. You know the ones, those with the oh-so-tricky questions to ensure that nobody in possession of a phone is ruled out from picking it up. The “What’s the capital of England, is it A)California, B) London, C) Fish” variety.

Only on Facebook, we have the space to be more creative, and that’s how we end up with posts like this:

Ooooh Walkers, we don’t know. It’s a toughie.

2: The Awkward Piggyback

Desperate for engagement, any engagement, the poor Facebook admin jumps on any subject which they know will get people talking. No matter how irrelevant it is to their brand. The usual example of this involves neatly-scheduled Saturday evening questions about the X Factor.

Sometimes, they get away with it, and sometimes the post falls foul of the slippery slope from irrelevant to actively inappropriate. Controversial current affairs are particularly dangerous territory here – of which more later.

3: The False Dichotomy

This is a concept that we first saw coming out of the US, where unsavoury characters were using it to scare kids into the equivalent of the old email chain letter forward. A scary horror-movie style grisly ghoul image with text along the lines of “share if you’re scared, like if you’re very scared – do nothing and she’s under your bed“. You have two, and only two, choices – you can Like, or you can Share.

Never let it be said that marketers don’t spot the zeitgeist…..

(with bonus points for the use of kittens, obviously). LIKE or COMMENT or SHARE but for the love of God, doing nothing is not an option!

4: Stating the bleedin’ obvious

A variation on the above, where the longsuffering audience is asked to click Like in response to something that pretty much everyone on the planet would agree with.

The go-to here is “Click Like if you’re happy it’s Friday“, but we’ve also seen “Click Like if you believe we should stop killing {insert endangered species here}”.

It’s only a matter of time until “Click Like if you’re a fan of breathing!” comes along.

5: The Current Affairs Hijack

As mentioned above, this is seriously, seriously dangerous territory. It’s a post about that thing that’s dominating the news right now. Yes, it’s topical. Yes, everyone’s talking about it. But unless you have something genuinely witty or insightful to add, maybe just count to ten before hitting that Post button.

Shoehorning (pun intended) your own brand into the mix is particularly risky, as illustrated by the gem below in response to the recent school shooting in the US:

Ouch. Seriously, guys??!

What do we learn from this?

Here’s the thing, though – despite the (hilarious) snarkfest over on CCBP, the numbers on these posts speak for themselves. Often, that brand’s Facebook audience (or at least, some part of it) love that stuff. No matter how banal, ridiculous or even borderline offensive some of these tricks may seem, thousands of customers will happily chat back or click the Like button just as they’ve been told to.

And everytime a punter clicks like, that activity feed tells all their friends, and on we go. This stuff works – for now, and for a certain demographic.

And for all Facebook marketers, there are useful lessons here about the psychology of engagement. Don’t demand too much thought or effort of your audience. Talk about stuff they’re interested in, even if you’re not. Be playful. There are ways that most of the cheap tricks above can be refined into valuable party pieces, if you give them enough thought.

Just to recap: QR codes are those square, usually black-and-white, barcode-style graphics you sometimes see on marketing materials these days.

You install a QR code reader app to your smartphone, which is then able to decode the data held within it to perform an action – usually, taking you directly to a specific web links, but it can be to do other things such as loading business card details directly into your phone’s contact list.

QR codes aren’t at all complicated, and you can set them up for free via any number of online services such as http://quikqr.com/ or http://goqr.me/.

QR code fails

It’s quite common to see examples of marketers Missing The Point with QR codes on a massive scale.  The Point being, that you’re essentially just saving the user from doing something longhand – typing in a URL, or your phone number.

This is only really helpful if you’re going from an offline to an online environment – otherwise, the user could often just click a simple link to achieve the same thing.

So a QR code on a paper flyer might be useful; a QR code embedded in a website, which just links to a YouTube video, is not. A QR code on a For Sale sign which, when scanned, takes the user directly to the online details for that house, is very useful; the same QR code embedded in an email, less so. You get the idea.

How you definitely don’t want to use a QR code

There are times, though, when ONLY missing the point would’ve been a blessing.

Here’s a collection of QR code uses so spectacularly misguided that they verge (literally, in the case of example two) on the homicidal. We love these so much that they just had to get their own blog post here – click below and enjoy!

From the narcissistic hipster renderings of their logo on every wall of the office, to the jargon-crammed and often incomprehensible chatter of Perfect Curve supremo Siobhan, the writers have been absolutely on the nail in lampooning the scarier reaches of digital agency behaviour. We’ve not laughed so much since Nathan Barley, if anyone else caught that.

So when we discovered this online special of Siobhan discussing the Olympics’ digital strategy, it just had to go on to the blog. Enjoy!

Now, we’re off to think about incorporating regressive media into all our campaigns….

In the course of exploring this idea for a client, we thought we’d have a little fun with it for our own brand. Our social media services aren’t a natural source of eye-catching material; most of what we do is verbal and text-heavy.

Hence our 30-minute lunchtime challenge:  to create something that was shareable on Pinterest, but still relevant to our company values and the messages we want to get across.

Here’s the result…

Why that?

We know people love to share things that make them smile. We also realised, from an analysis of what was coming up as popular on our Pinterest home feed, that you don’t absolutely have to exclude words – in fact a good proportion of the popular stuff is pithy, often slightly edgy, quotations.

Finally, one of the messages we want to get across to prospective customers is that we pride ourselves on quality and attention to detail, so this quote works perfectly to support that.

Did it work?

We saw an immediate impact from this approach, yes. The image was shared more than anything else we’d previously posted, we picked up some new followers, and most importantly we saw Pinterest.com show up in the referral stats (Google Analytics)  for our website for the first time ever. So, people were curious enough about what we do to come over to the website and find out more.

Applying it to your business

A few thoughts about what we learned from the experiment:

You don’t *have* to have stunning visuals to make an impact. We probably could have increased the impact more with some illustration – if we’d had a bit longer, something along the lines of one of those retro cowboy drawings, and a quick google for “surprised horse” might have been fun. But you CAN do without it – if you don’t have graphic design skills or budget to buy them in, you can manage without.

Be appropriate for the site. There are a small (and hopefully dwindling) number of people out there who might consider this wildly inappropriate for a business communication, or even be offended by it. Would we have posted it on LinkedIn? Probably not. But it’s in keeping with the tone of humour on Pinterest; frankly a large number of users there would very likely be “offended” by standard marketing. If that doesn’t sit comfortably with your brand then it’s best to skip this kind of site altogether.

Think a bit out of the box…. or whatever non-Apprentice speak you prefer for “trying a different approach”!

Don’t lose sight of your brand. It’s tempting to chase the crowd here by just posting up anything you think might be popular – and to an extent, that approach may work. A few eyeballs might end up on your site as a byproduct of idle curiousity. But it’s so much more powerful if you can keep a link to your marketing messages AND create some popular content.

Want to play?

If you’re on Pinterest, come and find us here. If you’re not and would like to be, leave a comment asking for an invite and we’ll send you one (we’ll get your email address  to send the invite to, but it won’t be published or used for any other purpose!)

Well, you could sit down and do a little thinking about your marketing strategy and where social media fits in, or alternatively you could consult this handy infographic from Flowtown!

The account isn’t doing badly either, clearly spreading the word and tempting people to try the new product, and with a fair bit of fun customer interaction. Full marks to Greggs!

Would you follow a donut on Twitter? What other creative approaches to Twitter have you noticed lately?

We love the section about that superb VW Darth Vader commercial, and the statistics about the purchasing power of social gamers should give any company who write off the “nerd market” major pause for thought.

Enjoy!

Gibberish alert  -we’re also validating our blog with Technorati, who want us to include this code: 7X2DXQPJBXPE

But once you take those first steps into the world of Twitter, you find all sorts of strange and inexplicable things happening. Why is that pretty American student following you, and why is she so keen to share the secrets of unlimited wealth? How come Richard Branson isn’t following you back?

Just for you, here’s a quick field guide to the main Twitter species……..

1. The S’leb.

Colossal numbers of followers, but following a relatively tiny number of people (often none) themselves. The Twitter account may or may not be the real deal, but the weirder the output (sample from Ms Banks:

“BellyButton talk time! I used to be outtie, now I’m innie. Weird. Maybe I am an alien… U outtie or innie? N how often u clean it?“)

the less likely it is to be being run by their PR agency. Mostly.
They’re probably not going to follow you back, or read your tweets. Sorry.

Follow them if: You’re a fan, and deal well with disillusionment.

2. The Pro

Colossal quantities of followers, often on the same scale as the Sleb, but on closer inspection you’ll notice that they follow almost exactly the same number of people as follow them.

How are they finding and keeping up with all those folks, you wonder?! Well, they aren’t. They’re using automated software to follow people, and a good number of those will follow them back. If you’re one of them, you’ll often become the lucky recipient of an automated DM message excitedly offering you their latest online goodies.

Follow them if: You’re genuinely interested in their tweets. Many “pro” type accounts are where they are because they’re generating good content around a specific topic. Others are just great users of the autofollow software. A quick check of the timeline will tell!

3. The Zombie

It’s dead, but it won’t lie down. The owner of this account got “a Twitter” because everyone said they should. Broadcast a few random comments, their customer base didn’t double overnight, so they gave up.

Follow if: You have faith in reincarnation.

4. The Bot

Getting more sophisticated these days, they’ll even have a nice friendly looking photo as their icon. A quick check of the nonsense they’re spouting will confirm the suspicions that should’ve been aroused by the very high followed: followers ratio. These are “bots”, automated accounts set up in their thousands to broadcast the Twitter equivalent of email spam.

Why are they following you? Cos they want to get your attention. Just ignore ’em and they’ll generally go away.

Follow them if: you’re really lonely; you want them to carry on following you forever.

5.The Secret Agent

We’re completely “live and let live” about how people use Twitter, but that little padlock on a profile always makes us wonder.

It means you’re not allowed to even see their Tweets unless you’ve been specially approved by them. Yep, there could be many reasons why….they’re shy….they’re on witness protection….they’re tweeting about their work at the forefront of nuclear physics. Or maybe they really are spies.

Follow if: you know them  and have passed the vetting…or you’re “Q”.

That’s all we have time for right now but we’re sure there are more – feel free to fill in any types we’ve missed, in the Comments