Download File - Whitepaper: How Facebook can destroy your business

How Facebook can destroy your business How Facebook is costing companies customers

October 2011 Martín Paredes Cognent, Inc. 121 S. Orange Avenue, Suite 1500 Orlando, FL 32801‐3241 US +1 407 809 4417 © 2011 by Cognent, Inc., all rights reserved. For more information visit: cognent.com This whitepaper is available at socialmediadanger.com

How Facebook can destroy your business © copyright 2011 Cognent, Inc., all rights reserved.Hos Facebook is costing companies customers

CONTENT Executive Summary . . . . . . . 2 Introduction . . . . . . . . 3 The Danger of the Like Button . . . . . . 3 Turning Customers Away . . . . . . 3 The company’s reputation . . . . . 4 Search engine reputation . . . . . 6 Dependence on third‐party website . . . . 7 Other Social Media Tool Dangers for Business . . . . 7 Other Issues to Consider . . . . . . 8 Relevant, consistent and current content . . . 8 Response is important . . . . . . 9 Solutions to the Social Media Dilemma . . . . . 9 Controlling assets . . . . . . 9 Social media affordability . . . . . 9 Blog economics . . . . . . . 11 Other social media benefits . . . . . 11 Crowd sourcing . . . . . . . 11 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) . . . . 12 Remember to defend the brand on other social media platforms . 12 The Amitor® Solution . . . . . . . 13 Acknowledgment . . . . . . . 14 About Martín Paredes . . . . . . . 14 About Cognent . . . . . . . . 14

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Businesses today are willingly giving up control over their two greatest assets: customers and their brand identity by not understanding the business model of Facebook. The ‘Like’ button is designed for the specific purpose of increasing revenues for Facebook through gathering as many people as possible from willing accomplices. More importantly, lacking a unified and organized social media strategy puts businesses at risk of alienating customers and destroying their business’ reputation. Social media is not an option for businesses, it is a requirement. Creating and maintaining a social media strategy is required for successful business growth and continuity. A business social media strategy addresses the potential loss of customers to competitors, the potential erosion of the brand and reputation, and the ability to proactively protect business interests when threatened by a negative and out‐of‐control viral message spreading throughout the Internet. A properly executed social media process not only encourages customer retention and growth but it can be as cost effective as the business requires. Properly implemented, the social media strategy would unify the company’s marketing materials and keep a consistent and effective message in front of customers.


Facebookgrowthslowing?According to a CNN report (Is Facebook growth stalling in North America?; Doug Gross, June 13, 2011) the growth of Facebook seems to be slowing in countries where it was first adopted. While in countries where it was later adopted, the growth continues. There seems to be a limit of 50% of the population for each country of people willing to get on Facebook according to early, unproven empirical evidence.

INTRODUCTION Social media, specifically Facebook, have become the business marketers’ darling of the last few years. It is hard to argue against a captive audience of over 750 million users as of July 2011, where seemingly customers are just a few clicks away. Especially for small businesses, the allure of reaching millions of customers for free makes Facebook too tempting to ignore. Unfortunately, in the rush to embrace this new technology, many businesses have given up control of their two greatest assets without being aware of it. All businesses have two very significant assets that are the core to the success of the business, their customers and their brand. Many small business owners spend so much time building the business that they forget that the hardest part and most expensive component of their business is getting new customers, keeping the old ones and making sure the business reputation is above reproach. Unfortunately, Facebook’s business model is to get the business owner to willingly give up their customers in exchange for the click of the ‘Like’ button. The ‘Like’ button works on vanity but it does nothing for the business.

THE DANGER OF THE LIKE BUTTON How can a ubiquitous button like the ‘Like’ button be so dangerous to business? After all, it is just an icon that customers click on to signify how much they like a product or a service. In order to understand the danger, it is imperative to understand the dynamics of what happens when a visitor clicks on the ‘Like’ button.

TURNING CUSTOMERS AWAY The click starts at a business’ marketing touch point. A business touch point is where a potential customer first engages the company. It can be the business website, the business brochure or the sign with ‘Friend us on Facebook’. By using the ‘Like’ or ‘visit us on Facebook’, the customer is immediately drawn away from the business and sent to Facebook to complete the process. From that moment, the business has given up control of their customer and sent them to Facebook. The business has spent time and resources attracting the customer to its website, only to send them away to Facebook. Although it may be tempting to think that the customer is still under the business’ control, after all, the Facebook page they were sent to is branded with company marketing material; the fact is that the business has no control over what the customer sees on that Facebook page. This creates two dilemmas for the business owner. The first one is that the customer is now bombarded with advertisements on the Facebook page, which is why Facebook is so anxious to get the clicks from


Facebook:$1.6Bin6monthsof2011According to Reuters (Exclusive: Facebook doubles first‐half revenue; Alexie Oreskovic, September 7, 2011), Facebook had revenues of $1.6 billion in the first half of 2011 and net income of $500 million.

$1.201billionadvertisingdollarsAccording to Advertising Age in the June 22, 2009 issue, McDonald’s spent $1.201 billion on US advertising in 2008.

customers, that it may become detrimental to the business that sent them there in the first place. Even though the Facebook advertisement may not compete directly against the business, the customer is still being distracted from the business and is being encouraged to go another direction. At this point there is nothing the business owner can do to control what advertisements are displayed to the customer. Anyone of the company’s competitors is now free to market directly to the company’s customers.

The advertising revenue on social media, especially Facebook, is driven by the number of eyeballs that see it. Internet advertising is normally auctioned to the highest bidder willing to pay for the website real estate it is displayed on. The value for the advertiser is based on the notion that the advertiser can target their advertising to a specific audience. Take for example a home builder. The homebuilder’s customers dutifully click on the ‘Like’ button and land on the builder’s

Facebook page. Although the builder’s logo and marketing material is displayed alongside Facebook’s, on the right‐side there are advertising opportunities for anyone to purchase. A competitor to the homebuilder realizes that there is a captive audience of home buyers that they can market to by placing an advertisement targeting home buyers looking for a new home. They buy advertising spots. The original homebuilder, who sent their customers to Facebook through the ‘Like’ button, is now at the mercy of its customers seeing competing advertisements. The homebuilder just sent their customers to a place that their competitor can freely market to them. Unfortunately for the businesses participating on Facebook, the danger to them is not only giving up customers to competitors but it also creates the potential for the company’s brand reputation to be damaged, either by inattention or by malicious activity. Erosion of the company’s brand is the second potential problem for a company on Facebook.

The company’s reputation Think of the company’s brand as the company’s reputation that the business owner has spent a significant time developing. It is more than the company’s name and logo. McDonald’s brand is not about the “golden arches” but rather it is an amalgamation of marketing components built over years and millions of dollars spent on creating the mindset that they make the best hamburgers. The worst thing that can happen to McDonalds is not the loss of the “golden arches”, but rather the thought that their burgers make people sick. That is the company’s brand, the thought that people have of a particular product or service.


TheMicrosoftBingDebacleThink before posting. The speed at which a message goes viral on the Internet is the very reason any posting, no matter how innocuous it is, should be thoroughly examined before actually being posted. There is no way to predict how the online community will react to a post. Most will be ignored but if it goes viral the repercussions can be long‐lasting. Shortly after the Japanese earthquake, Bing posted a Tweet asking for donations for the quake victims. The catch was that a user had to re‐tweet Microsoft’s message to another user in order for a dollar to be donated. The response was immediate and full of indignation. It was a clear attempt by Microsoft to use the tragedy for driving traffic to their site. Social media users are intelligent enough to see through gimmicks and have no patience for it. Microsoft apologized. It has a large enough advertising budget to take a few marketing hits. Would your small business survive the negativity?

Although Facebook conveniently allows a business to place the logo and the company marketing collateral on the page they so conveniently provided, the fact remains that it is still surrounded by Facebook advertisers targeting the company’s customers. Not only is the brand eroded, but the customers and brand are now open to malicious defamation through the Facebook posting and messaging system, in other words, the feed. The feed is where messages from the membership appear. Through the Facebook feed there is nothing stopping former disgruntled employees, customers or even competitors from posting malicious messages intended to destroy the company’s goodwill. Although the company has the ability to respond, an organized swarm of individuals intending to damage the company is difficult to curtail. Even current employees can damage a company’s reputation. Take for example the case of two former employees of a Domino’s Pizza franchise. In April of 2009, two former Domino’s Pizza employees in Conover, North Carolina, posted a video online preparing sandwiches for delivery that were tainted by bodily fluids by one employee, while the other provided commentary. Domino’s Pizza faced a national brand crisis when the video went viral and was viewed over a million times within days. Typing in “Dominos” in the Google search bar showed references to the video in “five of the 12 results on the first page”. At first Domino’s attempted to ignore the situation, hoping it would go away, but it was finally forced to responded when they realized that longtime loyal customers were “second‐guessing their relationship with Domino’s”, according to Domino’s spokesman, Tim McIntyre, in a quote in the New York Times. (New York Times; “Video Prank at Domino’s Taints Brand”, Stephanie Clifford, April 15, 2009) Domino’s brand had been damaged by two employees through YouTube and Twitter. In the case of Domino’s Pizza, they were able to weather the crisis because of their ability to generate the necessary resources to respond. How many small businesses have the necessary knowledge and capability, not to mention money, to respond timely and effectively? Most do not. A proactive strategy is best suited for businesses without the resources to mount an effective campaign for damage control. Controlling where the customers ‘Like’ the business, keeping them under the domain of the company and zealously protecting who controls the brand is the most cost effective way to guard against unforeseen social media mishaps.


Search engine reputation Although a business owner may be tempted to think that it may not happen to their business, the fact is that it potentially could happen. The same reason a business owner first seriously considered Facebook for their business’ marketing, the millions of users, is also the primary factor that it can destroy the business. Social media is about the concentration of people looking to communicate. The free and unrestrained nature of the social media platform comes together to form “swarms” of messages created and forwarded within seconds, leading to the viral effect. Once on the social media stream, it is very difficult to curtail or silence the message. The ability to freely express dissatisfaction via social media tools also creates the potential for the company to have to publically deal with issues that would otherwise remain unnoticed. Consider the case of one of the top three home builders in El Paso, Texas. In early 2011, El Paso, Texas experienced an unprecedented freeze that damaged the city’s infrastructure. Desert View Homes, an El Paso homebuilder, suffered an inordinate amount of frozen pipes in their homes leading to severe damage to the homes they built and sold.

Soon after, disgruntled owners banded together on Facebook and built a page titled; “Desert View Home Owners”. They quickly filled up the message stream with messages of dissatisfaction with the builder and its homes, which continue to filter in. The major problem for Desert View Homes is not in the page itself but the resulting erosion of the “Desert View Homes” brand. As late as September 15, 2011, a Google search for “Desert View Homes” lists the disgruntled homeowners’ page link right under


the company’s own website. Anyone searching for Desert View Homes will invariable see the page and likely click on it, leading to further brand erosion for the company’s brand. Because the Facebook community is large, not only can a small post that otherwise would be ignored, suddenly become a sensation, but that same traction will show up on the target company’s search engine results. That large universe of people has now threatened the company’s reputation as search engine results will now give prominence to the negative postings and push the company’s website and other positive web results down the list. Search engine results are governed by the relevance of the content, the company’s brand, and the number of current links to the company. In a viral stream, the company’s brand is the key and the number of comments or links to the viral message is the engine that drives the negative results to the top. Once the negative results are at the top, they become very difficult to push down. Under most circumstances they cannot be deleted.

Dependence on third‐party websites Another issue to consider, when dealing with social‐media tools, is the fact that a company becomes dependent on a third‐party for its social media strategy. A company spends an inordinate amount of time and resources building up a following for its brand. Collateral in the form of customer lists, tweets, messages, image galleries and other material is controlled by someone else. What if the provider decides to turn off the medium? First, the customers that the company dutifully spent accumulating and communicating with are suddenly left with no way to be reached. How will the customers’ respond? How can the company reach them and bring them back into the company’s marketing outreach? Also, the digital material; pictures, messages and advertising is either lost or inaccessible to the customers and to the company. Participating on Facebook without a clear understanding of the consequences and a strategy to protect the company’s assets can destroy the company through the degradation of the company’s brand and the loss of customers to a third‐party driven website. Even the amount of digital marketing material is subject to be lost at a moment’s notice. Depending on someone else means giving up control of the company’s future to a third‐party. As tempting as the free tools may seem, are they really worth the investment to the small business owner? The tools may not have a direct cost to them but they have a built‐in cost in time and effort put into gathering the customers and accumulating the social media content. That free service may suddenly decide to change its model or just close down. Facebook is not the only social media tool that is a danger to business but it is the most significant because its business model is based on gathering as many people as possible to sell advertising to. Other social media tools also have their own inherent dangers.

OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA TOOL DANGERS FOR BUSINESSES Twitter and Google+ are two other significant social media platforms enticing businesses to send customers their way. They are just a few among a myriad of thousands more. Although LinkedIn may


seem as if it belongs on this list, its business model allows for some measure of control over a company’s brand. In addition, LinkedIn does not encourage “friending” customers to it, rather its focus is on workforce outreach; therefore its ability as a vehicle to damage the company’s reputation or siphon customers to competitors is not as significant. Nonetheless, it is important to note that LinkedIn has the potential to damage a company by taking quality workforce away from the company. As with other social media, the potential for creating litigation threats for the company and the potential loss of company intellectual property is present as well. Google+ is still in the phase of creating the necessary concentration of active users but all indications are that it intends to compete directly against Facebook. Therefore, the dangers a business may experience on Facebook are relevant in Google+ as well. This is because its model, like the Google search engine, is to concentrate people to advertise to. In the case of Twitter, its danger lies in its ability to quickly generate “buzz” across the Internet at lightning speed, thus a message, positive or negative may go “viral” within seconds. YouTube, as well, has inherently the same dangers for small businesses as outlined herein. It is important to prepare for the potential that a viral message may threaten the company, but creating or maintaining active channels are not as important on these two tools, unless the company has the resources to keep them populated with fresh and relevant content. Otherwise, protect the brand as outlined in the section “Controlling assets” below.

OTHER ISSUES TO CONSIDER Embracing social media is not an option; it is now a requirement for any business, no matter how small. Just opening an account and populating it with advertising material is not enough. User’s today, expect more than flashy signage, they want to be engaged. It can be as simple as the business owner wants to make it but it is important that the social‐media strategy become part of the overall company strategy. Social media is not something to do when there is time, it should be integrated into the overall business growth plan. Ignoring it will significantly damage the company’s growth. Social media is about being current and consistent.

Relevant, consistent and current content This creates a dilemma for small businesses who are overwhelmed with daily activities and do not have the time to create content. Do they ignore social media to their detriment or risk giving customers and their brand away? If the business launches a blog then the blog must contain current, relevant and consistent information. Visitors expect that. It is not necessary to post every day but it is imperative that at least a new post appear once a month, preferably every week. Nothing is more annoying for the visitor than to see content from six months ago. The content should be informational and helpful to the visitor. This is true, as well, for status updates and tweets.


Response is important Be prepared to respond. Keeping an eye on the social media platforms is as important as keeping an eye on the email account or answering the telephone. A message, positive or negative, that languishes in cyberspace without a response from the company just indicates to the community that the business has no interest in them. A timely response is important. Social media is based on the notion that people like to feel as part of a community. If someone reaches out to the company and they feel ignored because there was not a timely response, their overall impression will be one where they felt disregarded. They are likely to tell their friends and anyone that will listen every time the company is mentioned. Even worse, now they have the ability to reach a much larger audience through social media. Integrating the social media platform into the company’s daily activities is imperative to avoid making customers feel unappreciated or even ignored. Take the time to actively monitor and respond online.

SOLUTIONS TO THE SOCIAL MEDIA DILEMMA With the dangers facing a business on Facebook and other social platforms should a business owner ignore Facebook? On the contrary, a business owner should be aware of the dangers on Facebook and develop a business defensive strategy to effectively protect its customers and its brand. Ignoring Facebook not only keeps a business from benefiting from the concentration of possible customers but its lack of an effective social media strategy will alienate those customers looking to access products and services via social media tools. More importantly, ignoring social media tools will allow someone else to manage the company’s brand online to the company’s detriment.

Controlling assets The key to the solution is to keep control over the business’ two greatest assets; its customers and its brand. In order to do this, a business needs to keep its customers under its own online platform; their website, and not send them to someone else’s. It may seem counterintuitive to place a ‘Like’ button on the company’s website that does not go to Facebook. The reality is that the ‘Like’ button is for the company’s benefit not Facebook’s. Keeping a customer on the company’s website is the key to protecting the customer from competitors and protecting the company’s brand on the Internet. By keeping the customer within the company’s domain, the business owner can then effectively market to them in conjunction with its brand and marketing strategy. The captive customer is given the social media tools it craves while at the same he is encouraged to grow the concentration of possible new customers for marketing purposes by encouraging them to bring their friends into the business’ website rather than going to Facebook.

Social media affordability A social media strategy is affordable to all businesses regardless of their revenues. When a social media strategy is properly implemented, it can be cost effective for the company. The greatest resource requirement is time. Most small business owners will tell you that time is the one thing they do not have. It is true, but when properly integrated into the overall business activities, social media actually reduces the time an owner needs to grow its customer base.


It comes down to integrating what the business owner already does into a cohesive and efficient process. Think of social media as an extension of meetings with people, marketing and sales calls. Businesses always find themselves explaining their products or services multiple times a day. Customers want to know about the business. Rather than keeping the information safely locked in the head of the business owner or scattered about in letters or email responses to customers across different computers, why not take a moment and organize all of the marketing materials, responses and talking points into a cohesive and accessible place? Social media is not Facebook, Twitter or a smattering of other brands. It is about communicating with people interested in the company. A simple page on the business website, organized with questions and answers or downloadable brochures is a good start. To make it a truly social media platform, it must allow customers the ability to communicate with the business. Give the visitors a way to ask questions and then grow the business social media program from there by adding status updates and blogs. Interactivity is important and it does not need to be expensive. Take a moment to organize all the material important to the customers and to your business and create a simple frequently asked questions (FAQ) section on the business website. More importantly, develop an overall business plan whereby questions submitted by customers, in whatever medium they are, are organized and their answers catalogued for adding to the website. The next step is to launch a simple blog platform. A blogging tool gives a business the basics of a social media program without having to depend on a diverse set of tools that require time to maintain. The idea is to make the social media strategy an integrated part of the business rather than adding to the work load of the business owner. A blog platform allow for visitor interaction and communication. A blog platform is nothing more than an online whiteboard where messages can be posted and reaction from visitors cataloged. Contrary to popular belief, a blog post does not need to be a lengthy article detailing a specific topic. It can be as simple as a one sentence line thanking customers for their visit, or introducing a new product. The important thing to keep in mind is that a blog allows for two‐way communications between the business and the visitors to the site. It can be used as a repository of frequently asked questions. It can also be a status update of the product, service or business. It can have a detailed article explaining how the service works. Or, it can even have a place where customers can talk about how much they like the company, much better than a ‘Like’ button and more informative. The blogging platform gives your visitors all of what they want in Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media tools, but it keeps them on the business website. For the business, a single central online location makes the ability to keep the content fresh, relevant and consistent much easier. If the business also integrates the blog into their overall daily business protocol than all public company marketing materials and information becomes easier to reach and share among the workforce and the customers. Much better, the customers and the brand are kept under the direct control of the company. Even better, the concentration of company marketing collateral is now a goldmine for the search engines thus raising the company’s profile in the search engines necessary to drive traffic to them. This increases traffic to the site, which was the reason any business wants to get on Facebook.


Blog economics Although, there are many free tools online for blogging that require the dependence and goodwill of a third‐party for hosting it is nonetheless more important to have one than not to. There are also free, open‐source programs that can be implemented into the company’s website. These require minimal technical expertise to add to the site. A blog is an effective and inexpensive platform for implementing a social media strategy for a company that does not have the resources to develop and integrate a true social media package into the company’s website. Although not ideal, it is cost effective and better than giving customers away to Facebook. Many have the misconception that a blog is an online diary for the author. It may have started as such but today’s blogging tools are essentially self‐contained publishing platforms that can be easily utilized as a social media platform. They have the basics for an effective social media strategy which are a way to communicate with customers, keep a customer registration tool on the site and an easy to use publishing platform for communicating via status updates and lengthy articles as the need arises. Using an open source package and integrating it into the company’s website achieves the primary goal of implementing a social media strategy while keeping customers and the brand protected.

Other social media benefits The same tools that have made social media successful are the same tools that small business can use to add to their social media strategy. Besides giving individuals the ability to express themselves, social media tools have also given the enterprising business owner the ability to use the creative talents of a diverse universe of people regardless of where they reside. The content driving people to social tools is created by individuals with lots of talent and willingness to work. Although it may be tempting to plagiarize or take someone else’s work product it would cause more damage to the business then ignoring social tools. Social media participants value their work and have no qualms about starting a viral campaign to let their displeasure be known. Learn from the work others have produced and use it to make your work product effective and attractive. If the business owner has neither the time nor the inclination to develop their own content then reach out to the individuals that have produced the work they find most interesting and ask permission to use it. Most would willingly give permission or offer a price worth investing in. A business owner is no longer geographically limited to their neighborhood or city for producing much needed marketing materials for their company.

Crowd sourcing One of the benefits of social media is the ability it allows individuals to express themselves. Self‐expression is driven by creativity. Creativity is the basis of all marketing materials, whether it is the written word, a photograph, art or video. Generally, for creative people, their product is about expression rather than the monies they can make from it. Creative people online are a good source of content that a business can use cost effectively. A business owner should take the notion of crowd


sourcing and enlist the help of others online who would be interested in writing the slogan, designing the company logo or creating a company video. Crowd sourcing allows the business owner the ability to reach a very large pool of creative people making the work cost effective for the business. For the smallest businesses that do not have the economic resources, or time to implement a social platform on their website, the strategy should still be to implement a defensive posture to protect their brand on the social media platform as outlined in the section “Remembering to defend the brand on other social media platforms” below.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) The primary reason companies consider creating a social media strategy in the first place is to attract more customers from the largest concentration of people available. Reaching the crowd requires getting the company’s name out on the search engines. Visibility on the search engines is the key to that. Achieving visibility on the major search engines is based on the relevance and how current the content is on the website. Additionally, the more websites that link to the business website the more visibility the company has online. The key to achieving this is constantly creating new content. A properly implemented social media tool achieves this by keeping fresh and relevant content on the company website constant. This gives the company not only search engine visibility but it serves its social media needs as well. Even better for the company, comments from customers not only raise the company’s brand profile but it also increases the content for the website that helps to increase the company’s rank in the search engine results.

Remember to defend the brand on other social media platforms Whether a business implements its own social media framework on its own website or forgoes one, the need to protect the company’s brand on Facebook, Twitter and all other social media tools is imperative. Although the business would not want to use the platforms for their own social media tools it is still imperative that a defensive strategy be implemented. A defensive strategy defends against opportunistic competitors or disgruntled individuals from using the company’s brand to damage the business. Defending the brand is accomplished by setting up an account, under the company’s brand in order to limit the ability of others to misuse it. Once the account has been created, its security should be tightened down to ensure no unauthorized posts appear on the platform’s feeds. This is true for Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Although the strategy is not to send customers to the third‐party website, there is no reason why a business should not use it to send customers to its own website. This is easily accomplished by creating a page on the social platform designed to entice potential customers to go to the business’ website. A simple, “learn more about us by visiting” is sufficient but including Facebook in the feeds of the company’s marketing strategy also gives the company an additional outlet for its message and keeps the content current.


As a company publishes new content on its own website, it should publish a link to it on Facebook and Twitter to entice visitors to it and raise the company’s visibility on search engines by creating additional links. Better yet, this also gives the impression of an active social media connected company while both protecting the brand, keeping customers under their control and still benefiting from the reason Facebook was enticing to begin with, the large number of captive viewers.

The Amitor® Solution As the company begins to embrace its social media strategy, the need to add more services and tools leads to a jigsaw puzzle of tools that makes for extra work and an inconsistent brand. Eventually the company is faced with a tool for blogging, one for maintaining the website, another one for posting frequently asked questions and finally one for keeping customers informed via digital newsletters. This requires multiple passwords and processes for the company and the customers and leads to an inconsistent and time‐consuming work cycle. Amitor® integrates all of the necessary tools to manage a company’s overall social media, customers and business processes via a single dashboard. Through Amitor®, a business can maintain its website, keep information relevant and consistent through blogs, status updates, news feeds and customer comments while engaging customers. The integrated design of Amitor® keeps the company’s brand central to all of the public communications. As a software as a service (SaaS) solution, Amitor® gives the company all of the tools it needs to grow and maintain its social media strategy while at the same time keeping control of its two greatest assets; its customers and its brand. Since Amitor® is fully integrated into the company’s website, the customers never leave the website and the company’s brand is never degraded by other brands or advertising. Because Amitor® is a cloud based software product, as new technology is introduced or social media takes a new direction, Amitor® automatically incorporates them into the business website without the loss of any content or the requirement to install or learn new software. Additionally, the one‐price model for Amitor®, makes budgeting the social media and customer resource management (CRM) platform for the company consistent and predictable regardless of the growth of the company. For information on Amitor®, visit amitor.com


ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The author would like to thank Greg Manson (facebook.com/MobileGman) for his thoughtful comments via Facebook on the dangers of Facebook for business.

ABOUT MARTIN PAREDES Paredes is a serial entrepreneur who has been involved in the Information Technology (IT) industry since 1990. Paredes is currently the CEO of Cognent, Inc., a Texas based company specializing in the development of Internet based portals and websites for a diverse client base. Paredes started providing web‐based solutions in 1994. Born in the Republic of Mexico, Paredes has written papers on geopolitical and cross‐border trade between the United States and Mexico. Paredes has specialized in solving multi‐lingual and multi‐cultural problems in application development. Paredes has been developing the Amitor® platform since 2000. For more information about Martín Paredes, visit martinparedes.com

ABOUT COGNENT

Cognent, with offices in Florida and Texas, is a Texas based technology company specializing in developing business websites and portals for a diverse set of world‐wide clients. Cognent is a leader in the implementation of multi‐cultural and multi‐lingual online applications for companies in Canada, Mexico and The United States. Cognent, Inc. Cognent works with clients to expedite their online success.

121 S. Orange Avenue, STE 1500 Orlando, FL 32801‐3241 US Phone +1 407 809 4417 Web cognent.com Cognent is a service mark of Cognent, Inc. Amitor is a registered trademark of ItNix, LLC, all rights reserved. The Amitor logo and “relationformation” are trademarks, and or service marks of ItNix, LLC., all rights reserved. Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc. Twitter is a trademark of Twitter, Inc. LinkedIn is a trademark of LinkedIn Corporation. All other trademarks are owned by their respective companies. Product information is subject to change without prior notice.

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