Change. Everything changes.

Yet, when Facebook changes, there’s an unusual amount of analysis of their direction and effectiveness.

Specifically, I’m talking Timeline here. But not Timeline for everyone, Timeline for business.

The article I link to above criticizes Timeline and the lack of effectiveness cover photos have on the intended audience. While good criticism is not lost on me, I disagree with the premise.

Cover photos are not inherently ineffective, there are simply ineffective implementations of the cover photo on Timeline.

We decided to take Timeline, and make our cover photos an integral part of it. Every time we launch a new website, we update our cover photo.

Doing so keeps our timeline up-to-date, gives people a reason to come back, and in one single view you can see the kind of work we do plus check our quality in a glance.

Additionally, our unique cover photos give our facebook fans a unique interaction with us. These graphics are obviously made just for our Facebook.

In short, the cover photo is effective. It just depends on how you utilize it.

Yesterday, we just launched the Sowards for Senate website. And, the market aces’ facebook fan page got a fresh cover photo as a result.

Creating a new website or bringing an update to your current site is a lot of fun. You get the chance to think about all the artsy, brand-image stuff that probably isn’t a huge part of your day-to-day operations.

Whether you run a business, non-profit organization or political campaign, you know that having a recognizable logo and branding is important, but you don’t need it to be able to perform the core function of your organization, and that’s why it’s a lot of fun for decision makers to get into the marketing or their product or service. It’s an opportunity to create or alter the face of what you’re selling.

It’s easy to get caught up in the list of features and the graphic layout of your new site, but you run the risk of planning a dinner party and forgetting to do the grocery shopping. It does you no good to have a beautiful table cloth, dishes, and ambiance if you don’t provide food for your guests.

Leaving a dinner party, there are four basic possible outcomes. Here is a breakdown from worst scenario to best.

1. I cannot believe I just spent time with that food in that room with those people.
   This is how you feel when you visit a website that has a poor color scheme and layout as well as lacking content. The photos on the page are pixelated. The background is the brightest neon green a monitor can possibly display. The contact information or basic information about the company that you are looking for has been left out. The only thing you can find are three paragraphs on the company philosophy which does not directly relate to the business. And you as the user walk away feeling like your eyeballs need a shower and frustrated. Do not be this person. Do not let your friends be this person. Friends don’t let friends forget to put contact information on their website.
2. The party was fun but the food wasn’t something I wanted to actually consume.
   This is what happens when you find a website that someone has put lots of thought into – for the design. The navigation is easy on the eyes and easy to use. The logo is exactly what you expect from the organization. The overall look and feel of the website is promising… So your heart breaks a little bit when you click on individual web pages and find that they haven’t been fully filled out, or are filled with dense paragraphs of information that you don’t want to take the time to read through. But you can find what you’re looking for, if you try hard enough.
3. The food was good but the party was awkward.
   This is okay in some circumstances, if you are trying to throw an awkward party. For example, some content-heavy sites work to make sure that the content is good and the content is accessible – and that’s their only goal. They don’t focus on their branding, they’re never going to want to put their logo on a billboard, and that’s fine for them. But if your organization or company has a particular personality, throw a party that reflects that! Your guests will want to come back, and they will tell their friends.
4. That was the best dinner party I’ve ever attended, I hope there is another one like it soon.
   This is what happens when you put your left side of the brain to work and plan out the content and photos that will best represent your business or campaign, and then use the right side of the brain to find clever ways to use words and layout to make the user experience both easy and fun. The user is never confused – by the branding, the layout, or the content.

So when planning your online presence, don’t forget to put some thought into your table decor and your menu.

After Goldilocks’ very embarrassing stint with those bears in the woods, she opened up her own bed and breakfast so that everything could be just right. She got her business plan together, figured out what it was going to take to meet her bottom line, and started making porridge. Everything was going well. Customers were steadily flowing, people seemed to enjoy her B&B, and she was able to use her past to help spread the message that she knew how to make things just right.

But what she didn’t know was that too much, too little, and just right were concepts she needed to apply to her social media strategy.

When she first opened up her B&B, she had gone and created a Twitter account and a Facebook page for her business, but she didn’t really take the time to fill out her information. She had other things to think about than the Facebook page for her business!

What ended up happening? When customers were looking for a place to stay in her neck of the woods, they would come across her Facebook page and assume that the business had closed, or had never opened. Goldilocks was losing business. She learned that if your company is going to have a social media presence, it needed to have an actual presence, or her clients were going to think that her company was a shell or inactive.

Still being very busy (as making so much porridge that is just the right temperature for all of her guests can take some serious time) she asked Baby Bear to handle her social media presence for her. She told him to come out in full force, create special landing pages on her Facebook page, keep her Twitter account active, monitor her reviews on Yelp and fill out her profile – the whole sha-bang.

With Baby Bear running her social media presence, Goldilocks didn’t have to think about her marketing anymore – but the problem was that she had never thought about it in the first place. Without a logo, a website, a comprehensive brand, and an idea of what she wanted people to think of when they thought of her new Bed & Breakfast, Baby Bear just put together whatever he thought was right.

The people who had taken the time to follow her business on these social networks became irritated with the large amounts of posts that had nothing to do with Goldilocks’ new business. Instead of posting specials, updates on the B&B, special recipes and photos of recent happenings, Baby Bear posted information about Goldilocks and her personal life, her relationship with the Bear Family, and images of honey pots that he thought were particularly interesting. He created a website for the Bed and Breakfast with a logo in Papyrus font that had no contact information to reach Goldilocks or the B&B.

It was a web presence gone wrong. So when her customers could no longer find the B&B because people weren’t using the Yellow Pages anymore, her Bed & Breakfast went under. But Goldilocks was not the type of girl to just give up when something was too soft or too hard. She kept looking until she could make things just right.

She decided to sit down and think about what she wanted the sign out front to look like. She thought about all the ways she could promote her B&B through specials and online coupons. She learned about e-mail marketing and had decided to have everyone sign her guestbook digitally so she could keep up with her past customers. She completely revamped her website, her logo, and created a strategy with Baby Bear so that he knew what she expected her social networks to say about her. She relaunched and made sure to keep up a weekly blog with pictures of the beautiful forest, so that past guests would want to come back. And they did.

And Goldilocks lived happily ever after.