Technically, this isn’t social media, but it’s essential to have a hub on your website that you can quickly update on your own without the aid of a programmer. When it comes to search-engine rankings, Google loves fresh content, and a blog is an easy way to add keyword-rich new stuff to your site. Use your blog to reach out to your customers. Offer them resources to aid them in decision-making; share the expertise you and your staff have worked so hard to acquire. Schechter suggests checking out Verragio (verragio.com) and Samuelson’s Diamonds (baltimorediamonds.com)—two sites that do it right.
Samuelson’s is continuing its focus on being a leader in the jewelry industry in social media and cutting edge technology.
The original article, “Social Climbing”, can be found here. A special thanks to our friend Michael Schechter of Honora Pearls for writing this informative piece.
MAY 21, 2010: Samuelson’s Diamonds, Baltimore’s Downtown Diamond Destination, was featured in the May 16th Edition of National Jeweler Article ‘The Facebook Wave is Cresting’:
Some of the jewelry retailers that have embraced Facebook are realizing significant returns. Samuelson’s Diamonds, for example, a recognized leader in the movement, has not only posted a page under its specific company name but also operates a page under the title “Diamonds.” As I write this column, that latter page was being followed by 342,977 people. Imagine what that’s doing for Samuelson’s.
Samuelson’s is continuing its focus on being a leader in the jewelry industry in social media and cutting edge technology. See our ‘Diamonds’ Fan Page here:
The original article is from the May 16th Edition of National Jeweler and is entitled “The Facebook Wave is Cresting” A pdf excerpt is available here.
As of last night, we’ve removed the recently-added authentication requirement for setting custom landing tabs on Pages. The requirement was instituted as part of a Pages quality initiative, and we apologize for the inconvenience this caused to our developer and business community. We are re-investigating the situation, and will not make any further changes without first giving our community standard notice and lead-time.
… Facebook recently made a change requiring that Pages be authenticated before enabling the ability to set a landing tab beyond Wall or Info. To be eligible for authentication, a Page must have greater than 10k fans or the Page admin must work with their ads account manager. …
This is potentially a good move, since it requires page owners to actually have a relationship with someone at Facebook (this is fine for small biz) whereas spammers and scammers in particular would shy away from any kind of relationship which could be used to trace their identity when their malfeasance is discovered.
But what is odd is the ambiguous language: ‘must work with their ads account manager.’ This implies that these page Admins must be paying ads customers – in other words, the little guy must put some skin in the game to prove he isn’t a crook.
Then again, presumably there is no required ‘minimum spend’ (Don’t see this anywhere) for being able to work with a manager to authenticate your page. While the attitude is typical of large bureaucratic organizations (guilty until proven innocent) when dealing with small players, the effect may be, in the long run, positive for small businesses and Facebook, provided that Facebook does not use this as a blatant opportunity to extract a toll from small or medium sized businesses.
Looked at in a different light, this could be more evidence that the switch to ‘like’ and the attendant changes were Facebook finally jumping the shark. I’m holding out hope that they retain their good sense.
Almost everyone I know complains about Facebook. Sometimes its the constantly changing interface, the privacy debacles, the spam, or even just service outages that are the cause of these complaints. Sometimes I think it’s like people riding a train complaining about it; sure the train could be better, but who is going to do anything about it?
Some guys from New York – freshly minted college guys of course – have put their money (or in this case, their summer and perhaps the rest of their lives) where their mouth is. Their project is called ‘Diaspora‘:
They’ve already raised over $100,000 ($135,815 as of this writing, according to KickStarter) from people who want to see this live. (They originally thought they might raise $10,000!)
The skinny is this: Unlike most ‘aggregation’ services, this is not some site somewhere that is trying to grab as much of your data for itself as it can (like, um, Facebook?) but rather a piece of software – a seed as they have it – which can be planted in a variety of places including (it seems) your own website, interact with everywhere else (Facebook, Twitter, etc) but let you choose how much data you want to share, and your own data remains your own (such as a list of friends) so long as you do not wish to share it.
It appears that there will also be a ‘turnkey’ service available – for hosting it no doubt – which raises the single question everyone might be thinking right now. In all probability, running Diaspora will not be ‘free’. Now, Diaspora will not cost anything itself, but you will be responsible for hosting it, or paying for the turnkey service (which logically must be a form of hosting with Diaspora pre-planted.)
My prediction is thus: If they can make the turnkey cheap enough, they can bust Facebook’s bubble. It might take a miracle, or a disaster (a privacy-related disaster no doubt!) for this move to take place.
To me, it is quite pleasing to think of this as internet homesteading; I log into my own seed, and there I get everything I have on Facebook, but not on Facebook at all. And if someone isn’t on Diaspora yet, I can still interact with them (via Facebook’s open graph) and best of all, Facebook does not know who all my ‘friends’ are.
And if you can’t pay or figure out how to host it yourself, chances are someone you know and trust can. Now that’s a local internet.
Have you ever seen those groups on Facebook that declare boldly, “We’re against Facebook charging for usage”? The “Petition against Facebook charging money”? Search for it, if you want; but know this: Facebook will never charge money for usage. In fact, I’d argue that they should be paying you for logging in an noodling around.
Take a look at F8: Zuckerberg, if you get past the jargon, wants to map all of the relationships on the web. Why? Because this is valuable to businesses, large and small. It is valuable to non-profits. It is valuable to governments. It is valuable to regular citizens. It is valuable to everyone.
If you want information on people’s needs, likes and habits, you need as many people as you can get. This is what you’d learn in any statistics class.
If you’ve ever tried to use a US appliance outside of the country, you also know that you need the same format to connect to the same network. Therefore, to make a map of the network of all these folks, you need them all in the same place, on the same format.
In short, they need everyone to get on Facebook.
Charging a fee for Facebook would raise the cost of entry (literally!) and mean that there are fewer people for Facebook to add to their map.
Facebook doesn’t charge because they know the value of each person they add for free will outweigh a subscription fee significantly.
So think about this: Why doesn’t Facebook pay us to use it?
Baltimore–Maryland retailer Samuelson’s Diamonds is constantly busy on the Facebook front, regularly adding photos of new designs and posting updates on giveaways and rare diamonds from around the world. But one of Samuelson’s latest updates might take the cake for being the retailer’s most interactive to date.
Samuelson’s Diamonds, whose Facebook fan page is simply named “Diamonds,” has partnered for a jewelry giveaway with Gemvara, an online jewelry marketplace that launched in February and allows shoppers to pick from thousands of jewelry designs and then customize the pieces to their own tastes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
This is the latest and biggest in a series of contests and giveaways that Samuelson’s Diamonds has been involved in. To customize your own ring, start here.
This is David here. I’m Ron’s brother-in-law, married to his sister, Ellyn. I’ve been here at Samuelson’s Diamonds for about six years and I handle lots of the finance and marketing related issues for the company.
We’ve been talking about how video needs to be a more active element of our marketing efforts and we sat down recently with a creative video production group to put together some concepts for Samuelson’s Diamonds. As we were wrapping up our meeting – keep an eye out for some great videos next month – we brought up the idea of collaboration.
How would we effectively share our ideas with one another? I don’t know about you, but I tend to get ideas at all kinds of weird hours and in some pretty strange places. Instead of trying to keep an email chain going indefinitely and having to search Gmail or Outlook for the one email that someone forgot to “reply all” to and is now MIA, we decided to use Facebook as our tool of choice. Although Google Wave is exactly structured for this type of cooperative work, Facebook is a much better option from the standpoint of familiarity. We all know how to update, share, join, invite, etc. Nobody has to be educated or trained. We simply set up a private group, invite the people involved and start adding thoughts, content, comments and more.
Just when you thought Facebook was exclusively a place for social networking and viral marketing, turns out it can also be used for doing actual work!
Facebook is free. Additionally, as a part of web 2.0, it is in a real sense ‘permanently broken’ or incomplete. Nobody really knows what we’re doing, and so things change and adapt quickly. However, a real question arises – if it is true that for instance Facebook will be launching a gmail clone – will people begin to actually rely on it for vital communications? If this is so, what will a fairly moderate interface change mean? Given that people on the web are about as vocal every day as strikers are on the day of the ‘general strike’, can a service like Facebook ignore comments? What are they to do if a change removes key functionality (such as in this case, viewing updates from a specific application or status updates alone)?
It can easily be argued that Facebook is free, and therefore, you pay for what you get. But Facebook itself does not have that attitude; that’s a ‘screw you’ attitude that they’d never be caught uttering. Therefore we can assume that despite being free (on the front end, anyhow) Facebook wants to give its users the best experience possible, as though they were being paid for all of this. (They are, but not directly by us.)
What is interesting in all of this is that when I spoke to Ron, he mentioned that his iPhone app still had the same functionality. In other words, the same Facebook ‘data’ is sitting there, there is just a new ‘terminal’ we who are using the Web need to use. It makes me think that going forward we will see Facebook clients, much the way we see clients for Twitter. The difference is of course that Facebook is many times more complex! Imagine though, if you could get a Facebook client for 1.99 – Facebook gets a cut of that – over a possible group of 400 million folks?
And what about how widely used (and despised?) it is… I am reminded of everyone carping about Microsoft whenever they try to change something. Difference is, we have to accept the change on Facebook. With Microsoft at least there is a few years for us to adapt. And yet we keep using it!
Free, rich communication is valuable; just like a very generic & flexible operating system is. Maybe Facebook will give up trying to play nice and annoy us until we pay to stop the annoyance. I’ll bet they won’t lose people – where else will they go? Twitter?
Or maybe the value is like that of a huge fan page – everyone is there! How can you take credit for that?
AUGUST 14, 2009: Ron Samuelson, CEO of Samuelson’s Diamonds, the premier downtown diamond destination in Baltimore, Maryland was interviewed by the National Jeweler publication about their involvement in online social media:
Ron Samuelson, chief executive of Samuelson’s Diamonds in Baltimore, Md., has taken that philosophy to the extreme. On his 12-year-old Web site, he offers links to the company’s official Facebook page, Twitter account and MySpace profile. He’s also got links to his personal blog and Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.
As if all that weren’t enough, a year ago Samuelson created a Facebook fan page simply called “Diamonds,” that has since amassed 260,000 fans, all of whom he can blast with updates about his business. While some of those fans live as far away as Australia and Saudi Arabia and therefore have little value to him as potential customers, he does not underestimate the value of free marketing.
“People ask me, ‘Do you get business from this? How do you have the time?’” Samuelson says. “That’s my job. The old way of doing things is handwriting tickets, making double your investment and those days are over. Young guys getting engaged–they’re all on Facebook. It’s like going to a big party.”
Samuelson is such a strong believer in the power of digital marketing that the JCK Show tapped him to lead a roundtable discussion in Las Vegas on May 31 titled “Become a Digital ‘Rock’ Star.” Naturally, Samuelson promoted it via Facebook and is also offering his consulting services to jewelers who need guidance on where to begin.
(Note: the aforementioned diamonds fan page now has closer to 280,000 fans.)
Samuelson’s Diamonds maintains its focus on interactive marketing and online networking in the digital age. Find us on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr, and look for Ron Samuelson on various other mediums, including his blog.
JULY 7 2009 – Samuelson’s Diamonds, Baltimore’s premier downtown diamond destination and their affiliated ‘Diamonds’ fan page community was the subject of Engagement 101 Mag’s interview published today: “Couples, diamond lovers flock to Facebook page.”
Jeweler Ron Samuelson wasn’t expecting much when he started a diamond fanpage on Facebook. Now 200,000+ fans later, Ron and his business are now pioneers in the new way the jewelry industry likes to market online. Thanks to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, the breech between jewelry businesses and consumers are closer than ever, and luckily, both parties benefit.
“The way we use social media, Facebook, Twitter — there’s a personal side,” Ron told Engagement 101. “There’s a personal side with my profile. People see that I like to play guitar, go to football games — they see you as a real person instead of a company saying, ‘Hey, this is what I sell.’”
The personable side of online media has changed the face of the jewelry industry. Ron’s diamond fanpage on Facebook doesn’t just promote his business, Samuelson’s Diamonds, but hosts a whole diamond community. Fans post pictures of their engagement rings, share proposal stories (and sometimes divorce stories) and participate in discussions.
Samuelson’s Diamonds maintains their commitment to social media and cutting-edge customer relations.
For the umpteenth time since last year 
