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Posts Tagged ‘blogs’

How I Use My Social Media Schedule

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Very few people at small businesses are dedicated to full-time social media marketing (it’s coming).

So between balancing all of your other responsibilities, you have to find some time, some dedicated time, to participation. Plain and simple. If you don’t, here’s what I predict will happen: You’ll get bored on the slow return (ROI and otherwise), you won’t follow the metrics, and, most tragically, you won’t make any worthwhile connections with customers that are reaching out to you.

It’s the digital equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. Before you do that, try this: use a schedule.

I work first hand with a whole lot of technophobes. These are people that don’t like tech under the best of circumstances (irony alert: now it’s their job!). I can guarantee you that a schedule clears the clutter, sets the bar low, and allows for a path into the world of social media marketing.

Ever see people in the gym staring at the equipment? Those people don’t have a plan. They won’t see any results. But what about the woman who goes at 6 a.m. for 45 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for aerobics and at 3 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday to lift weights? Better, right? That’s the way to do it.

Here’s roughly how I use my social media schedule:

1 hour in the morning: When I get to work, I spend the first hour catching up on social media. Mostly, I use my RSS reader and Twitter.

I go through my reader to find blog posts that might be interesting. Of these, I choose 4 or 5 to make comments on. They’re often the same blogs, because I like what the authors have to say (though I branch out, too). I’ll also post to twitter anything I find that’s interesting.

As I do this, I’m also searching Twitter. I’ve set up different feeds to bring me information on what people are saying about different subjects. I can comment on what those people say, or, most often, re-tweet what they’ve posted to show it to anyone listening on my network.

Twice each week, 1 hour in the morning: I blog. I have a good idea who our audience is, so I like to plan in advance what subjects I’m going to cover here. I talk about content, mostly, and how it relates to digital marketing as a whole. Most of it is basic, and I try to offer actionable items that people can put into practice right away. Pat writes about SEO tips mainly, sometimes high level, but most often it’s stuff that everyone can use. Again, he’s including actionable items.

Once we have a post up, we announce it on Twitter. It’s nice to see that people that I’ve RTed will often return the favor, so our content gets spread around

20 minutes mid-morning: Just before noon, I’ll check in on Facebook. There’s some research that shows that around 11:30 is the best time to post updates on Facebook for business pages, so I look around to see what our clients are up to, how they’re posting information, and what other businesses in their vertical are doing. I check metrics on pages that I’m an administrator on twice a week, so I know exactly what kind of communities are being built.

20 minutes in the afternoon: Time to check back in with Twitter and Facebook. If anything weird happens, or if there’s a problem, the earlier we catch it, the better. Also, there might be some direct messages or posts that I want to respond to.

15 minutes in the afternoon: I’m subscribed to several linkedin groups, so I’ll usually read the threads. I do more lurking there than anything else, but meeting @LewisHowes at SOBCon 2010 inspired me to get more involved. I’ll update you.

And that’s about it for the social media part. The rest of my day I spend writing and managing projects. (I know- I must be living right!) There are other things that will be incorporated as time progresses; mobile marketing is becoming a much bigger part of our content strategy, for instance. And that’s all part of it; it will have its place on the schedule just like the rest.

A note about timing: For me, it’s just as important to step back from social media as it is to participate. IT’s easy to get caught up in the conversation, and before I know it, I’m missing out on my writing and management work. That’s why the schedule is so helpful; it works for off time, too.

I’ll also say that I never separate one from the other. Participating in social media is just as much a part of my work as writing. Anyone who told you that social media will take care of itself lied.

What’s your schedule look like?

Tags: blogs, content, getting started in social media, social media schedule, writing
Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »

The Four Parts Of A Content Strategy For Small Business

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Digital marketing requires participation.

And, as a rule, participation as the cost of entry is setting the bar pretty low. In fact, it’s the award you got in P.E. when you weren’t good enough at sports to win any other awards (welcome, fellow geeks!).

From that standpoint, digital marketing is pretty simple. Get a website. Register your business on a bunch of networks (facebook and twitter aren’t the only ones, people). Start a blog. Post some pictures. Take a little video.

Yup, that’s it.

Except when you factor in a content strategy. That’s where the work, the planning, the effort all come in to it.

You need strategy for digital marketing, because you’re not just doing this to make friends. You’re doing it to make customers. But that business/customer relationship changes so much when you get into the digital realm, and social media, and all that it entails; if you’re not prepared, if you don’t have a strategy, you’re setting your business up to fail.

Publicly.

Without strategy, your blog gets neglected. Your facebook page gets no interaction. No one follows you on Twitter. Your pictures gather dust. Your video gets ignored.

Ever go to the gym and see people standing around? Those are the people with no plan. They don’t have a strategy for what they want to do. No goals. No way to measure their progress. No real chance at success.

Plan or fail. That’s when participation makes a difference. When your business takes the time to think about what to say, when to say it, how to say it, who to talk to, and why, that’s when it starts to pay off.

In other words, content strategy. Break this down into four parts:

Learn,
Plan,
Create, and
Govern

Here’s how that works. This is the content strategy workflow that was developed by Kristina Halvorson in her book Content Strategy For The Web.*

Learn- Take a look at all the content you have. All of it. Yes, someone has to read it. Create a spreasheet with all the information you have about those pages, including analytics and quality. Most small businesses don’t have any analytics info (one of the reasons digital marketing hasn’t paid off for you, if you’re in this group), so you’ll have to go on pure instinct: does this content help us with the direction we’re thinking of going, or is it outdated?

Plan- There are literally thousands of ways to market online using new and updated content. There are two main questions to ask here: 1) What are your objectives? and 2) What are your tactics? If you don’t know how to answer those questions, seriously consider hiring professional help. You’re a small business, so every dollar counts, and there’s nowhere that your money will go farther than in the planning phase of your content strategy.

Create- Ah, down to business. Here’s where you’ll map out who will do what and when, then put someone in charge of organizing it. Develop a workflow, and decide who will write, photograph, video, edit, etc. You’ll also decide what is getting created and when. The creation piece basically dictates who owns what; don’t leave it to chance. There’s plenty of room for strategy here, even with very small (like, two person) teams.

Govern- One of my favorite content strategy quotes from Kristina is “Text is messy as hell”. That’s why it needs to be managed. Once it’s up, it’s not finished; monitoring your content for conversion, for improvement, for user interaction, for growth… that’s all part of the deal when it comes to content strategy for small businesses. You can’t just publish it and forget it (and that goes for all of your content, not just text). Who owns the content when it’s up and running? That’s the question you answer in the governing phase.

What do you think? Does this process make you feel lost? Or is it too simple for what you have planned? I’d like to hear about how you’re using strategy for your content…

*Edited. The post did not originally name Kristina as the source for these ideas.

Tags: blogs, content, content marketing, content strategy, small business
Posted in Digital Marketing | 2 Comments »

The Worst Sentence In Blogging (And How To Avoid Writing It)

Friday, May 21st, 2010

There’s one surefire way to turn off your readers and keep what’s on your blog from being spread around and taken seriously: don’t post regularly.

Posting “every once in a while” is the wrong thing to do on a whole bunch of different levels. Even if you have the best intentions in the world, an inconsistent blog is a sign (a billboard, actually) reading “I don’t care”. And if you don’t care, why should your readers?

The Worst Sentence

I’m going to tell you exactly what the worst sentence you can write in your blog is. It’s seven words long. You’ve read it a hundred times.

First, a word on timing. Timing doesn’t come naturally to most people, and others will never get it. It’s like the old Steve Martin joke: ”If there’s one thing that’s important in comedy, it’s… …. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. …timing.”

Some people have a natural gift for timing; those are the ones with the super-organized closet, socks arranged according to moon phase. They have their timing down to a science.

Most people aren’t like that, myself included. I need practice, and the only way to practice is to have a plan. Because timing isn’t natural (anymore; it’s why we need alarm clocks), it has to be developed. And the positively proven way to do that is to get a system and stick to it.

Oh, and the worst sentence in blogging is this:

“Sorry I haven’t posted in a while.”

Blog, Meet Calendar

An editorial calendar is a tool that’s been used since periodical tablets were sold on Babylonian street corners in 4 column 9 pt cuniform. In other words, way before the internet. The calendar is simple way to plan out out posts, so you’ll never miss one, and your content will always be fresh. It’s an alarm clock for your blog.

Here’s how to do it:

Have a whiteboard session.

A legal pad will work, too. Make 12 labels, one for each month.

Plan out subjects for each month.

Seeing your posts laid out on a calendar will allow you to plan for temporal topics, which can help with your SEO, as well as just being interesting to people at the time they happen to be interested.

Enter the subjects into an ecalendar.

Every electronic calendar available will allow you to set warnings via email for the due dates of each one. Do that.

Huge Step:

With each subject, write a title to go along with it. This is a deeply creative process, and there’s an art to it. It’ll take some time, but it’s going to be incredibly worth it to have your title done ahead of time.

A couple tips to go along with creating your editorial calendar:

Be flexible

Don’t get stuck with something you ultimately can’t write about. If something comes up on the calendar that you can’t create, keep going. The important part is to replace it with something else. No dead spots.

Don’t get bogged down.

You don’t have to have all of your subjects tied to a specific date or event (July 4th, say). It works for some subjects, but not for every single one. What I mean is, if you do tie all of your posts to a date, you end up with something that’s more like a newsletter than a blog.

Leave space.

One thing a blog has to be above everything else (except for being current) is to be interesting. So make sure that you have space in your calendar for things that come up.

Commit.

Once the calendar is in place, make a commitment to stick to it. At least, stick to most of it. If you don’t that’s a lot of hard work going down the drain.

An editorial calendar is not a cure all for everything. But it’s a good way to start planning ahead and being consistent.

And it’s a good way to never have to write the worst sentence in blogging.

Tags: blogs, content, editorial calendar, marketing strategy, motivation
Posted in Content Creation | No Comments »

I Laughed, I Cried, I SOBCon-ed

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Here is what I envisioned: I would post the definitive, penultimate, consummate recap blog post about SOBCon 2010.

After all, it was my first time attending the conference. Who doesn’t want to get a “totally new and fresh perspective” from someone as new and fresh (not to mention witty) as myself? It would be like looking at SOBCon with brand new eyes!

As the newbie often learns, there’s a better way to do it. One of my favorite SOBCon panelists, Steve Woodruff, posted the official-and-conclusive best SOBCon recap yesterday with “The Official Post-Conference Re-Cap Blog Post Template”.

I was disappointed that I only got the chance to briefly introduce myself to Steve during the conference. Now I’m crushed. Yes, the post is brilliant, but there’s more.

What he had to say on the panel about battling depression mirrored my own experience. I know that I’ve never heard anyone so open and honest about it, and neither have you (here’s his background post, “Clearing Clouds”). How refreshing. And BTW, this is the first I’ve ever said anything about my own battles with depression. Steve’s example showed me that I really have nothing to hide.

So, you want to turn “transparency” from buzzword to real life? Follow Steve Woodruff’s example.

Which is exactly what I intend to do with this post. He wrote a template; I love templates! And I know he meant it with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, but I’m running with it. So here goes, with Steve’s template as a point of reference…

I Laughed, I Cried, I SOBCon-ed

I had a wonderful time. That’s a blunt way to start, but if I’m summarizing the whole SOBCon experience, I can’t be any more plain than that. It was awesome. Fabulous. If I was a guy that used exclaimation points without irony, I’d use them, without reservation, about SOBCon 2010 (!).

Terry Starbucker and Liz Strauss started the whole thing off with the word “love”. And I have to say, never having been before, I thought that was setting the bar, um, kind of high. You know what I mean? I was thinking business. Community building. Learning. Not love. I was wrong. My thanks to them and the sponsors for hosting, sharing, and teaching some love.

Here’s what I learned: Action makes the difference. Nearly every speaker echoed this sentiment in some way, most by example. Sheila Scarborough and Becky McCray did it with a session on how they invented and launched their business Tourism Currents. Extreme Leadership author Steve Farber did it by diagramming his Greater Than Yourself program. Chris Brogan did it by being Chris Brogan. And reformed Master Of The Universe Hank Wasiak did it best for me by giving away these 4 beautiful, actionable words rooted in Asset Based Thinking: Tell The Truth Fast (it’s the “fast” part that makes all the difference).

One real shocker was the uber-prevalence of a totally new technology in the digital marketing world: paper and pen. It starts up every time (another @sheilaS-ism). Going to have to check it out when it’s out of beta. Other than that, not much to report, except that I got silly putty all over my iphone case and had to get a new one (long story).

(skipping optional paragraph 5, if you’re following along at home -Ben)

Oh, and one more Chris Brogan thing: You can’t eat a hug. Chris was pretty up front about his ramen-noodle, living-on-a-prayer past which I didn’t know about (I think I was the only one there that didn’t maybe? I don’t know), and I love the paradox in his work that’s central right here: the more you give, the more you get, even when you’re dirt poor.

I didn’t get to hang out with nearly the number of people I wanted to (I’m looking at you, Julie Roads). But rather than focus on the misses, I’m going to say that I was amazed that I got to spend time with a ton of brilliant folks (Shashi Bellamkonda, Lorelle Van Fossen, Dave Barger, Jay Jay French (!), Steve Sherlock, George Kruger, Mary-Lynn Foster, Estrella Rosenberg, Angel Djambazov) including the incredible Glenda Watson Hyatt. I walked back to the hotel with her from the party on night 1, and read through her I’ll Do It Myself blog later that night. Holy. Moly. If you don’t know her, you should. And SOBCon 2011 can’t come soon enough.

Anyway, there’s a community out there for everyone, and I’m pretty fortunate in that I think I found mine at SOBCon.

Remember, you can’t eat a hug. But you can come pretty close. Thanks, SOBCon.

Tags: blogs, business relationships, content, content marketing, Digital Marketing, Inspiration, leadership, marketing strategy
Posted in Thanks | 5 Comments »

5 Ways To Make Your Marketing Manager A Publisher

Monday, April 26th, 2010

If I were a small business owner, here’s what I’d do with my marketing department: Make them publishers.

This isn’t news to anyone who’s been looking at news from the digital marketing world. Social media marketing, content marketing, and digital marketing are increasingly losing their definition and melting together. The heat that’s melting them, to keep the metaphor going, is publishing.

So what does that mean to small business marketers? It means you’ve got to get yourself some content (preferably with some heavy content strategy on the front end).

Here are five tactics to do exactly that…

Create an editorial calendar If you’re using project management software, you should have one of these at your fingertips. You should have one even if you’re not using any PM software (google calendar, anyone?). Get organized from a publishing standpoint, and your efforts will be much more effective. Never write a “sorry we haven’t blogged in a while” post again.

Don’t Stop At Text Photos and videos, like publishing itself, has become so completely accessible that there are really no excuses not to start. Just like your text, you need a schedule to produce graphic content. A picture is worth some specific number of words. Video even more. You don’t have to be viral. You do have to be consistent.

Put Social Media First Never think that social media is a fad. It’s not. Invest in it. The tools of social media will change, but the premise won’t. So from now on, you can’t broadcast your message to everyone online (you never could, although most websites were written and designed that way). Not possible, unless your plan is to out-amazon Amazon. So drill down and connect with the people that you’re interested in. And remember this: if you’re not having a conversation with them, you’re spamming them.

Read Your Analytics Numbers are scary to me. I’m a writer. An English major, even. But that doesn’t mean you should be (afraid of numbers, that is, not an English major, though there’s an argument for not being one of those either). Read those reports. How else are you going to understand what content works and what doesn’t? I’ve even gotten better myself. Publishers know the numbers.

Own It By that, I mean put an emotional investment into your content. Don’t just publish because you have to. These tools, this framework, allows you to do what direct mail, what your brochure, never could. The connections are there to make, if you want to. If you publish content that’s personal, not just your mission statement or your sale. That requires your marketing to break away from traditional thinking.

It requires you to become a publisher.

Tags: blogs, content, content strategy, getting started in social media, marketing strategy, Social Media, writing
Posted in Digital Marketing | No Comments »

How Do You Make The Switch?

Friday, April 16th, 2010

A small business that I know pretty well made a big mistake last week.

Here’s what they did: they hired a person to do their social media marketing.

Not a mistake on its face, right? Right. Having someone in a full time position to manage social media at this point should be obvious. And if it’s not, you’re reading the wrong blogs.

It’s so obvious, in fact, that for most small businesses, the marketing department and the social media manager should be the same person. The ubiquity (one of my favorite words, and a good name for a band BTW) of social media is such that to separate it from the rest of your marketing strategy is, well, dumb.

Back to our business at hand: they hired a person to manage their social media marketing. Nice. Good job, small business that I know pretty well. Way to go.

Until I found out why they hired her. She’s gen Y. That’s it. No experience other than having gone through high school with an ever-present facebook chat window open and an unlimited texting plan.

How bad a decision is this? Catastrophic. It’s like hiring your high school newspaper editor to design all of your print ads (no offense to the high school newspaper editors, current or former, but c’mon- that piece you did on how the fruit cup didn’t contain cherries last week wasn’t exactly the NYT).

Or hiring someone to run your shoe store because they’re bipedal. The point is that an internet age does not an internet marketer make.

Here’s how to switch:

-Embrace Social Realize that marketing socially is better than marketing traditionally. For small businesses, this is an absolute open-and-shut case. Over the long term, the ROI is better, the research is better, the metrics are better. At its core, it’s a better model for your business, because small businesses are about connections, and so is social media.

-Get Familiar Do some research on the space before you make any decisions. It’s said that the internet is an echo chamber, so maybe it’s ironic that the loudest echo is this: listen. Listen to what marketers are saying about the direction that social media is taking. Get familiar with the strategies and tactics. Once you understand a bit about how the gears turn, you can make decisions based on information vs. what’s all this hubub about the Twitter.

-Be True To Yourself Just because marketing is going digital doesn’t mean you have to all of a sudden become a geek. Your company has a personality. Lucky for us, that’s social media marketing’s strong suit. Copywriting isn’t dead, but it’s looking a whole lot more like the text you sent your sales team. Transparency is a bitch for most older businesses, especially the levels of transparency needed for good social media marketing. Anyone that tells you any different isn’t looking hard enough.

-Continuing Ed The big problem with most small businesses is that they’re static. Marketing may get a new look each season, but the tactics are exactly the same. Social media marketing is different. It’s a space that changes fast, and your HPIC (Head Poster In Charge) should be changing with it. And so should you. The cool part is that, digitally, this can happen with amazing ease and grace if you let it. It’s a matter of recognizing change and preparing for it, not just reacting to it.

Put another way: Everyone is aware of social media. Not many people understand it.

When you make the switch, be positive that you’re on the right side of that fence.

Tags: blogs, content, Digital Marketing, getting started in social media, relatonships
Posted in Digital Marketing | No Comments »

4 Ways Web Writing Is Like Dog Training

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

I know the internet is run by cats and all, but I’m a dog lover.

I’m just naturally that way. Maybe it’s from when my brother’s cat did a 90 MPH run over the couch on my face. Or when my wife’s cat pooped in my Christmas present.

I can’t make something like that up.

And I’m a big enough person to admit that it’s me, not you, cats. As a species, you can’t be be trained, mostly, and you’re just too demanding of me, wanting me to hold my legs still so you can rub against them. What’s up with that?

Maybe that’s why I’m a web writer (stay with me). Writing for the web is a lot like training a dog.

Here’s what I mean…

-It’s Going To Be Messy At First Take a look back at my earliest posts. I’ve always been a writer, but I most definitely have not always been a web writer. “Text is messy as hell,” says content strategist Christina Halvorson. Maybe she was talking about new web writers. You never know.

-For Best Results, Use Comfortable Surroundings I can’t say that I started off liking my text editor, or even wordpress. I’m a Pages guy (insert Mac fanboy crack here). It took a while for me to get used to working, not just writing, in different formats. But now that I have, I can stare at a black page in pretty much any format and chew it up (get it? With the whole metaphor and everything?)

-Repetition, Repetition, and Something Else To be a writer, you’ve got to write. Don’t ever create a blog post that says, “Sorry for not posting in so long.” If you do, then the terrorists win. And in this case, when I say terrorists, I mean cats.

-Lots Of Treats, All The Time Writers need praise way more than they need criticism. And that’s going to come from yourself, not the masses. Sorry to break it to you that way. Don’t beat yourself up as a web writer. It’s just not worth it. Know how many blogs there are? 14 million or so. If your voice is important at all, it needs to be important to you. So don’t go hitting yourself on the nose with a rolled up newspaper (remember those?). You’d look dumb.

I’m brilliant for even coming up with this metaphor. My dog is 14, and isn’t trained at all. But he does everything I ask him to. I guess he’s pretty much trained himself.

Like most web writers.

Tags: blogs, content, content marketing, Copywriting, motivation, writing
Posted in Content Creation | No Comments »

How To Write Like James Dean’s Face

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

James Dean was a man of few words, and it showed. When he made a point (“You’re tearing me apart!”), you knew it. No questions.

If you know what your point is, here’s what you should do:

Put it at the top. First. Up front.

In practice, it’s tougher than it sounds. Most people (and too many marketers are included in this group) aren’t comfortable writing or designing this way. There has to be some pre-get-to-the-point staging for them.

This is especially true when given a canvas such as the web and a palette like web design. So many options. Businesses get tempted to throw everything up on a screen to see what sticks.

Everything is a terrible option. When you choose everything, what you neglect is focus. Instead of having a point, you have a blob. If your blob is big enough, yes, you can take over the world with it. Just like in the movies.

You’re not the blob. You’re not trying to take over the world. Your business can’t use that method, so you have to focus.

But isn’t that a brilliant paradox? The more you try to say, the less effective you are at saying it. It’s an old adage, but sometimes it just hits you over the head.

Those are the times you should listen.

James Dean said more in the back of a convertible with a cowboy hat pushed down over his face than most people will say in a lifetime.

Less is more. Choose your words carefully.

Tags: blogs, business relationships, content, content marketing, Copywriting, Digital Marketing
Posted in Copywriting | No Comments »

It’s Basic Diction, Y’all

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

That’s right. I used “y’all”. And I’m not stupid for doing it.

English doesn’t have a good non-gender specific objective plural pronoun. Really. Seems like that’s something we wouldn’t have forgotten to include over the years. But there it is.

Plus, I’m from the south, so I get to pick and choose at will when I can use the word. It’s a thing we have- ask around.

A lot of people might write me off as soon as they see the word “y’all”. There are attitudes and stigmas and predispositions associated with it that no amount of persuasion can help.

But I use it anyway. Sometimes. If the situation is right. Call it artistic license. (And the same thing goes for grammar. Double.)

Correct word choice depends on more factors than calculus. Audience. Style. Tone. Structure. They all play a part in what words you use, and also whether you decide to go out there and dangle your participle for the whole world to see. Embrace it.

Because word police are cold, sad people whose mamas didn’t love them.

But they’re not entirely wrong. There’s a difference between the diction mistakes a writer makes intentionally and, well, all the other mistakes a writer makes.

So, like I said, I’m not stupid for using “y’all”. But I would be if I didn’t realize what goes into choosing the word. If I wrote an article for the WSJ that used “Y’all” without the quotation marks, the editor’s head would explode, Scanners-style. But if I included it in a column in the AJC, the Atlanta paper, I’m one of the family.

Same thing goes with your blog. Your word choice calls to the audience you’re looking for. Blogs are informal by nature. Put your sales writing in one at your own peril. Choose your words.

But choose them carefully. If your diction is screwed, so are you. Don’t say “It is readily apparent” when you should use “See?”

(Same goes with grammar, BTW.)

You can have the best design in the world, but if your words are all wrong, your site will suck.

Correction: Y’all’s site will suck.

Tags: blogs, content, content marketing, Copywriting, writing
Posted in Content Creation | 1 Comment »

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