getting started in social media (2)

Posts Tagged ‘getting started in social media’

Three Very Simple Fanpage Tips

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

The Facebook Fanpage. It’s everywhere!

After some time of groping in the dark, and some functionality changes to groups and pages, marketers have now turned in force toward the fanpage.

Why? It’s another platform for interacting with your audience and expanding brand recognition.

Need more? Here are some lovely statistics from Morpace, Inc…

Facebook has more than 400,000,000 registered users.
68% of consumers with Facebook accounts say a positive referral from a Facebook friend would make them more likely to buy from or visit a retailer.
36% say Facebook is a good tool for researching products.

Here are a few very simple tips, which can greatly improve the quality of your Facebook marketing…

Give your fans a voice
Interaction with your fans is a goal, so allow it to happen and allow it to be easily found.

I often see businesses that have made it hard for fans to be visible based upon the wall settings. Allow your fans to post to your wall, post photos, and post videos. Real people posting photos of themselves using your products, well, that’s gold, especially if you are in the travel and tourism business.

Within your admin section, under wall settings, ensure you are allowing your fans to interact.

Ask A Question
How many times have you carefully crafted a wall post, only to have no comments or response? When you make statements, you automatically preclude interaction.

Ask people questions. For example, if you were going to post about an event happening this coming weekend, don’t stop with just the basic “This weekend be sure to visit blah blah for event XYZ.” Finish with an open-ended question, “What are your plans for the weekend?”.

Try it. Yes, social media is about connections. But people really (really) want to talk about themselves. Are you inviting them to do that?

Post Photos in Threes
Many small businesses are digital asset-poor not having vast library’s of photos and videos. Because of this you have to maximize your assets and try to receive the greatest amount of interaction.

So, when posting photos to your fan page, post in groups of three. You can continue to add to existing albums, and maximize the opportunity for interaction.

Why three? Simply because three photos are all that will show on the page when you post. Post three, then when it is time to post again, the freshest three will display on the page.

A side benefit is that it will display any previous interaction with the album, allowing you to leverage social proof to keep fans posting and interacting with your content.

Those are just three simple tips for fanpage optimization. There are tons more. What are your favorites?

Tags: facebook, fanpage marketing, getting started in social media, marketing strategy, Pat Strader
Posted in Digital Marketing, Marketing, Social Media | 1 Comment »

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 »

Quiet, Please

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

I used to have a bad, bad problem with putting my foot in my mouth.

I mean really bad. I’ve asked fat women if they’re pregnant, inquired about the status of dead spouses, and mocked the developmentally disabled for being drunk.

And I’m a nice guy. I genuinely meant no ill will. But due to circumstances that I wasn’t able to perceive, I was left looking like, for want of a better term, a total jackass.

Check that. There is no better term for want of.

But, just so people understand, I’m not malicious, or stupid. It’s just that, when your foot goes into your mouth, you look both malicious and stupid.

Now imagine reliving that one embarrassing moment when your toes pass your teeth and your foot lodges ankle deep in your primary speaking orifice forever, with thousands of people watching. They share your horrible experience as an example to others on behavior and ettiquite. Did I mention that this moment lives on forever?

Oh. Yes I did. Twice. In italics.

So here’s a tip that my social inept brain learned to send my social media brain: be quiet.

Quiet solves so many problems, it’s amazing there isn’t more empty space on the internet. But that’s a question for another post.

The gist here is that, just because you have a cursor, it doesn’t mean you have to curse. Er, speak. There are some rules of thumb to remember in social media concerning the sound of silence…

No One Looks Good In A Fight On The Internet Notice how movie villains always have the polite lines in the evil scenes? There’s a reason for that. The context around what they’re saying makes them darker. Thing is, the internet rids speech of context. There’s no inflection, and there isn’t enough text in social media to give context to speech (It’s why people use emoticons, BTW). That’s why, when arguments happen on the internet, it’s so easy for others to ridicule. Avoid arguing online.

The Internet Is A Great Place To Have An Opinion And it’s a terrible place to tell someone that they’re wrong. Part of it, again, is context. The other part of it is space. People have social media space, just as they have personal space. You wouldn’t get all up in someone’s grill, as the common parlance has it. So don’t do it online.

Better To Remain Quiet And Be Thought A Jackass than to start typing and remove all doubt. It’s an old saying right? Well, how do you think sayings get old? They’re true. And online, it goes back to that whole forever thing. If you say something inappropriate, it eventually gets forgotten (usually. certain restrictions apply). But if you post something inappropriate, it’s out there for as long as you’re online. Longer.

The echo chamber of the internet sounds the loudest when it says this one word: Listen.

Tags: content, content marketing, getting started in social media, social media mistakes, twitter
Posted in Uncategorized | 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 »

How To Make Great Marketing In One Easy Step

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Care.

That’s it. If you care about your marketing, most of the labor is done. It’s what Seth Godin calls emotional labor, and in our economy, nothing means more.

If you care about your marketing, you’re necessarily going to manage the details. Caring creates more work, but if you really care, that’s what you’re looking for.

Your site is going to match your collateral pieces, because you cared enough to realize that design is your first impression. Your message will be the crux of who you are, because you hired a writer to help craft it. You cared enough to spend more time on your strategy than your tactics.

You blog because you care. You pile up your photostream because you care. You spend time using social media to connect people, not to sell, because you care.

In Gary Vaynerchuk’s presentation last week at SXSW, he cared enough to:

-Greet everyone coming into the auditorium at the door personally.

-Not use powerpoint.

-Call out a Johnson & Johnson marketer (in a friendly way) for having an agency tweet for them.

-End his presentation with some spontaneous rap and beat boxing at the Q and A microphones.

One point that really struck me about the emotional labor that Gary puts in was what he had to say about projects. He made the (totally believable in his case) point that once he decided to take on a project, he had already succeeded at it.

Not because everything always works out for Gary. Because he’s interested in the process. If you care enough about the process, the result is great marketing.

And we all know what the results of that are.

Tags: blogs, business relationships, business trust, content, content marketing, getting started in social media, marketing mindset, marketing strategy
Posted in Inspiration | No Comments »

Grab Ass With Gary Vaynerchuk

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Last week at South By Southwest, Gary Vaynerchuk, best selling author of “Crush It” and creator of Wine Library TV, grabbed my ass on stage in front of 1000 people.

I’m not sure how a feel about it yet. Excited? Shocked? Maybe a little dirty?

Actually, I feel pretty cool. Love him or hate him, anyone with half a brain needs to admit: Gary Vee walks the walk. He’s a loudmouth? So what? I’d rather do business with Gary than some unhappy hipster that’s too cool for me and everyone I know. In a second. The guy loves the Jets. Publicly.

I’ve had brushes with the internet famous before. In light of this last episode, it’s beginning to get a little strange. Here’s what I mean: I met Chris Brogan and Jay Berkowitz about 6 seconds into the first conference into the first conference I ever went to. They gave me restaurant recommendations. Two days later, I got lost in a cab with Guy Kawasaki. And now, several hundred people think I’m bi/curious because of Gary (actually happily married, thanks).

Wow, someone just dropped names all over the place. Sorry for that; I’m making a point.

The internet marketing famous and semi-famous, in my experience, are a really interesting, really accessible group of folks. You could be cynical and argue that it’s their job to be friendly. But you’d have it backwards. Those people start with friendly. The good ones have a desire to help people be motivated enough to do the things they imagine they can do, and make a business out of it.

Even when it goes wrong. If you were following some of the #SXSW drama last week, you may have caught a little drama concerning Peter Shankman and some conference volunteers with close ties to the creative locals in Austin. I think it’s a pretty good illustration of how people who have made big strides can get tripped up. Think of it this way: the first word in Shankman’s business is “Help”.

Nobody’s perfect, and I’m going on record as saying that the internet famous get a bad rap. Even if I don’t agree with what they’re doing (is Guy a spammer? Or are you signed up for it?), I’m slow to criticize anyone. It’s a lot more constructive to think of ways I can do a better job myself than to worry about how bad a job someone else is doing.

Think I’m just being soft? Why?

P.S. Thanks for the interesting presentation, Gary. I think : – )

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

How To Introduce Yourself With Social Media

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

We talk a lot about the conversation.

But one question a lot of business owners have is, “How do I join?” That makes sense. Business owners usually sell things to the people they’re talking to.

Or at least, they did. Now, it’s not up to the business owners to sell as much as it’s up to the consumer who to buy from. I can buy a $200 import guitar from anywhere. Everyone has a sale, everyone can ship to my door. What makes you so special?

What makes you special is I know you. You came to where I was and introduced yourself.

There are more than a few good ways to find conversations about what you do. But once you find them, it’s best to spend some time reading up on what people are talking about there.

If it’s a message board, read the notes from the moderators. Check out the people who post a lot. If it’s a comments section on a blog, read past entries. Try to get an idea of the audience. Take some time to hear what people are saying.

Why? Because it’s possible you’ll be stepping all over the conversation if you don’t.

You’ve been listening, so you should get an idea of how to best introduce yourself. It doesn’t have to be a formal “Hello”. And this isn’t a post about etiquette, necessarily. But there should be a few cues you can take from the people already taking part in the conversation.

And if you can’t, it might not be somewhere that’s worth your time. In general, places online where the conversation is “noisy” isn’t a good place to make a suggestion, say hi, offer something, etc.

It’s a rule that the more anonymous a conversation is, the less helpful it tends to be. In other words, stick to conversations where people are who they say they are.

That’s who you want as a customer.

Also, be humble. Acknowledge that people have been contributing to the conversation for a while before you showed up.

Along that same line, be honest. Tell people who you are, and what interest you have in being there. One caveat: Don’t sell. Ever. Almost. We hammer this point here pretty regularly, so I won’t go over the finer points in this post. But instead of selling, just be helpful. Okay? Great.

That’s what you showed up to do in the first place, right?

Tags: content, getting started in social media, relatonships, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

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Posts Tagged ‘getting started in social media’