Tag: social media

May 29, 2011

3 Lessons About Social Media Marketing Learned From Transformers

Social Media is awesome. Transformers are awesome. Coincidence? I’ll let you decide.

Lessons can be drawn from anywhere. Not long ago I remembered an old poster titled ‘Everything I need to know about life I learned in Kindergarten’. I also stumbled across one of my old G1 Transformers toys the other day. These two memories combined in to the inspiration for this post. There are some great pearls of wisdom that can be drawn from the epic struggle of Autobot vs. Decepticon, many of which can be applied to your approach to Social Media marketing. Here we go…

1 – More than meets the eye.

Ah yes, the ever-famous tagline of the Transformers franchise. It’s simple message: Don’t always believe things are how they look on the surface. The perfect example of this is the typical ‘Twitter is useless’ or ‘Facebook is for kids’ stereotypes we hear all too often. A deeper look at Social Media reveals that there are mountains of helpful information being shared all the time on Twitter, and Facebook is proving to be one of the most powerful relationship-building tools businesses have ever seen.

The Lesson: Never assume that first-glances tell the whole story.

2 – Never underestimate the little guy.

Bumblebee and Laserbeak were arguably the least ‘powerful’ Transformers in the series, and yet many episodes saw these little guys play crucial roles in the outcome of the battles. They had unique skills that they could bring to the table, just like the lesser-known or smaller Social Media tools. Just because a Social Media tool doesn’t have hundreds of millions of users doesn’t mean that you should ignore it. The more options you give your audience to connect with you, the more they WILL connect with you. By limiting your audience to only a few channels, you’re also limiting your ability to hear what they have to say.

The Lesson: Recognize the benefits to every tool you have available.

3 – Your success depends entirely on your team.

Every time the Decepticons started out a new plan, it went really well…..at first. Inevitably though, their infighting, aggressiveness, carelessness, and general contempt for everyone surrounding them led to their failure. Social Media communities don’t tolerate those individuals who attempt to game the system, speak in condescending tones, and generally just act like jerks. The keys to success In Social Media are respect, honesty, and a genuine desire to be helpful, just like the Autobots.

The Lesson: If your team is full of jerks, don’t expect to do well.

In short, if you recognize all the real benefits of Social Media, make use of every option you have available, and approach it with the right attitude, you’re well on your way to developing an effective Social Media marketing strategy. It may seem like simple, obvious stuff, but all too often it’s the simplest lessons that get ignored.

Pics linked from: http://tfwiki.net/

May 25, 2011

A Different Kind of Influencer – Find Your Enthusiasts

I have a really hard time putting any kind of stock in to a Klout score. It just seems extremely artificial to me. After all, a quick look at those with scores of 100 yields an awful lot of pop music personalities, whom I shall not name because they clearly do not need any additional referrals. Klout strongly believes that these individuals hold a massive amount of influence, but the question remains: What are they influencing people to do? Retweet their stuff? Buy their song on iTunes? Big deal. Above and beyond that, the real influence of celebrities doesn’t really amount to too much.

One can easily argue that individuals who are ‘experts’ on a particular topic have far more actual influence than celebrities, because they often post blog articles and advice that people will put in to practice, thereby changing the behaviour of their audience based on the information that they share. If they share a review of a web design technique that works, or tips for communicating in the social media world, many followers will heed their advice and put those tips in to play for themselves. This, in my opinion, is a much more accurate description of ‘influence’.

But there’s a third group of people who hold ‘influence’ in the digital world. They’re not celebrities. They’re not experts. They are what I call the ‘enthusiasts’. People who are absolutely nuts for whatever it is they are talking about. They live it and breathe it. Whatever it is, it is their passion. It could be cars, PC’s, flowers, web design, photography, woodworking, travel, or antique toys. Everyone is passionate about something, and everything has someone who is passionate about it.

These individuals are a new kind of influencer. Finding these individuals and engaging with them can create a brand advocate of far greater strength and loyalty than any well-known expert. After all, if a popular expert endorses a product or service, there is a good chance that there is some mutual benefit coming back to them from that company. Either they got the product for free, or were paid to do a review, or simply got the benefit of being featured on the company’s website. Not to say this is bad, because most popular experts got to where they are by being good at what they do. They evaluate products and services very methodically, and tend to have broader experiences to draw comparisons from. But an enthusiast? They probably paid for whatever it is out of their own pocket.

There’s something to be said for having super-passionate enthusiasts interacting with you, sharing their opinions and reviews, and becoming your best friends. Social media amplifies their voices and creates a whole new level of word-of-mouth. Someone with 200 followers who’s crazy about your company tweeting about your stuff for weeks (or months) on end can have far more reach and influence than a single tweet in the daily stream of an expert to an audience of 30,000.

Ultimately, if you are carefully checking Klout scores and looking at follower counts in order to determine if mentioning or responding to a specific individual is ‘worth your time’, you may be missing out on a huge untapped resource of ‘influence’. Every single person who mentions you is worth your time. You never know who’s voice will really carry the farthest in the social media world.

May 19, 2011

4 ‘Share’ Button Tips – Choosing the best buttons for the job.

There are as many types of ‘Share’ buttons as there are Social Media sites, so how do you pick the right ones for your site and avoid the clutter?

There’s no denying that you need to have share buttons on your site or blog. They are an absolutely essential feature, and are crucial for anyone who wants to encourage sharing of content in an easy way that’s familiar to your users/readers. But there are SO MANY options out there, how can you effectively choose the right buttons without cluttering up your pages?

Each SM site provides code for their own button designs, and often there are multiple options that are different sizes, shapes, colours, etc. In addition, there are mutli-source sharing button options that pull in virtually every possible share option in to one expandable button, like those from AddThis or AddToAny.

Should you use only a couple of the most popular buttons? Or maybe just go with a multi-share button that covers every option? Or just go with the one share location that you WANT people to use? Well, there are a few good rules-of-thumb that I’ve put together that might help you choose which ones are really the best choice for your particular application and audience.

1 – Size, colour and shape

Visually, your share buttons should both blend in with your site, and stand out enough to be easily noticed. Sound like a contradiction? Perhaps, but think about it this way: the ignition on your car could be a tiny slot concealed to blend right in with the dash, but that would make it hard to locate when you need it. Or, you could make the ignition super-easy to find by using a big red button the size of your fist, but that would look out of place and silly.

• Your share button should be sized to be proportional to the other elements on your site.
• Your share button should be the right shape for the location of the button so that there’s a decent amount of space around it, without being too close to other elements or sticking it in the middle of nowhere on your page.
• If you have a dark background, use a lighter button. Light background, darker button. Just like text, dark-on-dark and light-on-light = bad.

2 – Location, location, location.

Example: Mashable is great at placing their share buttons in an easily accessible spot, and makes them scroll with the page so they are always visible.

Where you put your share button is just as important as how it looks. I’ve seen some web pages with the share buttons at the very bottom of the page, lumped in with things like the privacy policy or the ever-useful site map. Other times I’ve seen it scattered in multiple places on the same page. Ideally, you want your share button to be easily accessible, but not intrusive. In sidebars, below product title headers, or at the end of blog posts are all great locations that make it clear what information you’ll be sharing.

• Very rarely do you need more than one set of share buttons on a page.
• It should be clear to the ‘sharer’ what content will be shared.
• If your share button isn’t easy to find, it won’t get used. Don’t throw it at the bottom of your site.

3 – Single-site share buttons vs. multi-site share buttons.

This is where things get tricky. It really depends on the type of content on the page, and the type of users you are attracting. If it’s a blog, for example, you’ll likely want a multi-site share button so that readers can share it in any way they want (Tweet, Like, StumbleUpon, Re-blog, email, print, etc).

If it’s an individual product, then a pair or a trio of individual site share buttons (A ‘tweet’ button, a ‘like’ button etc) may be the best way to allow users to simply indicate that they endorse that particular product. In addition, those individual site share buttons usually come with a ‘counter’ to display how many people have liked or tweeted the page. If your users appear to have an affinity to one particular social media site, Facebook for example, providing them a native share button for their preferred site may encourage them to share more.

Also, there are combo-buttons that typically feature Facebook ‘Like’ and Twitter ‘Tweet’ buttons with counters, as well as a multi-site ‘Share’ button that ties in all the other sites. These are great all-round solutions since they combine the best traits of each option in to one share tool.

• Multi-site share buttons are excellent for educational/informational materials that users would share in many different outlets.
• Single-site share buttons are simple, easy ways for users to share that they ‘like’ or approve of a particular product, service, or singular piece of content.
• Combo buttons provide the best of both worlds.

4 – Familiar trumps freaky.

Do a Google search for ‘social media icons’ and you’ll get countless options of funky, sleek, crazy, and cool social media icons made by graphic designers that you can use on your site. The only problem is that the majority of these really only appeal to other graphic designers. The vast majority of your users will simply be looking for the ever-familiar Facebook ‘F’ or Twitter ‘T’ icons in the official colours used on those sites. Even a passing glance will generate instant recognition of what it is and what it does. Using an icon for your button that looks like a bottle cap or a lab experiment beaker may get the occasional user to think ‘wow, that looks neat!’, but hardly encourages your average user to click on it.

• Always use the official logo, colours, and appearance whenever possible for your share buttons.
• If your share buttons look different from everyone else’s share buttons, you may lose potential sharers because they don’t recognize them.

Overall, what you really need to look at when deciding how to setup your sharing options is what really fits with your site or blog. This is one instance where the Keep It Simple Stupid mantra really should be kept in mind. Just like all things in web design, people like simple navigation over complex, clean design over cluttered, clear calls to action over hidden links, and ease of use above all else.

Don’t forget that all of these buttons and widgets will come with analytics so that you can easily monitor how they are performing, and how users are interacting with them. Be sure to check these regularly, for they will reveal fascinating insights that you can use to help refine your ‘sharing’ strategy to encourage more and more shares.

Here’s a list of share button resource links that you can choose from when incorporating share functions in to your site:

Multi-site Share Buttons:
http://www.addthis.com
http://sharethis.com/
http://www.addtoany.com

Single-site Share Buttons:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
https://twitter.com/about/resources/tweetbutton
http://www.linkedin.com/publishers
http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/share_button
http://www.stumbleupon.com/badges/landing/

April 27, 2011

Sharing the web, your way. – A look at the BO.LT web editor.

Last week, Avinash Kaushik tweeted about a new service that allows you to edit and customize web pages before sharing them. Called ‘BO.LT’, this concept intrigued me, and I promptly signed up to give it a shot. After playing around with it a bit, I’m struggling with how to best use this tool. It has major benefits, but also some downsides, which I will examine after I cover the basics of how the service works.

Signing up for a BO.LT account is done by submitting a request to join and then waiting a short time to be accepted, unless you are given an access key from an existing BO.LT member. Fortunately my account was approved in just a few days, so the wait is not unreasonable, and when you do get invited to join, you are given an access key that can be shared to create two additional accounts for friends.

Once you sign up, you must enter what will be your subdomain, which acts like your own personal URL shortener. Every link you create with BO.LT will begin with your subdomain and then a random string of letters, just like a bit.ly link. EG: http://jonbarrick.bo.lt/3yv6d You can even customize the link, just like with other URL shorteners.

BO.LT takes any URL that you give it and creates an exact duplicate of it that is hosted with one of the best wordpress hosting providers and you can edit using a simple editor interface. You can delete images, text, links and whatever else you want, while maintaining the integrity of formatting and anything else you leave intact on the page.

In addition to deleting unwanted things, you can also replace existing elements with your own. Images can be substituted, text can be edited, embedded links can be altered. It’s an incredibly powerful tool to make any web page the way you want it to be.

There are many advantages to editing a page with BO.LT before sharing it. Not the least of which are that it allows you to clear out the clutter. For example, web pages on news digest sites are typically jammed with ads and links to other stories that hold little to no relevance to the reason you want to share the page. Often times, you are only sharing a tiny portion of the page, and the rest is essentially junk. BO.LT allows you to remove all the extra ‘stuff’ from a page to make it easier for your ‘clickers’ to see only what you intended for them to see, and to relieve them from the otherwise constant stream of banner ads we are exposed to.

However, the downsides of this kind of tool are also plentiful. Web pranksters will quickly discover this to be a dream come true, as they are now able to create 100% visually accurate parody pages of legitimate sites with minimal effort, complete with altered links to not-so-nice content that can easily deceive all but the most vigilant of users.

And while removing banner ads and unwanted content from pages is great for readers who are fed up with the constant barrage of ads flashing in their eyes, advertisers will not be pleased if their revenues plunge. We all know that many of the sites we value as content sources are supported through advertising revenue, and those advertisers will only continue to pay for those spots if they’re generating clicks and views. Otherwise, many sites will need to seek other sources of revenue in order to stay alive.

Of course, it’s still way too early to tell if this service will catch on with the majority of users, but even a handful of the webs most prominent content sharers could have a significant impact by using this tool to strip out unwanted content before distributing it to their massive audiences.

One last major issue with this tool that I can see is the time needed to alter pages before sharing. Instead of simply clicking the ‘tweet’ button, users now need to copy the URL, paste it in to BO.LT, edit the page, save, and then share it. Any page that you choose to edit before sharing immediately takes significantly longer to get distributed. Of course, we’re only talking a matter of a several seconds to a few minutes, but relative to not editing at all, that’s a major difference.

Overall, there’s no doubt that it’s a cool service. Very cool. And I’ll continue to play around with it, especially on pages that, as Avinash would say, ‘totally suck’. After all, if I can make the content I share more pleasing to my readers, isn’t it worth it?

April 15, 2011

Getting a Head Start Through LinkedIn: Networking Tips for College Students

I recently had an opportunity to speak to a group of up-and-coming marketing interns at the local college who are going through the same course of study that I completed ‘back in the day’. As I sat on the discussion panel with two other marketing-program alumni, talking about what is expected of interns during their work terms and offering advice and tips to help them get the most from their experiences, it struck me that one thing that must be mentioned to this group was LinkedIn. After all, LinkedIn is a crucial tool that allows professionals to network, share ideas, learn, and build their reputation as well as seek out career opportunities of all types.

So, when my next turn to speak came around, I brought up the topic of LinkedIn, and asked for a show of hands for any who knew what it was. Out of a group of 25 or 30 students, only two hands rose in the air. TWO. That’s less than 10% of the group that were aware of the biggest professional social network in existence. I was simply astounded.

Suffice to say, I promptly unleashed a large batch of reasons why they should get their LinkedIn profile up and running as soon as they got back home. The benefits for students to get themselves setup on LinkedIn are just as numerous as the benefits for any professional out in the world today. Here’s a few of the key ones that I feel students can start to realize almost immediately:

1 – Always keep your experience and references complete and up-to-date.

Your LinkedIn profile is like a resume on steroids. It is constantly evolving, and allows you to incorporate much more information than what is feasible in hard-copy form, such as things like Twitter accounts and links to blogs. While we’re not quite at a point where you can strictly direct people to your online profile, I can easily see resumes created in Word or Acrobat to go the way of the dinosaur in the near future. After all, why shuffle around files or attachments when a simple web link can accomplish the same thing, and much more? But in the meantime, maintaining a LinkedIn profile allows you to easily pull out applicable experience and information for the job you’re looking for, and put together a targeted application in virtually no time.

2 – Engage in discussions and learn more from industry professionals.

Want a job at Nike? How about Coke? Or one of the major agencies? Find their reps profiles on LinkedIn and see what groups they belong to. Join those groups and start asking questions and participating in discussions. Hearing about the latest trends and industry effects allows you to take the core concepts and ideas that are in the curriculum and textbooks and apply them to the current state of things in the real world. The business battlefield is now changing faster than ever, and talking to the soldiers who are out fighting in the trenches right now will be crucial in developing an effective career strategy.

3 – Build up your network.

Though they may only be fellow students right now, they’ll all be professionals in your field someday, so making meaningful connections with the superstars in your class can have major benefits in the long run. Also, any teachers or professors that you have a good relationship with can be a great source of referrals and references for you. Connecting with them on a professional level is a huge plus. In addition, if you go to any seminars, shows, or events where prominent businesspeople are present, make sure to connect with them if you can. Let them know that you’re a rising star, and that they should be paying attention to you. Lastly, don’t forget to connect with any professionals you meet or work with at any internships or work placements. If you do a good job with them and keep in touch, they can be excellent contacts to be called on in the future.

4 – Learn proper modern business communications early.

You can’t act the same way in business as you do at the college bar on Friday night. The sooner students learn this, the better off they’ll be by not posting incriminating or embarrassing things that can deep-six their careers before they even begin. The professionals you’ll find on LinkedIn networks have no time for joking around or unprofessional behaviour, so it’s a great way to get conditioned for how to communicate in a business environment. Respect everyone’s opinion. Proper spelling and grammar are important. Don’t let texting become your default communication style. How you talk to your buds on Facebook doesn’t jive very well with the Fortune 500.

5 – Begin forging your personal brand.

Every individual is their own brand, and LinkedIn is an excellent tool for letting the world know who you are, and what you’re all about. Your specialties will come to light through your experiences, and you will probably find that it will help you discover where your real aptitudes are, and assist you in enhancing them. Your ever-expanding LinkedIn presence helps develop your reputation as a professional in your field, and eventually as an expert. The earlier you start, the sooner you’ll reap the benefits.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. LinkedIn’s benefits also stretch in to your overall web presence, and the job postings on LinkedIn are proving to be far more valuable than those on traditional job posting sites. It allows you to connect directly with individuals at certain organizations that are of interest to you. Finding that ‘dream job’ may still be hard, but with LinkedIn you have a greater number of paths available to you that you can use to find your way to your career utopia.

When you first start out, you’ll want to make sure that your LinkedIn profile is complete, and follows the best-practices used by successful LinkedIn users. Here’s a few quick tips to help you get your profile setup in a good way:

Use a professional looking picture. No beach pics, bar pics, party pics, baby pics, or anything else other than you looking like you are a smart, savvy, intelligent person. First impressions are huge.

Make your headline about YOU, not your current job. Anyone can look at your profile and see where you work and what your title is. Your headline should talk about what YOU, as a professional, are all about.

Shorten your public profile URL to http://linkedin.com/in/yournamehere. Here’s a link to the instructions on how to do this. Having a custom URL makes it easier to share your link, and is also a piece of your personal brand.

Personalize your network requests. When you ask someone to connect with you, make sure to include a personalized message with your request. Professionals find it extremely frustrating to get a generic LinkedIn request that tells nothing of how you might actually know the person. Let them know who you are, how they know you, and why you are connecting.

I hope that these tips are found to be helpful. I sure wish that I had a tool like LinkedIn back when i was going through college. Even though I’ve since connected with a great deal of people I would have back then anyway, I can’t help but wonder where life would have taken me if I’d had this amazing tool at my disposal. Just one of those ‘what if’ things that I’ll always be curious about, I suppose.

March 24, 2011

Outsourcing Intimacy – Making the Case for Internal Social Media

Are you farming out your social media activities? You may want to reconsider.

Do a search for ‘social media agency’ and you’ll get more than a few results. 23 million in fact. There are an awful lot of people out there clamouring to handle your social media presence for you, and they make a pretty strong case as to why you should let them.

Having an effective presence in social media is time consuming, and internal marketing departments are typically already stretched pretty thin covering traditional marketing efforts. Hiring an agency to handle your social media activities would seem like an ideal solution. It’s quick, easy, and gets the job done for a nominal fee. But be aware that there are a number of factors that make an equally strong case for handling social media from inside your company.

The first is quite simple: Someone connecting with your business will want to connect with YOU, not someone sitting at a desk at an agency, far removed from your business. For example I know that for myself personally, if I want to ask someone at Apple a question, I sure don’t want to talk with their ad agency. I want the same experience online that I would be able to obtain if I walked in to an Apple store and sat down at the Genius Bar.

Another reason to keep social media internal? The people working at agencies just don’t share your passion for your product or the industry that your business serves. But what’s most important is they don’t share the same passion for your customers. They can’t, otherwise they’d be in your business and that would make them your competitor. It’s not to say they’re not capable marketing people. It’s just that they’re coming at your customers from a very different angle than you are, so they can’t possibly understand them the same way you do. What ultimately makes your customers WANT to connect with your business is the experience they had with your business, not the experience they had with your ad.

Need an example of a worst case scenario?

Just look at the recent snafu that Chrysler ran in to. An employee at the agency they had hired to manage their social media not only made a grievous error in judgement by posting a rogue tweet with the ‘f-word’ in it, but the obscenity was directed at the driving ability of the entire city of Detroit. DETROIT. Motor City, the birthplace of the American automotive industry. Think that someone who actually works at Chrysler would have made that same mistake? Possibly, but I really doubt it.

Now, I certainly don’t want to give the impression that Agency = Bad, because that’s really not the case. They excel at certain tasks, and one of those tasks can be training you and your people on how social media works. They can train you on the right language to use, the importance of replying and acknowledging your community’s activity, and they can show you the methods and tools to use in order to be successful. They can show you how, but they can’t do it for you.

Ideally the agency you choose should support you in your efforts, as a guiding hand through the complexities of social media. Providing advice, education, and suggestions on what to try next. But the conversations? Those should be yours to have.

Social media is the most intimate way a business can maintain a relationship with its customers. We’ve never had the ability to connect so easily, on an ongoing basis, with customers and businesses as we have today. Does it really make sense for your business to outsource that intimacy? Every company should be asking that question and choosing the path that’s right for them, and for their customers.

March 21, 2011

Apprehensive about using Foursquare? Don’t be, and here’s why.

Location-based social media is huge, but what if you’re one of those people who just doesn’t want to share where you are all the time? Well, fear not! You can still have fun AND stay private.

I first heard about Foursquare early last year, but I didn’t really give it much thought as something that was ‘for me’. At the time, I couldn’t wrap my head around the whole issue of privacy, and why people would be so willing and eager to broadcast their exact whereabouts all the time. I guess I thought of all the same apprehensions that most of the naysayers have about it: “Open invitation to stalking/robbers/perverts, etc”. But like most things that generate a fear-based response, this was just due to my not really not understanding how it actually works.

When I went to the UnGeeked Toronto conference last fall, Katie Felten gave a fascinating presentation/discussion on Foursquare, and answered a lot of questions about what it’s capable of, how it works, and why Foursquare users love it so much. Katie’s discussion removed some of my negative assumptions, and I recognized that Foursquare did have it’s benefits, but ultimately I still wasn’t ready to give it a shot myself.

Then the other day, I had a simple, obvious realization: What if you just don’t add any friends? Foursquare will only broadcast your location if you specifically tell it to, and even then only to those people that you have added as friends. That’s the beauty of these new tools. They can be as social as you want them to be. There’s no requirement saying that you HAVE to add every one of your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers, or everyone in your address book as soon as you create your account. You don’t need to add anyone unless you choose to. Your Foursquare experience can be completely private, if you want it to be.

So, if you want the benefits of Foursquare, including deals and discounts at all kinds of local businesses, you can do so without anyone knowing where you are or where you’ve been. Create your account, skip the step where you add friends, and when you check-in just stay ‘off the grid’ (Foursquare slang for toggling the ‘share with friends’ switch off when you check-in). Just reap the benefits, and have fun while doing so.

So, I created an account, and began exploring it personally. I was immediately impressed by the quality of the ‘specials’ that were available in my local area. 10% off at a local clothing store, free song download at Old Navy, 15% off purchases at American Eagle, free appetizer at local restaurant, 40% off bicycle service at Mountain Equipment Co-op, etc. And all you need to do to earn these discounts is check-in at those locations. You don’t need to share any other information other than show your server/cashier your phone proving that you’ve checked in.

Not only that, but even without any friends added, you can also begin collecting Foursquare badges. These are simply fun little virtual badges you collect for doing certain things such as visiting lots of coffee shops, checking in at 10 different places, going to a gym, etc. They just add a tiny little incentive to get out and explore a bit more of your town.

Now, I’m sure that the Foursquare advocates out there will likely comment that it’s more ‘fun’ when you add your friends, and that a little friendly competition can help you get out there and experience all kinds of new things, and they’re probably right. But for those people out there who like the idea of scoring rewards for loyalty, or for being in the right place at the right time, but don’t want to lose their sense of privacy, there’s no reason that they can’t use Foursquare in their own way.

Your experience with location-based social media can be what you want it to be, and doesn’t have to be what other people tell you it should be. If you eventually get to the point where you feel like adding a few friends and maybe sharing a bit more, then great! If not, that’s great too. As long as you’re having fun with these new tools, that’s really all that matters.