Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Social media guru Chris Brogan writes about making your blog deliver a business value to your organization by developing a strategy. Strategic Blogging and Some Tactics to Nail It discusses several ways to devise a strategy that works for you.

• A Strategy is the Path You Choose to Take
• Sample Goals to Start our Strategies
• Blogging Strategies
• Tactics to Consider
• What Works For You?

Establishing an engaging and effective online presence takes continual maintenance. Chris Brogan suggests 19 Presence Management Chores You COULD Do Every Day in order to do just that. Here are a few of his suggestions:

• Find seven things worth retweeting in your general feed and share.
• Visit your blog’s comments section and comment back on at least 5 replies.
• Enter any recent business cards to invite them to LinkedIn (if you’re growing your network).
• Check in on birthdays on the home page [of Facebook]. (Want a secret? Send the birthday wish via Twitter or email. Feels even more deliberate.)

Michael Brito, social media strategist and community builder at Intel, blogs for Mashable about 10 Twitter Best Practices for Brands. The article discusses the art of using Twitter effectively for your brand. Here are his top 5 recommendations, be sure and check out the full post for more:

1. Do your research before engaging customers
2. Determine organizational goals
3. Utilize either a branded or personal profile
4. Build your Twitter equity and credibility
5. Track metrics and conversation trends

Beginning at 12:01 am on Saturday morning, Facebook users will be able to claim their usernames as part of their Facebook Web address to easily point people to their profile or FB Pages. To find out more check out the press release here.

via TechCrunch

Chris Brogan, social media guru, details 23 Essential Elements of Sharable Blog Posts. If you want to know how to create link-friendly blog posts which spur conversations, be sure to read the full article. Here’s his top 5 recommendations:

1. It starts with a picture that captures your eye.
2. No. It starts with a title that makes you pay attention.
3. The post is useful to others, and not just about you.
4. It’s easy to read, and not a big clump of text.
5. It’s written in a human voice, and not corporate-ese.

Jennifer Leggio writes for ZDNet’s Social Business blog about the Nine worst social media fails of 2009… thus far. Anyone interested in social media marketing will want to check out these summaries of marketing misses.

“What is to be learned here? Well, don’t lead with tools. Don’t think that your brand is above the risks and backlash of social media. When plotting a social media campaign, truly think about what you want your end result to be, and fully examine everything that could possibly go wrong. Word-of-mouth marketing is a fantastic thing when you know how to leverage it. But if you lose control of your brand, the disasters are almost endless. Let these brands’ failures be a lesson.”

Rajesh Setty, entrepreneur, author and speaker from the Life Beyond Code blog writes about 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online. The article discusses the influence your content may be having (or not having) on your audience, and the different ways they may be responding to it including:

1. Spam
2. Skip
3. Scan
4. Stop
5. Save
6. Shift
7. Send
8. Spread
9. Subscribe

Time Magazine has published a feature article on How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live written by Steven Johnson.

“The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.”

If you aren’t sure whether you want to start a Facebook Page or a Facebook Group for your organization, you’ll want to check out the latest post from Howard Greenstein at Mashable. Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference? takes a look at the value of creating each of these by analyzing several factors including:

• Personal vs. Corporate
• Email vs. Updates
• User Control
• Applications
• Moderation
• Ability to create events
• Advertise

Mashable presents a guide to How To Create Custom Twitter Backgrounds. This useful article includes excellent examples of Twitter background designs along with 7 helpful Twitter background resources.

Dan Schawbel, bestselling author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, writes for Mashable about How To Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter. This helpful guide offers on-point tips in the form of six steps to developing an effective Twitter image. I found the idea of forming Twitter knowledge groups especially appealing and can’t wait to try out GroupTweet.

1. Claim your Twitter handle
2. Decide how you want to brand yourself
3. Become known as an expert or resource
4. Establish a Twitter marketing plan
5. Utilize third-party applications
6. Form a Twitter “Mastermind Group”

Alyssa Gregory at SitePoint presents a guide to Online Reputation Management. Those interested in keeping track of what people are saying about you online will want to check out this post divided into the following sections:

• Blog Monitoring
• Twitter Monitoring
• Link Monitoring
• Other Tools

Students in my LIS697 (Web 2.0) class at Pratt Institute really went all out with their final projects this semester. Here’s just one as an example - a promotional video created by Andrew Matrich for the ABC No Rio Zine Library, located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was shot on Digital 8 tape to better capture the aesthetic feel of the library. Great job Andrew and to the entire class, your projects were outstanding!

DesignReviver gathers links to 13 Tutorials & Resources for a Perfect Twitter Background including:

• How to brand yourself with a Twitter background
• How to make a Twitter background picture
• Create a Twitter background using PowerPoint (I used this one to create my Twitter background, it was very easy to follow).
• Create a Twitter background with Photoshop

Brett Borders at Social Media Rockstar provides a guide to How to Build a Strong Reputation With Comments. This helpful post points out appropriate tools for making commenting easier and discusses how to strategize about commenting.

• The Reciprocal Nature of Comments
• Tools for Efficient Commenting
• Building an Effective Comment Strategy
• Take the “100 Comment Challenge”