Posts Tagged social communication
The Dangers of Content For Content’s Sake
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization on October 18, 2012
The Anxious Type by JD Hancock
Content is king! The web is all about content! You must have fresh content if you want to be seen on the new, ever-changing, social web. A lot of advice regarding social media strategies and blogging suggest creating new content every day, setting a schedule to post within, and not deviating from this. This approach does have its advantages – for example, the idea that people will check back every day, or on certain days, out of habit, whether they have seen a social media update informing them of a new post or not. Bloggers and businesses alike promise themselves that they’ll add content to their site as frequently as possible, to keep up the momentum of FRESH! NEW! CONTENT!
However, some content creators, particularly for business, find themselves in danger of creating content without intent – content solely for content’s sake. Sometimes, there isn’t any news. Sometimes, there isn’t anything in the media which even vaguely relates to your field of expertise. Sometimes, there just isn’t anything to say. So, what happens then?
Content for content’s sake is just noise. Content without intent is irrelevant. Content for content’s sake is content that contains very little actual value to readers, and is only there to make your site seem “fresh”, and to beef up your backlinks, or keywords, for SEO purposes. This kind of post seems valuable – fresh content attracts search engines, but it can be off-putting for your audience. Repeat readers will be expecting a post of the usual high quality with relevant, actionable or inspirational information. To come across a boilerplate piece that’s only posted as a means of sticking to your posting schedule and boosting search engine rankings may make them reconsider your value (and where they spend their time on the ‘net).
“Businesses that produce too much information start to appear spammy and scattered. This does not instill confidence in customers and prospects. In fact, it is more likely to confuse them and push them away. Content for content’s sake does not help a business that is trying to be a true influencer in their industry. In fact, it makes you look like the little boy who cried wolf, because when you actually have something important to say, no one will be able to see it through all the other drivel you have produced.”
And it’s true. Everyone re-Pins. Everyone re-posts. Everyone re-Tweets. Google any one phrase and you’ll see a host of websites with that same message. What stands out from the masses of repurposed content? Content that’s relevant, that makes sense, that’s written for humans by humans as a means of conveying facts, knowledge, opinion, and interesting information. And if you don’t have that? Don’t post just because you have to keep your site fresh.
A good way of avoiding this type of content is to read over each piece and ask if you would send it to a stranger as a good representation of your website overall. If the answer is no, then don’t publish it! Readers would rather a blogger miss a few days worth of posts than read through half-baked content. Post when you have something to say – it doesn’t have to be life-altering, but it should be valuable to your reader.
Have you ever skipped a few days of publishing content until you found something worth writing about? How did it affect your website?
Dos and Don’ts of Social Networking
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Networking on July 3, 2012
For a good social media strategy, there’s no make-or-break way to be truly successful. However, being successful at this type of social networking requires a little finesse (and a lot of patience). We’ve got some tips for both companies who are just finding their niche, and established businesses who want to see more ROI from their networking efforts.
Do Give Your Brand a Personality
People, especially on social media, like to connect with people. Come up with a persona for your business, and stick with it. Followers and friends then know what to expect from your feed, and feel more like their connecting with some*one* rather than some*thing*.
The bonus is that having a personality – and a personable networking account – builds trust and authenticity. Trust and authenticity are 2 of the cornerstones of any great social campaign.
Don’t Go Straight For the Hard Sell
Would you ever start a conversation at a networking event with “Hi, have you bought our product yet?” No? Then don’t do it online either. People like to be introduced to a company on social media networking sites before they trust or value them enough to connect.
This also draws us towards our next point – users don’t respond as well to self-promotional talk, as they do to conversation.
Do Start Conversations
You want more information about your client base; people love to talk about themselves. Ask a few questions about contentious, but relevant, topics, and soon you’ll have a full-scale debate on your feed. As a bonus: people will feel more warmly towards your brand, because you actually care what they think.
This is also a great time to show off your customer service skills by engaging and responding in a professional, friendly, and timely way.
Don’t Be Boring
Have you ever been stuck at a cocktail party with the self-absorbed bore who won’t stop going on about their own personal woes? It’s not fun for anyone. Provide value with your feed – link to interesting, informative and relevant content which your followers will value – and even share!
Don’t Use a ‘Comedy’ Photo
While it might be tempting to portray your company’s sense of fun with a photo of Dave in a cardboard crown, remember that people want to believe that you are capable of handling their complaints, inquiries and orders in a professional manner. Unless you are an actual clown, just the company logo or a serious head and shoulders shot will do.
Of course, being too stern in photos can also have repercussions. You want to seem approachable, as well as professional.
Do Have Fun
People turn to social media to enjoy themselves, so go ahead and link to that skateboard otter story for a little light relief. Extra points if you can find something life-affirming or giggle-worthy which is relevant to your marketing pitch.
Still not sure how to make friends and influence people using social networking sites? Get in touch with our Seattle social networking experts today, to improve your business connections.
For Social’s Sake: Managing A Brand With Socialized Communications
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on May 5, 2010
Don’t let your brand be a social outcast. Especially in Seattle, NY, LA, and Portland
It used to be that brands sought partnerships with publications to publicize their offerings, host events or write about their products. And many publications did and still do an excellent job at providing these services to help promote a company’s products to specialized audiences. However, the dynamics of buying and selling has shifted the power from the media over to the brand and consumer.
Now, in order to launch a new product, a brand needs to extend its identity in many more channels and to many more audiences. Thus in addition to promoting itself in worthy publications, a brand must have a strategic digital marketing strategy, a solid list of target–and often splintered–consumers, and a multitude of social networks to engage them. Many marketing activities are now direct-to-consumer instead of company-to-consumer. In fact, new research predicts that spending on Internet-based marketing is expected to overtake print ad budgets in 2010 for the first time. For these reasons, traditional media is now adapting to this new marketing reality.
Today’s savvy consumers will respond to a brand that speaks to a need they have identified, resonates with them on an emotional level, or solves a problem that they maybe didn’t even know existed. Brands today are actively harnessing social media platforms to create content and communities to find their brand loyalists or advocates. Once identified and engaged with, brand advocates do the marketing campaigns for them. These brand advocates might enter an online contest to help name a new product or create a new food flavor that then gets produced and distributed. They may select music they want to appear in a videogame. And they can decide to tell all of their friends and networks about how they have taken control of their brand relationships in this new marketing paradigm.
The new model of targeting brand ambassadors is about two-way, open, social engagement and not just top-down and inside-out pushing of products. It is as much from the outside in–from consumers back to the brand. While most brands are implementing social communications programs using one or two social platforms, only a handful are thinking holistically about managing communications across all media and touch points. The requirements are now to communicate who you are as a brand and what you stand for through social media in a far more consistent, strategic and global way. After all, unlike traditional media, online content and experiences are inherently open and accessible everywhere around the world.
RoryMartin.com helps clients educate their markets and build brand awareness while winning and retaining customers with engaging and impactful websites and web marketing. We offer a comprehensive set of services from website design and web development to search engine optimization and search engine marketing and social media marketing.
The Albert Einstein Guide to Social Media
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on February 14, 2010
11 February, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund
Albert Einstein knew an awful lot. And if you pay attention to his work and his most famous statements about it, you might just think he was talking about us, the social media crew.
We might not be looking for a unified theory for all things quantum in our day jobs, or pondering the discrepancies between particle theory and relativity, but here are a few things Einstein has managed to summarize for us just the same. Funny how some concepts apply pretty universally…
As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, I really like this stuff.
A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.
It all starts with the goals and objectives, but look around you, and you’re sure to see the folks that still think the Facebook Page is the holy grail of social media success. Know what you’re aiming for before you choose any one path to get there.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
We’re hell bent on creating convoluted indexes and formulas to calculate and measure the fuzzy stuff like influence, affinity, or loyalty. As if somehow putting an algebraic formula to it will make it legitimate. Are there simpler ways we can be approaching these seemingly complex problems from a more human level?
Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.
You can count a zillion fans and followers but what are you going to do with them when you have them? Are they moving you toward something, or are they just there? And things like having genuine intent or an authentic mindset (not one on a mission statement somewhere) are much harder to quantify and put on a report, but they matter a great deal. They’re part of the untouchable essence of outstanding companies.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
We need more clarity, accountability, and translation of social media into terms that everyone can relate to. Enough with the buzzwords and lingo already. “Joining the conversation” doesn’t explain anything.
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
Teaching and guiding adoption of social media can be an arduous task. But forcing too many rules without context and understanding is a recipe for resistance and resentment. And dragging people unwillingly into the social web before they’re truly culturally equipped will undoubtedly end in failure. Understanding new concepts and ideas takes time, patience, and the willingness of some to make small strides instead of huge leaps.
People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.
We all wish that you could just throw up a blog and instantly see a lift in your sales numbers, but it doesn’t work that way. Cultivating a social media community takes more time than many businesses would like. They’re so anxious to know whether they’ve made a good or bad investment, so they demand results and guarantees before they start. But much like the business relationships you’ve built the old fashioned way, creating trust and loyalty is an investment, not a transaction.
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.
In a world where content is everywhere, it’s not enough to just have a bunch of eyeballs see what you do. Value is a wonderful aim, if you understand that value is defined differently for everyone. Your definition of value doesn’t matter when it comes to offering it to someone else. You have to figure out how your customers, prospects, and community define it, and deliver that to them, relentlessly.
We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Social media is, in many ways, a solution to some of the problems we’ve created ourselves. The divide we’ve created between the company and the customer is one of our own design, and social media is helping to shorten that distance again. As a result, we cannot try and cram social media into the same mindset we’ve used for sales, marketing, and customer service for the last several decades, or we’ll just end up right back where we started, and end up blaming social media itself for not living up to our expectations.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
We collected impressions for ads as if having a million people see a billboard without any notion of what they did with that information was actually effective. We build call centers to automate customer service. We talked in “key messages” and soundbites, and we buried our mistakes under PR gloss-overs. Customers are now pushing back on those ideas and demanding better from businesses. Yet, we’re approaching Facebook as an eyeball collection tool, or Twitter as a press release distribution service, or throwing interns to manage our customer support forums, and we’re wondering why we’re having trouble seeing value in these tools?
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
We’re talking about new approaches to business problems, here. We’re talking culture shift. Adjustments to our approach, the courage to evaluate our weaknesses, and the willingness to invest in things that aren’t the same as we’ve always done. All that means that mistakes are inevitable. And rather than lynching and publicly vilifying those that fall short, let’s learn from each other, from ourselves, and start allowing social media a legitimate place in business process innovation.
Not bad for a guy with crazy hair who never tied his shoes, but who managed to single-handedly and drastically change our understanding of the universe around us. I’m thinking we can help businesses do the same for the online world we’re creating here. You?
As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, I really like this article…for more information please visit our site at RoryMartin.com
The Seattle Social Advertising Trends of 2010
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on January 28, 2010
Forecasts and predictions about twenty-ten are EVERYWHERE. We looked deep into our crystal ball here at SocialMedia.com, but it seems someone swapped it for a beach ball.
So rather than try to guess the future, we put together a list of five emerging trends that are already stirring up social advertising. To be successful in 2010, you must plan for how these trends will impact your business.
As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, I really like this stuff.
1. No stone is left unturned when it comes to finding social data.
Social networks are gaining a larger chunk of online advertising dollars, in large part due to the effectiveness of using social data from these sites to deliver targeted brand messages. But data from social graphs is not exclusive to social networks. As more money shifts to social networks, traditional publishers will want to get a piece of the action.
TAKEAWAY: To offer social data to advertisers, publishers are working hard to uncover and grow their existing social graphs – and succeeding. Don’t get left behind.
2. Social relationships are more than just friends.
At SocialMedia.com, we break social relationships down into one of three categories: friends, influencers, and communities.
- Friends are the easiest to spot; they are a one-to-one connection, approved by both parties (e.g. connections on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.).
- Influencers are characterized by a one-to-many relationship, bloggers and micro-bloggers being the best examples. For instance, a wine lover blogs about new wines she has discovered and others wine drinkers read her blog and view her opinions as a trusted source of information, even though she does not know the identity of all her readers.
- Communities include individuals who are largely anonymous to each other, but relate to the group around a similar interest (characterized by a many-to-many relationship). For example, fans of new TV show might discuss recent episodes in a discussion forum. In this particular case the community may only last for the duration of the television series. In other cases, the community relationship may persist much longer, e.g. moms trading advice on a website dedicated to parenthood.
TAKEAWAY: Because communities have been largely overlooked as a significant social relationships, there is a tremendous opportunity to execute social campaigns on sites other than social networks, where the voice of a given site and/or community is leveraged as a whole. This opportunity appears even more promising when advertisers consider the upward trend of online users embracing social activities and identifying with online communities. (We believe that the nuances of social relationships are so important that we’ll be following up with another blog post that digs deeper into this topic).
3. Consumers turn to online social connections for recommendations.
The rapid growth (not to mention sheer number) of social media users is bolstering the credibility and perceived value of social media channels, tools, and most importantly, content. This larger base of active users allows people to connect with virtual peer groups in more niche categories. For example, a foodie follows a list of local restaurant critics on twitter, a CIO joins a LinkedIn group for IT leaders and discusses cloud computing, an indie rock fan blogs about new bands and other indie rock fans read her posts. These connections are real and authentic (establishing trust) and are hyper-targeted, which means users get highly tailored opinions by turning to these groups.
TAKEAWAY: More open-minded consumers actively seeking advice and recommendations from online peer groups, creates a gold mine for advertisers who can be armed and ready with real brand messages from real people.
4. Online endorsements are happening in real time.
Not only are more consumers using online social connections as an input for decision-making, but when they do they are also finding real-time information from other consumers. Reviews of retail locations are posted before consumers even leave the stores. Bad (and good) customer service experiences are tweeted, blogged, and posted to social networks within seconds, when emotions run highest. And all of the content created in real time is distributed immediately through viral actions like posts, shares, and retweets. Moreover, new services like Aardvark allow users to pose questions via web, chat applications, twitter, or Facebook to get immediate answers from an extended network of peers. What does it mean? Your reaction to real-time reviews must be in real time too.
TAKEAWAY: By monitoring real-time conversations, brands can put out fires, leverage positive endorsements, and participate in the conversation. But that’s just scratching the surface. Brands that go beyond monitoring may find opportunities to initiate endorsements at the time of interaction by providing prompts and channels to leave feedback, thus maximizing positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
5. The objectives of online creative are shifting from consumable to sharable.
As a social online experience becomes the new norm, online display advertising follows. Whereas in the past online advertisers wanted big flashy ads that shouted messages and captured eyeballs, now advertisers want ads that inspire consumers to take action, particularly using social channels to spread brand messages to friends and followers.
TAKEAWAY: Our experience and research at SocialMedia.com has shown that the most effective ads: 1) include real people, 2) spread real messages, and 3) are adapted to the environment in which they are served.
As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, I hope everybody does this stuff…it’s free and easy.
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