Three perspectives on the practices of social media and yoga!
Some big-picture perspectives on doing social media:
How Social Media Marketing Is Like Yoga. Julia Campbell with observations such as “You must do both correctly, and often, to get results.”
How Social Media is Just Like Yoga. (Acceptance: “If you can’t get your ankle behind your ear, so be it.”)
Social Media Is The New Authentic. Josh Pollock of The Magazine of Yoga calls social media “speaking and listening with emotional intelligence.”
Should your company set up a Facebook presence? Yes, if a high percentage of its customers are already active Facebook users and…
I’m still on the fence about the value of a Facebook presence for businesses.
Most companies have not yet begun to harness the power of their websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts for social media and search engine optimization (SEO). They’d be crazy to set up a Facebook page where they could make a spectacle of themselves doing yet another mediocre job of social media.
That said, there are some companies for which Facebook pages are ideal:
If you’re using Facebook, Jim Belosic of ShortStack has some great tips for writing Facebook posts with good calls to action. These tips also work well for Twitter.
Get an inside look at what the Facebook Growth Team thinks about when they make decisions about the site’s user experience.
It seems there’s always someone whining about a change in the Facebook interface or a new way that the company uses people’s information. Sometimes I agree with the whining; sometimes I don’t.
But I’m always aware that the changes at Facebook are made with the company’s bottom line, not the users’ preferences, as the first priority.
For an inside look at what the Facebook Growth Team thinks about when they make huge decisions about the site’s user experience, take a look at this discussion on Quora.com. (Thank you to the folks at SEOMoz for pointing me to the discussion, which made their “Top Ten” list of June’s most critical SEO and online marketing news.)
Don’t settle for a generic “social media package.” If you don’t know your social media needs and budget, a social media audit will help you find out.
Early in my reporting career, I wrote a story about Christmas Eve at a big shopping mall. As the clock ticked toward midnight, last-minute shoppers were shelling out big bucks for just about anything — as long as it could be shoved in a box and gift wrapped.
In the shoe store, one man grabbed a pair of fuzzy pink slippers and asked the clerk to wrap them.
“Are you sure they’re your wife’s size?” she asked kindly. The box said Size 13.
The guy shrugged.
“Hey, it’s a Christmas present — I’m desperate,” he said.
It doesn’t take once-a-year holiday shopping to bring out this sort of irrational thinking in people. In fact, I see it at least once a week when a business owner calls me (or a colleague) and wants to know how much we charge for “the social media package.”
When I ask them questions like:
the usual response is a short silence, followed by the admission that they really have no idea. Can’t you just give me one of those social media package things and be done with it? they wonder.
At that point, I strongly recommend that they hire me, or another consultant, to do a basic social media audit to help them answer the three questions above. It’s not cheap, but at least the social media strategy they subsequently select and implement will be a successful one.
They’ll get the right size, at the right price. And trust me — they’ll find out they can do a lot better than fuzzy pink slippers.
Illustrations have become increasingly important as people find blog content through image-friendly links on Facebook or online periodicals like Seattle Women Daily.
It’s ironic that today’s issue of Kathy Gill’s Seattle Women Daily leads off with a story about importance of great headline writing. That story (a blog post by Nick O’Neill) explains how a New York Times’ article with a run-of-the-mill headline was ignored while the Forbes summary of the same story garnered 680,000 page views. The difference, notes O’Neill, was that the Forbes headline writer “cut out the crap and got to the real shocker of the story.” (You’ll have to read O’Neill’s post to see how that was done.)
The irony was that the same issue of Seattle Women Daily also has a story I wrote, reporting on another site’s reporting of a subscribers-only Nature article about a breakthrough discovery of the mechanism by which exercise may increase longevity. What distinguished my summary from the pack, and won it a place leading the Health section, was not the headline I wrote, but the photo I used — of a lab mouse who appears to be doing yoga.
I’m a firm believer in the value of photos for enhancing the readability and linkability of a blog post. Illustrations have become increasingly important as people find blog content less through search engines or news readers and more through image-friendly links on Facebook or online periodicals like Seattle Women Daily.
This low-res mouse photo, from iStock, was more expensive than the usual photos I buy to illustrate my blog posts — $6 instead of $2. But, oh, so totally worth it!
Greetings to all the folks I met at Macworld | iWorld 2012 in San Francisco last week!
Greetings to all the folks I met at Macworld | iWorld 2012 in San Francisco last week!
You’ll find my writing about the iPhone (and Macworld) at iPhone4Tips.wordpress.com and my writing about social media and web content here on the Writer Way blog.
Look for YouTube channels to replace blogs, and for successful bloggers to offer how-tos and paid content (my contribution to the predictions for tech blogging started by Jeremiah Owyang).
In End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over, Jeremiah Owyang pinpoints the four trends that signal a shift in blogs that cover electronics technology and the tech industry:
My own predictions for 2012:
Once you start treating a company blog like a PR vehicle (posting twice a month, filling it with self-congratulatory press release material, and saving time by ignoring the SEO tools) it quickly becomes ineffective as a marketing tool.
Corporate blogging makes no sense — from the viewpoint of traditional corporate public relations. In fact, if you look at blogging through a traditional PR lens, it’s absolutely counter intuitive.
I raise this point because I frequently talk with public relations professionals who are getting ready to scuttle or let die a corporate blogging program that was established by a previous communications executive or outside consulting firm. To many traditional PR folks, devoting resources to blogging makes absolutely no sense and they can’t imagine why the company started doing it in the first place. They point out that there are much better ways to get out your story to the media and investors — such as the traditional press release or media placement, Twitter, or the company’s Facebook page.
And they are completely right.
However, they are also missing a key point. Corporate blogging is not good PR. It’s good marketing.
Odd as it may seem from the PR viewpoint, business blogs are only secondarily about telling the story. They are primarily tools for helping potential customers locate a company online. Done right, over time, a corporate blog can be as effective at attracting website visitors as paid online advertising. A skillfully done corporate blog lets potential customers know that a company can provide the products and service they’re searching for.
So, here’s a quick guide for my public relations friends who are puzzled by corporate blogging, focusing on why it’s done differently than PR communications:
• Frequency. Unlike press releases, which go out when there’s news about the company, blog posts need to go out on a regular basis. Google’s search ranking algorithms continue to reward fresh content. Blogging frequently (a least twice a week) is a great way to get links to a website to appear near the top of search results.
• Keywords. Unlike public relations, which is all about getting your own name out there, marketing blogs are all about getting the generic keywords out there — on the web, you already “own” your company name. Suppose a company called Thompson Metalworks sells bakeware to large bakeries. The important keyword phrase is not “Thompson Metalworks” — it’s “bakeware” — or perhaps “baking sheets” “industrial baking pans,” or “non-stick bakeware.” (NOTE: Keywording is not intuitive, even if it looks as though it should be. A good SEO firm can run analyses that show what keywords and keyword phrases people are using when the look for a company in the context of its industry, its region, and its competitors.)
• Timeliness. The best way to get a blog post — with its links to a your website — high in the search results is to post about a breaking news story that’s related to your products or services. This does not mean issuing a full corporate analysis, vetted by experts and attorneys, a week after the news event occurs and people have stopped talking about it. It means issuing a simple, innocuous blog post (without any need to insert a corporate spin or go through legal review) within 24 hours of the event occurring. A great example (for our friends at Thompson Metalworks) would be a blog post about music fans baking a 6-foot-wide cake and delivering it to a pop star’s hotel. Or a quick mention of a Wall Street Journal article about an industry trend, such grocery stores expanding their bakery sections.
• Use of sophisticated SEO tools. Notice how in the PR world, online press release services have begun including SEO tools in their packaged services? They learned this from marketing. Effective corporate blogs make use of SEO keywording tools (such as excerpts, titles, edited permalinks, tags, and image names) and social media tools (such as links to and from partner sites, and publishing to Twitter and Facebook). This is why crafting a blog post involves more than simply writing and copy editing it. Learning these tools, and using them correctly, takes time.
• Basic common sense. Only a small percentage of the visitors attracted to a corporate website by a blog post actually read the blog post itself. Many click quickly through to a product page. Of course, the post still needs to be well written and informative. But, unlike news releases, the ideal blog post is as much about the reader’s interests as it is about the company writing it. Again using our friends at Thompson Metalworks as an example: A post could cover the benefits of registering products, provide information about a sale on a discontinued product line, walk readers through a how-to for upgrading a company product, or simply point out some interesting bit of industry news (such as the Wall Street Journal article mentioned above).
The irony of PR’s disconnect with corporate blogging is that once the corporate communications department starts treating a company’s blog like a PR vehicle (posting twice a month, filling it with self-congratulatory press release material, and saving time by ignoring or misusing the SEO tools) the blog quickly becomes ineffective not just for PR but for marketing as well. At that point, of course, devoting company resources to it…makes absolutely no sense.
Noted author Scott Berkun shares his experiences in self-publishing, including why he gave the book away for free for 48 hours.
You couldn’t do better than to follow the experiences of noted author Scott Berkun as he steps away from traditional publishing and releases his latest book, Mindfire, through the self-publishing route.
Is self-publishing for you? Keep in mind that Scott is not only an experienced writer (The Myths of Innovation, Making Things Happen), he’s an experienced public speaker and an extroverted self-promoter. (I had the pleasure of speaking at Ignite Seattle with Scott, and attending a session he did at Seattle Mind Camp.)
You can catch up with Scott on his blog — which, by the way, was the testing ground for much of the material that appears in the book. In recent posts he talks about:
The folks over at the Search Engine Marketing Group have written a concise article on how to optimize your social media presence.
If you’ve made the first steps into social media to take control of your online appearance, or that of your product, service, or event, chances are you’ve been quickly overwhelmed and annoyed by all the work it seems to require. Post here, link here, comment here…and, face it, we all have real work to do! Which are these tasks are important for reputation and search engine ranking and which are just digital squirrel-caging?
Now, we have some answers.
Kristi Hines over at the Search Engine Marketing Group has written a concise article on how to optimize your social media presence. “How to Optimize 7 Popular Social Media Profiles for SEO” makes sure you know about the basics of social media and then gets very specific about what you can do with the SEO tools on Linkedin, Quora, Biznik, About.me, and more.
If your online presence is due for a facelift, you couldn’t pick a better place to start.