This profile of the current geosocial universe will help you plan your social media strategy.
Here’s something to think about as you plan your social media strategy and think about how to invest your time and other resources for online communication. It’s from data visualization expert Jess Thomas via TechCrunch:
Check out JESS3 for more on the Geosocial Universe.
Develop a social media strategy first, and you’ll save time and money on implementation.
I would no more send a client out to “do” social media without a comprehensive plan and strategy than I would send a child out in a snowstorm without a warm coat, or put my car on the freeway without gas.
Every time I see a seminar on social media “tips and tricks” for small businesses, small-to-midsize nonprofits, or any other organization without a full-time marketing communications person on staff, I cringe.
Those of you who tell me how you wasted time Twittering and wasted money buying Google ads? Your experience does not reflect badly on either of those tools. It means that you were using tools that didn’t match the problem you wanted to address. It’s like racing into the bathroom brandishing a hammer instead of a plunger when the toilet is overflowing. Even messier.
Yes, I know your budget and your time are limited. But instead of paying $100 for a two-hour tips and tricks seminar, read a good book about crafting a social media strategy*. Then budget $300 or more to have a good social media consultant (here’s how you know if you’ve found a good one) come in to your organization and talk with your team about what you’re doing, what your audience, your peers, and your competition are doing, and what your marketing communications budget might allow you to do in the future. If possible, find a social media consultant who’s familiar with your field.
Facebook? Twitter? Blogging? No hurry. Once you’ve got a strategy in place, you’ll be able to figure out what social media tools you want to carry around in your toolbox and which ones are better left in the basement.
* Recommended books on social media strategy:
You don’t necessarily have to “do” social media — it pretty much goes ahead and does you. The question is how much you want to try to shape what it’s doing.
For those of you who weren’t at the presentation at the University of Washington last night, a little explanation: Every year I give a short talk to a PR class at the university about social media as it’s used in the PR field. As you might expect, this talk changes rapidly as trends in social media change (Remember when Twitter was the hot, new thing?). This year I nearly entitled it “Social Media for Facebook.”
I promised the class that I’d post the slides from the talk, so here’s the link to the slide presentation in full-size PDF form.
This being a “new-style” presentation, the slides are meant to be used in conjunction with a talk that is pretty much counterpoint: questions for the audience, stories, and case studies. Molly Haas, head of PR for Northwest Folklife, joined me this year and she walked through the slides of Northwest Folklife’s social media presence (2010 contrasted with 2011), talking about what social media had been crafted by her team and what had “just happened.”
This slide deck is illustrated with examples of Northwest Folklife’s social media presence, but I’ve done customized decks for several of my clients and for prospective clients interested in “getting into” social media. As the presentation points out, you don’t necessarily have to “do” social media — it pretty much goes ahead and does you. The question is how much you want to try to shape what it’s doing.
You won’t get a great website until your company is ready for website greatness.
It’s easy to do a great website for a company or organization. Here’s how:
Have a homepage with these 6 attributes:
Have your home page navigation link clearly to:
You might also have links to:
Here’s what a great website looks like: Feel free to give behringer.com a spin. It not only looks great, it works, right down to finding me a Behringer distributor in my neighborhood. (And, wouldn’t you know, it’s a electronics shop owned by a friend of mine.)
I particularly liked their blog. Because it focuses exclusively on the recording artists who use their products, it isn’t given the deadly name “Blog” in the navigation — it’s called “Artists.” Think about it: Are people visiting their site interested in artists or a “blog?”
OK, if it’s this easy, why don’t more companies do it?
Here where we get to the sad part of the story. Watch closely, and cringe as I review the FHE (frequently heard excuses):
1. Your organization’s name, clearly identifiable
- “We paid thousands for this incredibly clever logo that turns the letters of our name into people jumping up and down. You mean, you can’t see that they spell out “McDonald Software?”
- “We just use the acronym MSIIBG. Everyone knows that MSIIBG means ‘McDonald Software International, Inc. — Bergstrom Group.’ Don’t they?”
- “The sales director wants the tagline for the end-of-year campaign up at the top of the page and there wasn’t room for that and the company name.”
- “Oh, everyone knows us by our logo; we don’t need to spell out the name.”
- “We’re going through rebranding and might change the company name, so we don’t want to feature it until we’re sure.”
2. A clearly identifiable picture of one of your products or services with a call-to-action tagline or a benefits statement that mentions your product or service.
- “We don’t use a product photo because we keep updating our product, and don’t want to pay the web designer to update the page. So we use this nice photo of our headquarters at the office park.”
- “We can’t afford professional photography.”
- “What do you mean, hundreds of other organizations are using the tagline “Software Solutions”?
- “No, we don’t sell software, we help small businesses configure it. Isn’t that clear from the pile of software boxes in our homepage picture?”
3. Simple, clearly labeled top or side navigation with one- or two-word links in “customer language” to key pages on the site — and a link that gets you back to the homepage from anywhere on the site.
- “But we can’t call it ‘Our Story!’ We call it our ‘Organizational Mission and Vision Directive,’ and we want the link to be consistent.”
- “We have 24 links because want people to be able to reach everything on the site directly from the front page.”
- “Yes, I know all those pull-down menus with multiple hierarchies are a little difficult to use, but we had to get everything up there. What do you mean, the hierarchical menus break on ‘other browsers’? I thought everybody used Internet Explorer.”
- “Oh, you can just click on the logo to get back to the home page.”
4. Icon links to your related social media pages or channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)
- “Oh, we don’t believe in that social media stuff.”
- “Oh, we don’t have time for that social media stuff.”
- “Actually, we don’t know how to use all that social media stuff.”
- “I doubt our customers use Facebook/Twitter/YouTube.”
5. All the necessary “small print” links at the bottom of the page (Privacy Policy, Site Map, Contact Us, etc.)
- “We put them up in the top navigation. I guess that’s why it’s so crowded.”
- “Oh, nobody needs a Site Map anymore.”
6. Brevity. On a multi-page website (as opposed to a blog), aim for fewer than 100 words on the homepage (about 75 is ideal) and no paragraphs at all. Think of the homepage as a lobby, and your goal is to get the customer into a showroom, a conference room, or someone’s office.
- “If we don’t put it on the homepage, nobody will read it.”
- “People can just scroll down two or three screens.”
- “We didn’t want to add more pages to the website, so we put it on the homepage.”
- “I guess four different embedded videos in four different formats probably is too much.”
- “HR, Marketing, Sales, and the Board Office all insisted that their stuff go on the homepage.”
- “We had new stuff to put up, but no one would authorize us to take the stuff that was already up there off the site.”
Have your home page navigation link clearly to:
1. A “catalog” or products page that lists all of your products and services (or categories of products and services) with a meaningful, iconic photo for each (or each category).
- “We don’t have/can’t afford good photos.”
- “Our different in-house groups can’t agree on which categories should be featured, or in what order.”
- “Oh, we don’t have time to keep something like that updated. People should just email us and ask us what we have.”
- “Our services can’t be illustrated by photos.”
- “Our marketing team insisted on a separate section of the website for each product/service, all linked from the top-level navigation.”
2. A “buy” page where people can go to buy/order your products, find a dealer or store, or contact you immediately by phone to inquire about services.
- “Oh, they can just fill out this web form and someone from our sales team will get back to them…in a week or so.”
- “If people want to contact us they can click on the “Contact Us” link and fill out the web form.”
- “We really don’t want people calling us.”
- “That would mean we’d have to keep our distributor list up to date, wouldn’t it? We don’t have time.”
3. A “story” page where you tell your story, with professional, candid photos of your key people (founders, staff, or clients, etc.)
- “I don’t think we want to feature one or two people at the exclusion of others. We have 200 people, and we’re a team!”
- “We have our Mission and Vision Statement on the website, so that tells people what we do.”
- “I think we have a studio picture of the Executive Director around here…it’s 8 years old, though. He doesn’t like having his picture taken.”
- “The founder doesn’t usually talk about how he was inspired to form the company after he installed Internet technology for two provincial governments in the aftermath of the tsunami in Southeast Asia. Gee, do you really think our customers would be interested in that?”
You get the idea. Many organizations have resource and communications issues that are barriers to effective website communication (and, often, barriers to business success — but that’s a different blog post). You can bring in top-level designers and still not get a great website if a company isn’t ready for website greatness.
NOTE: The tsunami story (details slightly tweaked to protect confidentiality) has to be my favorite FHE ever. A software company had asked my PR team to make their website more interesting to print and broadcast media reporters so they could get media coverage (including interviews with the founder) during the roll out of a new product. But the founder (an extremely handsome, outdoorsy-type dude) didn’t want to talk about anything except the relatively technical product and didn’t want a photo of himself on the website.
Find out why many organizations that crave Facebook publicity aren’t yet putting their best face forward.
Isn’t it great that your customers and clients on Facebook can add a link, complete with images, that people can use to get to your website?
In theory, yes. But in reality, it turns out that many organizations that crave Facebook publicity aren’t yet putting their best face forward.
When well-meaning Facebook members write a nice note and link to your website’s URL, they may discover that the array of your images they can use to illustrate the Facebook post are just plain weird. Instead of a photo of your logo, or the image that accompanied your latest blog post, they get a choice of irrelevant logos of your partner agencies, or third party ads, from ‘way down at the bottom of your home page.
It’s easy to test your website’s Facebook readiness. Give it a try.
Fixing the problem may involve a little experimentation — particularly because Facebook doesn’t immediately register changes you make to your page. But it’s worth putting in some work on the process — if you want to get the most mileage out of Facebook publicity.
Attention is an unacknowledged factor in the success of user-generated conferences like mind camps and barcamps.
For the past five or six years, I’ve been attending “unconferences” like Seattle Mind Camp. I love them because you never know what’s going to happen — only that you’re going to meet, work with, argue with, and perform in front of some of the brightest, most creative minds in the local technology community. (Here’s a great site for the Toronto Mindcamp that captures the experience.)
A year or so ago I brought my friends Hank (a computer engineer) and Tom (a community organizer) along to Mind Camp and they, too, were enchanted. We jumped into spontaneous volunteer activities, played games, learned to swing dance, argued about the future of technology, joined a large group of people scratching their heads over a new Google product, and engaged in a team-building activity that had three groups of people fighting each other over how to arrange a pile of folding chairs. I led a session called “Do Non-Profit Websites Have to Suck” and we actually solved one of the major reasons why they do.
Tom was intrigued by the way the unconference broke down barriers between organizers and attendees, presenters and audience. As a result, he’s about to try the unconference model — on a group of traditional-conference organizers. They have, in the past, held annual traditional conferences and are not wholly on board with the unconference model.
The key to an unconference (aka a user-generated conference, open environment learning, barcamp, etc.) is the way the program sessions are created and arranged. Instead of choosing panels of bigwigs in advance and assigning them to pontificate (or debate) topics the organizers think are important, the unconference team simply secures a space, time, food, and other basic conference structures — and gets the word out.
The attendees arrive, register, and are given sheets on which they can write a proposal for a session. They describe what they’d like to present, discuss, or inquire into (in two or three sentences). After an hour or so of registration and meet-and-greet activities, the hand-written session proposals are put up on a wall, and each attendee is given a batch of stickers — usually one for each time slot. A one-day conference might have 6 or 7 slots. Attendees affix a sticker to the proposal of any session they’d want to attend — and they also leave notes to indicate if they’d like to join the panel, or help moderate the session, if appropriate.
After the stickers go up, the event organizers pull the proposal sheets and sort them so that popular sessions can be assigned to large rooms, smaller sessions to smaller venues, and similar sessions don’t conflict.
They then re-post the proposal sheets on the wall in a traditional grid (by time and room), and the unconference begins.
The way in which the conference session content is generated is so unusual that it’s become the definition of an unconference. And I realized that we are all assuming that this unusual generation of content is why unconferences are so refreshing, energizing, and generally successful.
But, as I prepare to go to the unconference Tom has organized, I realized there may very well be a completely different factor playing a major role here.
It’s attention.
I’m not a major conference organizer, and I’m more or less tagging along to Tom’s conference. It’s my birthday, and I was thinking to get some shopping in, do some yoga, have coffee with some friends in the San Jose area…or, in short, cherry-pick a couple of conference sessions and blow the rest of it off.
That’s a common strategy for traditional conferences. We’ve all done it.
But it’s impossible at an unconference! From the point of view of an uninvolved slummer like me, there’s no way to find out in advance when the good stuff is happening. The unconference requires you to be present! To be involved! To be committed! To bring your whole self, the whole time.
And now I realize that’s possibly why people get so much out of unconferences. The other participants are engaged and contributing. Everyone is responsible for everyone else’s experience.
So much for shopping, yoga, and coffee. I’m going to attend all the sessions, even if one of them is “Pros and cons of unconferences.” At least I know I’ll have something interesting to contribute to that one.
This MacVoices radio interview was a delightful, if unexpected, part of promoting my new ebook.
This summer I wrote a 138-page book for new and intermediate iPhone users. Take Control of iPhone Basics, iOS 4 Edition, is part of the Take Control series of ebooks (also available in print editions) published by Adam and Tonya Engst at TidBITS Publishing. I’d edited two books for them, and was thrilled when Tonya asked me to take on a writing project myself.
The writing process is iterative: You outline, you research topics, you write sections, you get technical and editorial reviews, and you rewrite. At the end it was tweak, tweak, tweak — plus another round of research and writing to cover the updated operating system for the iPhone.
Maybe you’re not supposed to say this, but I totally enjoyed writing the book.
I also enjoyed, as the writing gave way to editing, developing a modest marketing plan for the book. I didn’t want to find myself in the place where I’ve seen so many authors land: The book goes live, but there’s no support material. Fortunately, Take Control does a fabulous job of creating a book/author page and sending out targeted press releases. But I knew I needed to do much, much more.
In July, as I was researching the book, I started the iPhone 4 Tips blog. I used it to write about iPhone accessories, apps, news, and research that didn’t quite fit into the book. Now it includes some information about the book itself — plus the updates to the ebook that Take Control will be issuing. (A huge “thank you” to the makers of the magical DoubleTake software I used to stitch together multiple screenshots to create the graphic for the blog’s header.)
I ordered business cards for the ebook. The problem with using my own business cards is that most prospective customers for the book don’t want to reach me — they want to buy the book. Making them email me, or go to this website — or even to the iPhone 4 Tips website — and hunt around for a link to the ebook is obviously not the way to make sales. The card has the URL for the Take Control sales page. I’ve since met several fiction authors who use book business cards, complete with graphics from the book’s cover.
My marketing plan included a list of my existing social media identities: Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and some specialized professional lists. I drafted little blurbs for each that I used, with a bit of modification, when the book came out earlier this week. I’m still working my way through that list, crafting blurbs that are appropriate for each list. It’s difficult not to feel that I’m spamming people, so I’ve carefully studied the way that each community handles this type of announcement.
My partner, Tom, is an established member of two major web communities; his postings about the book on those sites, using short budURLs I created, have been more effective than mine in generating click-throughs.
Now we get to the interesting part: What went, not wrong, but not at all the way I’d expected?
First, I sprained my ankle the day before the book went live, which meant that I was implementing the PR plan while alternately in severe pain or pretty thoroughly drugged. I used a proofreader.
Second, there were radio interviews. I’d been lining up some speaking engagements, but somehow overlooked the radio and podcast world. I found out that Take Control authors get invited to be on some of the major technology shows. The irony here, of course, is that my book is less for geeks than it is for the people who pester geeks when they can’t find their email.
Chuck Joiner, of MacVoices, made my first radio interview a delightful experience. You can stream or download the interview.
Audio interviews require earphones and a microphone, I discovered. Fortunately, I have top-of-the-line noise-canceling earphones. I was not as well prepared on the microphone front — deep in my closet I found a box labeled “audio” that contained an ancient, cheap USB mic with a flimsy plastic mic stand. Fortunately, it worked (taped firmly to the desk), even when the cat leaped on the desk in the middle of the taping and began gnawing on it.
As for the content of the radio interviews, I’m realizing that I need more preparation. More on that, later.
The Definitive Twitter Guide is a must-have for contemporary marketers. Author Shannon Evans provides a substantive, thoughtful description of how the market has evolved to a place in which 140-word messages, carefully crafted and frequently sent, can establish, communicate, and reinforce a company’s reputation.
The Definitive Twitter Guide: Making Tweets Work for Your Business: 30 Twitter Success Stories From Real Businesses and Non-Profits by Shannon Evans (CreateSpace, 2010). 244 pages.
The only way to succeed in social media is to jump in, start swimming, and keep paddling, every day. There’s no alternative. Yet I watch businesses assign their receptionists to “do something with Twitter” and decide after a month that Twitter can’t do anything for them. (Would they have assigned the receptionists to design their TV ad campaigns? I seriously doubt it.)
If a company is avoiding Twitter, Facebook, and a robust, interactive web presence, chances are they are watching with growing frustration as their competitors the social media tools gain and serve customers.
“Twitter? Facebook? It just doesn’t make any sense,” one business owner I know, firmly “old school,” frets. Because she doesn’t understand why it works, much less how it works, she’s not going to do it—even though she can see it’s helping her competition.
No amount of nagging or shaming or prodding is going to work here. But something that lets her see behind the fairy dust to the real-world mechanics of how and why Twitter works just might do the trick. That’s where Shannon Evans’ new book, The Definitive Twitter Guide — Making Tweets Work for Your Business, comes in.
Evans provides a substantive, thoughtful description of how the market has evolved to a place in which 140-word messages, carefully crafted and frequently sent, can establish, communicate, and reinforce a company’s reputation. Evans writes:
“As a marketing tool, social media presents a shift in thinking from the days of direct marketing and one-way communication. Instead, social media creates a different opportunity to interact with potential clients and to build rapport with a savvier customer base.”
With 30 studies of businesses and non-profits that have put Twitter to work to for them, Evans builds a convincing case for the advantages social media have over traditional forms of PR and marketing. These include:
Evans does an outstanding job of stepping outside the often self-congratulatory world of social media and approaching Twitter from the viewpoint of an established business professional. This is a great help to anyone who needs to assess the value of Twitter and social media work in relation to the value of their other PR and marketing activities.
The book includes illustrated step-by-step instructions to setting up a Twitter account for your business and using it, complete with examples of good and bad accounts and Tweets. (I loved her tip about reigning in your Tweets at 120 characters so you leave plenty of room for other people to retweet them.)
The book’s later chapters have deeply researched and sophisticated information on creating national and local Twitter campaigns, using multiple accounts, and developing audiences. In Chapter 12, Evans evaluates Twitter’s role in the context of business marketing (using as an example the experiences of my friend and client Joe Hage, director of Marketing Communications at Cardiac Science.)
In short, The Definitive Twitter Guide is a must-have for contemporary marketers and business owners—even if all they want to do is figure out what their competition is up to. You’ll find it on Amazon ($19.99) and also in ebook form.
I’ll be at Gnomedex Friday and Saturday, soaking up new ideas.
I’ll be at Gnomedex Friday and Saturday, soaking up new ideas and meeting new people.
Working at a computer, connecting via all the usual social media platforms, certainly gives you the feeling of being exposed to new ideas. But the in-person experience is so much less controllable and, usually, so much better.
I’ll report back on the highlights — or maybe I’ll see you there and we’ll get to talk.
Karen Anderson’s presentation on social media for the Public Relations Writing class at the University of Washington.
This evening I had a wonderful time giving a presentation on social media for the Public Relations Writing class at the University of Washington.
This is the Keynote slide presentation and here are some additional notes:
• What the rise of “social media” means for PR
• New PR tools (includes list of suggested online reading and sites to follow)