It’s a special kind of hurt when you do it to yourself, especially online. Here are several reliable approaches to stepping onto the virtual garden rake:
1. Post when angry or drunk
Saying anything online is like squeezing out toothpaste – it’s a messy business if you need to push it back in for any reason. Best NEVER to post in the heat of the moment, when angry or tired, or if you have alcohol under your belt.
2. Suppress comments on your blog which are contrary to your own
So somebody disagrees with your worldview – get used to it. But don’t moderate out comments on your blog or elsewhere from people who have respectfully taken the time to offer an alternative position or have challenged you on a point. It’s a a sign of weakness to marginalise dissenters.
3. Say horrible things online while hiding behind a pseudonym
Hi zingerman666 – sooner or later we’ll work who you really are.
4. Post a fake a review for your own business
Tempting yes, but now also illegal. Don’t go there.
5. Post a negative review for a competitor business
Also illegal. Furthermore you run the risk of being outed (say goodbye to your professional integrity).
6. React angrily to a a negative online review
When you respond to a review it’s not really intended for the person who posted it – they’re long gone. It’s really for all of the people in the future who will read the original review and then your response to it. An angry retort is not what potential new customers want to see.
7. Don’t respond to your customers on social media
Don’t ignore genuine customer enquiries, questions or complaints which have been posted through a social media platform. If you can’t be responsive across all of your social media touch-points, you shouldn’t be there in the first place.
8. Give your social media login credentials to someone who needs to ‘reset your account’
You ‘reset your account’ because you received a message from someone who you’ve never met and they asked you to. Now your Twitter wall is full of weight reduction products and you can’t login to stop it.
9. Allow an ex-employee to take control of your social media accounts
You fired the person who looks after your social media media. Now they’ve left the building with the login credentials to all of your social media accounts. Oh dear, this could get nasty…
Easy traps to fall into: both underestimating how much you know, and overestimating how much you think others already know. Tradespeople and subject-matter experts are the worst offenders – they easily forget what it’s like to be a newer entrant to their world; their comfort with their own expertise is so high they can sometimes come across as arrogant or patronising without meaning to be. The heavy use of jargon and industry-speak can further muddy their written and verbal communications. It’s the curse of (having too much) knowledge.
How tricky it can be to grasp the foundational ideas of any discipline before the stepping-stones of greater understanding can be built. Online marketers of all disciplines – search, social and content – all need to remind themselves of this. Too often there’s a gap between what an organisation wants the market to know about themselves, their products or services through what they publish online, against what people want and need to know as part of making an informed purchase. Don’t underestimate the level of consumer level research which is typically undertaken online prior to a purchase – and the higher the value of the purchase and/or the higher the perceived risk of making an incorrect purchase, the greater the need for non-sales related information.
Organisations commonly make the assumption that somehow it’s the job of generalist publishers to bring their potential customers up to speed with the basics of how their stuff works. But their potential customers are readily searching for straightforward answers to straightforward questions: help me through this process of understanding before I waste my money!Most commercial organisations still don’t see themselves in the ‘teaching’ game. They fail to see the benefit of educating their market.
The internet has changed the way knowledge is distributed and found – holding tightly onto industry expertise is no longer a source of competitive advantage. It’s now a distinct disadvantage. By being a (relatively) scarce provider of the entry-level information within your industry niche, and appreciating the value it delivers – no tricky strings attached – businesses are able to capture the attention of potential buyers at the very beginning of their purchase cycle, and boost their own credibility in the process. The art and science of this approach is to see the world from multiple buyer perspectives – different buyers will have different informational needs depending on where they are within the decision cycle and their own levels of expertise. But new buyers will always start with basic research. Why not be the one to give it to them?
Avoid the curse of knowledge – nothing about your industry niche is too basic to publish online. Try and remember what it was like when you started out all those years ago.
Titles associated with online content generally fall into 1 of 3 camps: enticing, search aligned, and space-fillers. Be clear how you’re positioning your titles in the first two instances and avoid the latter.
1. Titles Designed to Entice
Hardcopy magazine covers are filled with attention-grabbing article titles which span the bizarre, mysterious, unbelievable, shocking, sexy and tragic. These are well thought-out hooks designed to lift casual interest to high interest and onto a purchase. The effective cross-promotion of digital content via social media draws upon the link-worthiness of the display titles. At the extreme, the super-clickable titles we call ‘link-bait’ often lead people to content that doesn’t live up to the promise; but even genuinely great content needs every attention leg-up it can get.
To increase the readership of your business content it should be cross-promoted through your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ (and possibly Facebook) channels. But your content won’t be consumed within those channels, only linked to from them. Your title link text – in parallel with your content titles – should therefore be crafted as inbuilt calls-to action or enticements. They must be attention-grabbing enough to entice your followers, connections or fans to click away from the social space they’re in, and across to your website, blog, video or PDF download. Flat titles are seldom asked to dance.
2. Titles Designed to be Found
Titles designed to be found are constructed differently. Search-friendly titles are aligned with the keywords a person would logically use when searching for specific information via a search engine behemoth such as Google or the internal search engine of any social media or publishing platform. The objective is to make your article, blog post, webpage, video, image or PDF findable when people search. A lack of keyword alignment on your content titles assigns your content to the digital backwaters – no matter how valuable it would have been to the people who were searching for it, had they found it.
Keyword alignment is still the cornerstone of search engine optimisation (SEO): titles, sub-titles and other textual content which has a close keyword structure to the search patterns of your target audiences. Titles which incorporate grammatical devices such as irony, humour or double entendres fare poorly in organic search. A grammatically clever title may impress a reader, but if a person can’t find it in the first place it will never be read at all (the same existential angst a falling tree in a lonely forest endures).
3. Titles Not Designed at All
Space-fillers – titles added because titles were required. Neither alluring nor lending search utility they are like forgotten books which gather dust on a secondhand bookstore shelf. Business level videos on YouTube suffer this fate especially.
Three Possible Titles for this Blog Post
1. ‘Have you ever seen a man eat his own head?’ (designed to entice).
2. ‘Using keywords in page titles to maximise the search visibility of online content’ (designed to be found).
3. ‘Blog post #49 – content marketing ideas’ (not designed at all).
Have I ever seen a man eat his own head? No, but that’s not the point.
At the Myer Christmas windows last December I Instagrammed the big mechanical Gingerbread Cat above against a reflection of the buildings opposite. I applied a filter (Mayfair) and the ‘Myer Christmas Windows’ geo-tag. But I hesitated on the hashtag – there was nothing to indicate what the ‘official’ Myer Christmas Windows tag was. Where was the designated tag that the Myer online marketing folk would surely have wanted me and others to use to make it easy for us to collectively share our window viewing experiences on our Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest accounts? You know, to encourage online sharing and buzz around their branded, off-line event.
Left up to my own devices I started with logic: #myerchristmaswindows2013 made sense but seemed ridiculously long (and to bolt the year on the end or not?). Or should I use something in keeping with the theme of the windows for that year, e.g. #gingerbreadfriends? No, too vague. Maybe #myerxmas? Or #myergingerbread? No, too ambiguous. In the interests of time I settled on #gingerbread – yes, pretty lame.
The lack of an obvious hashtag to use effectively fractured the Myer Christmas Windows viewing community. It’s unlikely the majority of us would ever discover each other’s images and tweets – and that’s a shame. Today, the social back-channel streams of content and engagement serve to enhance the traditional front-channel, live activity. In short it’s fun sharing a common experience online with strangers (and absent friends).
If you’re hosting your own event, give thought to prominently displaying a unique hashtag for your quests or visitors to use. It’ll take the guesswork out of the process for them, facilitate a sense of community, and make it easier for you to respond to anyone who has been so kind as to share your (branded) moment with others. Then run a hashtag search during or after the event on a multi-platform search engine such as Tagboard and collate the very best of what was posted. These branded, earned social media assets are gold – recycle the best of them through your own social media platforms.
Ideas for hashtag placement:
On any marketing hardcopy collateral leading up to an event
Whilst it makes sense to first define your social media involvement according to your organisational objectives, a secondary and often overlooked consideration is your ability to source, produce and manage the distribution of digital content. Here are half-a-dozen content driven frameworks to consider as part of your obligation to keep your online garden-places relevant, fresh and engaging:
Media Formats
Each social media platform where you’ve staked a brand claim requires one or more specific media formats to be published through it. YouTube for example requires video content – if you don’t have the ability to source or produce video you probably shouldn’t set up a presence there. There are five main categories of media formats, and every social media platform requires at least one or two of them:
Text – short-form, e.g. status updates on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
Text – long-form, e.g. blogs
Images, e.g. Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram
Video, e.g. YouTube, Vine
Audio, e.g. podcasts
Content Sourcing
Knowing clearly which content is required to drive each of your social media vehicles is one thing, getting your hands on it is another. Here are 3 questions to ask yourself:
1. Do I have access to subject matter expertise? You may be the social media manager, but the value of any content is defined by the end users its being targeted to. Engineers for example will need credible content produced in most part by other engineers. You will need the means to tap into the expertise of a wide range of people across other departments within your organisation: finance, operations, sales, contact centre, and even the CEO.
2. Will my content be original or will I curate other people’s content, or both? Producing your own content in-house is the ideal, but its not always achievable. Curating or filtering the best industry specific content of others can also provide value to your target audience.
3. Can I pay others to produce content on my behalf? Yes, content production can be outsourced to subject matter experts, but you’ll need a budget allocation.
Content Capture and Production
Physically capturing and producing content is the next hurdle. If you wanted to produce a series of ‘how-to’ videos to feed through your YouTube channel and Facebook page, would you film these yourself or outsource the task to a professional videographer? Outsourcing can be expensive in the long-term if the content requirement is ongoing (as it surely will be). If you are producing in-house you’ll need to be able to write well and/or have access to AV equipment, and then the requisite skills to record and edit at acceptable quality levels.
Posting, Pre-Scheduling, Cross-Promotion and Re-Purposing
Okay, so now that you have your content together you’ll need to get it published it online through one or more of your social media platforms. Smallish amounts of content are easily uploaded as they come to hand, but larger volumes will require a publishing schedule and likely the use of pre-scheduling software such as Hootsuite.
To maximise the reach of your content you’ll want to cross-promote it or syndicate it across your different platforms. Your YouTube videos for example may be cross-posted through Facebook, Google+ and your blog; your blog posts may be cross-posted through LinkedIn; your Instagram photos may be cross-posted through Pinterest. Or your Twitter stream may be automatically syndicated into your blog.
All of your content should also be viewed with the potential for repurpose. The hard work which has gone into a blog post for example could be the outline of the script for a YouTube video.
Post-Publication Maintenance
Your social content has been posted, corss-posted and syndicated. But don’t sit back just yet – Facebook, YouTube, and your blog all require you to moderate comments in response to your posts. And most social media platforms allow (and encourage) comments and questions – timely and considered responses on your part are required.
And Repeat
The content creation and publication processes described above never let up. By entering social media you’re setting yourself up as a media outlet akin the modern newspapers, radio and television stations – and there’s nothing worse than dead air or white space when it comes to the media, your media or anyone’s media.
Elizabeth Ebeli, Practice Manger of Digital Media at Slade Partners Executive Search, talks with Tim Martin about the Australian digital and social media recruitment landscape. If you’re curious about salary bands, emerging skill-set requirements, the merits of building a personal online portfolio, and why Arts degrees are still important – it’s all here.
And for the traditional marketing executives out there who might be contemplating a move into digital or social… well, listen to this first.
Does working for yourself make social media marketing an easier or harder task compared to running social media for an organisation as a salaried employee?
Simon Waller, Director of mobile workforce training business Mobial, talks with Tim Martin about the challenges of utilising social media for business, despite there being no sign-offs to navigate, no-one to set objectives, and no ROI managerial oversight.
A social media marketer must be a jack of many trades: content creator, data analyst, community manager, technician and business driver. They’re also mostly self-taught, often work on their own, and are under increasing pressure to justify their efforts against more traditional business outcomes.
Gaynor Alder, Editor-in-Chief of the Modern Woman’s Survival Guide tells Tim Martin how she keeps her social media plates all spinning.
The skills and temperaments required to perform brilliantly across all aspects of social media are too many to fit inside one person. But if such an individual did walk the earth here’s a glimpse of what she’d be capable of performing:
Capital ‘R’ Responsive Tireless responder to an ongoing slew of comments and questions that are posted daily across her charge platforms. Her return comments and acknowledgements are timely, original (not canned), and sparkle with genuine warmth.
Hosty with the Mosty Instinctively gets the notion of community – proactively engages people she’s never met and pulls them willingly into her social nexus. And she’s tough enough to enforce community fair play: you’re a welcome houseguest, but leave your shoes (attitude) at the door – or else.
Bear Armor Handles online barbs (and Barbarians) with unflappable grace: the ill-tempered complaints, the snide one-liners and the serial whiners.
Tester and Measurer and Re-Tester Relies heavily on data, both from her social media platforms and her website analytics. Borderline obsessed with which types of her content gets shared the most, by whom, and at what times. She is constantly fine-tuning a matrix of variables to maximise her social reach and engagement.
Business Operator Knows that social media is a means not an end – the business must ultimately benefit in some tangible way. Maintains a focus on increasing conversions that lend value to her organisation, not just boosting followers and likes on the public scoreboard.
The Write Stuff / Thought Leadership Loves to write, and writes well and fast. The blog is the centerpiece of her social media efforts – she has established strong credibility within her industry sector for deep-diving on a range of topical subjects.
Content Wolf Inside the House Always on the look-out for practical and story-based content, she has convinced her work colleagues of the importance of helping her write posts for the corporate blog, take more pictures and videos of their business processes in situ, and to appear occasionally in her business videos.
Image Conscious Feeds her hungry social media babies with a steady diet of images. While simultaneously tweeting she can snap an image, crop it to precise pixel dimensions, change horizontal orientation, apply a filter, overlay text, and compress the file size. She also knows how to source great online images for free under Creative Commons licensing.
Photographer and Videographer to the Stars Carries her trusted Sony NEX-7 HD video camera with her EVERYWHERE. Never misses an opportunity to capture an evocative image or an engaging video snippet which she can cycle through one or more of her social media channels.
A Human Filter Oragniser of other people’s online content. Repackages and passes on the best stuff she discovers during her web travels, so long as it’s relevant to the needs of her audience.
Web Monkey Bends and twists the web to her will: hacks basic bits of code, embeds iframes and snippets of JavaScript with ease, eats RSS feeds for breakfast, and installs campaign specific tracking codes quicker than you can say ‘conversion’.
I Robot Never eats, sleeps or goes on holiday – that’s for wimps.
