Tactics before Strategy (the web demands it).

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I’ve trained hundreds of business professionals over the years on how to use the internet. My focus has been on stripping away the mysteries of the underlying mechanics – I believe that mastery of the foundation building blocks enables organisations to establish a meaningful online infrastructure. Yes, strategic insight is another requirement, but any strategy without the ability to implement it at a tactical level will be compromised.

I’ve also observed that strategies often fail, social media ones in particular, because organisations over-reach their technical and resource capabilities. They have too little hands-on experience to be able to estimate the input requirements – time and money (mostly time) against their expectations of a reasonable return. Understanding the tactical in’s and out’s helps in the formation of a realistic strategy.

If you don’t play with the web – roll in it, push it, pull it and get your hands dirty, you’ll have difficulty appreciating  the different scales of difficulty vs. reward – is it just as easy and productive to build up a video library as it is to build up a community on Twitter? Is is easier to elicit online reviews or Facebook Likes and which gets more visibility? Is a blog post that takes an hour to write more or less valuable than a 2 minute LinkedIn status update? People will readily offer their opinions on what do do and what not to do when it comes to social media, but until you’ve attempted to do any of these things yourself how can you get your arms around any ROI calculation?

When you outsource online marketing and social media functions you’re bypassing those valuable experimentation and observation experiences. So roll your sleeves up and get a little dirty – the internet Gods will applaud you.

 
image by brewbooks

 

Hashtags: Social Media’s Binding Agents

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#tags are useful things – they boost the findability of online content and facilitate the creation of virtual communities around events or activities.

Hashtags inserted within posts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram are live – click on one and it will reveal other public posts that share that same hashtag. Inserting aligned hashtags in your own posts will help others discover your content as people search on themed hashtags.

Hashtags enable people who are participating in a shared experience to discover each other and each other’s related social content. Conferences, festivals, television programs, cultural and sporting events are commonly assigned one or more hashtags. This can happen organically or by design by the organisers – either way, they act as a social binding agent for the occasion.

Hashtags are also commonly used in online competitions, enabling organisers to find the social content entrants have tagged as part of an entry requirement, or to judge content they have generated.

And finally, hashtags can be used as a form of expression – not to make a post more findable. Someone for example might tweet in anticipation of an upcoming concert using the hashtag #cantwait.

Hashtags commonly fall into 1 of 5 categories:

General theme  – what people would generally and logically use to theme their content, e.g  #socialmedia #icecream, #trains, #quotes, #autism, #foodporn

 Place – associated to physical places, e.g. #melbourne, #smithst #melbmuseum #parismetro

 Event or activity – associated with live events such as conferences festivals, sporting fixtures, television programs, tweet-ups, etc. Organisers of these events and activities will often proactively promote the hashtag they want their audiences to adopt (even if this doesn’t happen, the audience will often make one up and adopt it quickly).  Some tags persist across multiple instances of an activity such as a TV show, or they might be one-offs – see below.

Disposable, one-offs – used just once such as at a conference, e.g. #dentalconf13

Brand – promoted by organisations, groups or teams to help people find all related branded content, as well as to encourage others to adopt the tag when referencing the organisation, e.g. #net101 #melbvixons #pwc

Here are some of the do’s and don’ts of using hashtags:

  •  They are not case sensitive. If a hashtag incorporates more than one word, some people like to use upper and lower case characters to make the words stand out, e.g. #SydneyRoads
  •  You can’t have spaces or include punctuation (except for an underscore) – each tag must be all one word such as #ausvotes – NOT ‘#aus votes’ or ‘#aus-votes’ or ‘#ausvotes!’
  • You can use as many hashtags as you like in a post but more than 4 starts to look crowded or spammy – the exception is Instagram where up to 20 hashtags associated with a post is common.
  • Before announcing a hashtag to an audience make sure it’s not already in popular use by group of people somewhere else in the world.
  • No-one owns a hashtag – they’re public fare. You can try and keep a hashtag a secret, but there’s no stopping outsiders using your hashtag once it becomes known.

If you want to search a specific hashtag across multiple social platforms, try TagboardScreen Shot 2013-09-21 at 3.35.05 PM

 Image by “CAVE CANEM”

Blogs & business: made for each other

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Blogs are the most versatile of online platforms when it comes to publishing business level content. Cultivating a blog can deliver immediate and long-term value which can be measured in a number of ways. Blogs are appropriate to most B2C, and probably all B2B organisations.

The business features of a blog are hard to go past:

  • Blogs have simple and self-contained content management systems (CMS) – only low level training is required to publish, edit or delete a post. 
  • Blog posts can incorporate all media types: text, images, video and audio.
  • A blog’s visual elements can be fully customised to reflect an organisation’s branding livery.
  • All blog posts are automatically indexed by Google, able to be served in standard search results for years to come.
  • Visitors can ask questions or leave comments on your posts that can be responded to by the blog owner.
  • Comments on posts are easily moderated whenever ready.
  • When integrated to your website as a sub-domain or sub-directory a blog serves as a magnet for qualified search traffic to your primary web property.
  • Past posts within a blog are quickly discoverable by visitors by browsing categories, tags, searching on keywords or viewing ‘related posts’.
  • Visitors can opt to subscribe for email notification of new posts, or to new comments on any post.
  • It’s easy to generate permanent URL’s (permalinks) to specific posts – great for sending to customers or clients for pre or after-sales service support.
  • Hyperlinks can be inserted within a post to cross-reference other blog posts or website pages.
  • Nobody but the blog owner can mine the content, its traffic or subscribers. The blog is fully controlled by the owner and not a third party.
  • No third party advertising.
  • Google Analytics can be hooked in to measure which topics are generating the most interest, and which posts are contributing to leads or sales.   
  • All posts are directly sharable to the major social media platforms by others.

 

Image by zigazou76