I’ve been doing social media for almost three years. A close friend suggested I try it out after the sudden death of our family cat, Dugs. I was only looking for a short-term distraction but have since adopted social media as part of my weekly routine and enjoy it very much. But here’s my issue: some of the people that I am following on Twitter are not following me back. I consider myself to be an outgoing person with a pleasant disposition, and can see no reason for these slights. In one instance I know the offender personally, which is doubly hurtful… should I say something to her? I would hardly know where to start.
Yours Sincerely,
Upset Tweeter
Hobart, Australia
Dear Gentle Reader
Miss Social must correct you on a point: one does not “do” social media, one engages in it. Social intercourse of any nature is a participatory activity between two or more consenting parties. Miss Social does not approve of broadcasting into a vacuum.
Your current predicament with Twitter is understandable, but eminently avoidable. Miss Social is reminded of dogs who harbour simple notions of social reciprocity such as ‘you can smell my bottom, and I get to smell yours’ (usually a simultaneous exchange when the breeds are of a similar size). Such a compact, so to speak, does not exist within social media. Twitter is a network – it scarcely matters who is following whom, as long as all participants are able to derive value from the collective. If we all do our very best and concentrate on making Twitter an interesting place to be, the connecting threads of value will form quite naturally. “It all evens out in the wash” as Miss Social’s dear Granny Mayfield was very fond of saying.
As to your non-following acquaintance, Miss social recommends this course: lift your credibility in her eyes by adding her to a public Twitter list called ‘Interesting and Beautiful Individuals’ – few people could stop themselves from taking an enquiring sniff or two of something as intriguing as that.
Following on from our popular ‘Photocopying for Success’ workshop we bring you the next in our Office Technology series.
97% of Australian consumers use, or would consider using, the telephone as a way to contact their preferred businesses – yet many organisations have not confidently embraced the technology. This workshop will provide a roadmap for the introduction and adoption of the telephone in your business. Can you afford not to talk with your customers – even if they’re not in the room? This full-day session is presented in a practical learning format: real telephones will be used in an interactive class setting limited to 22 people. A Certificate of Training is provided.
NB: A series discount applies: if you book this workshop in conjunction with the ‘Photocopying for Success’ and ‘Printer Mastery’ workshops, you will receive a 20% discount. Please contact us for the promo code before registering. Have any questions? View our FAQ’s or call us.
PROGRAM
Building the Business Case Internally It may not be fully understood by senior management what the business benefits of a telephone are. We will present compelling case-studies from the commercial, government and NFP sectors where telephones has been successfully introduced.
Calculating Telephone Return on Investment (ROI) Counter the common objection to installing a telephone in your workplace: “But how will we quantify the return?” While there is no fixed ROI formula there are ways to calculate demonstrated value by tracking ‘assisted business conversions’ using an analogue notation ledger (pad and pen).
Setting Your Telephone Objectives Introducing a telephone into your organisation without management buy-in and objective setting can be risky. Utilise our 4-point framework to identify, then articulate the objectives to others: customer relations, crisis management, sales and recruitment.
Telephone Etiquette Knowing how to interact with and speak on the telephone can be baffling, even for seasoned operators – we will build your confidence when dealing with situations such as: receiving calls from people you’ve never met in person, answering a call without knowing who’s calling, working out the order in which two people should talk, what to do if you need to go to the toilet in the middle of a call, and how to terminate a conversation without causing offence.
The Telephone as an Outbound Communications Channel It’s not widely known that the telephone can also be used to initiate calls, not just receive them. While the business need for this may not be immediately obvious it’s an important option to keep open.
Telephone Terminology Learn new telephone terms and use them with confidence. We will demystify expressions such as “Hello?”, “Who shall I say is calling?” and “How do you spell that?”
Building a Multi-Telephone Strategy (Group Exercise) Is your business advanced to the point that more than one telephone might be necessary? We will run a mapping exercise to determine whether your organisation is positioned to take full advantage of a second (or even third) telephone.
Physical Placement A telephone must be carefully positioned within your workplace for maximum effectiveness. Find out which rooms are ideal for telephones and which are not.
Telephone Number Registration Identifying authorised providers to secure your unique 8 digit telephone number.
Telephone Trouble-Shooting & Maintenance Learn how to increase or decrease ring volume, deal with cord tangles, and maintain a high standard of mouth and ear-piece hygiene.
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.
