Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

Facebook does not allow specific calls to action in the banners on business’s Timelines. Facebook may remove the offending image at its own discretion, with little explanation or recourse. In a recent meeting, one of my marketing peers complained about Facebook’s failure to clarify this policy. I directed him to this infographic at memebase.com. Here’s what it says:

If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product being sold.

On March 30, I was one of three panelists providing an overview on social media for Commercial Real Estate Women of Detroit (CREW).  Joining me were Kelli Herman of MICCO Construction and Heather Greene of Neumann Smith.

 This web document contains links to resources we introduced during our presentation.

Kelli’s topic was Facebook business pages and Heather covered Twitter. I spoke on corporate social media policies and blogging.

 Social media policies

There oughta be a policy — There are two kinds of companies in the world: Those that embrace social media and those that avoid it. No matter which one you are, you have to have a social media policy. It should be part of your employee handbook.

In the links document you’ll find two websites to help you. One engages you in a dialog to help you write your policy on the spot. The other links you to the social media policies at nearly 200 companies and organizations.

Social media R U: I believe that every company should embrace social media. You can use it to help employees and customers more easily collaborate with each other and/or to move from a marketing campaign to conversing with your customers.

For example: When I was buying a used car, the salesman at the dealership was blocked from using the Internet. I could compare prices at other dealerships and he couldn’t!  He had to use his smartphone. (That example isn’t necessarily about social media, but it does show how bad communications policies can hurt sales).

Embracing social media must go beyond a policy. It means training, supervising and measuring results. It means you trust your employees to represent you.

 Blogging

People freak out at the idea of blogging.

“I don’t need to tell everybody what I had for breakfast,” they huff.

Don’t think of it as a blog. Think of it as news. This is especially true if you’re in a service business. You’re selling yourself  – your wisdom and creativity. Show it off!

Blogs posts don’t have to be weighty tomes. A couple sentences about a creative solution to a problem will suffice. Repurpose other people’s content. When you see an interesting article in an online publication, write a sentence about why it’s relevant, include a one-sentence quote from it and provide a link to the body of the story.

There are tools that allow your readers to subscribe to your blog posts, but don’t stop there. In the digital marketing world there is no pull; there is only push. Today’s best practice is to send a regular enewsletter with headlines about recent blog posts and links to the full article. This puts control into the hands of your readers, using their time in a respectful way. (In fact, that’s probably how you wound up reading this article: Because you receive MY monthly enewsletter).

But sorry, that’s not enough: You must share, share, share! Remember, this is SOCIAL media. Go beyond Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Use social bookmarking sites to expand the influence of your product, company or brand: Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious.

You can start a blog right on one of websites for popular blogging platforms, like WordPress and Blogger.com. There your blog will have a domain like

Douglascommunications.wordpress.com. But why should wordpress get all the credit? You would do better to work with your website manager to integrate the blog into your existing website: Douglasgroup.biz/newsletter. That way your analytics will measure blog traffic along with the site’s other stats. (You do use analytics, don’t you?)

Once again, click here for the list of links on these and other subjects. You’ll also find my updated list of favorite smartphone apps, including the guide to finding all the Angry Birds golden eggs.

Bob Thomas of the Michigan Association of Chamber Professionals and I have been connected through social media almost since it started. In 2009, a Twitter comment by Bob led me to an engagement facilitating an economic development planning session at the Tawas Area Chamber of Commerce. (Yes, social media ARE good for business!) We’re friends on Facebook, where Bob recently shared this informative perspective on how to be a strategic thinker. In summary, you must

• Anticipate
• Think critically
• Interpret
• Decide
• Align, and
• Learn

This article by Copyblogger founder Brian Clark use the influence of social media to demonstrate how to frame a message to change group behavior. It shows that the language you choose can actually make people do more of the bad thing that you don’t want them to do.

“You want the momentum of social proof aligned with where you want to go, not with where things are,” Clark said.

The National Park Service experimented with signage to stop theft of petrified wood scraps in the Petrified Forest park in Arizona. This message — “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time” – reminded visitors that “everybody does it.” This message – “Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest” – resulted in fewer thefts.

So what did I do? I took one of their examples and shared it on Facebook like this: “Researching an article on social media, I stumbled across this fact: Four years ago, 22 million single women did not vote. To my young, single female friends: Your rights as a woman — rights my generation battled for and won 40 years ago — are under siege. Go to the polls in November and support the candidates who commit to protecting your freedom and health.”

D’oh! In that post, I reminded my single female friends that it’s a hassle to vote and maybe can’t change anything. I should have left out the statistic and just posted the last two sentences.

Here’s a quick list of some handy tools and websites I’ve stumbled across lately.

• Microsoft has developed a sensational tool for creating panoramic photos. I can’t wait to use it! Learn more about it here.
• This website will proofread your documents for you.
• Torn  between two lovers? Feeling like a fool? Let Simon Decide and Lifehacker offer two options for better decision making.
• Hashtag? Meme? Reddit? WTF? Go to this site for a glossary of social media terms.

At the Michigan Association of Planning’s October, 2011 annual conference, Midland City Manager Jon Lynch, AICP, ICMA-CM gave a great presentation on communications. One of this blog’s regular readers was also in the audience and said to me, “Hey – you should write about this!” Good idea, Eric!

Here were two of Jon’s messages.

If you’re explaining, you’re losing.

The city lost 17 percent of its revenue overnight, after a decade-long tax appeal. Angry citizens demanded explanations for a complicated process that is hard to explain in 10 words or less, Lynch said, especially when opponents had simplified THEIR sound bite down to “You mismanaged money.”

“As municipal leaders, we WANT to explain,” Lynch said. “We strive to be open and transparent and provide information; that’s the right way to do business.  People take advantage of that. The message gets lost: ‘If you’re explaining, there’s something wrong.’”

The city turned its part of the conversation into “Tell us what you want.” They conducted a community-wide visioning process that succeeded in part, according to Lynch, because “People understand when you ask what’s important to them.”

In a world of 15-second commercials and USA Today McStories, you must be concise.

“The information is the same.  It’s how you explain it and how you deliver it,” said Lynch.

If you don’t tell your story, someone else will gladly do it for you.

A Midland child with severe allergies wanted a pet. His parents discovered that a miniature pig was the best solution, but Midland’s ordinances prohibit pigs as pets. The city wanted to accommodate them but, as in the previous example, had to go through several time-consuming municipal processes to do so. The Midland Daily News covered the story accurately; not so the blogosphere. The further away the story got from Midland the less accurate it became.

“We learned the hard way that there are thousands of opportunities for anybody with an interest in a particular subject to offer their opinions,” Lynch said.  “People opined on what was happening in our community — sometimes accurately sometimes inaccurately – and we weren’t even aware that they were talking about us.”

The city’s communications staffer spent two weeks doing almost nothing except responding to the resulting blizzard of emails.

“People didn’t understand the need for a regulatory foundation,” he said. “They weren’t interested in being informed.”

The city ultimately found a solution that would allow miniature pigs as pets. They also began more closely monitoring social media mentions, using tools like Google Analytics and SocialMention.com.

Don’t be overwhelmed by this list of 30 tasks to “improve” your social media profile (and smartphone use).  I did three of them and am positively giddy with self-congratulation. Here are my accomplishments:

Day 8: Start segmenting your Facebook friends. This series was published in 2010, so some of it is a bit outdated; however this piece of advice presages Facebook’s recent grouping improvements and the advent of Google Groups. I do want to connect with clients and journalists who are my friends on Facebook but I don’t want them to know everything. There are updates I only share with the theatrical community. Only my women friends would be interested in that new mascara (OK, some of the men, too. You know who you are.)

Day 10: Lock your phone already. I didn’t even need a separate app on my Android phone. Go to home screen/menu/settings/security/change screen lock. A refinement: Clean your screen regularly, because the swipe path is a visible smudged line.

Day 23: Switch to Firefox or Chrome. Firefox offers supreme customizability. Chrome is clean and fast: Type a URL into the address bar and it’ll take you there or enter words or a phrase and it will initiate a Google search.

Here’s my additional tip, for Android users: Move as many of your applications as possible onto the SD card. Go to home screen/settings/applications/manage applications (be sure you click “all” at the top of the screen). When you click on each app, you may see a button that says “Move to SD card.” If you don’t see that option, it’s because that app must run in the phone’s memory.

 Got tips? Share them as a comment on this post!

For our client The First Tee of Southeast Michigan, we combined traditional media relations with a social media strategy. The First Tee teaches children nine core values, within the framework of the game of golf We asked TV, radio and print media personalities to come to one of the The First Tee’s classes and talk about how one or more of the nine core values shaped their lives. While we’d have been happy if they mentioned the program, we knew we could generate social media mentions, as parents snapped photos and shared them. Fox Sports’ Trevor Thomspon spoke to a class, as did Lisa Grou, who wrote about the program on her blog, as seen here:

Clipped from: oaklandcountymoms.com (share this clip)

I switched from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser years ago. When my Mozilla Firefox web browser started doing squirrely things (like crashing Microsoft Outlook), I moved to Google’s Chrome and I am loving it.  It’s clean and fast.

I recently started using Better Facebook, a browser extension which adds some desirable features to the way Facebook appears.  For example, have you ever signed up for an event and then been unable to find the information because you couldn’t remember the exact name of the event?  Better Facebook remembers and shows all my events in one place.  Anyway, Better Facebook doesn’t even offer a version for Internet Explorer.

“IE is a bad browser,” their website says. “Do not use it. It is most vulnerable to viruses and spyware, and it lags behind most other browsers in capabilities. Seriously. Switch to Google Chrome at least!”

Here are conclusions from a study done between August 2007 to October 2010, evaluating 1.64 million status updates with 7.56 million comments.

• • The most activity occurs at 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. with the biggest activity occurring around 3 p.m.
  • The most popular day and time of the week is Wednesday at 3 p.m.
  • Sundays are slowest

The study said that posts that are published in the morning will receive more comments than posts published in the afternoon. The morning posts are 40% more effective. The most popular time of the hour is 00:00 to 00:15.

So update your status between 11 and 11:15 a.m., especially on Wednesdays.

Thanks to HKO Media for the analysis.