Organic Marketing Musings

In an effort to reach younger shoppers–and to have a little fun with their brand, Sears has rolled out an alternate, social, version of their website in which zombie have taken over–yes, I’m serious.

For the brand that has been touting to “see their softer side” for about as long as I can remember, they have taken a risky move in zombie-fying their look for the Halloween season. But it is this kind of risk that is getting them renewed attention.

A little of what you will get is images of jewelry accessorizes a partial arm; running sneakers are dripping with the unfortunate remains of, perhaps, a browser; and brains that sit inside a new a new Kenmore fridge. Of course, in keeping with wanting to reach younger shoppers, there area all of the necessary links to “share this page”, “like it”, “dislike it”, and a collection of YouTube videos, like this one:

It is fun, refreshing look at Sears so be sure to check it out before, maybe, pilgrims take over next.

Do you use your mobile phone to “check in” to locations? The GPS in your phone can do a lot more than help you get from one place to another. It can also let others know where you are and help you discover new places. If you “check in”, share with us what tool you use!

In checking out Social Page Evaluator, a tool which tell you how much your fans on your Facebook Page are worth to you (all you Sinuate Media fans, in case you’re wondering – you’re worth $241 according to them but you are priceless to us!), they talk a little bit on their site about what is link shortening–those great little programs like bit.ly, budurl.com, and ow.ly that take your long, ugly links and make them into nice little short ones–and often while tracking how many clicks you are getting.

They say:

Having a branded, shortened URL would give your links more credibility and assurance to users that the link will redirect to a relevant page.

I definitely agree about the branding part about this statement–branding is important in all aspects of how your company communicates to the public–and yes, that can even go as granular as a link. However, the part of “redirect to a relevant page”, I’m not quite sure how that factors in. Shouldn’t your audience, those who have elected to become fans, trust your brand enough at that point to direct them to relevant pages on the web. After all, a Facebook Page, if done well, provided targeted, carefully curated information to its audience.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think link shorterners detract from creditability?

UPDATE:

We did a little more digging on this and did find a service that lets you create your own custom link shorterner using your own domain. Here’s the link: http://makeme.awe.sm/

So, it would work like this: if we were to sign up for it, we were to sign up for this, we would get the domain http://sinuate.me/ … not exactly the name of the company but close enough that people will know its us. Then, we would use the service on http://awe.sm/ to go create short links that would look like this: http://sinuate.me/hgyf (for example).

There are 4 key practices that I feel are essential to effectively communicating online–and this goes for anyone who has a web presence (which is just about everyday these days… even the Dali Lama).

Whether you are maintaining a Twitter account for personal or business use, interacting on message boards, commenting on a blog, or operating an e-commerce store, these practices are important to remember:

• Transparency
• Accuracy
• Community Relations
• Privacy

We’ll take one at a time:

Transparency – a very important societal change with the advent of social media is the need to be transparent. This does not mean that you have to give away all of your trade secrets. However, it does mean that you allow others to see into your processes and offer regular communication with them. Think back to when lonleygirl15 was discovered as a hoax or when you read a review of a hotel on TripAdvisor and it sounded a little to favorable (yes, a few hoteliers here and there have gotten into trouble for padding their reviews online). It is because of these bumps and bruises along the way in social media’s evolution that transparency is now so important. People what to know who is really talking to them online and what they can expect from their interactions.

Accuracy – People and companies make mistakes. We all do. It is those that quickly admit the mistake and take action to correct the issue are the ones that build brand loyalty. With information rapidly spreading online, it is important to first check then double check anything that is posted on a website, profile, blog, etc. Then, should a mistake be made–be a good guy and fix it… and let your customers know as soon as possible that you are in the process of fixing.

Community Relations — This of this one as being a good (virtual) neighbor. It is kind of a no-brainer, but especially if you are on a company profile or computer, and you tend to get riled up easily, try to stay away from any forums that will draw you in for an argument. There are people who love to instigate, but especially if you are logged into a company profile–just do the right thing and close the computer before making a dumb move.

Privacy–oh, privacy. The topic of the moment. Tired of hearing about how Facebook is changing this and that to make your information online more publicity available? Yup, we are too. But a few things you can do to help with that: remember that anything you post online can be seen by a whole lot of people, and screenshots can also be taken–so even if something is posted then deleted, does not mean that it is gone forever. Avoid asking sensitive questions on a social platform to friends and coworkers, such as “How did that job interview go?”… not a good one since lots of employees are connected with their bosses on social media… or “Did you tell your husband you’re leaving him yet?” Yes, there are people who have found out on Facebook that their marriage was ending, and that really just stinks. A whole website is actually devoted to calling people out on their less-than-intelligent posts on Facebook. So, always remember: Think before you click, and everyone is watching to if you want to scream your message to a big room and you don’t care who hears… that’s when you are ready to update your status or write a new post.

What applications do you like for your Facebook Page? New ones are added all the time so we’d love to hear your feedback!

Every once in a while I come across an online tool or site that really makes my life easier by saving me time, headaches, and sometimes even money.

One tool that has made my life tremendously easier is the Firefox Add-On Screengrab.

Screengrab is a tool that lets you take a screenshot (or “photo” of what your desktop looks like). The screenshot turns whatever is on your desktop into an image file, like a .jpg.

There are several reasons to take a screenshot:

• Copy charts from the internet to insert into a Word or Powerpoint document
• Capture articles written about you/your company online to archive or print
• Type on the screenshot image to demonstrate to a web design what you want changed on your website

Before Screengrab entered the scene, I would use the “Print Screen” button on my computer (which take the “picture”), open up Paint or Photoshop (depending on how much editing I need to do), crop out the parts of the photo that I did not want, go back to my document and paste the image in. Talk about a time suck.

Now, with Screengrab, the process is simplified.

• Download the Screengrab Add-On (If you don’t have it already, you’ll need Firefox first)
• Once the Add-On is installed, it will appear in the lower right hand corner of your Firefox browser and it looks like a partial yellow box with some blue and green circles behind and in front of it.

• Go to a website that you want to take a picture of, then click on the Screengrab icon. Once you do this, you get two options: “Save” or “Copy”. Save lets you take a picture of your screen and save the image file to your computer. “Copy” lets you, do just take—copy the image so you can paste it into another file. You then get three more options which allow you to decide how much of the screen do you want to capture.

Now for my favorite part.

“Selection” – this dream feature allows you to take the image you want, while cropping the image to the exact size at the same time.

When you click this option, your screen turns a pink hue. With your mouse clicked, create a box around the part of the website you want to copy. This part of the site is now copied to your clipboard – and it completely eliminates the need to open another program like Paint or Photoshop.

This is a must-have feature for anyone that takes screenshots frequently!

Now go grab Screengrab!

Social Sight, Sinuate Media’s training arm, will be hosting a series of digital marketing workshops this spring.

> Register online at http://www.sinuatemedia.eventbrite.com

This educational series of hands-on workshops is geared towards educating business owners, marketing teams, and entrepreneurs on uses of digital marketing. Benefits of digital marketing, especially social media, include researching competitors, monitoring brand reputation, and networking.

Our workshops are intended to:

• Educate and inform you about how to see through the hype and focus on the tools that will help grow your business
• Clear up any confusion you have about the internet marketing tools you are using (or thinking about using)
• Help push you to the next level of how to use these tools effectively

Our Spring Workshop Schedule

• April 22 2:00 – 4:00 — The Best of B2B Social Media Tools
• April 29 2:00 – 4:00 — Creating Your Facebook Business Page
• May 13 2:00 – 4:00 — Leveraging the Power of LinkedIn
• May 20 2:30 – 4:30 — Blogging for Business
• June 10 2:00 – 4:00 — Using Twitter for Business
• June 17 1:00 – 3:00 — Generating Online Publicity

About The First Workshop: The Best of B2B Social Media Tools

Are you finding that you need to be on Social Media but are not sure where to spend your valuable time, energy, and money? The Best of B2B Social Media Tools is a workshop that provides an overview of the essential social media tools, websites, applications, and networks that business owners and professionals need to know today. We will discuss the benefits of each tool as well as the challenges businesses face in developing or managing their social media presence. This workshop is a great introduction to uncovering what social media can offer your business.

Workshop Details

Each workshop will last 2 hours. Please bring a fully-charged laptop with wireless capability so you can follow along and experience the sites and tools the workshop will explore.

Cost

Each workshop costs $80. For those that wish to follow the entire curriculum, and pay for all 6 classes at once, they will receive one class for free! We also offer discounts to current or former clients of Sinuate Media. See tickets page for details: http://www.sinuatemedia.eventbrite.com

Location

Our workshops will be held at the Emerging Technology Center, located at 2400 Boston Street, Baltimore, MD 21224. It is in the Factory Building, and there is ample free parking in the lots surrounding the building.

About Your Teacher

Sinuate Media CEO, Leah Messina, has been teaching classes on digital media for over three years. She has guest-lectured and taught courses for such organizations as Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins, Small Business Development Council of Maryland, Prince George Chamber of Commerce, Carroll County Technology Council, National Association of Women Business Owners, and others. In addition to offering custom digital marketing strategy and social media campaign services, she provides consulting and training through Sinuate Media’s Social Sight division. These workshops were created out of the need for businesspeople, especially those who did not “grow up with the internet” to remain current and market to the consumers of today.

Our Sponsor

This event is sponsored by Hospitality Technology Group (HTG), offering a full range of solutions to meet the modern challenges of managing your hospitality business: point of sale systems, POS service & support, video surveillance, restaurant management software integration, web design and eCommerce. Visit them online at http://htg-solutions.com/

Questions?

Contact Leah Messina: leah@sinuatemedia.com or call 443.992.4691

There are several tools available to manage social media with a team

Managing social media accounts can be challenging enough for one user alone, but when multiple cooks are in the kitchen, it can become downright chaotic. Here are some ways to organize the process of managing social media when a team is involved.

I believe there are two parts to managing social media accounts with multiple users:

1. Implement a structure of how the accounts will be managed among your team—the how, when, why of your updates.
2. Decide which tools can be streamline the process for your team

Let’s deal with implementing structure first.

This is an important step for anyone managing a social media account, whether it is for individual use or team use. For your account, it is important to ask yourself or your team at least these basics questions:

• What is the purpose of this profile?
• Who do you want to reach on their social networking site?
• What kind of personality will you portray in your profile?
• What kind of information do you have available to share on your profile?
• How often will you update your profile?

Once this structure is outlined for your team, you will have a much better idea of expectations and guidelines everyone should be following. There are something other things you might want to consider as well, such as metrics for success, how you will deal with responses, and how questions or complaints will be routed to the appropriate person at your organization.
While this next point touches upon the much deeper topic of social media monitoring, it is important to mention here: It is a very good idea to establish how quickly you will be able to respond to questions or comments directed to your profile or made about your company online. If more parties from your organization need to have input before you can provide a concrete response to the person online, then notify them that you received their question and will get back to them within 24 hours, or however long is reasonable for your company.

Now onto social media management tools for teams.

There are several tools that exist that help teams manage social media accounts. Here are some I recommend and a brief description:

• HootSuite (http://www.hootsuite.com) – this is a web-based social media management tool, and my favorite. From your HootSuite dashboard, you can update your profiles on Twitter, Facebook (including your Pages), LinkedIn, Ping.fm, FourSquare, MySpace, and also on WordPress. It allows you to see and manage multiple accounts at once on these sites which is great if you have a personal account on Twitter and one for business too. HootSuite recently launched a team feature which allows you to invite other HootSuite users to share your profiles and assign permissions to team members. This is an incredibly powerful ways to share the responsibility with others because they have made it so easy—no more swapping of usernames and passwords since everyone will log into their own HootSuite account. HootSuite has a lot of other great features like Stats to track link clicks and more. Cost: $0

• CoTweet (http://www.cotweet.com) – as its name suggests, CoTweet is a tool for teams to manage Twitter. It allows up to five Twitter accounts to be access and managed through a single CoTweet login. What I like about CoTweet is that you can assign responsibilities to your team of “who’s on duty” and they can be notified via email on when they need to follow up. It is all then tracked and archived in conversations threads. Cost: $0

• Radian6 (http://www.radian6.com) – Radian6 offers an incredibly robust social media monitoring platform that is chock full of pretty reports and analyses. Set up similarly in layout to HootSuite and TweetDeck (another management tool), it has more features than you can imagine. Teams are supported in the tool—and this is especially important for their clientele of large brands and agencies. If social media monitoring is important to you, contact them for a demo. Cost: $$$$

Have you tried any of these tools for managing social media among your team? Are there others you have found that work well? Share with us in the comments!

It is good to be back! Back online, that is. After recovering from a website crash at the tail end of 2009 (always, always back up your websites, friends), we are happy to just relaunch our website and blog. Thankfully, we were still able to keep in touch online via email, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Yes, this is another reason why social media presence can be so useful.

During the three months, we had some time to think about what we should be sharing on this blog–and how can we make it more useful to not only those that attend our seminars and workshops–but to anyone in need of tips, suggestions, or even a clear explanation of something happening in the world of digital marketing.

From this, we decided to feature some of the best, real-life questions we receive from people who attend our workshops.

If you would like to have your question about social media or online marketing answered in our blog, post it in the comments or email leah[at]sinuatemedia.com.

Our first Real Life Question: How to Manage Social Media with Multiple People

When dancers streamed on stage at New York City’s Ziegfeld Theater just prior to a showing, moviegoers got more than they bargained for – a three and a half minute, 10 dancer, first-of-its-kind live in-cinema ad. The “Fitting Dance” was accompanied by images on the movie screen behind the dancers. Only near the end was it revealed that patrons had been watching a lengthy ad for Daffy’s.

The dancers and images on screen show people piling on clothes, the idea being that you’ll find such good deals at Daffy’s that you’ll have too many clothes to wear. As part of the promotion, patrons received 20% off coupons to Daffy’s.

Daffy’s will be using footage from the live ads, including the audience’s reactions, to create a traditional 30-second spot that will air in select Screenvision theaters beginning around Thanksgiving.