Publishing content in various formats has become necessary to stay alive in consumers’ memory. However, good content can be easily lost in all the noise on the Internet. To stay fresh in your audience’s memory, you need to push content through various Web 2.0 channels such as YouTube, Social Media networks, and Podcasts. The Web 2.0 revolution has also changed the way businesses interact with customers. The communication model has moved from one-to-many to many-to-many.

This paradigm shift in how businesses interact with customers has increased the complexity involved in keeping a unified front when interacting with customers in the different phases from pre-sales to customer support. Here are some of the reasons why the many-to-many communication model is fraught with hazards, and why you need a social media editor to monitor your interactions in the virtual universe.

Avoid Inadvertent Social Media Mistakes

Social Media is a new beast and we need to think what to post many times to avoid a backlash from the social media community. Professional content writers, journalists, and columnists are often trained in avoiding biased language or making offensive statements. However, your employees, who may not be trained and sensitized about avoiding offensive words or biased language, can easily make these mistakes. Mistakes that, of course, are not mistakes to them.

Other than these writing errors, people can push the wrong key and publish things that they may not really intend to publish. You can apologize, but as Shane Duffy – an Irish soccer player – found out when someone RTed from his phone, you are already in the eye of the social media storm.

A social media editor can correct these mistakes before the tweets, posts, or messages in any other form go public.

Maintain Hashtags

A hashtag is the cornerstone of a business’s conversation with the public on Twitter. With other networks now adopting the hashtag approach, it has become all the more important. The importance of hashtags is not what I wish to reinforce. The conversation can be consistent and meaningful only if the hashtags used by your business are consistent.

A recent study presented at the 29th ACM international conference on Design of communication found that people tend to float many different hashtags when discussing an event or a catastrophe, and that a consensus evolves gradually. Until that time, the conversation is split across different axes and people are conversing among themselves in multiple groups.

To ensure that your business’s dialogue with people is not lost or fragmented, your social media contributors need to use the right hashtags for the right purpose and without any spelling mistakes. An important message sent with a spelling error can be lost in the Twitter world and spell doom for your company.

The social media editor can maintain a style guide for hashtags that informs contributors of the appropriate usage. And as the message is reviewed, the social media editor can fix any errors to make sure that the message is not lost.

Ensure the Time is Right

Use of tools to automate certain tasks on social media is not a secret anymore. Most businesses use a combination of queuing messages and interacting in real-time with people on their social media accounts. However, a message queued in good faith yesterday can be a problem tomorrow.

For example, the NRA tweet that followed the Colorado Shootings couldn’t be any more ill-timed. But it is not only the context of the message that can get you in trouble. NBA player Brandon Jennings was fined for the timing of his message rather than the content.

If only . . . A social media editor could have easily taken care of the problem by ensuring that the messages going out were appropriate for the time and adhered to the rulebook.

Thwart Malicious Intent

Not everything is a mistake. People are people; they get angry, or just frustrated. The point is they lash out and you need to ensure that they don’t let out steam at your expense. Just as you walk out the person who leaves your organization to protect your data, it is important to immediately revoke their access to official social media accounts.

But can you be really sure that the person has nothing scheduled for the next week? A control mechanism such as the social media editor will help remove any intentional tweets scheduled to undermine your business.

Monitor Conversation

Talking to customers is often tricky. It was all right when this conversation mostly happened on the phone, but with social media, everything is public. As Zoe Barnes from House of Cards says, “These days when you are talking to one person, you are talking to thousand.” In such conditions, spotting a brewing customer discontent with a company representative and diffusing the tension becomes very important.

The channels of communication may change, but the solutions remain the same. One way to diffuse the tension is to get someone higher up the ladder to talk to the customer. Tools such as the LiveWorld’s moderation application allow moderators to escalate messages to the right person and facilitate communication.

Social Media is dynamic and engaging, but hasty implementation of social media solutions without appropriate control mechanisms can do more harm than benefits to your business. Having a social media editor on the team or designating additional responsibility to an existing team member can minimize the chances of social media mishaps. There was a time when some believed that even negative publicity was publicity, but with sentiment analysis applications not too far away, it is wise to keep that negative publicity at bay.

Coming on the heels of the DDOS attack that choked the Internet earlier, this brute force attack on WordPress was carried out from multiple IP addresses and exploited weaknesses in WordPress username and password.

The attackers set out to bring the websites down by systematically trying some common usernames. A few common usernames attempted on our website, that we tracked using a security plugin, included Admin, Admin1, Manager, support, administrator, admins and so on.

I still remember how our website was attacked last year within days after it was launched. We still had the default ‘Admin’ username at that time. The password was fairly strong, or so we thought, but the common username made things easier for the attackers and gave them access to infect the website.

I am no web security expert, but this attack on our website made me look into website security. Here are some of the basic tips I learned that you can use to secure your WordPress website.

Server Level Security

Some of the most common attacks WordPress websites face are the SQL injection attacks. A typical attacker first goes through the .htaccess file before moving on to other WordPress files. Think of .htaccess file as the gateway to your WordPress installation. By modifying the .htaccess file, you can stop the attacker from accessing other important files and folders of your WordPress installation.

You can secure the files on your installation by defining the permissions in the root .htaccess file and adding .htaccess files to other WordPress folders such as /wp-content/uploads. This tutorial on How to protect WorPress folder with .htaccess file shows the code snippets you need to add to your WordPress installation to make it more secure.

Adding the additional code to the .htaccess file will ensure that visitors don’t have access to the documents you upload to your WordPress website or the theme and plugin files.

Website Level Security

Attackers use different methods depending on the vulnerability of the CMS. The .htaccess file changes help you secure access to your directories and files. However, you cannot always keep all the attackers at bay, and it is important to monitor your WordPress installation all the time.

WordPress plugins such as Wordfence Security and BulletProof Security help you monitor and set preferences to harden your WordPress installation. For example, with the Wordfence Security plugin you can monitor crawlers and visitors to your website and block access to any suspicious visitor. Additionally, you can keep track of all the login attempts to your website, and set the maximum number of allowed unsuccessful login attempts before the plugin blocks the user. The plugin also scans all the WordPress installation files and gives you an option to restore original files if any of these file are infected.

Moreover, most plugins have options to set up email alerts to stay informed of any vulnerability that the plugin detects.

User Level Security

Your Username and Password is the most important part of securing your WordPress website. A weak password can undermine all the work you have put-in to secure your website and give attackers access to your files.

As was the case in the recent attack, a brute force attack typically tries a list of common usernames and password on a website. To counter this type of attack, the first thing you should do after installing WordPress is create a new user with administrative privileges with an uncommon username. Something that is unique to you and not a common username such as manager, support or administrator. In addition to the username, you also need to create a strong password for your account.

Usually a strong password has at least 8 characters, is not a dictionary word, and includes digits and special characters. This list of Dos and Don’ts from the University of Maryland is a good guideline to create a strong password for your WordPress website.

Maintenance

WordPress is an open source CMS. Any new developments and code changes are public immediately and available to everyone. Similarly, the plugins you use on your website are also open source. Any vulnerabilities in the plugins and WordPress code can be exploited by attackers, if they are not addressed.

Thankfully, WordPress fixes and sends out an update whenever they come across any such flaws to protect the users. As a website owner, you must ensure that you install these WordPress and plugin upgrades as soon as possible.

Website security is a complex topic and needs many more tweaks than discussed in this brief post. Banks and governments spend millions to protect their data, network, and websites. However, mass attacks on technology target everyone using a specific platform. While these basic steps to secure your website may not stop a dedicated attacker bent on breaking your website, it can protect you from most of the mass attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in the system and those created by ill-informed user actions.

I hope you found these tips useful, and are off to create stronger usernames and passwords for your blog or website to say the least. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. Also, don’t forget to share this so that we can all implement stronger measures to ward off website attacks.

This post looks at some of the important features that give users a better control over their post appearance, and make a number of things easy by lowering dependence on external plugins.

Post Formats

The Post Formats feature was released in 3.1, but it was something that only developers could use until now. WordPress users could exploit this feature only if it was included in the theme or had to specifically get developers to enable the option. With post formats available in the interface, WordPress 3.6 users can now easily differentiate the look-and-feel of different types of posts and help readers navigate the blog as they scan and skip various blog entries.

Image Post Format – The image added here is defined as the image for the post, similar to the Featured Image option. This type of Format is well suited to share an Infographic, or if you are an artist, perhaps share your illustrations and digital art. You can add a short description if you want, or use this format to just post images as you do on Pinterest.

Gallery Post Format – The gallery post type makes it easy to insert image galleries. You can insert existing image galleries and create a post, or create a gallery on the run and publish a post in the Gallery format. This post format can be suitable for a travel blogger or a food blogger, where the blogger can create a image gallery of a recipe and put it at the top of the post.
Video Post Format – The Video post further reduces your dependence on external plugins and you do not need to get embed code from YouTube and fret over the video size and other similar parameters. You can now easily share your videos published on YouTube by copying the video link to the post and adding a brief description to the video. Similarly, you can also share videos published by others on your blog by writing a commentary for the video and express your views.

Audio Post Format – Similar to the Video post, you can add an audio file from your Media Library to your text post. You can also share free podcasts on subjects that interest your readers.

Quote Post Format – Do you like to share inspirational quotes with your readers? This post format will make your life easier. You could even start a Quote of the Day post on your blog for your regular readers and make their day a bit brighter. Write a relevant headline and just copy the quote and the source URL, no need to spend additional time on formatting the quote every time once you define the style for the post format.

Link Post – If you blog a lot about current affairs or fancy writing caustic headlines and briefs on the current news items, you will definitely love this one. The link post format allows you to link to external pages in a way that when your blog readers click the post link on the main blog page, they are directed to the original page.

In my earlier post, I talked about how content curation can help you generate traffic to your blog. With Link posts, you can easily share interesting information, provide your take on the subject discussed in the main article and direct the reader to the original article – all without violating any copyright!

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Multiple formats allow you more control on your posts and help you define how they appear on your blog. Of Course, you still need to add code to the CSS if you wish to differentiate the look-and-feel for each post type. But they do have some inherent differentiators. For example, a link post will automatically take the reader to the original web site. Similarly, an image post will display the image you specify prominently on the post.

Navigation Menu Interface

I still remember how confused I was when I started with WordPress. The Menus page had a number of options and I spent a lot of time figuring out what needs to be done first and in what order. WordPress 3.6 has simplified things in many ways.

They have clearly spelt out and put a link at the beginning that says ‘create new menu.’ Furthermore, when you start creating that new menu you want, all other options are blocked and this enforces a workflow for you.

It also wasn’t clear earlier if the menu structure could be defined on the same page. The new interface clearly lists the pages, links, and categories that you select under Menu Structure that you can rearrange. The Menu Settings options help you assign one menu to multiple locations in just one click.

Post Locking

WordPress is a wonderful Content Management System; however, it still lacks a few features such as blocking access to a post that is open for editing by other users.

The new WordPress 3.6 now gives you the post lock feature that is so important if you are using WordPress in a multi-editor environment. For example, if you have an editor reviewing a post and don’t want others to get access to the post at that same time, this feature adds a padlock sign showing that the editor is working on the post.

Even if someone tries to edit the post, they are presented with a Warning to inform them of the lock status again, but do have an option to take over the post control.

If they do take over the post control, the editor is then informed of the action and can work toward resolving the post control issue.

Revisions

You could restore earlier versions of your post in WordPress before, but it was a bit difficult to guess the exact date of the version and users had to try a few time before they could open the correct version to restore. The new interface to restore old version makes it very easy.

The Previous and Next buttons at the top now help you browse all the revisions with ease. The bottom portion of the screen shows the content you have deleted and added in each revision. The new interface definitely reduces the number of steps you need to go through to find and restore the version you want to restore.

In summary, this new release is full of features that will make your life easier and give you more control on how you want to style your blog posts. Other than these options, WordPress 3.6 has also tweaked the the Autosave option. The new Autosave saves the text you are typing in the browser’s memory. So if you lose internet connectivity or your computer crashes, all that content will still be in the browser memory and will be retrieved.

What feature of this proposed Version 3.6 do you like the most or have been waiting to see the most?

Small business owners and solopreneurs are hard pressed for resources and managing a blog in-house can be quite resource intensive. Furthermore, unless you are in a writing profession, or have a flair for writing, churning out content each day can take hours.How do you exploit this current and dynamic marketing channel before you breach that content threshold with your own posts?

What is Content Curation?

Content curation, in simple words, is managing a collection of items from different sources. You must have collected some rare stamps or coins as a kid, or perhaps players’ cards that you were proud of. The value of your collection was dependent on your skill to recognize that rare stamp or coin that wasn’t in the possession of your immediate circle.

A content curator, similarly, builds a collection of the best content available online on specific subjects for the target audience. Think of yourself as a museum curator who selects the best art from across the world to showcase in her museum.

Content Curation over Blogging

Content curation has various advantages. Most important being that it establishes you as an expert in your subject if you share quality content. In this information age, where there is tons of information and limited resources to process the information, a single location that provides the most relevant and current information on a subject easily becomes a go-to place for online readers.

Wouldn’t you prefer to open a website with eclectic content from different sources rather than visit ten different websites to know the latest and the greatest?

Your Website Vs. Other Websites

Various websites help you curate content on the Internet. Some of these content curation websites like RebelMouse allow you to automate the task of adding everything from a website or author, while others such as Scoop.it require you to handpick each article and put it online. These are some of the great tools you can use to showcase your expertise in your area of work. Hosting content on a third-party website may help you establish your authority; however, it doesn’t help you generate traffic to your website and expose your readers to your products and services.

Jumpstart Your Blog

Don’t get me wrong. Nothing beats original content. But until you get into the blogging groove and have enough content to generate traffic to your blog through Search and other Social Media referrals, curating content on your domain can get you off and running.

But traffic is not the only reason to curate content on your website. By providing content that compliments your products and services you help your readers and customers solve their problems.

I hope I have made you realize the benefits of content curation on your own domain or website, and also outlined some scenarios where it might be your best bet. Our next post will look at how you can jumpstart your inbound marketing effort with content curation and get readers to your blog from day one.

Our previous post on this topic discussed the most likely reputation battlefronts. So when the Dementors strike, how do you weave the Patronus charm to see the light of good reputation beyond the immediate crisis?

Look Before You Leap

That may be your response to the immediate stimulus: to fight back. An aggressive stance does help sometimes. After all, some do believe that attack is the best form of defense. Well, not always. Before you go all out on the networks countering whatever is flying you must get to the bottom of the claims that are being made against you. These questions will more or less help you define your social media strategy to manage the crisis.

When You are Right

I remember a couplet I read when I was kid from a book ‘Banish your Blues’ that said

‘If you are right; you don’t need to be angry, and

If you are wrong; you cannot afford to be angry’

Either way you need to take a balanced approach to the situation. Try to find out the truth. If you can prove that the accusations are baseless and false, use all the possible networks to put out this news. A business blog can be a very helpful tool to refute any false claims as it gives you space to discuss the issue at length. Use micro blogging platforms to get the news out and invite people for a discussion on your blog.

Moreover, all through your tense and lightning fast responses, never commit the mistake to attack the attacker. A large corporation or business attacking an individual creates more sympathy for the individual. To turn the tide, keep your focus on the issue and not the attacker.

When You Are in the Wrong

Accept you can go wrong. However, that doesn’t mean you just ignore what’s happening and let the crisis run its course. You still have to respond and contain the fire. So what can you do to control the situation, and perhaps even get out unscathed.

1. Engage and Explain

Issues surrounding certain policies and events can be seen as against a group or an individual. People turn to social media for specific reasons. Even if they take up a cause only to get attention, they will have to answer if you engage them and ask what they want. If it is about a policy, ask what parts they think need further consideration. If it is a customer issue, how do they think it can be best resolved now and for future occurrences, if any. Most people will understand the situation if you give them information and time; and if you are lucky, they might even start talk in your favor.

2. Redirect the Conversation

People are busy and they accept the point of view that is projected most widely and is discussed passionately. You can, of course, counter if you are right; but not everything is black and white. What if there is some truth to the discussed problem. Whatever it is, it cannot be bad a hundred percent. Provide a different perspective to the situation.

3. Overshadow

Doesn’t sound very diplomatic, right? But sometimes sheer force helps. You need to respond to social media crises with lightning speed or it can blow out of proportion very fast.

A statement from a senior executive always helps; however, people identify more with people in their peer group. Let your social media manager marshal a team of your brand’s advocates. In a highly volatile environment, people may find someone like them more trustworthy than a senior executive.

If a client starts a social media spat, ask other clients to support you. Similarly, support of other industry influencers whom you know well can give the required push to your credibility.

Summing Up

Conversations on social media networks are hardly contained, and you might find someone holding an old grudge chip-in during this free-for-all. Use your social media tools to dig out anyone who is talking in your favor and give them your full backing.

Reputation is fickle and must be defended at all times. A tried and tested response plan can prepare you for the unseen and help your team work as a well-oiled machine.

Responsive Blogs

People read blogs to stay updated, know more about products, or as a leisure activity. The thing is, most of these activities are now increasingly done using mobile devices when waiting in a long queue, on airports, train stations, and in coffee shops. To make sure that your business blog provides a good reading experience to the reader, the blog design should respond to the device screen size. You can help your users by doing following:

• Use a responsive theme for your blog, or
• Create a separate sub-domain for a mobile site, and
• Submit a mobile sitemap to search engines

Avoid Horizontal Scrolling

Well this has been advised for a long time for computer screens. Mobile device interfaces are much smaller, and the advice becomes a must-have feature of a responsive blog design.

The smaller interfaces already require readers to scroll down multiple times to read long texts, but as many of you must have already experienced, having to scroll horizontally to read each line is definitely more frustrating. For example, this popular website (www.indiatimes.com), which shares news from the entertainment world is not optimized for mobile devices. It uses the same 3-column layout for a mobile website that it uses for a desktop or laptop.

Although the website is responsive to the size of the device, it crams all the content on the small screen, which makes it difficult to read. The readers then have to focus on one part of the website to zoom in, but the website then manages to display only half the content at a time to the user and the user must scroll horizontally to read or explore other parts of the website. The design also wastes valuable screen real estate with the left-hand sidebar that has no content.

A Better Example

Compare the above site to the Huffington Post website’s mobile version that is designed for mobile devices. The regular website of Huffington Post has a standard 3-column layout. But the mobile version is optimized to fit all the content within the screen size in a single column and you don’t need to scroll horizontally. The mobile website is also much less busy than its regular website designed for larger desktop and laptop screens.

Pagination Over Scrolling

That’s that then, no horizontal scrolling. But what about vertical scrolling, can you address that part? An alternative to vertical scrolling is displaying your blog post content as pages. The content of the page will, of course, have to be dynamically divided according to the interface size. This feature reduces the number of times the user must interact with the interface to move to the next chunk of text.

Information displayed as a page also gives the reader a guide to where the text begins and ends on the screen, along with the page count.

An Easy Solution

Responsive is good. However, certain websites with too many visual elements in the interface, which might look good on a large screen, appear cluttered on small devices. If your business blog is mainly text and you want the readers to go through long articles, it is important to strip your website of all the non-essential elements when viewed on a mobile device.

If you are a WordPress user, you can do this quite easily using the Readability plugin. The plugin provides your readers with an option to view only the content in the browser and strips down all other elements of the web site. Readability apps are available for all mobile devices and browsers, but I believe it is better to provide the service as a publisher rather than have the user install multiple applications on their mobile devices.

The Readability plugin also helps your readers define other reading options such as font size, color, the column width along with an option to choose if they want to view the images in the post.

You can try all of these options on the RightMix Technologies blog with your mobile device by clicking on Read Now at the beginning or end of a post.

What attributes of websites annoy you most while surfing the web on your mobile device?

A copywriter creates advertisements with a certain audience in mind. The content and the visuals of these advertisements are often oriented toward the age group of the target customer, their socio-economic background, and their aspirations among other things.

Similarly, the language and style of writing employed by an academician in textbooks differs greatly from the style and vocabulary used in a peer reviewed journal. Here, in the first instance, the audience of a textbook is often students who are entering the field and not completely conversant with all the terms. The author here will take an additional effort to define all the terms and often explain concepts using metaphors that the student can understand and apply to the topic of discussion. Whereas, the content of an academic journal is more to the point with little background information as the author is talking mostly to an audience that is similar to her.

The group’s ability to comprehend

If you wish to communicate with your audience, you want to include information they need and write it in their words. Adding demographic information to the analysis will affect the writing style as well as establish a baseline for the information you want to include in the document.

For example, when writing for an audience that is not tech savvy or internet savvy, use of acronyms like WYSIWYG will be misplaced and the readers will have to go hunt for the meaning of the acronym.

Their Objective

Readers often access a document with specific intent and to satisfy a information need. Is it a reference document that readers use only to look-up specific information? Or, is it a sales brochure where the reader is receiving information as well as evaluating your services and quality.

The reference guide users will want to get to the information quickly and complete the task that is holding up their work. On the other hand, while reading a brochure, the readers will be evaluating the product and willing to spend time on reading about the product features.

How much do they know?

What does the audience need to know? Another dimension that you need to evaluate in depth is what does the audience already know about the subject? It does not really matter if it is a complex environmental report or a legal procedure. Do your readers know all the terms? Are they from the same domain or is it for a general populace?

For example, a Global Warming report for physicists will assume a lot of technical knowledge. However, a report covering the same subject for the general population will need a lot more basic information.

Where are they?

The physical location of the reader puts the environment of the use in context. Will your document be referred at home, in a dark hallway, or a brightly lit airport lounge? These environmental conditions will dictate your choice of typography, design, and use of visuals.

For example, you might get away with text of similar shade as the background in a brightly lit hall, but it would definitely pose problems in a hallway with dim lighting.

Are they in a hurry?

Will the document be used in the office while completing a task? Or, is it an emergency instruction sheet that will be referred in a high-pressure situation? The stress in this part of the analysis is not on the physical environment but on the context of use.

For example, a user guide for operating a fire extinguisher is much more comprehensive than the emergency sheet pasted next to a hanging fire extinguisher. It is assumed that this specific information sheet will be accessed in a time of emergency and therefore the information is much more succinct, almost abrupt, and with ample visuals to aid people who may not understand the language used in the information sheet.

Summary

In summary, any audience analysis should address following attributes of the audience:
· Reading level and vocabulary
· Reading purpose
· Existing knowledge of the subject
· Physical environment
· Context of use

Article originally published on Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7137680

New technology brings new ways of communication and we stumble and fall until we adapt the rules of our physical world to the virtual. Email didn’t change the way we salute people in electronic letters compared to written mail. So what rules of our physical world do we need to follow in the Twitter universe?

Stolen Identity – Bad Idea

It’s not like people don’t do it. Do a search on Bill Gates, or any other celebrity, and you will find multiple Twitter accounts claiming to be Bill Gates or associated to Bill Gates. Thankfully, Twitter verifies accounts of celebrities or any business or person at high risk of being impersonated.

Needless to say, stealing an identity is not a smart choice unless your intention is to dupe and spam your followers. With a verification mechanism in process, you will soon lose what followers you have.

Personal Information – Share What You Want Shared

Airing your thoughts aloud can be satisfying at times. But always remember what you think and say can hurt others. Personal information about your friends and happenings in their life are best kept private. We are well aware of people giving up their lives because of being dumped on social media networks or because some sensitive information was tweeted.

Rule of thumb: Say things that you won’t mind your friends to say about you. But then, your friends might be more sensitive than you are, so it is best to keep personal information out of a public discussion.

Follow/ Unfollow – Don’t Play This Game

Everyone wants a huge following, right? But getting that number by unscrupulous methods is not the right way to go. Plus, an unengaged list of followers won’t mean much or be beneficial in any way.

Additionally, most people either use social media tools like Sprout Social that allow them to clean up their Twitter lists or use free tools like Just UnFollow to check followers who are not following back.

Foul Language – Not Cool!

A witty message now and then or in your bio is fine, I guess. But it is definitely not cool to swear in every tweet. Unless, of course, you do that every day in real world too.

This is more important if you are trying to build a professional image for yourself. You could be a small business owner or a professional, or even a recent graduate; it is highly likely that people looking for your services or to recruit you will be discouraged by the foul language in your tweet stream.

Automation Is Not the Key – Be Human

Tools like Hootsuite are great to organize your tweets and tweet something when you’re asleep or away. But use them sparingly. Do tweet something in real time! Use the ‘@’ and enagage users, have real conversations and make friends. That is what you are here for. No one can build a relationship with you just by listening to your voicemail greeting – even if you change it everyday. The same applies to Twitter.

Avoid bots, offers for fantastic followers, and anything that sounds too good to be true. It generally is!

Direct Message – Private Communication Only

There is a reason the Direct Message option is available only after you have a two-way connection – to avoid spamming. Otherwise, Twitter would be one big email database.

Use Direct Message to communicate private information or talk about business propositions that you do not wish to make public. It is good to thank people who have followed you, it is better to thank them publicly. Twitter is a social network, and when you thank your followers publicly, you are introducing them to your group as you would in the real world.

Respond – However BIG you are

You do say ‘Thank You’ when someone compliments you, don’t you? Then it is only polite to thank people who retweet or share your thoughts with their followers. It may not be possible for celebrities who get thousands of retweets, but even they do it every now and then.

I am not a Twitter veteran and not a busy user by a long shot. Nonetheless, I firmly believe that our behavior on Twitter becomes easy if we follow all the rules and the legal bindings of the land.

What lessons have you learned on your journey using Twitter?

Delegation is the key

Doesn’t really matter if you are a big organization or a small business, delegation is the key to efficient utilization of available resources. With Sprout Social, you can create groups for each of the business functions, Marketing and Customer Support in the least; or if you are a social media consultant, create a new group for each client with multiple contributors.

With groups in place, you can invite your team members and assign them to specific groups. You can also specify the rights and permissions for the users.

Growing your Network

Number of connections and followers are important, but if you own a meat shop, having vegetarian followers won’t make any sense. Sprout Social’s Discovery tools help you make meaningful connections with your potential customers.

Let’s see how this feature works. Continuing with the meat shop example, let us say it is safe to assume anyone talking about an oven or grill is also interested in buying meat. With Smart Search I can look for people discussing these keywords in a given area and connect with these potential customers.

You can do a similar search for steak, ribs, crab, or any other meat that you sell and target customers in your area.

Having the ability to find people with specific keywords in their profiles and tweets can help you build a targeted and meaningful followers list.

Saving your customers’ time

Sprout social also supports Zendesk Integration. We have all experienced long waiting time on a support call or the lengthy process of creating a support ticket online. You can eliminate this additional burden for your customers by integrating you Zendesk support platform.

So the next time your support staff see a tweet saying “can’t access xyz”, they can respond in a flash by creating a support ticket for the customer.

Maintenance

There is a lot of churn on Twitter. People join, try a few tweets and many times move on if they don’t get the expected results. But social media is no magic drug for all your ailments, and needs time and the right kind of effort. Anyway, the point I want to make is that you may have many followers who are not active on Twitter anymore. The whole point of following someone is to have a conversation or learn interesting things from them.

The Cleanup feature in Sprout Social helps you find these inactive accounts and people who do not follow you back.

Feedback

No campaign, social media or otherwise, can be complete without tracking the results of the campaign. After all, you don’t want to spend big bucks on something that doesn’t work. As an administrator or a social media manager, you can connect your Bit.LY account to track the links shared by each group and review a weekly summary.

The latest feature unveiled by Sprout Social, Response Rate, helps you analyze your engagement with your Twitter and Facebook connections.

For example, this graphical display shows how I fared this last week on Twitter. For 72 tweets that I sent, I received a 35% response and appeared on 72,000 screens – any number of whom may have seen the tweet.

But this does not tell me about the links that I shared on twitter. You can dig deeper with Reports. If I pull up a detailed report for the same week, I get some more information.

This report tells me that each of the links that I shared in the past week was opened at least seven times. It also shows me the daily engagement graph if I wish to analyze and find the events that triggered better engagement.

I am using this free Trial for a week now and everything has worked well so far. A mild irritant, which may not be really an issue for you, is that the interface shortcuts tend to interfere with my activity. For example, whenever I press CTR+N to open a new browser window it opens the New Message box. I think this happens only if you use the Firefox browser.

Have you ever used Sprout Social before? Which feature do you like the most? And which do you find most useful for your business. I think it is definitely worth trying out, especially when you’re getting a 30 day free trial.

Earlier, only a few people who had access to mass media could attack someone’s reputation. Social media has now enabled anyone with a mobile phone and a decent following to reach millions and cause irreparable damage.

While fame can be achieved in minutes and hours, reputation must be earned over a period. Reputation is also something that you must nurture and protect all the time and therefore is an ongoing job; a job that requires skill and agility to handle negative sentiment. An attack on reputation on social media is akin to be lynched by an unruly mob.

Before you train your social media team for this war, it is important to understand the internal and external threats to your business’ reputation.

1. Disgruntled Employees

Disgruntled and unhappy employees can mean heavy losses and less than optimum work for employers. But that is not the only problem. Increasingly, employees who disagree with some company policies discuss these on the SM networks with their friends and family.

One person making an emotional rant may not need your attention immediately. However, in a highly charged atmosphere, if the policy is relevant to the current national problem, the rant can easily spread like a wild fire and travel great distances. This was quite evident from the social media storm created by HMV employees who took over HMV’s official Twitter account.

2. Whistleblower

I would assume that most whistleblowers would report wrongdoing because of their moral and ethical standards. While systematic reporting is required for the government to take legal action, Internet and social media networks require no such mechanism.

The whistleblower’s claims may or may not be true and may not even stand legally. As with any rumor, a negative or controversial statement is shared much faster and farther than a positive remark.

3. Product or Service Quality

Social media is used for almost every aspect of business – marketing, customer support, recruitment, and talent development and retention – but the busiest and popular application of social media is customer support.

Again, a happy customer may not go to your website or social media account to praise your product. However, dissatisfied customers will jump to all available resources to air their views against your product or service. More so if all their attempts through traditional channels have failed.

Replacing a bad product is an obligation; not a solution to the bad experience your customers have.

4. Unprofessional Conduct

Interactions on social media platforms can be as busy as you want them to be. Everything’s fine as long as you are doing things yourself or have absolute control over what goes out to the world. But most large organizations and some small businesses will have a dedicated staff to handle marketing and customer support dialogue with their followers and fans.

So what happens if this person makes a mistake and fails to handle an irate customer? The business must be ready to handle a situation that can quickly turn ugly because of the employee’s misconduct.

5. Leaked Documents

WikiLeaks. That one word is enough to explain the gravity of the damage a leaked final or draft document or an internal memo can cause your business. In addition to this, employees may inadvertently share some proprietary information via email or training material. Even though the purpose here may be as innocent as helping out a friend or family member, any copyrighted information that leaves your door (or virtual fence) is open to criticism and misuse.

Feedback Mechanism

Although the common thread across all these scenarios is the highly connected network of people where news can go viral and reach millions in no time, the reasons of and therefore the response strategy must differ to counter the crises.

At a high level, we can say that a feedback mechanism is essential in every function of your organization so that you are not taken unawares by any of the above scenarios. Setting up a process for diffusing the situation is as important as minimizing these risks.

Have you ever encountered any of the above scenarios? How did you deal with them? Have you set up a process to address each of these above situations? We want to know your experience. Please write to us or leave a comment. We look forward to hearing your real life experiences.

Advertising has been among one of the most dynamic fields and has kept pace with the changing times. Popularity of the WWW provided new advertisement avenues. Technological advances and social media are now posing a new threat to TV advertising.

With people micro blogging through their favorite TV shows, are the ads on television losing their worth?

It was easy to captures a viewer’s attention when there was only one channel aired on television. Cable posed a stiff challenge to get viewers to stick through the advertisement – you don’t really watch the ads through your favorite show, maybe snippets if they are synchronized with other channels. But you still flip through a few before settling back and they somehow get your attention.

The question is ‘Is an ad impression on a social media network worth more than a TV ad?” And is it a matter of choosing one or the other? Questions that advertising consultants will have to answer soon for their customers.

Attention Deficit is Real

Let us say I buy time during a popular show to air an ad. Now this TV show has millions of self-reported viewers. Another way to quantify this would be to count the number of households that subscribe to the channel. I have always had this question – how do you know the viewers didn’t flip the channel while the ad was being aired or were paying attention?

This is quite similar to paying for impressions. My recent experience with social media advertising taught me that a popular social network can get you 50,000+ impressions in minutes, if not seconds. And I don’t even know if anyone has looked at that little ad in the sidebar that we are so accustomed to ignore.

So neither this nor that seems to be the answer.

Vying for users’ attention at multiple touch points may earn better results.

If viewers are engaged with multiple devices at all times, why not channel them to a place where they want to be anyway? Almost all TV shows now have a hashtag (‘#’) associated with them that viewers use to converse on Twitter.

Advertisers are now creating hashtags to fuel brand discussion.

Advertisers can leverage these hashtags to keep viewers engaged during the commercial that they may not be paying attention to. However, as Tom Fishburne points out, people don’t discuss brands, they discuss events, news, problems, likes, dislikes, and so on.

Greater Brand Memory

Hashtags by themselves fail to kick up a conversation. When an advertiser pays for the airtime during the show, it would perhaps make sense to also piggyback on the show’s hashtag and engage the viewer in the other medium by sponsoring the hashtag.

For example, the official hashtag for #oscars could be #oscars13jcp, which would cover the official sponsor – J C Penny. This mainly helps in two ways -

One, users who discuss anything about the Oscars will be automatically exposed to the sponsor through the event and their Twitter conversation.

Two, sponsors can then weave their social media advertising campaign around these popular event hashtags and be present at the live event, the television broadcast, and also the social media networks.

The day won’t be far when you see advertisements in your Twitter feed based on the hashtags you use. These hashtags will then help advertisers display context sensitive advertisements to anyone who is following the event and using that specific hashtag.

A Captive Audience

If you ask me, Pay Per Click (PPC) is better than impressions. At least you know someone’s seen your advertisement! Pure or conventional print or television advertising can only promise to give you impressions.

Integrating social media concepts such as hashtags with legacy advertising can exponentially increase your impressions across a wide demographic.

Although this may not be a click per se, using a tag containing your name or brand repeatedly lets you increase your equity. It will also be easy to quantify the results of such campaigns leading to greater potential for analytics, further allowing you to generate more accurate predictions.

Have you thought of leveraging various channels for brand promotion? Do you think integrating conventional channels with social media can be the key to greater user engagement? Your comments are crucial to take this concept forward and I look forward to discussing it with all readers.

However, before you jump in the social media universe to publicize your brand or start a new campaign, you need to ask these important questions.

What do I want?

Your business will always be in one of these stages: creating brand awareness, providing product information, answering questions, giving comparisons, selling the product or service.

What are my objectives and expected result?

You may have just started your business or you may have launched a new product. The content you develop will fit into one of these categories. Eventually you will have to develop content for each stage, but it is important to define the immediate activity and objective of any campaign. For example, you want to create a buzz for a new product. It is important that you define this objective and define the kind of results you expect from this exercise.

Which Medium to Use?

You have your objective defined – create awareness for your new product. Depending on your business and product, you have to determine the type of media that is most suitable to create a buzz. If your products mainly appeal to visual senses, then creating content in the visual medium is the right choice. For example, if you are a tattoo artist, people will want to see your designs before they come to you and these will also appeal to tattoo enthusiasts. Long texts or short text messages will definitely not have the desired impact.

Which medium will have maximum impact on my customers?

Apart from matching the medium to the product, if you the only contributor to social media activities, selecting the media that best suits your business and that you are good at producing without investing a lot of time will give better results.

Which Social Media Network Will Help?

This is an age-old ideology in HR departments – find a person suitable for the job you have rather than adjusting the job to fit the available candidate.

Fit a social media network to the business, not the other way round.

Now you know your objective and the type of content you need to publish to create a buzz for your product. The time has come to go social media network hunting – with so many around, it can get really confusing. The most important factor, of course, is which network has the most number of active subscribers. For visual media, Pinterest, Instagram, and Youtube are your best bets.

Did it Work?

Any improvement in strategy is possible only when you measure the response to your campaign. If your objective was to create brand or product awareness, how many likes, shares, and visits to the product page did you get? Although these numbers do not guarantee that all the people will remember your brand, they can indicate brand exposure or reach. Brandon Hickie explains different methods you can use to measure the impact of your campaign.

Count the numbers!

These numbers can indicate that the people who engaged in any of these activities know about the brand or the product. There would be others who saw but did not Like or share, but that number can only be higher than those who did click or Like.

Recap

So here we are, with a simple 4-step process that ensures your social media activities for business are not random and thoughtless.

Step 1: Define your social media objectives and their expected results.

Step 2: Identify media that best portray your products.

Step 3: Identify social media networks that support your objectives and media.

Step 4: Measure and adjust your social media strategy.

Answering these questions will provide you with a concrete plan to work on your social media strategy. How do you measure the success of your social media presence and your activities on social media networks?

Attackers hijack networks for many reasons. It can be as simple as making an impression and joining the big boys’ club, or for monetary reasons. With big data becoming a panacea for all ills, the follower data can get attackers quick money on the black market, according to the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive. But that is a discussion for some other day.

An attack on one network is unfortunate. Simultaneous attacks on all social media networks will spell doom. While you may lose control of one account, you still have your other networks to communicate with your followers, who follow you on other networks too.

Better Security Features

What would help is if social media networks could come up with a mechanism, where the users could suspend their account via some other tool or interface. The access to this feature, although password based, could be stored at a location other than where user passwords are stored. Doing this gives the account holders an opportunity to shut down the account until regular service is restored. I know this is after the fact, but our technology is not perfect and created by humans. If one human can create a barrier, another can devise a way to break that barrier.

This is just one more item for the security wish list until the networks come up with better security features.

Other Networks Can Help

So your Twitter account is compromised and there’s some objectionable stuff that is posted from your account. That is not the end of the world. Use your presence on other networks to issue official statements when you are still gaining back control. There is a good chance that most of the followers overlap. By issuing a statement through all other channels, you can spread the news faster than other online media such as blogs and news portals.

So Can Your Competitors

This is the least you can do, and is very important for business accounts. If your account is used to malign your competitors as in the case of Burger King, contact the social media manager of the competing brand and inform them of the situation. You can also request them to issue a statement asking their followers to ignore the messages on the compromised account. As discussed by Annie Colbert, this specific Burger King example affects both Burger King and McDonalds.

Panic is never an answer to a crisis. What you need is a well chalked out plan to handle different types of crises and train your staff to react with a cool head during a crisis. Billions of users mean billions to be earned and popularity always has its price. The price for celebrities is their privacy, but for organizations that use social media, this could mean a tarnished brand image leading to image erosion.

The huge, one-time effort that you put in crafting that perfect blog post can be used to serve audiences in different channels.

Let us look at some of the ways you can repurpose the content you create for your blog. Just as social media, blogs are an inalienable part of any marketing effort now. This is also the medium where you can provide maximum information to your readers and for as long as you wish compared to social media networks, where messages are a flowing stream. You can use blogs as a content reservoir that can provide content for all other media channels.

#1 Content Reuse: Blogging to Micro Blogging

Every blog post contains hidden gems, statements you make about your products, the business environment, your business philosophy, and so on. When buried in the text, these are often ignored by the readers or do not have the desired impact. According to this recent report (about memory retention), people remember statements made on Twitter and Facebook posts more than what they read in long texts.

For example, the TweetHerder plugin helps you mark specific statements and adds a tweet button next to the statement or the quote. You or your readers can then tweet these specific statements.

#2 Content Reuse: Story in Pictures

No content is complete without images anymore. Blog posts with attractive imagery and an infographic often attract more views that those without any images. Why should the image you created with so much effort be limited to your blog? Share these images on Instagram and Pinterest to attract readers to your blog. Twitter too allows you to embed images with tweets.

Pinterest Pin It Button For Images WordPress plugin makes it easy to share images for your readers.

# 3 Content Repurpose: Podcasts

When 24 hours are too less, multitasking is the only solution to stretch the time we have. People often listen to music and other shows on walks, during a commute, and though not advisable, during driving. Read your posts aloud and publish them as podcasts on iTunes.

# 4 Content Repurpose: The age of Video

Popularity of Gangnam Style video on YouTube (1,233,227,947 views) is an indication of this medium’s popularity as well as the potential. Moreover, most of the smartphones now come with the YouTube application installed. You can use the content of your blog post and convert it into a screencast available through Youtube.

# 5 Content Recycle: The Afterlife

Blogs are the most important part of your content strategy. But content strategy involves activities and media beyond the online realm. You will surely have people making presentations to clients, or attending conferences and events. A series of blogs posts that you produced so painstakingly can be converted into a conference presentation.

Do you agree that the effort required to reuse and repurpose the content is much less than reinventing the wheel every time?

We would like to know if you have used these techniques before and if they were planned.

But with no historical data on follower behavior in this channel, we have all become natural guinea pigs. Social media mishaps by celebrities and the likes have burnt their fingers many times – only by doing something stupid and new every time. So what can we learn from these mishaps?

Image By: Greg Westfall

Don’t be Insensitive

The Tweet from the official account of Kitchen Aid about President Obama’s grandmother’s death or this unpleasant tweet by a Patriots fan about the death of the brother of a Ravens player invoked an angry response from thousands.

It is easy to submit to the urge of tweeting or posting something on Facebook when you have a mobile device at hand and are a power user. It is equally easy to hurt people’s sentiments. Your affiliation for a political party or passion for the game can often make you blind to other people’s sensitivities.

Don’t Demean or Talk Down

Talking down to your prospective customers or their influencers is not the best strategy to win hearts. Unless you are a competitor’s spy and want to sabotage the brand.

Volkswagen India’s official account recently tweeted something like ‘women don’t really understand driving experience’ – a completely politically incorrect remark that is sure to ruffle a whole demographic.

Avoid Association with Negative Events

Yes, social media is the medium of choice and Yes, you need to be current all the time. But that doesn’t mean you need to exploit all events for commercial gain or earn a celebrity status. All the social media tools that help you put generic messages in a queue can backfire in the event if the ‘Breaking News’ is not in favor of your industry.

The National Rifle Association learned this the hard way when their Twitter account posted ‘Good Morning Shooters. Happy Friday! Weekend plans?’ early morning after the terrible shooting event at the Colorado theater.

Avoid Personal Attacks

Well, you may be very angry at someone or about something. But making personal remarks are definitely a sign of weakness. And if that does not appeal to you, this may well: New York Times writer, Andrew Goldman was recently suspended for making a personal attack against Tippi Hedren on Twitter.

Don’t Lie!

This one is a no-brainer. Everything you say is public and can be verified. You don’t need me to remind you of the hoopla caused by Manti Te’o confession about an imaginary girlfriend.

Don’t RT Information From an Unconfirmed Source

It’s all right to RT someone’s article or a quote. But something else if you RT specific and critical information like a flash flood or some similar event without verifying the truth.

Spike Lee, I am sure, unintentionally, retweeted George Zimmerman’s (charged in Trayvon Martin shooting) fake address, causing much trouble for the real house owners.

Don’t Turn a Discussion into Blatant Self Promotion

Hosting a Twitter conference on a technical subject or a new policy? Don’t answer every question by adding how your business or you as a candidate can do it for the audience. You could easily anger the participants and this might even backfire on you causing damage to your business.

What is the most important social media lesson you have learned in the last year?

What this report suggests is that blind use of social media and blogging does not help anyone. But like every other technology wave, we all tend to jump into it and start running around directionless. After all, you don’t want to be that guy who couldn’t see the inevitable and jumped in too late.

My last post discussed the reason why you need a content strategy before you immerse yourself in the vast ocean of Web 2.0. A strategy helps you align your objectives with those of your readers and prepare a game plan for success.

The most important element of content strategy is the marketing objective. But that alone cannot help you prepare a strategy. A marketing objective will help you define the ‘call to action’. However, you need to be discovered and engage the readers before you can direct them to wherever you want them to be.

One of the primary aims of any strategy is to offer the consumers value. You buy a product of a certain brand over the competitor’s because you believe the brand offers more value.

So how do you offer value to the consumer through your content?

Rule #1 Offer Unique Information

Image By: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seier/698675849/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Information is valuable to your readers only if they want it. But at a time when there are thousands of content creators writing about the same topic, it is difficult to find content that is not discussed at all. The differentiator, then, is your opinion and perspective on the specific subject.

Easier said than done, I hear you. But it can be done. Say your business is to sell custom shoes. One of the topics you will write to market your product is ‘shoe design’. A Google search for ‘shoe design’ yields 44,100,000 results and you are competing with the likes of Nike, Adidas, and Reebok.

In this case, you can offer value to your readers by giving them information other than just the features of specific shoes. For example, talking about shoes in context of different body types. Perhaps get a medical opinion to back what you are claiming. This is the information that readers would find valuable as it helps them make the buying decision.

Rule #2 Write for a Specific Audience

What is valuable to me is not necessarily valuable to you. Your blog offers value to your readers only if you know who they are and what they want. For example, as a custom shoe manufacturer, your audience for the blog and other media channels is mainly the consumer.

The consumer, in this case would want to know about the features and benefits of the particular type of shoe and not the technology or machines you have used or how efficient your manufacturing processes are. These other topics would be more suitable for the B2B audience.

Rule #3 Current and Relevant

Almost everyone knows what happened a month ago. People come to blogs and hog social media networks to stay on top of what’s happening now.

Write about topics that are important at that time.

Image By: http://www.flickr.com/photos/captsolo/3794856563/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Writing an entire post on some political upheaval somewhere, though current, may not be relevant to your readers. Your readers, people looking for shoes, would be more interested in a medical discovery related to the effects of shoe design on posture or a new training regime for runners.

Rule #4 Easy to Find and Access

The value of anything is always relative. Relative to the cost and difficulty of acquiring it. For example, I may agree to buy from a pricey restaurant near my house compared to a cheaper takeout place slightly away from the house in bad weather. Similarly, if cost is the barrier, I might compromise on a couple of features and choose a cheaper product.

You might generate great content, but it needs to be found easily. Even when you do generate traffic and get regular visitors, the organization and design of your website should be intuitive enough for the reader to find the content they want (ease of accessing the information).

And third, the content must be easy to understand.

The more time I spend on each of these tasks ( because I can’t find the content or the writing style is difficult to understand), the higher the cost of information and lower the value. If I can find and consume the same information on some other web site more easily, I won’t be back.

Rule #5 Easy to Read and Understand

You must have heard this many times before, write for humans first and then machines. Ranking can get you first hits. But you should aim to get loyal readers – and that can happen only if your writing style is entertaining and easy to read.

Take additional care that you do not make grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Short and simple sentences are easier to read and keep the ‘story’ moving. Errors interrupt the flow of the reader as they automatically tend to fix the word or the sentence structure. Frequent errors in your writing not only discourage the reader, but you lose credibility too.

Rule #6 Don’t be a Rock Star

Exactly! You are not the center of attention here. Aspire to make your readers a celebrity in their friend circle and social network. In this era of tweets and fast mobile devices everyone wants to have an answer for everything.

People read blogs to get information, make them the influencers. As Alex Weinstein says, this influencer will then spread your word to many more, on and off the Internet.

Rule #7 Give Specific Advice

I can’t stress this enough. People read for information. Most of the time they are looking for answers. Personal blogs can afford to ramble on about one thing or another. But if you are writing a business blog and want to offer something of value to your readers, don’t forget to make specific statements. Your post must answer “So What?” at the end.

Looks like I am going to end this at number seven again. These were just some important and, if you look around, the most followed rules to add value to your content on websites and other social media messages.

We would like to hear how you determine what’s valuable to your audience and how you ensure that your content offers value to the readers. Please leave a comment to take the discussion forward.

In our information economy, information is generated, sold, and consumed by thousands – if not millions. Optimizing the way information is generated and used can help businesses maximize returns on their investment. However, information creation is not limited to text anymore. With myriad devices and high-speed connectivity at your fingertips, people access information in multiple media and across multiple channels.

Creating content for each channel from scratch is like writing one story for a book, another for a movie or a video clip, and a third for marketing collateral.

This fragmentation of information not only shows a disconnect between the various channels, but also increases the cost of production. A well-defined content strategy can help you create a consistent image and also reduce the cost of creating and managing that content. Small businesses, because of their limited resources, must formulate a content strategy that gets them maximum returns with minimum investment. We present seven basic reasons why you should sit down and define a content strategy before churning out your posts and social media messages.

1.) Offer Unique Value

The main objective of defining a strategy, a marketing or business strategy, is to differentiate your product or service from your competitors. So if you are going to plunge into the content marketing ocean, it is vital that you differentiate your content from the rest. Defining a content strategy can help you create a unique space for yourself and offer value to your readers.

2.) Engage your target audience

Who is your audience? Do you create content only for the internal audience. Or do you have a blog and a social media department that creates content for the external audience – your customers, sales partners, franchises, and so on. Defining your audience contributes to your content strategy and helps you define your content scope and style.

3.) Present a unified front

Nobody likes to engage an organization where the arm doesn’t know what the leg’s up to. You don’t want different people from your organization talking different things across various channels. Imagine your bloggers making a statement in their blogs and the social media executive or whatever you call them say something else in a tweet or on a Facebook post!

A well defined content strategy will ensure integration across multiple channels. More importantly, it will present everything in the same voice – the brand message you want to convey.

4.) Maximize Reuse, Minimize Costs

Re-purpose – Recycle – Reuse! These are the 3 Rs of this century!

In a world where everyone has something to say and can provide a unique angle to look at things, you can generate a staggering amount of information from within the organization and from outside sources. But asking multiple contributors to create content in a vacuum can multiply the input costs. Collaborative content creation and content reuse ensures that you use the content from a central repository and re-purpose that for different channels and media.

5.) Achieve specific objectives

Content is used in different channels for different audiences and the objective of each channel or campaign will differ. Clearly defining your objectives can help you create specific guidelines for your content. What type of information do you want to distribute? What type of information is accessed in which channel? For example, nearly 70% Facebook users have said that they mostly follow businesses on Facebook because they expect to get good deals and discounts.

A well laid out content strategy will leverage the strengths of each medium, also providing the customers what they expect from a certain channel. Brevity and time sensitive updates on Twitter, an educational or informative blog, a visual representation on Pinterest are just some examples.

6.) Nurture Leads

A well defined content strategy engages potential leads in all channels. Once you have your content tailored for a specific audience and designed to achieve specific objectives, the content strategy should define how you intend to engage your audience across various channels. An important part of this engagement plan is to connect with a lead across different channels after they initiate the first contact.

7.) Be Everywhere At Once

Multitasking is the new normal and you will often find users engaging in different channels at the same time. A most common example of capturing the user’s attention or keeping the user focused on your brand is to be present on all available channels and keep the user engaged as they move from one channel to another. For example, twitter hash tags for TV shows encourage the users to discuss the story and air opinions in real time.

Formulating a content strategy is all the more important for small businesses. Although you may not have the problem of plenty – multiple departments creating different content – resources are definitely scarce. Having a content strategy will give you a clear plan and help you or your employees save time by molding your content for different channels and audiences.

Have you already defined a content strategy and do you intend to immerse in the content marketing phenomenon in 2013? We want to know. So feel free to drop a line and chat with us any time.

Hiring someone to help you get set up on the networks and get started can save you a lot of time. You can then choose to continue using the consultant or get your full-time staff trained – they can also learn by simply observing what is being done. But as a very thoughtful reader observed in a comment to my earlier post, offloading social media activity to an outsider is a bit difficult as the conversation with followers, connections, friends etc. must be formal and personal at the same time. Can the social media consultant capture the essence and philosophy of your business? Neal Schaffer provides some excellent questions that can help you hire a social media consultant.

So Let us say you have found a great consultant who can help you achieve your goals through social media. But this is definitely not the end of the road. This is your entry into the exciting world of micro tweets, entertaining posts, and valuable comments. Now is when you have to put on your captain’s hat and sail the boat.

There is a crucial handshake that needs to happen between you, the business owner and the expert you hired. Unless you’re clear about what your philosophy is and share important historical stats and data, you might be throwing money down the drain.

We bring you six ways to make the most of the social media consultant you hired.

1. Discuss and Define the Objectives

Various organizations have jumped on the social media bandwagon for many different reasons. Some with hopes to generate leads, others to engage existing customers, while some to recruit people.

Whatever your reason, you need to discuss this with your consultant so that she can come up with a strategy and plan the road map.

The discussion will also help you quantify the results that you expect to see out of this investment.

2. Outline the Level of Service

What will you do and what will the consultant do? Social media management is a complex job. Depending on your objectives, the exact mix of tasks will change. For example, if your objective is customer support, an external social media consultant will have fewer tasks and your product support person – need not be a dedicated resource – will need to invest more time.

It is also desirable to have some control over the content that will be posted online.

Would you want to manage each comment and post, or does your consultant have the skills to make those decisions? You can keep the help you get restricted to just posting content, or go all the way and hire someone to manage the entire thing top-down to achieve your business objectives.

3. Assign a Point of Contact

It could be you or the sales and marketing guy – the key here is assigning the person whose abilities you trust. Even when you have a skilled consultant, you need to be in the loop. The dynamism of social media requires that you respond fast, and even if your consultant is skilled, she might need some critical business information to respond to a specific comment.

Assigning someone as a point of contact frees you from the task and keeps information accessible to the consultant.

4. Create a Buffer

No. I am not talking about the application. Give some time to review the material planned for the week. All publication houses follow a calendar; there is no reason to not have a plan for the week or more. Accidents Happen.

Just as you take some additional time into account while estimating a project, it is helpful to have posts for 2-3 weeks reviewed in advance.

5. Discuss and create a Guideline

This is the most important thing. There are numerous examples of people shooting off their mouths online on micro blogging platforms. You want to avoid this at all costs.

Define what you want the consultant to reply to.

For example, keep specific questions related to business philosophy and future plans for yourself and let the consultant respond to routine Thank Yous and His.

Do you want them to respond to any accusations or complaints? Maybe not. Specify who will address such questions. This could be the assigned point of contact or you.

6. Meet/talk once a week

Talk about what’s happening in the office. Talk about interesting things you thought about your products and other related subjects. This will help the consultant look at the company from the inside.

Social media engagement is a process.

It is not something like an advertisement in a Newspaper that you get designed and published. The better the person gets to understand your business and views, the lower you will need to assign resources to the consultant.

Have you been through this already? Tell us about your experiences. What was the best and the worst of hiring an external consultant to manage your social media activities?

User friendly interface

Making changes to a website and then shuttling between the two windows to see the changes was really annoying, but seemed necessary. Now WordPress 3.5 has found an answer to that problem. The new 2-column layout, which shows preview in the same window, works really great and most of the changes are dynamic – you don’t need to update anything. Just make the changes in the left column and you can see the result in the preview.

As you can see in the left column, WordPress 3.5 has also bunched together all appearance related features in this column, which are otherwise distributed across different menus. The number of options, however, change from theme to theme.

Common Tasks and Actions

Another interesting addition to the Welcome screen or the Dashboard section is one-click menu for most common tasks that users will want to do, such as adding an About page or writing your first blog post.

It also brings out the most frequently discussed option that was buried under Discussion Settings – Turn Comments on or off – to the Dashboard.

Better Media Management

Now this is one area that has a lot of changes. One question that always bugged me in the early days was how to create an image gallery. But WordPress 3.5 now makes it really easy to find and create different image galleries so that you can bundle images in one gallery and use that for a slideshow.

This new window opens when you are inserting an image in a post. You have all the image options now available from this one window.

Image Editing

Another change related to images is the Image Editing interface. The Edit Media page has a more cleaner look. You can see a bigger image size than in the earlier versions of WordPress. The new interface shows a post-type of layout with the Title option at the top, and the Permalink replaces the File URL field.

The Description box gets a facelift in WordPress 3.5. I am not an SEO Ninja or Expert, but I think the ability to make your text bold or italic and also add a hyperlink can help in your page discovery.

Plugin Management

If you have a WordPress account and prefer to browse for plugins on the WordPress.org website, you don’t need to make a separate list of plugins you like while browsing the wordpress.org website anymore. You can now favorite the plugins you like on the WordPress website and see the list on your Install Plugins screen under Favorites.

Once you have marked the plugins you like on the WordPress website, you can then see the list on your Install Plugins page after you enter your WordPress username.

What changes and new features do you like most in WordPress 3.5 ? Have you updated your WordPress installation or are you still waiting for others to try and upgrade a little later. We would like to hear about your concerns and things you hope to see in future WordPress releases. Join our LinkedIn group to discuss this and other blogging related subjects.

Social media networks have been pulled in all directions by every business function since its widespread use by consumers and other businesses alike. The marketing guys use it as a channel to push product information and advertise new offers. The design department looks at it as a tool for innovation and an opportunity to capture the knowledge of the masses so that they can design products based on the actual requirements. The recruiters see it as an excellent channel to attract and find new talent for the organization. So we all have our fingers in the social media pie for one or other reason.

If we look at the way the social media networks are designed, it is nothing more than a meeting place for like-minded individuals. We have Twitter lists, LinkedIn groups, and Google Circles organized around subjects and products. These networks, then, are ideal for customer engagement above everything else. I say so because our goal in customer engagement is to facilitate connections among customers themselves and between customers and the organization to build loyalty and spread the good word.

There is no doubt that the rules of engagement are changing as we move from the traditional Interrupt and Repeat advertising model to online customer engagement. The early adopters who spend nearly a million dollars on social media seem to reap the results of this new medium. According to this research by Bain and Company, customers engaged over social media tend to spend 20% to 40% more with the organization they are engaging with.

Small businesses have much tighter budgets and restricted access to resources compared to large organizations. However, as you move from traditional methods of customer engagement to engagement over social web, it is important to avoid these common mistakes.

Engagement Mistake #1: Don’t have enough time to respond

We are all strapped for time, but if you decide to leverage social media for customer engagement, this is one mistake that you should avoid at all costs. Research by International Data Group shows that 53% of online tech buyers want the product organization to respond to their questions and comments.

An efficient social media strategy will factor in this time in your schedule. Answering customers’ questions should have higher priority than posting new content.

Consider that any one taking the trouble to post a question is a lead, and is already part of your sales funnel. So treat any query online with the same urgency as you would treat them in traditional channels.

Engagement Mistake #2: Don’t think it is necessary to respond

As the above research shows, more than half the consumers want you to respond. Now that is not a small number and it will be very wrong to assume that it is not necessary. Customer engagement means engaging your customers in a dialogue. To create a community where they can come up with suggestions and voice good and bad opinions.

If you fail to respond to your customers’ posts and comments, they will soon lose interest in participating in any discussions.Silence is certainly not an option!

Social media is not just about pushing content all the time like an electronic ticker board.

Engagement Mistake #3: Spread the net far and wide

Build as large a following as you can – spread a wide net and someone will bite, right? Wrong! Customer engagement is all about relationship building. You can announce new products every now and then, but the dialogue should be about the users and their experience with the product.

Whenever possible, engage individual customers and answer their questions or help them solve a problem. This way the customers know you are there to help and you earn loyal customers and a product advocate.

But engaging customers is easier said than done. Many small businesses find it difficult to answer questions posed by their customers or are not sure how and what to reply to a comment.

What your business needs

As we saw in our earlier post about Social Media DIY myths, you are already spending a lot on your social media plan – either in terms of time or money or sweat equity – or even if you have hired a consultant. The ultimate goal of this effort is conversion. At the end of the day, you want more customers and higher revenues.

It is imperative that you have engaged and loyal customers through this effort, and not just eyeballs! This is only possible if you have a tight feedback loop and really care about what every current or potential customer thinks about your business.

Are you flummoxed with these kind of scenarios? We address these issues almost every day for our clients. Contact us to set up a free consultation and we will be happy to discuss a social media strategy for your business.

Because Fonts are the dress that you put on alphabets to add a punch to your Christmas wishes.

And while you all are dressing up yourselves and your home, why not dress-up your website a bit? Spread that holiday season spirit to your customers and web site visitors.

In my earlier article on why you should use fonts suitable for a specific communication, I talked about why using appropriate fonts is important in business communication. In this short article I will discuss a couple of websites where you can find free fonts and how to install them on Windows XP, so that they are available across all your applications.

Although there are multiple websites that allow you to download fonts, they each have their terms and conditions. Most of the fonts are free for personal use, that is if you use them for personal communication or a banner at your home, there are many that are completely free, or have a public domain license. Here are a couple of websites where you can find a great collection of fonts.

• http://www.dafont.com/
• http://www.urbanfonts.com

Let’s say you want to create a quick Christmas e-card to send out to your friends and family. You can add a family photo and use existing fonts, but wouldn’t it look better with a decorative font? Let us find one for you. I think Kingthings Christmas is just the right one. You can download it from this page.

The steps below illustrate how you can install this font on your operating system so that it is available to use in Word or Photoshop.

1. Scroll down to Kingthings Christmas, and then click Download
2. Save the file to your download location
3. Uncompress the file to extract the .ttf file
4. Copy the file, and then browse to yourdrive\WINDOWS\Fonts
5. Paste the font file

Voila! Your font is ready for use with Microsoft Word or most of other applications you have. Hope you like the font and use this or any other to spread the cheer this holiday season.

Do you plan to change the look of your website or blog this year or do you think this is not really appropriate for a business blog, or is it just too much effort? We want to know, so feel free to leave a comment or write to us.

Interruptions for giving time, though desirable, can take you away from your work. Let us look at how the Appointment Calendar plugin can help you with your busy schedule.

CP Appointment Calendar

This plugin helps you set up an appointment system for your office. If you are a consultant, a dentist, or a lawyer and want to provide your clients with an option to book an appointment online this plugin can help you do that with a few simple steps.

Plugin Details

Author: codepeople

Last updated: 8 November 2012

Dowload Link: http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/cp-appointment-calendar/

What can You do with it

With the appointment calendar plugin you can configure a calendar and insert it on your WordPress website. You also get to add your PayPal information if you wish to receive a nominal payment from the person booking the time slot. Apart from professionals, this could also be used by small business owners who offer lecture halls and meeting rooms on rent.

Options

The calendar configuration options help you define the number of days you work and the time slots for an appointment.

Using the options page, you can:

· Define the working days of the week (1).

· Exclude specific dates such as holidays from the calendar from the Restricted Dates tab (2).

· Specify the hours that you want to make available for the appointment or booking (3).

The Public calendar settings define how the calendar looks and functions. For example, today + 2 days ensures that there will always be a delay of 2 days from the time a customer visits your website.

The payment configuration section provides options where you can add your PayPal information and the web pages that the user is directed to after making payments or cancelling the payment process.

And finally, in the notification section you get to add email addresses you want to use to inform the user about appointment confirmations and the default message sent to the user.

This plugin is quite easy to set up and does not need any coding skills. But above all it allows you to automate the appointment system. If you are a super-busy consultant or a lawyer, charging a minimum fee up front can ensure that your time is not blocked unnecessarily.

Even if you are not busy, you still have to prepare for an appointment and adjust your schedule around the time slot.

The ability to charge for an appointment can help you introduce some seriousness in the whole process – you can always refund the money if it is for a free consultation.

Do you currently have an appointment calendar online or wish to have one just like this? Or have you come across any other plugin that is working well for you? Please leave a comment and let us know. This will also help others in the community who may be looking for such functionality.

Small businesses were comparatively late entrants to this online party. This could be partly because of lack of resources – the owners had to not only invest time to understand and learn this new animal, but also devise a strategy to tame the social media beast.

DIY is the way to go for most small businesses. But it is not always the answer!

Juggling a shortage of resources and manpower, the typical small business owner is trying to do everything himself.

After all, anyone can use Facebook or Twitter. And they are free! This is perhaps the worst misconception out there. Building a brand or a business is hard work. And it takes time, money, sweat and grime.

We take a look at some of the most common myths associated with using social media networks for business.

Myth 1: It’s Inexpensive

Any successful businessman will tell you ‘Time is Money’. First, Creating accounts on different networks and populating your profile may be free, but you still need to put in time to do that. Second, social media is not static. It is not like creating a website for your business and going back to it only when there is something important that you need to change – like product information or contact numbers.

Social media is like a flowing river, and your customers see everything only when they are sitting on the river shores. To ensure that your customers see your message in networks like Twitter you need to invest in automated tools or visit every hour at the least. So, no, it is not inexpensive. These are some of the costs involved -

• Cost of your time
• Cost of Tools
• Cost of missing out on professional advice
• Cost of time spent doing something more productive (opportunity cost)

It can be inexpensive if you get your existing staff to work with social media accounts, or hire a consultant who can design a solution specific to your needs.

Myth 2: It’s easy to use

Posting a comment or a wall post may be easy, but if you want to exploit the social media networks to make new connections and generate leads, you need to be aware and learn advanced tools. But the problem is, this is not a one time job. The social media networks are constantly evolving. For example, Facebook has changed its Reach and EdgeRank algorithm many a time in the past few months. And these are just the features you need to use social media channels for your business.
Well, there is nothing that you can’t learn if you give it time, but do you have that much time? Ties in with my first point that it is not inexpensive. But you can have a dedicated resource whose job is to know what’s happening in the social media world and keep learning new things.

Myth 3: It doesn’t take a lot of time

Really! I don’t think so. To begin with you have to invest a lot of time in initial analysis to choose the right networks for your business and products. It also takes considerable time to create profiles that can engage new customers. These are the one-time activities. The recurring tasks, the true time gobbler, is the constant analysis of what you’re gaining, re-evaluating your strategy, and maintaining your accounts. Let’s say you have accounts on at least the three major networks – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – then, depending on your engagement rate (followers and conversation, new posts) you may need to spend around 10 hrs a week on these. That is roughly 25% on your work-week! No less.

We understand that hiring someone full-time to get only 25% of the effort, or 50% at the most, is a great burden for a small business. Getting a consultant to do this job can get you 100% of your money in terms of the effort the resource puts in, and you also get a premium service from people who know what they are doing and are always on top of things.

What is the Solution?

It is easy to post photos on Facebook, or just write on your friends’ wall. Or tweet about where you had dinner. When generating business and building a brand is your objective, you add a whole new dimension to the process.

Creating a social media presence for your business is a specialized skill. It needs careful analysis, strategy and execution. Delegation can be the answer in this case. You can either hire a social media strategist or engage a consultant. Social Media consultants generally offer various levels of service. Most are ready to create a custom package for your needs. Getting a quote from someone should be easy enough!

Have you tried to build your business via social media yourself? How did it work out for you. Did you spend a lot of time. Did you enjoy learning the nitty gritties of all the different networks out there?

We want to know what you think. Please leave a comment below and tweet or share this with your friends. You can also check out our various services for any packages that may suit you.

We have compiled a list of ten winning techniques used by experts around the world. I am sure that reading these will help you generate many ideas and topics for your business blog.

Carol Tice of Tice Writers Inc., a regular contributor to Entrepreneur, talks about how you can write about your industry and your experiences with your customers.

1. Customer Success Story: Did you solve a customer problem recently? Perhaps you got an encouraging testimonial from one of your customers. Ask your customer for permission to weave this testimonial into a blog post. Case studies take a long time to write, but you can create a small post that talks about how you solved a specific problem for the customer and the gains your customers made out of it.

2. Industry Trends: In our dynamic world, changes are a permanent feature. Changes in political and economic situations affect industry related policies and the way they do business. Technological changes often impact how customers interact with you and how they use your products. Talk about these trends and write about what you think of these changes. How will these changes impact your customers and your products?

You could be serving other business or individual customers. No matter who your audience is, people have questions. Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends suggests that you could turn out posts from these questions.

3. Answer Industry related Questions: Industry specific Forums and Groups are often a fertile ground for questions from your consumers or other business stakeholders. New business owners also have a lot of questions about how to go about different things while setting up their business. Write a post about what problems you faced. You could also pick frequently asked questions and write a post on that.

4. How you do things: If you work in a B2B model, your customers will want to know about your processes and team members. Write posts that detail your office infrastructure and how work gets done at your office. Who does what?

However, not every post you write must pitch something or be about convincing your customers. You can give your blog a personal touch and open up to your reader. Miranda Miller suggests these two great ideas for blog posts.

5. Inspiration: We are all inspired by someone at some time in our life. Talk about who you look up to. Past and present industry leaders you like and the business philosophy you believe in. You cannot meet each of your customers or business associates; talking about what you like and believe in can project a positive image to the people who read your blog.

6. Simplify: Is writer’s block real? Well . . . I don’t know. But you can counter that. Help your blog readers understand complicated subjects. Some blog posts, although information rich, are complicated or addressed to peer-level readers. Pick some technical posts and simplify the subject for your readers. Your readers might not be interested in technical reports, but they will surely like a simple summary of these reports.

Ken Mueller makes an excellent point in his list of post ideas.

7. It’s not all about you: Social responsibility need not be fulfilled only by giant corporations. You can contribute in a small way through your blog too. Take-up a local cause you believe in. It could be as simple as building a consensus for funding the local library or new land for a park. Tell people you care about the place where you live.

8. Tips and Tricks: This is never out of vogue. If you sell software or any other product, write posts about how to use them best. What are the things your users can do with them. How can they use them in combination with other products?

These were some excellent ideas from expert bloggers. Reading about so many ideas helped us come up with a couple of our own.

9. Shadow the networks: All leading news networks and magazine blogs provide great content. Look at these networks and see what their experts are discussing. Look at the comments readers post at the end of the post. Do they all agree? What is it that they do not agree about? You can then write your own post on the post and what different opinions people have.

10. Talk about your company: How old is your company? If you have been in the business for long, you surely have a lot to talk about. Even if you are new, you can write about how you got into what you are doing now. What problems you faced and what worked.

These are not the only ideas that can help generate blog posts. But these are some of the most valuable approaches to generate blog post ideas for a business blog. What do you generally blog about on your business blog?

Different organizations have adopted different models and management styles to organize their blogs. Some use them for product promotion, while others use them to provide their employees an avenue to express themselves and go beyond their “roles and responsibilities”. Some of these blogs are private – locked for internal viewers, while others are public, and any employee can post without any editorial (and I don’t mean proofreading) oversight. Of course, there are strict guidelines for what these employees can publish . . . or not.

But that is not the only reason you should ask your employees to blog.

Let us now look at some of the reasons you should encourage your experienced employees to be active bloggers and how their participation can help customers, other employees, and themselves.

Employee Motivation

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lorenjavier/5998848572/

If there is any one thing that connects everyone using social media today, it is the desire for public recognition. Leaders want it, actors need it, sportspersons love it – why should your star performers be any different?

Compensation, benefits, and the core job duties are still the most important factors that can help you retain talent. But not all your employees fall in this category. Maslow taught us that people usually move from basic needs to a higher plane as they age and gain experience. However, the hierarchy of needs did not talk about the time it takes people to move from one need to the next. Organizations need to recognize and place each employee in the right category to motivate and retain talent. This survey from Deloitte claims that employees rate intangible elements such as candid communication (50%), employee recognition (49%), and access to management and leadership (47%) as more important.

Encouraging your experts to interact with your customers and within the organization shows that you genuinely recognize the efforts of the employee and have no hesitation in certifying them as a valuable resource.

Knowledge Management

Capturing tacit knowledge of employees is a long-standing challenge for any organization. The short transition time between the old and new employee is not always enough to get the new employee up-to-speed. Other than the one-to-one handover, it is always desirable to have a workforce that is agile and can take on different responsibilities at a short notice. Breanna Banford, at Xerox Corporation discusses how internal blogs at Xerox help increase collaboration and discuss innovative ideas.

Gary Klein in his keynote address highlighted the importance and the challenge of capturing experts’ tacit knowledge. According to him, storytelling is one of the most effective strategies organizations can adopt to capture this information. Although, employee skills can be maintained through periodic training, each expert blogger brings a different perspective to every situation. The conversational tone of blogs and the freedom to write long posts can help experts talk at length, which is difficult to capture in presentations.

Influence other employees

In our dynamic habitat where multiple forces act and prod us, everyone gets influenced and at time influences others. Every mother instructs her child to avoid ‘bad company’ and stay on the right path. Most of us are influenced by movies and television stars – and I increasingly see people buying stuff because their favorite actors uses it or endorses it.

My point – it is important that new additions to your organization are influenced by the experts. The more they come in contact with a happy, motivated employee, the more likely they are to stay and be motivated. A senior employee openly sharing knowledge also indicates a healthy work environment and encourages new employees to do the same. Judy Gombita outlines similar core benefits encouraging experts and seasoned employees – she calls them opinion leaders – can bring to the organization.

Internal blogging, Insourcing, Internal Crowd Sourcing – call it what you want, the benefits the company can accrue by encouraging its employees to blog are manifold. How do you leverage this new tool to help your employees help you?

We would love to discuss your specific needs and provide solutions to harness the power of blogging for your business.