Social Media « Shoestring Branding

Social Media

Book Recommendation: How to Make Money with Social Media

In a discipline as hyped as social media marketing, it could be all too tempting to dismiss a book that promises to teach you how to make money off it. How to Make Money with Social Media by Jamie Turner and Reshma Shah, however, is the real deal, and will help you do just that.

The book is a thorough guide on how to use new and emerging media to grow your business, and runs the gamut from clearly explaining what social media marketing is, to describing specific ways that you can integrate it into the fabric of your business and brand strategies.

The book briefly covers all the important social media platforms (Linked In, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) and for the sake of clarity divides them in three groups, depending on what their main purpose is: networking, promoting or sharing. It then teaches you how to use them all in conjunction, to generate what the authors call “circular momentum”, a state of flow that when achieved will maximize the effectiveness of your social media strategy.

I particularly like the parallels the authors draw between social media platforms and places or situations in the bricks and mortar world (i.e.: Facebook is like a pub, LinkedIn is like a trade show and Twitter like a cocktail party). Another handy feature of the book is the lists of takeaways at the end of each chapter, which summarize the most important points and suggest action steps to put them into practice.

The authors’ style is casual and humorous, and will put even the most novice or skeptical reader at ease and in the best frame of mind to learn.

I find this book relevant to both beginners and more advanced users, and applicable equally to the small business arena or the corporate world. Beginners will find it very clear and easy to follow, while more advanced users will want to keep it handy as a reference guide to help them refresh social media marketing’s most important concepts.

Posted via email from Mario Sanchez Carrion | Posterous

Marketing / Social Media — 16 Comments
26
Nov 09

Social Media Marketing: A Three-Legged Stool

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc0047/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

With social media consultants popping up faster than Realtors in 2006, we need to set the record straight: knowing how to use the tools doesn’t make you a social media expert. Like the proverbial three-legged stool, using social media effectively means paying attention to three basic elements:

Strategy
Tools
People

Strategy:

Before you set up profiles in every social network, think about your customers: who are they, what problems do they face, where do they hang out: are they on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace? If your customers are there, you need to be there. Before putting out content, though, think about what you want to communicate, and how you want to communicate. Your message and style must be consistent with your brand, and with the way you communicate offline.

Tools:

Learn the nuances, idiosyncrasies and etiquette of each social media platform. Social networks are not sales tools as much as they are relationship building tools. Using social media to aggressively sell products is not effective. Instead, focus on building your brand, being helpful and showing that you know your stuff .

Also, you don’t need to jump into every new social media platform. There are only so many hours in a day, and it is better to be an active participant in one or two networks than to just dabble in five or six. As Laura Roeder says, social media is not an area where you necessarily want to be cutting edge: sometimes the tried and true, older social networks are better because they gather a larger audience and more of your potential customers.

People:

The real experts never lose sight of the big picture: social media are just a means to a bigger end. It is not a coincidence that Chris Brogan, one of the top names in the field, has chosen these words for the title of his homepage: Beyond Social Media: Learn How Human Business Works.

The end goal should be to help people and build community (which is also a great way to build a business). Focusing on people and solving their problems is a more sustainable business strategy than just showing them the mechanical aspects of how to use the tools.

As Adam Singer explains in his popular blog The Future Buzz, social media is not new. Just as it would be ridiculous to build a business around showing people how to dial a phone, social media is soon going to become second nature (it already is for Millenials). The challenge we face now is not how to set up a Twitter or Facebook profile, but how do we use the leverage that social media gives us to build value and help people.

Branding / Social Media — 10 Comments
23
Aug 09

Social media, branding and control

Photo Credits: Damien Basile

Simple enough: social media is all about giving up control and letting users be creative. But how much control should social media brands give up to their own users? This interesting question ignited a lively debate in Tom Anderson’s blog. Tom had uploaded a caricature of himself on his LinkedIn profile, after which LinkedIn contacted him and asked him to replace it with a real picture (caricatures, logos, and group pictures, among other things, are against LinkedIn’s user guidelines).

Needless to say, Tom wasn’t happy and asked his readers for their opinion: was LinkedIn justified in making this request? Should social media brands impose restrictions and constraints that limit their users’ creative expression?

Here is my take: absolutely, yes. Social networks are brands too, after all. Good brands must create the conditions for a powerful, relevant and consistent user experience.

Allowing the use of caricatures instead of actual pictures would erode the brand experience LinkedIn is trying to create. Most people view LinkedIn as THE professional social network, and there is no doubt that its strict user guidelines have played an important role in strengthening that brand position (the fact that LinkedIn is the only major social network that makes money seems to validate this even further).

The same reasoning applies to other social networks:

For example, is Twitter justified in limiting our creative expression to 140 characters? Absolutely, yes. The 140-character limit is pivotal to Twitter’s brand experience. Take that limit away and Twitter would become just another blog platform, and it would not be the strong brand it is today. We could also make the point that constraints actually increase creativity: by imposing the 140 character limit, Twitter is in fact forcing us to get more creative, by finding ways to be more clear and concise.

Similarly, is Facebook justified in deciding that only official representatives of a brand should be allowed to create a fan page, and not extend the same privilege to brand enthusiasts? Absolutely, yes. By enforcing that rule Facebook keeps spammers at bay and reduces the possibility of getting hit with copyright infringement lawsuits, while at the same time enhancing the user experience and increasing the value of the Facebook community.

Social media are revolutionizing marketing, and the fact that customers are more empowered by them every day should be celebrated and encouraged. But first and foremost, social media properties are brands too, and as such, the universal rules of branding apply to them as well. As brands, they must design a user experience that best serves its most valuable customers.

Social Media — 14 Comments
13
Apr 09

Create a Mobile-Friendly Version of your Blog

Mobile phone use is growing by leaps and bounds around the world, and every day more people access the web from their phones. I recently spent about an hour to create a mobile-friendly version of my blog. I am going to show you how I did it in the next few paragraphs.

What users want and don’t want in a mobile site

When accessing the web from their phone, users want easy navigation with only a few options, pages that render fast, and quick access to the content. They usually don’t want sidebars, menus with a hundred different options, icons and banners, and excessive formatting.

Where to start

I used a service called Mofuse, which makes creating a mobile site a snap. Go to mofuse.com and sign up for an account. You will be prompted to choose a sub-domain. You can choose yoursite to get a URL such as yoursite.mofuse.mobi

Next, you’ll be prompted to add your RSS feed. Mofuse will take your feed and make it the default home page of your new mobile site; it will show as a collection of links, starting with your most recent post, more or less like this:

Customizing your mobile site

I didn’t want my mobile site to default to my RSS feed. Instead, I decided to create a menu with three different options: Blog, About and Contact.

To do this, take a look at the Your Mobile Content section of your control panel’s right sidebar, click on the link to your RSS feed, and change the title to “Blog”.

Next, go to the Add Content section in the sidebar and click on the Add a New Page link to create your About page (you can put a picture of yourself with a brief paragraph about you or your elevator pitch). Do the same to create your Contact page.

After you do this, Mofuse will automatically create the menu and it will show in your mobile site’s homepage.

Finally, go back to the Your Mobile Content section and organize the three links in the order you want. This is how they look on my mobile blog:

Adding a logo

Go to the Make It Unique section of the sidebar, click on Your Logo, and upload it. If you want a tagline to go with it, go the the Add Content section and click on the Edit Homepage link. Then, just type your tagline. This is how it looks on my mobile site:

Using your own domain

Mofuse gives you the option of using your own domain or sub-domain. The universally accepted convention is to create a subdomain of your main site using just the letter “m”. For me, it is: m.shoestringbranding.com. To create it:

Go to your domain registrar or hosting account control panel and edit the DNS records to create an alias called m.yoursite.com and point it to yoursite.mofuse.mobi. (if this sounds too technical to do by yourself, email tech support with your request).
Go back to the Make It Unique section on your Mofuse control panel and click on the Custom Domain link, to set it up as m.yoursite.com.

Remove advertising

By default, Mofuse will show small Google Adsense ads at the top and/or bottom of your mobile pages. You can remove them by clicking on the Monetize link in the Other section of the sidebar and unchecking the box next to “Yes, I want to make money with my mobile site”.

You also have the option to remove the “Powered by Mofuse” icon from the bottom of your pages, but I decided to leave it, since I’m extremely happy with the service and wouldn’t mind more people knowing about it.

Publicizing your mobile site

Click on the Mobi Badge link in the Promote/Integrate section of your control panel’s right side bar and choose one of the “mobile-friendly” icons. Get the HTML and paste in on your blog’s sidebar, to let people know that you have a mobile friendly site.

If you want to get really technical, generate a QR code for your mobile blog and put it in your stationary or other printed material. QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that can be read by mobile phones. Go to this page and type in your mobile site URL to generate your QR code.

Mine looks like this:

To enable your mobile phone to read QR codes, you need to download a QR-Code reader. Once you do that, the reader will turn your camera phone into a scanner: just take a picture of your QR code and you will automatically be transported to your mobile site.

That’s all there is to it. I hope this brief tutorial is clear enough and that it encourages you to build your mobile-friendly blog. Let me know how it goes.

Social Media — No Comments
23
Dec 08

Custom Landing Pages for Social Network Profiles

Photo Credits: Tony George

All social networks are not created equal. While we normally use different social networks, the way we use them is different. We use Facebook mostly to connect with friends, LinkedIn for our professional networking, and Twitter… well, there are hundreds of ways to use Twitter.

This being the case, wouldn’t it make sense to create specific welcome pages on your blog, tailored to visitors from each specific social network? By linking your different social network profiles to the appropriate welcome page (instead of linking to your homepage) you have the opportunity to highlight how you can best help those visitors, and what they can expect by interacting with you.

I will soon start creating welcome pages on my blog for the four social networks I use the most: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Amazon (reviews). These are some of the things I may do with those pages:

Twitter:

Explain that I use Twitter mainly to interact with other bloggers in the marketing and branding fields, but that occasionally I also tweet about other topics, like personal finance, cars, food and travel.
Include links to posts on my blog that give tips on how to use Twitter.
Briefly explain my Twitter style and posting frequency.
Explain that I have added “Twit This” buttons to my blog posts to make them easy to share on Twitter.
Include links to useful Twitter resources on other blogs .
Link to my del.icio.us bookmarks about Twitter.

(updated 12-28-08: I’ve already created my Twitter landing page).

LinkedIn:

Offer a more detailed explanation of my skills, experience, interests and values than what can be found in LinkedIn.
Include a link to my résumé on PDF.
Include a specific paragraph for head hunters asking them to feel free to contact me if they are looking for someone in my field (even if I am not interested I may know somebody who is, and that way I can help both the head hunter and my friends).
Links to my portfolio (videos, slideshare presentations, etc.).
Links to posts on my blog that give tips on how to use LinkedIn.

Facebook:

Explain that I use Facebook to interact with friends from many different places: from school, from work, from the web, etc.
Explain that I’m originally from Peru, where many of my friends are also from, so that visitors understand why they may sometimes find content written in Spanish.
Tell visitors that they can read my latest blog posts in Facebook by clicking on the “Notes” tab.
Tell visitors that they can also read my “tweets” on my wall (Facebook imports them automatically).
Indicate what topics I’m mostly interested in, so that users that have created Groups or Pages can ask me to join or become a fan.
Ask Friends if they know any common acquaintances that are also on Facebook so that I can contact them and add them to my Friends list.

Amazon (for reviews):

List the topics that interest me to do book reviews.
Contact information and address, for publishers and authors who want to send me books for review.
My reviewing style, and the fact that I can’t guarantee a positive review.
Links to the Book Reviews section of my blog, so they can read my other reviews.
Link to an article I once wrote, about How to Write a Book Review.

You may participate in other social media sites that are not listed here, however, you can use the same approach to create landing pages for them too.

(The idea for this post came from an article by David Meerman Scott where he talks about the concept of persona-focused website marketing).

Book Reviews / Social Media — 5 Comments
4
Dec 08

Book Review: Blog Blazers

Have you ever wanted to pick the brain of some of the world’s top bloggers? How about having the opportunity to talk to 40 of them and ask them questions like these:

What’s the best way to make money from your blog?
How do you market your blog?
Which five blogs do you regularly read?
What would you do differently if you could start all over again?
What’s the most common mistake new bloggers make?
And many more…

Stephane Grenier has already done that for you in his new compilation: Blog Blazers – 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets. At a retail price of $16.95, it is a real bargain considering the wealth of information that these blogging pros share with you throughout the book.

The featured bloggers are experts in a wide array of fields: small business, entrepreneurship, internet marketing, technology, software development, dieting, personal finance, etc. I was especially glad to see Aaron Wall, Pamela Slim and Ramit Sethi featured in the book, three remarkable people I have followed since the beginning of their blogging journey.

No matter what your area of expertise is, there are plenty of actionable tips that you can take away from each of the 40 bloggers. Obviously, due to the topic of this blog, I paid special attention to bloggers specialized in small business, entrepreneurship and Internet marketing. I particularly liked the tips shared by Anita Campbell (www.smallbiztrends.com).

One common theme that transpires in the book is how little money bloggers spend marketing themselves. Most of them don’t spend money directly, but instead spend time networking, reaching out to other bloggers and writing really good posts.

Also, around 60% consider that they make more money indirectly, using the blog as a platform to get consulting, speaking and other related gigs, while the other 40% make more money directly, through advertising or affiliate sales.

Another valuable takeaway from the book is learning what blogs these pros regularly read. I discovered around ten great blogs that I didn’t know about, which I have now added to my feed reader.

To make the most out of the book, I recommend that you read it with a highlighter handy to mark out all the tips that resonate with you. Think about this: if you get just one good tip per blogger, you will have forty specific, actionable steps that you can follow to improve your blogging.

I would like to congratulate Steph and thank him for his dedication in putting together this useful best practices manual, and finish with one thought that circled my mind after reading the book: would it be possible to create a companion site to the book, where ordinary bloggers could answer some of the same questions, and have their answers featured in their own individual page?

I don’t know how feasible that would be, but I think it would be a particularly effective way to further promote the book, build community, and expand the best practices repository from 40 bloggers to perhaps hundreds or thousands.

Personal Branding / Social Media — No Comments
16
Nov 08

Creating and Managing Your Social Media Avatars

Some time ago I mentioned that favicons and avatars (or profile pictures) are important branding elements on the web. This time I’ll talk about how to create and manage your avatars.

As we participate in different social media sites, we notice that each one requires a different size of profile picture. This means that we must either manually crop our picture, or let the site resize it (which may result in cropping your picture in the wrong place or decreasing its quality or aspect ratio).

To create profile pictures for different media sites, I use a service called mypictr.com.

The process is simple:

Upload the picture you want to use.
Select a social media site from the drop down menu. A frame with the correct size will pop up on top of your picture.
Play with the cursor at the left hand side to reduce your picture’s size, and click and drag the frame until you’re satisfied with your picture.
Click on Pictr It button and wait a few seconds.
Once your profile picture comes up, right click on it and save it on your hard drive (you can create a folder called Profile Pictures or something like that, and name your picture using the name of the social media site somewhere in the file name).
Select a different social media site repeat the procedure.

Here are a few tips to take into account before creating your profile pictures:

If you are participating in social media as an individual, try to use a picture of yourself. If you participate as a company, you can use your company logo.
A good way to get your picture noticed is to set your face diagonally in the picture frame.
Don’t change your profile picture too often, which can be confusing to your followers.
Try to use the same picture in different social media sites. Most people frequent more than one service, and using the same picture in all of them will make it easier for your followers to spot you.

Social Media — 3 Comments
9
Nov 08

How to Make Your Blog Posts Easy to Read

Photo Credits: WalkingGeek

Blogs, wikis and social networks are being credited for a renewed interest in writing among college students. Having an audience and a medium for self expression are encouraging members of our younger generations to find their voice and share it with the world.

At the same time, the popularity of texting and micro-blogging platforms like twitter , which limit the number or characters you can use to send a message, are teaching us to be more concise and to make our point quickly.

As more people create content, our attention span keeps getting smaller. There is just too much to read, listen to or view these days, that is why when it comes to blog writing it pays to follow a few simple rules to make our content easier to read.

Here are a few of them:

Write less: Try to use 50% of the words you would normally use. Once you finish writing, go back and try to further reduce your word count. Repeat the process until your paragraphs are short and tight, and your message is clear.
Try to make your paragraphs short; three or four lines work best.
Use headlines to break the discussion into several paragraphs. Breaking the discussion into small, manageable chunks, each dealing with a sub-topic of your discussion, makes it easier for readers to scan your content.
Use other elements that facilitate scannability, like bolding key words and phrases, and using bullet points to organize your content.
Link to complementary information instead of trying to include too much information in the body of your article. Linking to sources of information is not only good ettiquete but it helps to put your writing in the right context, both for your readers and search engines.
Use an easy-to-read font size. Normally, 10pt or 12pt are good choices. Use fonts like Arial, Verdana or Georgia; they are optimized for computer screens and easy to read.
Use plenty of contrast: black text on white background works best, followed by white text on black background.
If your article is long, consider listing the three or four major takaways at the beginning (news items in cnn.com show a good example of this technique), or include a ‘Summary’ paragraph at the end.
Learn how to craft informative and/or catchy headlines. In aggregator sites like Alltop, on Twitter posts, or in search engine results pages, your headline is usually the only thing your readers will see. If your headline fails to garner attention, your article will never be read.

Social Media

Let’s Connect

Top 5 Posts

Featured In

Categories

Archives