Toolkit

You are currently browsing the archive for the Toolkit category.

5 ways to create a successful Facebook page

4 March 2010 in Case Study, Toolkit by Anya | View Comments

Anya Woods is the Director of Advancement Communications for Lesley University and has shared her thoughts on a recent Facebook page development project.

I recently collaborated with our friends at Thought Labs – fantastic Facebook gurus – on the creation of a Facebook page for Lesley University. We just launched the page this week and have already seen great results, but the success of the page comes after weeks of hard work to make sure we got it just right. I thought I’d share five things we did that were instrumental in ensuring that the Facebook project wasn’t just something we could say we tried, but instead something with enough planning and strategy that we would see real and tangible success from it.

We did our research. In approaching the Facebook project, we started with the idea that we wanted to create a space for our Lesley alumni only. But that was just the beginning… a lot of schools have alumni pages. What was going to make ours special, what was going to make it work and keep our alumni engaged and coming back? We decided we’d need a lot of different kinds of content, not just news and events. So we created a home page with many different functions. It has events, alumni highlights, access to our library resources, photos of alumni, announcements and news, video features, and ways to donate. We give people a range of content to interact with, and a lot of reasons to keep coming back.
We researched and developed a strategy around our various audiences. Lesley is unique in that thousands of its alumni graduated from remote programs called cohorts, so many alumni relate to their program, but have never been to our campus in Cambridge, MA. In equal numbers, we’ve got traditional alumni who spent fours years on campus. How do we reach both audiences? How do we give them relevant information? Many schools face similar issues when trying to tie alumni chapters from other states back to the larger university. Others are looking for ways to bridge the young and more adult alumni. In any case, alumni bases are a highly disparate groups for any university. In our case we focused on the issue of connecting locally, and addressed it by creating tabs for each of our local regions and tied all those tabs to an Alumni Chapters section of our Facebook page. By doing so, we’ve given alumni a way to communicate with each other directly and locally, while keeping that interaction within the overall alumni page. Alumni are also able to post to the main wall tab, so they can communicate locally or with the larger group depending on preference and topic.
We tapped the expertise of people on campus and beyond. To understand what our alumni are looking for, we spoke to alumni, staff who have worked with alumni for years, offsite coordinators from other states who deal with remote programs, and administrators who are looking for specific outcomes from the cultivation of relationships with alumni groups. We even changed, significantly, our original plans and designs for the site based on the advice and input of these various groups. Without their help, we wouldn’t have been able to produce a page that worked for our audience and really served their needs.
We used fresh content and update it frequently. The page is not stagnant. And I’m not just talking about the wall. We post new information to the wall, but we also have dynamic pieces in the main landing page that will be updated frequently with new content, creating new reasons for alumni to come back and interact with the site.
We promoted our page everywhere, and will continue to do so. Not just because we want people to become fans, but because we hope that the content on the page will be relevant and that by providing a place for our alumni to interact they will see value in their continuing interaction with the institution. It’s not about numbers, it’s about quality relationships. Nowhere else can our alumni message us directly and publicly and receive a candid reply from a real person quickly and openly. The value in that alone makes our Facebook page an incredibly important part of our communication with alumni. That’s why we didn’t throw up our logo on a page and start posting news items. We did our research, and created something dynamic and interesting, and devoted specifically to our alums.

In the end, we created a unique page that is tailored to the needs and wants of our alumni groups.

To check out the Facebook page, click here. If you’ve got questions about what we did, feel free to get in touch. If you love the page, contact Thought Labs to get your own!

9 Reasons Why Posterous is a Great Tool

24 February 2010 in Toolkit by Kate | View Comments

I’ve been into Posterous lately, for more reason than one.

Posterous is, in their words, the “dead simple place to post everything. just email us.”

Why do I like it? A few reasons, roughly in order of how important I view each characteristic:

It encourages a more robust content strategy: This is the main reason I like Posterous. It’s all about content, which you know we like. Here you’ve added one more outpost to the mix, and it’s primarily used to house this content, have people find it, expose people to your brand, bring them back to your brand if you want them to and so on. The focus is on your valuable material, getting it out there and providing one more place for people to discover it.
Serious SEO juice: I don’t know if you’ve noticed this lately, but I’ve been seeing posterous.com posts pop up pretty high in search rankings. The site has high authority, perhaps higher than your own website, which increases the chances that someone could find your material – and hence, your brand – while searching for something in particular.
Inbound linking opportunities: Because of the added outpost and SEO opportunities, Posterous gives you continuous strong inbound linking opportunities – more direct routes for people to get to your website. If you’re not sure of the power of inbound linking, check out the HubSpot blog.
It’s not all about your material: Posterous not only offers another outpost for your own content, but you’re able to supplement it with outside resources in a way that’s more robust than tools like Twitter or Facebook. While the brevity of Twitter can be useful, the depth of having full articles, or more deeply analyzed thoughts from outside parties also has it’s place. Remember that sharing valuable information from any source with your audience adds to your own credibility as an expert.
Easy to use: You can post from email, your browser, your phone, the Posterous website – you can really post from (physically) anywhere or from almost every device. You can have multiple pages from the same account. Etc, etc. It’s pretty fool proof.
Measurement and analytics: Yes, you can measure “stuff” on a lot of sites. But Posterous allows you to use Google Analytics and Feedburner as measurement tools, which you’re likely using on both your website and your blog. Sure, this may not be entirely unique, but it means you can draw pretty direct relationships between each web presence, and understand how each affects the other…..all in the same language. That’s important and useful, at least to me.
You don’t necessarily need engagement: Posterous isn’t necessarily about building a community that will continually engage with your brand. While those are all benefits built in to it, and of course it’s an added benefit, the focus is really on content sharing.
You can involve people in the process: Each page can have multiple contributors that only need to email content to get a post up. Enough said.
Syndication options: This should be pretty standard nowadays, but Posterous offers integration with Facebook accounts, Twitter profiles, etc.

How have you found Posterous helpful?

You can connect to Kate and to the Other Side Group on Posterous.

Why I like a good content production strategy

8 February 2010 in Explanation, Toolkit by Kate | View Comments

Can’t figure out where to start a “social media” marketing program? Why don’t you start with a content strategy. Frankly, I don’t think most social media programs should be done without a content production component, for a few reasons:

It’s your starting point. It’s pretty hard to have a social media program without having content to put out. One way to get that is by pushing out other peoples’ content. But the best way – for obvious reasons – is usually to push out your own content. See below.
It gives you credibility in your industry and backs up your product or service. By putting out your own content, people (end-users, customers, partners) see that you know what you’re talking about, and that you have internal knowledge on whatever space you’re in. This content and credibility also justifies your product/service as a solution when it comes to making a decision.
It’s your brand. By branding your content, and developing a sense of expertise in your industry, you increase your brand image and your brand awareness, and you’re ideally able to reach a lot more people if your content is valuable enough to pass along.
It’s easy. This is the part that a lot of companies don’t recognize. You already have all of this content inside your doors. If you think about it, your company exists because it’s got at least some level of knowledge that’s directly applicable to the solution you’re offering. You may have internal marketing documents, business plans, strategy meeting notes, or product write-ups that can easily be repurposed into content. Not to mention the wealth of knowledge you and your coworkers have in their heads. I’ve never actually seen a company that doesn’t have scores of content opportunities inside their walls.

It doesn’t have to be formal. Instead of dedicating the amount of time it might take to write a white paper, why not try a few blog posts, or a one-pager on the subject?

So if you’re considering getting your feet wet in social media, think seriously about how you can add your own content to that.

What success have you seen with content production in your organization? Do you have any examples of identifying creative content opportunities?

If you’re interested, you can get more information on how we can help you with your content production strategies.

5 Things to Make Your Website Links Linear and Logical

18 December 2009 in Toolkit by Kate | View Comments

I was on a website today (I won’t say which)…. but I left the website probably before I wanted or needed to. Why? I just plain got lost. And the problem was linking… way too much of it! I know, I know… it helps your SEO, but there’s a point at which you’re degrading user experience by leading them on a wild goose chase for what they want.

I’d get to one page, wanting to read about products, and I’d follow one of the page links, which had more links and soon I couldn’t remember what the heck I was looking for to start out with. I got tired of this quickly, so I just left.

So, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to offer a few ways to think about your website when you’re putting it together or planning the content.

Think linearly. When gathering information, people usually want to follow a linear and logical path to get that info. Sometimes it’s from big-picture to details. Sometimes it’s being led through the process your company takes with its customers. Sometimes it’s a look at groups of offerings. Whatever it is, think about how to lay your site out in terms of information-gathering.
Make sure the internal link makes sense. Don’t add a link for the sake of adding a link. It doesn’t do any good to be having your readers move between disjointed pieces of information, as it makes it more difficult for them to put the whole picture together. From a technical standpoint, having your readers feel disjointed will also likely increase your exit rate (in other words, the leave your site!).
Make it very easy for your readers to get back to the original page they were viewing. Much in line with #2, your readers came to a particular page to read about that facet of your company. If they came to your services page, they want to know what you have to offer. They probably want to know about everything you’ve got before moving on, and of course you want them to know that too. Make sure they can get back there to get that info.
Don’t forget your blog and/or your social media assets. Directing someone towards a blog post or two can be a great idea. Ideally (if you’re blogging right) they hang out there for a little while, engage in your contact, and get to know your company more. Without overdoing it, this can be a great way to add an internal link that follows the above guidelines, but also has the possibility to really hook your viewers and supplement your content.
Think about lead conversion while you’re at it. When you’re putting together a logical path for your readers to follow through your website, think also about how that goes into converting them to customers. Would adding a particular internal to your services page add the “right” type of info for them to get out their chequebook?

Any other tips for people to think about?

How to Find Content for Your Business Blog (buildabetterblog.com)
Tips for successful link building (va4growth.com)

SEO Strategy: Short-term feeding vs long-term foundation-building

9 December 2009 in Business to Business, Toolkit by Kate | View Comments

I’m working with a company in the B2B space that has an interesting but very common website case:

They have an old, basic and static site
It has very weak SEO
They’re paying significant amounts of money for Google Adwords each month to get them page ranked
They’re not tracking anything

Luckily, they want this to change. In conjunction with a website design overhaul, we’re going to completely up-end this model and flip it on it’s head (or side, or whatever).

One of the main topics of conversation has been the issue of Google Adwords – do we use them or not. My answer is no, not right now. A few further thoughts to that end [Disclaimer - I had a quick call with the team at HubSpot, as I would like to use their product in this process, and some of these thoughts stem from a conversation I had with Vas]:

Firstly, there is nothing in place right now to determine the effects of their Adwords: they don’t know who’s clicking, what they’re clicking on, if they’re qualified leads, etc. All they know is that they’re the first (sponsored) link that shows up on Google for one of the keywords.
There was little research done to choose those keywords, and it was based loosely on product lines. The list also hasn’t been updated in many years.
They have little to no effective SEO built into their site, which hasn’t been changed in over five years.

Essentially, they’ve put Adwords in place and let it run.

They’re simply paying the meter to reserve a parking spot, and hope they don’t have a cop come around and write them a ticket or tow the car away. Because that’s what would happen the minute they stopped paying the meter if they’d relied on their existing website. The Adwords are only giving them short-term benefits while they’re still paying.

What we’re working towards is building their own parking lot where they won’t have to worry about paying the meter: An architecturally strong website, with sophisticated SEO, continually updated content, metrics in place to determine how people are accessing and using the site, and developing more paths for people to get there.

Does that mean we nix Google Adwords? For now, yes. There doesn’t seem to be much point in using them if they don’t know what they’re bringing to the table. It’s sort of like parking in the first available spot before you know if it’s close to your lunch meeting near City Hall (”It’s around here somewhere,” he said.). There might be spots closer. Heck, City Hall could have it’s own free parking lot.

But only for now. Once we’ve gone through the process of developing a much stronger foundation – our website, and once we understand the best keywords to use (though, ideally, we’ve keyword-maximized the site so well that it can stand alone)….once we’ve really built something with a long-term future…..only then should Adwords be used to supplement these efforts. We’re building their own parking lot that they can park in on most days, and telling them where the best spot to pay for is next time they have lunch near City Hall….

Getting to Know Your Website Search Engine Competition (ronmedlin.com)
SEO Program Boosts Auto Supply Sales (prweb.com)
Denver SEO Expert Illustrates Why Websites Depend on SEO to Succeed (prweb.com)

Marketers as Content Instigators

8 October 2009 in Media Analysis, Toolkit by Anya | View Comments

Pointing_Finger We hear it all the time. From clients, from fellow marketers, from our peers: Content creation is great, and there are so many people in our organizations and institutions who have a great story to tell, and want to tell it. The challenge is getting those people to sit down and contribute content in a meaningful and timely manner.

This is understandable. A discussion sprang up this week about why we don’t see more college presidents twittering. My first reaction? They’re already insanely busy, what college president has TIME for that? The same has happened time and again… the CEO of one of our clients wants to blog, and he’d be great at it, but we can never get him to sit down and write.

As marketers, this has become an interesting new challenge. We used to play the role of content creator ourselves. But with blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube established as important communications channels, we’ve taken on a larger role of content aggregator and distributor, and even more important, content instigator.

I may be going down the road of coining yet another term for something someone has already named, but I think this is an important distinction to make. In order to get the right content in the right place with the right voice at the right time, we’ve got to have authenticity. And authenticity comes from having the actual person write, record, perform etc. Or as close to that as possible. We spend a lot of time worrying about what we’re going to create (a video, a podcast, a blog post, a newsletter article??) and where we’re going to put it (on the website, on the blog, on youtube, on twitter, on facebook, everywhere??)

But how much time do we spend chasing down the content itself? I would argue that many marketers would respond — A LOT! A major role that gets lost in the shuffle of our many varied new marketing responsibilities is that of content instigator.

Instigator might be too nice. Nag, badger, bait, heckle, hound, cajole, bribe, beg! I’m sure most marketers have been reduced to some or all of these methods when attempting to get individuals to contribute to content marketing efforts. We’re learning every day what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to trying to get the content creation process to go smoothly and work for all the different parties involved.

In a future post I’ll talk about some ways we’ve been successful in doing so, but my point here is that it’s something we don’t often talk about but that is crucial in many marketing efforts today. We hope you’ll share some of your experiences with content instigation issues, and we’ll continue to talk about it in new ways.

Organizing social connections

5 October 2009 in Networking, Toolkit by Kate | View Comments

I decided it was a good time to rein in on the many social connections I have and that we’ve set up for the Other Side Group. I started out by going through the list and drawing it out…. it’s a little messy, but it got the job done.

I wrote down every outpost (and threw in blogs there) and drew arrows to determine where the connections were. From there, I was able to get a better picture of where all the content was going and coming from.

A few things I was able to do:

Clean up (I don’t use Jaiku or Tumblr, so I deleted the accounts)
Find overlaps (For instance, I have Twitter fed into Friendfeed, but I also had Twitter fed into BrightKite, which fed into Friendfeed, so it was posting twice)
See what I use the most (I use Twitter and Facebook)
Find holes (Could we maximize our company LinkedIn page more?)
Identify hidden potential (I’m thinking Posterous might play a larger role in the future)
Ask questions (I have a lot of stuff going into FriendFeed, but don’t ever actually use it… is it doing me good? Is that best practice for social media usage?)

It was a fun exercise, and I was able to learn a lot, and get a grasp on what all of my social media tools were doing for me out there. I’d highly suggest it for all of you heavy-users!

If you want to connect to me or to Other Side Group on any of these platforms:

Other Side Group

Website
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube
BlipTV
Other Side Notes (Anya’s blog)
Anya on Twitter

Kate Brodock

Today and Tomorrow (website/blog)
Twitter
Facebook
BrightKite
Google Reader
FriendFeed
Posterous
Delicious
Disqus
Portfolio (Still needs work)

The Facebook “@” reply and what it means for business

16 September 2009 in Toolkit by Kate | View Comments

Anya and I have been excessively excited for the “small” change that Facebook made the other day that allows you to use the Twitter-esque “@” symbol to add contacts, pages, groups etc to a conversation pretty much anywhere you would normal post content on Facebook.

For example, on our Facebook page, you’ll see that once I inputted “@,” a drop-down menu pops up where you can choose from your contacts, your groups, your pages, etc. I was posting up Anya’s post on academics having open access to scholarly work and wanted to attribute it to her, and I also got to let her know that I did so. You’ll then see the prior post, citing Adam’s thoughts on social media ROI, and his name has been tagged.

Since I’m pretty interested in what this means for viral capabilities, I was playing around with the Walls today. Here’s what I’ve seen so far just using Wall postings.

Personal Profile:

You can post a status update with a contact name and/or a public profile (businesses/organizations) and your update will show up on their or its news feed. [Note: It does not seem to update on a group page]
If it’s a contact, they will be notified via email, just as they would if you had tagged them in a photo in your own album (assuming they’re set up for email notifications). [Update: if you go to our FB page now, you'll see that Adam has already commented on the link we posted. Most likely because he was notified that we posted it.]
Your tagging allows people to click on the contact/group/etc directly from your newsfeed, or their own home feed.
You can only link to contacts that you’re friends with, groups that you’re a member of or pages that you’re a fan of.

Business Public Profile/Page:

Much the same as a Personal Profile.
You can post an update or a link with the same information as above, and tag someone you’ve mentioned. Again, groups do not seem to be affected.
It it’s a contact, they will be notified that they’ve been tagged.
Other fans of the page are able to click directly through to the tagged party, whether it’s the author of a posted link or a group that was mentioned.
Any fan can post something that is tagged with a contact/page/group that they are connected to.

Implications for business:

You are in front of more people, in places more removed than your page. Being tagged allows you to reach people one layer out, by being able to be mentioned in a way that’s interactive on profiles and pages that are not your own. Because your fans also have these capabilities, anytime you’re mentioned by them, you’re exposed to all of their contacts in the same way.
It draws people back to your page more easily. If your page is tagged “somewhere else” it is much easier for new eyes to connect to your page, click, and be there. No one has to actually interact with your page directly for that to happen now. If a person is tagged on your page, they’re notified of that discussion, which isn’t directly on their profile. This will ideally bring them to your page. All-in-all, you’re drawing people back to your content from further away and in an easier manner.

Still playing around, I’ll update when/if I find new features.

Did I miss anything? Any other cool features you’ve come across that increase virality? Do I have anything wrong?

HOW TO: Use Facebook’s @Mentions Status Tagging (mashable.com)
Twitter’s Tough Week: The Social Media Recap… (Mashable … (jonggunlee.tistory.com)

Is Google really a leader in the search engine industry? Enter Bing.

12 June 2009 in Toolkit by Tyler | View Comments

: Image by Daniel F. Pigatto via Flickr

In the past ten years, Google has become our e-mail service, our newspaper, our encyclopedia, our street map, and our little black book. Google is so integrated into our lives that it is treated like a verb. There is a reason why you never hear “I’m going to Lycos that.”

Being that nearly 74% of all search engine queries were performed in Google (as of 6 June, according to Hitwise data), a valid competitor entering the market not only has to perform to a certain standard, but also must differentiate itself.

Enter Microsoft’s Bing. Launched June 3rd as a search engine competitor, StatCounter reports that Bing was the number two search engine worldwide one day later. In the US. People have been made aware of Bing, but the question is, how does Bing compare?

I spent an afternoon using Bing lined up against identical search criteria entered in Google.

Basic searches: After many random web searches, I found Google performed better in returning general search results. Not only did it prompt more terms when I began to type, but also with certain ambiguous search criteria, Google pulled what I was looking for.

For example, if “cabinet” is entered, it is not clear whether shopping and retail results or information about the US government is more relevant. At that point, the individual search engine must make an educated decision on what results to return. Based on the sheer volume of search data Google has, it knew that when I entered “cabinet,” I was looking for retail results. Google results even show local search business results for “cabinet”, based on my IP address.

If Bing increases in popularity, I expect there will be an improvement in search results because they will have a large enough database and enough search inquiries behind them to make similar educated decisions. One very helpful feature on Bing allows you to see an excerpt from the webcopy of the site without ever clicking on the link. This is very helpful as a user when determining which sites you are actually interested in visiting.

Video and Image searches: Both the image and video results on Bing have a nice interface.

The image results are displayed on one page instead of on multiple pages you have to click through. I like this feature because after four or five pages I get tired of clicking through results. The single page loads surprisingly fast, and only displays the related text when you hover the cursor over a particular image. Result? I viewed more results than I would have in Google images.

Bing’s video results also have a unique feature; if you hover the cursor over the link image of the video, it will start to play, allowing you to decide if you even want to visit that site without ever leaving Bing. Another great feature on Bing is the option to sort through video results by video, tv show, news clip or sports clip.

Mapping tools: One large drawback for me about Bing is the lack of “walking directions” and “search nearby” options within their maps application. Within Google Maps, from an established address, you can find driving or walking directions to a particular location or search for nearby establishments by type. I find this tool invaluable and I think as Bing develops, they too will have similar features.

However, mostly because Google has been working on these projects for much longer, I think Google will always be more accurate and advanced in these features.

The bottom line: Google is unsurpassed, but might face some healthy competition if Bing continues to develop innovative features while becoming more utilitarian.

Have you used Bing much since launch? What do you think?

Bing off to solid start, but not that good (news.cnet.com)
Bing Off to a Good Start: Takes #2 Spot Ahead of Yahoo (readwriteweb.com)
Bing Overtakes Yahoo (everyjoe.com)

« Older entries

Toolkit

5 ways to create a successful Facebook page

SEO Strategy: Short-term feeding vs long-term foundation-building

Marketers as Content Instigators

Is Google really a leader in the search engine industry? Enter Bing.

Follow Us!

What we’ve been thinking lately

Looking for something?

Old Stuff

Advertising/PR

Business

Entrepreneurship/Small Business

Interesting

Marketing

New Media

Technology

Twittering

Toolkit

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Related articles by Zemanta

Follow Us!

What we’ve been thinking lately

Looking for something?

Old Stuff

Advertising/PR

Business

Entrepreneurship/Small Business

Interesting

Marketing

New Media

Technology