Whether you’re new to social media completely or you’re trying to get more involved in it, social media can be a difficult area to successfully break into. To help you enter the social media landscape with success, here are five essential questions you should answer before you engage in any social media channels:
- Are members of my target audiences there? You’ll want to make sure your target audience is active on the social network you’re thinking about getting involved in.
- What is my competition doing? Have a clear understanding of which social media channels your competition is involved in and how they go about it. You might find that you can learn a lot from their mistakes and their successes.
- How much time will I need to dedicate to this? Remember, social networking is more than just making a few posts here and there. Consider the time it will take to set-up the page, as well as your daily management tasks. You’ll also want to make sure you know who is responsible for developing the page and keeping the property updated.
- How will I use this network? Determine how you’ll use each particular social networking site. Are you trying to push a particular product? Gain exposure for your brand? Also consider which tasks are necessary to meet the goals you’ve determined for each social network.
- How will you measure success? Start by setting short-term goals since it can be difficult if you're just breaking into social media marketing. You should include goals for engagement, user action and sharing.
By asking these five questions before you dive into any social media marketing campaigns, you’ll have clearer goals, strategies and smooth implementation.
1 Comment »It's December the 20th and we've been busy sharing
So many e-commerce tips it can be considered quite scary
But please don't be afraid of our e-commerce skills
They give a great gift: ROI that thrills
So take a few minutes from this season's hustle
And watch one more video about our e-commerce muscle
And in closing, it's been fun sharing our tips with you
And now there's only one thing left to do do
From the e-commerce team, we wish you a sincere
Happy happy holidays and a happy new year!
Having to read and respond to emails—and often failing to read and respond to emails—is the common experience that unites professionals in nearly every field. So can you imagine if your boss decided to ban internal emails?
That’s what Thierry Breton is planning to do as CEO of the international IT company, Atos, which is headquartered in France. By 2014, Breton wants all of his employees to opt instead for in-person, instant-messaging, or social media communication.
Why is Breton making such a radical change to the traditional structure of workplace communication? Atos reportedly conducted research on how email was used within the company, which has around 80,000 employees worldwide. According to BBC News, they found that . . .
- Employees spent 15–20 hours each week reading emails, both at work and at home
- Employees received an average of 100 emails each day
- 15% of those emails were reported as useful or relevant
Atos does seem to be experiencing a severe problem if they have to read and respond to hundreds of messages each week. We all know how it feels to lose hours of valuable time dealing with emails, but should email really be banned?
Not to fear, email marketers. “External email is a fantastic tool – it's a fantastic way to communicate between organisations,” said Breton in the BBC News interview.
Significantly, Breton doesn't consider email an outdated communication method. Email itself isn't the problem, it's how email is used, and this explains why Breton only targets internal email. Emails sent externally, especially in email marketing, are crafted much more thoughtfully than the messages we send each day to our coworkers. At Fathom, I’ve been told to send one email per topic, each with a self-explanatory subject line. This tip can create a larger volume of emails, but it certainly helps you send clear, concise messages.
Breton doesn’t state it specifically, but the thing he seems to dislike most about email is the time delay it builds into the communication process. Although lack of immediacy is what causes our inboxes to fill up, the time delay can also be considered email’s greatest strength. Email is extremely useful when you don’t feel like interrupting someone. And when you’re waiting for a response, you can temporarily escape the responsibility of dealing with the issue yourself.
In the end, what worries me about this ban on internal email is that Atos is an information technology company—and if anyone is going to initiate a huge shift in the way we communicate in the workplace, wouldn’t Atos be a logical candidate?
Although the benefits of using email are evident, I think it’s far more realistic to believe we'll all adopt new internal communication systems before we ever learn to use email as efficiently as possible.
*Image provided by m-c on Flickr
1 Comment »It’s been well known for some time that Google Image Search can recognize many images. You can try it yourself by opening two browser windows and dragging an image from one window to the Google Image Search bar in the other window. Google will try to identify the image and show you identical and similar images. This works even when there is no associated identifying information in the image “alt attribute.”
One useful way to use this image search tactic is for comparison shopping: If, for example, you go to Target.com and drag an image over to the search bar, Google will display all of the other vendors that sell that item.
I recently analyzed a site that sells t-shirts that would occasionally get traffic from the keyword “t-shirt model.” Since the word “model” was nowhere on the site, it was assumed that the word “t-shirt” was driving this traffic. However, by dragging the front-page image of a man in a t-shirt into the image search bar, Google classified the image as a “t-shirt model,” thereby confirming that Google is using image recognition to classify Web content and search results. Just for clarification, this image did not contain a description or alt attribute that mentioned “t-shirt model.” In fact, the image alt attribute only mentioned the brand name of the shirt.
Knowing that Google uses images to affect text search results, you should keep a couple of key points in mind:
- Make sure that the images you use on your site are relevant to the content. Minimize backgrounds to assist Google’s algorithm in identifying your image. Text within images can also be recognized by Google, so make certain any words in your graphic or image are relevant to your content.
- Continue to use descriptive alt attributes. Although the spiders have “eyes,” those eyes may be color-blind. A blue shirt was identified as a green shirt, and a green shirt as an orange shirt. If color is critical to your product, make sure you include that in your image alt attribute.
- You may consider using custom images if you want Google to identify your site as having unique content. Don’t make the mistake of developing unique written content and then use a stock image.
“Content is king,” and images are considered part of your content, so make sure that the images you use on your site are not an afterthought.
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The more copy I write, the faster I get. But sometimes the words flow a little too easily.
One morning a few weeks ago, I felt like I was on a roll, the words spilling out exactly how I wanted them to:
Focus on getting involved and being open-minded in college—trying new things creates memories and opens new doors of opportunity.
Although I expressed this college advice with sincerity in the blog post I was drafting, I quickly realized that something wasn’t quite right about the way that I expressed it.
Opens new doors of opportunity? I wondered. Staring at the words, I felt irked. Was it too corny? Cliché?
Now, this contemplation may be nit-picky, but then again, being nit-picky is part of my job as a copywriter. So I decided to follow what I consider the major rule of combating content corniness:
When in Doubt, Take it Out
Sure, “opens new doors of opportunity” has a nice ring to it. But due to overuse, there’s nothing really special about it. Taking a step back, I had to ask myself whether I’d still appreciate the sentence if it I came across it online. I decided that it was, in fact, cheesy and a little fake. And there’s no greater mistake in copywriting than alienating your readers.
All writers, experienced or inexperienced, feel tempted to use clichés sometimes. That’s because clichéd phrases come easily—even naturally—because they have an active role in our daily lexicon. But although clichés are acceptable in common speech, they make for weak professional writing.
The best written metaphors and details catch our attention because they surprise us and make us think. Adding surprise to your copy requires effort and creativity, of course, but it ultimately makes your writing much stronger.
The worst thing about clichés is how easily they sneak up on you. Avoiding clichés was one of the first things I learned as an English major in college, and as a copywriter I still have to make sure that I don't let any tired language slip in.
Remember that clichés aren’t always blatant, as in “you should avoid them like the plague.” Sometimes I even try to avoid Cliché’s evil twin, Clichéd Writing, which simply includes overused go-to phrases such as “you should avoid clichés at all costs.”
Just remember that whatever unique combination of words you come up is much better than any cliché phrase we’ve already heard.
(I used at least five other clichés or clichéd phrases in this blog post. Can you spot them?)
*Image provided by Tom Newby Photography on Flickr
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