I originally heard of this Twitter tracker on NBC, but today saw the actual video on motion while reading the latest news on Mashable (if you want to keep up with all things cool, techy and typically marketing related, start following Mashable). I enjoy seeing things like this and would love to develop something cool for our clients, but until that happens, enjoy watching how this one works… and go U.S.A.!
Raquel recently wrote a post about using humor in your marketing – especially your online marketing. That principle doesn’t just apply to your big campaigns. You can also inject humor into your bite-size marketing endeavors. Case in point: Twitter.
Earlier today, Indianapolis-based Twitter aficionado Kyle Lacy ( @kyleplacy ) wrote the following tweet:
Follow @claymabbitt : It is very rare to find an individual that can make you laugh through Twitter. This guy does it.
Do I make people laugh on Twitter? Well, I certainly think I’m pretty funny. Apparently Kyle does, and I imagine there are at least a few others out there. Is it the tweets about the songs playing in the bathroom where I work? The inappropriate things I say to my wife? Road rage? Maybe it’s just because I make a point of following very funny people and retweeting their best stuff.
Would Kyle have told people to follow me if I had never made him laugh? Well… hmm… maybe? I do also tweet about serious stuff in the online and social media spheres, which are areas most of Kyle’s audience probably cares about. But it certainly isn’t “very rare to find an individual” who does that. (Actually Twitter is crawling with us.) Kyle decided to endorse me because he thinks some of the stuff I’ve put out there on Twitter is funny.
That endorsement had a positive effect. My new followers have spiked in the last few hours. That’s more people who get to see me be funny on Twitter. While they’re chuckling, they also get to see my occasional tweets about upcoming Silver Square seminars and new resources we have available. Because I’ve made them laugh, they like me a little bit. Because they like me, they’ll be more inclined to look for the value in the seminars and resources I’m talking about.
Does that mean everyone I’ve made laugh will become a paying customer? Not even close. My product or service still has to address some pain they have, be appealing, be in their price range, and fit dozens of other variables that go into a buying decision. But I have a bit of their attention, a bit of their interest, and a bit of their goodwill.
Today’s post is from guest author Curt Franke. Curt is Vice President of Business Development with BitWiseSoultions.
My friends at Silver Square have asked me, Curt Franke of BitWise Solutions, to write a blog entry this week. (Yeah, it’s possible that their judgment was slightly impaired.)
If you know anything about BitWise Solutions, then you know that we develop complex web solutions – that means web sites and software applications meant to run on the web. So, I would just like to take this opportunity to share with you a few of my thoughts about getting a good web site design.
(In this case, when I’m referring to design, I’m not talking about the look and feel, because frankly it’s more art and preference and subtle psychology than what I am probably qualified to weigh in on. Although if you know me, you know that I have opinions.)
Number one key to getting a good web site design – find a good designer. (By the way, Silver Square does goodgreat work.)
Besides that, here are nine more thoughts to help you get a good web site design:
If you already have brand standards, (i.e. logo, colors, etc., and printed materials), be consistent with them on your web design. Why confuse a prospective client about whether they have come to your site?
There are de facto standards for good web design. Don’t get cute, follow them. For example, clicking on the logo should return the visitor to the home page. Search boxes go near the top.
Make it easy for your site visitors to contact you. Don’t make them dig for a phone number or some other way of reaching you. Put your contact information on the footer of each page and/or present a “Contact Us” page.
Then there are the basics. Who are your target visitors and what specific action do you want them to take when they visit your site? What is the call to action for individual pages? Good web site developers will ask you these questions.
Great web site developers* will ask you the questions that help to define the web site strategies that support your business goals and objectives. A web site that supports your business goals and objectives will ensure a good investment of your time and money. A good investment should anticipate a return on that investment. If not, it’s not an investment. It’s a donation.
Be logical in the presentation of the content. Think through the groupings of the content so the site is intuitive. This is part of what great web site developers* do for you.
What web site functionality will support your goals and objectives? For example, does there need to be a secure login for customers to be able to access your inventory and place orders online so that you can increase sales and customer satisfaction?
Practically everyone wants some visibility with search engines. So, make sure to invest the time and effort to get the tags and content in place that will support the search terms for which you want to be found.
Practically everyone wants to make changes to the content on the site themselves. So, get a good Content Management System (CMS). Get a demo of it first. You will be glad you did. Not all CMS’es are created equal.
I realize these are pretty basic elements. But heck, John Wooden taught his basket players at UCLA how to put their socks on. So, getting the basics right is a good first step.
May God bless you.
Curt
*BitWise Solutions = great web site developers, providers of complex web solutions, and good people
Who is your customer? You’ve given some thought to this question. How old are they? Male or female? Are they tech-savvy? Where do they spend their free time?
Your customer and how they think should be the driving factor in all of your marketing decisions. You may love reading The New Yorker, but if your customers prefer People, there isn’t any reason to spend your marketing budget on ads in The New Yorker. Nothing shocking here, right? We all understand this.
Here’s where it gets tricky: do you think you are your customer? You’re wrong. Disagree with me? Perhaps you’re thinking, “I’m just like my customer. I am my target market. We’re the same in every way.”
same taste in music
same age
same income level
same hobbies
same politics
we read the same magazines
we watch the same TV shows
we like the same celebrities
we care about the same news
we live in the same kinds of neighborhoods and shop in the same stores
All of these things will help you understand your customer. You are a part of your target demographic. This will give you extremely valuable insights for growing your business, but you still aren’t your customer.
What’s the difference? Your expertise. Your solution. Your business.
Your product or service addresses some pain. Maybe you used to have that pain, but you don’t today. Your customers still have that pain. Every time they decide to hand you their hard-earned money, they are thinking about that pain and deciding you are worth the price you set.
Why am I making such a big deal about such a subtle difference? (And it is subtle.) It doesn’t matter if you like your website. It doesn’t matter if you like your logo. Or your copy. Or your business cards. It doesn’t matter unless they motivate your customers to buy. Sometimes the small difference between you and your customer is why you like one logo when a slightly different one would resonate better with your customers.
Obviously you don’t want to be embarrassed by any of your marketing pieces. (If you grimace when you hand someone your business card, that will ultimately hurt your bottom line.) The opinion that really counts, though, is the one of someone who needs your solution and has money to pay for it.
Sometimes that’s easier to see as a business owner when you don’t have anything in common with your customer. But it doesn’t matter if it’s easy or not. Either way it’s critical to your success.
I was excited to read on the Twitter blog yesterday that Twitter is bringing a new feature for businesses – a way to “deepen engagement” with your audience. This new feature also tackles a major question we’re often asked, so you should be excited too…
The new feature will allow businesses to tag their employees, or those using Twitter on their behalf, to send Tweets for the business, but, with their name as the byline so you can see just who, exactly, sent that Tweet from that company. I like this feature because this means multiple people in the company can still use Twitter for that company but each person still has their own byline. This helps you build realtionsihps with those indivdiuals in that business, not just brand in general.
In our Twitter workshops and speaking engagements, we’re often asked “Who should Tweet; the company or the people?” We think everyone should be using Twitter if it makes sense for your business and goals, but now you can have your cake and eat it too once this hits the masses.
While this feature isn’t ready just yet, it’s coming. Stay tuned and keep an eye out for Tweets from Silver Square with bylines from Angela and Clay. Sweet!
Will we print a second run? We’re not planning on it at the moment, but we wouldn’t rule it out. We had a few people order a batch of the guides to send out to their best clients as a way of saying thank you and staying in front of them. In those cases we prepared a wrap for the guide with custom branding and messaging. If more people want to do something like that, I imagine we’ll definitely look into a second run. Interested?
In the meantime, you can still order the downloadable PDF version.
One of our favorite things to do at Silver Square is to help a business create a brand and identity for their business or organization. It starts with conversations and research centered around who they are and how they want to present themselves to their clients, vendors, competition, the media, and public in general. Next comes the logo, which is always a lot of fun for us and our clients. Once the logo is finalized we create business cards, envelopes, letterhead – anything that is going to have the client’s name printed on it.
Almost everyone gets this far. The idea that these printed items should all look like they came from the same company is a concept that most people are able to wrap their brains around.
Some people stop here, but many go on and create a website that carries through the same look and tone. So when someone sees your website address on your card and types it into their web browser, they are greeted with a home page that has the same design elements and feel that they saw on your card. Even this rudimentary online branding bears fruit. They had an expectation about what they were going to see on your home page, and that expectation was met. That’s a great impression to give visitors: you are going to meet their expectations.
Many people get this far.
But this is where the herd starts to thin out. Very few businesses have email templates or even email signatures that look like they belong to the brand. Twitter backgrounds and Facebook photos may or may not have any connection to the image the company intends to present. If a representative of the company leaves a comment on a blog, what avatar is showing up next to their comment? That’s not to say that every background and image needs to be the company logo (although that can be a successful approach.) But is it right for you to have images of your employees making wacky faces or should they be in business formal attire with calm, confident expressions?
What’s true for print in this case is also true online. Branding needs to be pervasive and consistent.
I may not ever get a letter or business card from you. I may discover you on my computer monitor, and I’m going to have questions. Who are you? And how do I know unless you tell me?
The last couple of days I have watched as a promotional campaign has gone wrong with Pepsi. They released an iPhone app for helping men ’score’ with the women, but really, it didn’t score anywhere.
You can do your own reading up on all the routes and comments consumers everywhere have posted, but what I would like to point out is Pepsi’s handling of this situation, particularly their use of Twitter in doing so. Most of the buzz on this topic has been passed around on Twitter, so it was only applicable Pepsi release their comments via this medium too, but, we all know corporate brands sometimes miss this mark. Not only have they correctly used the medium to voice their apoloogies and rationale, they have attached the #pepsifail hashtag to their remarks. I give them big, big kudos for realizing their mistake and using the word fail – on their own behalf.
Lots of us find it easy to point out a fail when it comes to someone else. A lot less of us are able to do it when it hits our own stuff. Follow the hastag to see what else develops and write down some lessons learned from Pepsi on this one. I am guessing this will all work in their favor in the end.
This isn’t going to be rocket science, but it will be easy peasy. It will be so easy you’re possibly already doing it, but not realizing it’s a marketing activity that helps you build readership to your blog/site. I’m going to use the three most popular mediums I know this blog’s audience uses, but you can just about mix and match any medium to push content out and about.
Tweet It. Yes, get yourself a Twitter account if you don’t just yet, but it’s a great way to gather readers and build followers of your content and company. Use a service like Bitly to shorten your links and track how many people are visiting that link. I recently showed a client how one Tweet sent 121 people to his website; he had no idea you could track links like that. Be sure to send people to the link you’re talking about, though, not a homepage unless that information lives there or there is another reason people cannot get to that information, like a membership subscription.
Status Updates (Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook). If you’re working on a blog post, tell people about it and link to your blog. Maybe they didn’t even know you had a blog! Maybe the new topic you share is just the thing someone has been trying to learn more about. We often release how-tos on our blog (Thanks, Clay) and the Facebook icon for sharing links was just the information someone needed. You never know who you may reach.
Roundup. In your email newsletter (yes, you need to have one at least quarterly if not monthly), add links to your most popular blogs in a blog roundup. If you’re not sure what this is about, check out our newsletter. We often use this roundup feature to remind our newsletter readers of our blog and share our most clicked-on topics.
We’ve talked before about what you should be putting on your business’s Facebook page, but how does your business look when other people are putting you on their page? With Facebook continuing to grow at a staggering rate, it’s worth considering.
When someone is talking about your site, they can include a link to it right there on their wall. Facebook is sophisticated enough to look at your website behind the scenes and pull an image, title, and description for that page.
Where does that information come from? If you do nothing special, Facebook will do it’s best to guess what words and images should be used. All things considered their guesses are pretty good, but it doesn’t need to be left to chance.
With a few lines of code, you can dictate exactly what should appear when someone shares your link on Facebook. (More details at Facebook’s info for share partners.) It looks like this:
<meta name="title" content="Silver Square" />
<meta name="description" content="Silver Square is an Indianapolis-based marketing company that helps businesses create and implement strategies to grow." />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://www.silversquareinc.com/img/logo.gif" />
If you’ve previously optimized your site for search engines, you’ll notice that the meta tags for title and description are the same way you tell search engines how to display your page. The tag to specify an image is probably new to you, though.
If you’ve managed to win someone’s heart so that they want to share your website with all of their Facebook friends, make sure you’ve made this last extra effort. The better the link to your site appears, the better they look for endorsing it. Share this blog post on Facebook and your friends will be staggered by its beauty and majesty.
