The Bulls Roar

Do You Have a Plan?

AnnieInfinite — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:21:50 +0000

: Image by Linda Nowakowski via Flickr

Well do you?

By this I mean a plan for your business? a plan for your website? a plan for your marketing? for your social media?

Planning means you get to take in both the big picture and the smaller steps it takes to achieve those long term goals, it also allows you to track your success!

Creating a plan for a business means knowing where your going by creating your vision and mission statements, have you done yours? Your vision and mission statements don't have to be on display to anyone, however they servce as a reminder to you about why you are in business, and as a road map to where your business is going.

A website plan is so important, we so often have people who come to us with no plan at all, we love to know your branding colours, taglines and branding statements – you do have branding don't you? Your vision also helps us to create the design that reflects your vision and passion out into the world. Know what you like not necessarily what you want, as your website designer can often come up with something far more amazing than you could dream yourself. However some very important things you must know about your website and structure into your plans are what you want your website to do!

Your marketing plan can include all your marketing, your branding statements and colours, your taglines, your marketing statements and words to use when marketing and it can include your where's as well. Where are you going to market? Where can you get the most bang or BUZZ for your buck? This takes research.

Your social marketing plan can be included within your larger marketing plan, however it also need to have planning in and of itself. Which social sites and types of site you will use, why you are going to use those, how often and how much time you will spend. Will you have a social marketing manager? Will you do it yourself? Where you will get the training you need to use social media efficiently.

Planning must of course include targets, goals and accountability. How else will you know whether you are on course and whether you are being sucessfull?

Make some plan and put them down on paper, draw up a mindmap of how all these plan fit together and help make you successful, then put the mindmap and your vison and mision statements up where you can see them every day.

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Branding, Business, Marketing, Marketing plan, mission, Social Media, vision, Website

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How to Make the Most of Your Facebook Page Stats

AnnieInfinite — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 01:39:59 +0000

Do you have a Facebook Page?

You would be seeing your Facebook Page Stats in the left-hand column under your profile image and you would recently be receiving this information via email from Facebook, a new innovation – very handy and thank you Facebook!

Do you know how to read these statistics? Or even more importantly how to make the most of them?

Let's take a look at a typical Page's stats as we look at my three week old Facebook Page Noosa BizBuzz and what the activity stats mean and what I can do about the information in them to create even better engagement and more 'Likeers' on my page.

First of all let's take a look at the information about 'Monthly Active Users' the arrow is pointing downward even though the information is telling me that there are still 27 people actively commenting and liking my comments on this page – this information put together means that although I have 27commenters actively using the pageI had morelast week and so my average has come down a little. I could read this as meaning I need to do a little more to create conversation on my page, up the ante, find new information to comment and post about, create a competition or poll or other strategy designed to engage others in conversation.
Next I have had 0 new 'Likers' this week, and 63 the week before, this means, I will need to put the word out more often about this page and what it can do, and the other way I could read this information too is that that I may have reached the limit of people who live in Noosa who have business pages on Facebook – so my new strategy might be to reach out to those people in Noosa who do not yet have a business page and let them know I can help them get it up and running and help create Buzz for their page through my BizBuzz pages.
Wall posts and comments are down, this means my own posting and commenting is down this week, again this is tied to the first statistic and means that it is up to me to engage more frequently with my page and get things going again. This is going to happen from time to time as there are times in your business when you are more engaged 'out there' in the real world than online and as I had a couple of conferences to go to this week my own posts and comments were not as frequent – on my other page though Brisbane BizBuzz I had one of my Social Media Managers take over and the stats on that page where not only stable, but on the rise! A great incentive for using a Social Media Manager to boost your page engagement no matter how busy you are.
Visits stats are a reflection of how many people come to take a look at your page, not necessarily those who are reading and commenting on the posts on their wall, just those who have come to look out of curiosity or to decide whether the page is worth their 'Liking' or those who want to visit to see what is happening because they are 'Likers'.

Now this information can really help you to market your business in so many different ways, you can use it to understand what it is you do to create the most activity, commentary and likers on your page by using a strategy once a week to see what happens to your page acitivity. Use only those strategies that create the most engagement. There a loads of options for different markets, using more visual posts like images and videos, using more polls and contests, posting more specials, quotes, questions.. the list goes on.

You could also decide on the best strategy for your page whether you can afford to fit it into your busy lifestyle or whether it would pay to pay for a Social Media Manager to take over the page for you.

Use it to find what you do that creates the most engagement and fine tune the most useful strategies to create maximum engagement and new likers on that page.

What are your favourite tactics, what works for you?

What one thing you have done created the most engagement with your Likers?

What one thing helped your page get more 'Likers"?

The Zen Bull

Ikea NZ Facebook Page Stats (flittermedia.co.nz)
Essential Reading: Facebook Marketing Articles (tweetreports.com)
Targeting Your Facebook Messaging For the Greatest Impact (searchenginewatch.com)
Facebook Pages Become Customer Support Centers (e1evation.com)

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Business, Facebook, Facebook Page, Facebook Page Stats, Social Media, Social network

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Google Wave is Dead!! Long Live Google

AnnieInfinite — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 02:20:32 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Yes folks Google announced it will put no more energy into Google Wave and that it will be dead forever, until resurrected by someone else (Google have also announced they are allowing free access to the code for it, so someone will be sure to make good use of it) by the end of this year:

Official Google Blog – Upate on Google Wave

Loads of great posts about this event can be seen on the web and the best are linked below just for your reading pleasure:

Search Engine Journal – Sayonara Google Wave

Mashable – RIP Google Wave

Personally I loved it! Without paying a cent I was able to collaborate with friends, clients and business acquaintences on conversations, content and so much more.. I believe that people just didn’t understand it or ‘get it’ if they had it would have taken off the way Google expected it to. Just ahead of it’s time – like so many other of the worlds great innovations.

God Speed – Google Wave – come on back now y’here!

The Zen Bull Websites and Marketing

More Meat, less potatoes

Online Marketing Professionals

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Business, Google, Google Labs, Google Wave, Search Engines

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How to Create Your Own Page on Facebook

AnnieInfinite — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 01:51:54 +0000

I have recieved a few requests for an easy step-by-step guide to creating your page on Facebook, this is a very easy process although there are a few extra tips that can come in very handy when creating a page to help maximise your leverage, your conversations and your exposure that can make a real difference to the success of your page.

So here goes:

First of all the easiest way to “Create your own page” is to go to another person’s page and scroll down to the bottom of the left hand side of the page and look for the link – as shown here
You will be taken to a new page where you can fill in the form with the name and type of your reason for creating a page. Here you have some very important choices to make as the information you choose here is written in stone! So let’s go through your choices:
* Choose your business typ - either a Local Business or if it is a Product or Service or if it is time to brand you as well Public Figure. Here you can also decide if you are more of a community or group based around a certain subject or meetup.
* Choose the name of your page – Here use your Business name, the name of your product or service or of course your own name if you are branding yourself. EXPERT HINT: add two descriptors or keywords of your brand here so that people and search engines know what this page is about. This is expecially important if your business or product name is not clear about what it is. e.g. Our business “The Zen Bull” does not prolaim itself as a website and online marketing company so our descriptors on our FB Page name are “Website Creation and Marketing”.
Once you have made these very important decisions click on ‘Create Official Page’ and Bingo! you have your very own page!
The next page you will see is the very new ‘Getting Started’ page with lots for you to do: Here you will put in the profile image for your page EXPERT HINT: don’t waste this very important real estate – make sure you have a profile image that displays your business or product to maximum effect. See previous post here Ins and Outs of Facebook Pages for more information on enhancing your Page
When filling out your Page information please make good use of all the spaces provided -if you cannot see a box that describes exactly what you need use anything available, as in the case of a Local Business page there is a box provided for describing Transportation and Parking – instead use this to describe your business or product and what you do, and what you solve and your passion for your business.
Once you have filled out as much as you want or need to on this list it is time to see your behind the scenes ‘Edit Page’ dashboard and set up your settings for maximum effect on your page.
Go to ‘Edit Page’ underneath your profile image and click this will bring you to a long page with lots of settings on it. For beginners the main setting to change is the Wall Settings – click on it and this will open to a smaller area where you can change these settings your choices are “Only Posts by Page” or “All Posts” choose all posts for enabling the maximum conversations on your page. This is very important to go from being an advertising page to a conversational, relationship marketing page.Yes you may have to delete the occasional annoying post, this is far better than being an advertising page after all Facebook is a social platform.
You may want to add more applications to your page as encouraged in my other posts on Facebook:
Why Does My Business Need a Facebook Page?
Facebook for Business Are You Missing Out?
to do this scroll down to the bottom of your ‘Edit Page’ dashboard and click on ‘Add more’ – easy!
Oh! and don’t forget to ‘Like’ your own page Be your own first ‘Liker’ this creates your very first FB ‘vote’ for your page and your stats will begin to go up immediately and with every ‘Liker’ and link.
Another great post can be found here: How to create a facebook fan page

The Zen Bull Websites and Marketing

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Brand, Business, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Marketing, Social Networking, Zen Bull

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Internet SEO Lies Designed To Keep You Poor

AnnieInfinite — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:56:09 +0000

This post is quite obviously going by the title a little bit of a wrist slap for all you people who think that old tired and ‘Black Hat‘ SEO and marketing methods are going to miraculously put your tiny site on the “first page of Google” which seems to be some hackneyed ideal that every one is still searching for.

The bad news: It WON’T!

Matt Cutts verified this himself: “NO-ONE can promise you the first page of Google any more!”

Unless, yes there is an unless… unless they are promising you to put you on the first page of Google under one keyword, in your locality (small defined area) with two adjectives that creates one long tail search term and most importantly you will be there more often on your computer not others because of Semantic Search practices.

Basically semantic search (and this is Google and Bing and all other search engines are following suit) where the search algorithms take into account your own search history on your IP including your locale, your previous search history and your keyword semantics – the meaning you put on those keywords or search terms e.g. if you search for fishing and your previous history shows you really mean fly fishing when you search the term fishing, your searches will be based around fly-fishing whether you want them to or not, until you show enough search history to Google to change the meaning placed on your ‘fishing’ search.

Please read the previous paragraph several times, enough times for you to fully understand the repercussions to your site and to your SEO practices!

There are heaps of SEO firms out there right now still trying to make promises they cannot keep. Read these vital posts I have collected for you over the past few weeks to validate what I am saying to you:

Don’t Get Google Slapped!

Link Farms – Link farms are a whole bunch of websites set up with one job in mind – to link to other websites and create backlinks. They have minimal or zero useable content and simply link out to other sites. You can usually purchase links from these farms (so as to increase your number of backlinks) for a price, but this is simply not worth it. As soon as the search engines recognize the site as link farm, they ignore all the links. It’s quite possible that you could get “blacklisted” for this sort of thing and end up ruining all your efforts.

When I was new to SEO, I bought 1000 backlinks from one of these link farms and anticipated huge results. Google Webmasters only picked up about 30 of them (out of a thousand!) and within a month or two they were lost (or removed). I was just lucky that I didn’t get banned!

Cross Linking – Similar to link farms, this is the practice of linking between a whole lot of websites that you own. Apart from being ineffective, the cost of this sort of practice is simply a waste of money (considering that you can easily get links from writing articles, etc).

Cloaking – Cloaking essentially involves having two different pages – one that your visitors see and one that the search engines see. This allows you to create a heavily optimized page for the search engines, and a very “pretty” page for users. This practice is strongly frowned upon by search engines and will in most cases get your site banned within a few months.

Duplicate Content – Whether it the same content placed on different pages within your website, or content copied from another site – the search engines don’t like this for one reason – there’s no value to the visitor.

From www.site-reference.com via clp.ly

Understanding Metaweb The Official Google Blog (Semantic ‘Entities’)

Google Buys Metaweb What this means for you!

Metaweb’s technology could change the way Google Search works.

Metaweb is a difficult concept to describe, although the video above does an admirable job. Essentially, it views keywords, the way we search now, as an inferior search method to what it calls “entities.” Words can vary in meaning, refer to different things, have different levels of importance or relevance at different times, and often return inexact results. So Metaweb has created a constantly growing database, or directory, of 12 million “entities,” which are really just persons, places, or things, and all the different ways you might refer to them. Wording isn’t so important with Metaweb, it’s the end meaning that matters.

Once Metaweb figures out to which entity you’re referring, it can provide a set of results. It can even combine entities for more complex searches–”actresses over 40″ might be one entity, “actresses living in New York City” might be another, and “actresses with a movie currently playing” might be another. Instead of searching through that jumble of keywords, Metaweb would just connect you to those three entities, and file down your results.

From www.fastcompany.com via clp.ly

and of course this excellent post on what Google thinks of your Squeeze or Landing Pages:

Google Slaps Squeeze Pages

It’s true: squeeze pages are nothing less than poison as far as your performance in the search engines is concerned. Google and other search engines have been working on ways to discount the rankings of these pages, which are rarely the kind of content that users are actually looking for when they use the keywords which these sites target. It comes down to what it always comes down to when search engine rankings are the issue – relevance. A webpage designed to entice visitors to fork over their contact information simply isn’t that relevant to many, if any, actual search engine queries, no matter how much content you try to cram onto the page.

Speaking of the content, this is something which has changed about squeeze pages in the last couple of years. Once these pages started being penalized by search engines for their lack of content (”classic” squeeze pages, after

all, feature little more than an opt-in form), marketers started turning them into the online equivalent of the long form sales letter – in other words, something no one wants to read, especially not page after page. This unappealing content has led to a further decline in the ranking of these pages in search results, making them even worse marketing tools than they already were.

From www.sitepronews.com via clp.ly

The Death of Squeeze Pages

Google Buys Metaweb for Better Search Results (dailyfinance.com)
How has social media affected search? (simplyzesty.com)
Why Semantics Is Important For Search Engine Optimization – Semantic Web (semanticweb.com)

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, Matt Cutts, Metaweb Technologies, Search Engines, semantic search, SEO, Web search engine

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Why Does My Business Need A Facebook Page?

AnnieInfinite — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:07:18 +0000

: Image by luc legay via Flickr

Just this week I had a little idea and put it into action immediately, I created a Facebook Page to help my clients and other locals Buzz Up their businesses on Facebook and Twitter.

Now what has come out of this for me was the astonishing number of people who have created a personal profile in their business name!

When I did ask a few of them why, I recieved a number of answers including:

“I didn’t know how to make a page”
“I wanted to be able to comment as my page”
“It was just easier”
“What’s the difference?”

This post is for you! All of you who do now know how much you can get out of having a page on Facebook, most especially if you have a website!

Facebook ‘Like’ Pages or Fan Pages as they used to be called are Facebooks answer to business profiles and they are created to represent a business, an identity or brand. In fact they are the perfect answer to doing business on Facebook, as there are a number of hidden perks for your business and your website in having a Page.

Pages are indexed by search engines, yes your Facebook comments, links and posts will show up in the search engines as being a representative of your brand, business and website and also serve as high quality back links to your site.
You can have mutiple Pages, all linked by Favoriting each other and this creates a web of indexible links back to your site.
You can have unlimited fans for a Page, but only 5,000 friends.
The box provided under your profile image can be filled with keywords which will also be indexed by the search engines and this includes your site URL
The “Like’ factor is like a vote for your page, the more ‘Like’s’ the more votes, and the higher ranked your Page and your own website which is linked to your fan page will be. This is great SEO for your page and your site!
When other pages Favorite your page, this is like another vote for your page and your ranking goes up even further and a pic of your Page shows up on their Page under the term Favorite Pages!
You can get away with a lot more marketing from a Page than you can from a profile, in face Facebook can and does ban you if you’re are caught using a personal Profile for marketing, too often.
You are allowed to message all fans at once, whereas on a personal profile you are allowed at most 20 people at once, and if you message the same message more than twice in batches your account can be suspended.
You can create a Welcome Tab for your Page which can look just a like a mini version of your website, and can gather readers for your blog, or Optins for your material.
It looks much more professional for your business than a using a personal profile, and it looks like you know what you are doing!
You can send every post on your Page directly to Twitter automatically
There are loads of great apps created just for pages!

You cannot get any of this from a personal profile and if you tried you might find Facebook Admin breathing down your neck!

If you have a business on Facebook, please do yourself and your business a favour and get yourself a Page!

The Zen Bull

Websites and Marketing

More Meat, less potatoes!

Creating and Optimizing a Facebook Fan Page for Your Business (slideshare.net)
Dummies Guide to Creating Facebook Pages (labnol.org)
3 Reasons Facebook Trumps Twitter for Business (socialmediaexaminer.com)

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Business, Facebook, Facebook Page, Marketing, Twitter, Web search engine, Website

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Are You Optimizing for SEO 2.0 and 3.0?

AnnieInfinite — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:13:23 +0000

: Image by PubCon via CrunchBase

The truth is the internet is changing very fast and one of the ways it is changing is with Search Engine Optimisation and what works now as opposed to even just 6 months ago. If you are paying for someone to SEO your site there is one very important question you need to ask them:

“Are you optimising for Web 2.0 and 3.0?”

If they do not know what you are talking about it might be time to rethink hiring them and this is why:

“Many old SEO strategies have become obsolete, for example ranking for keywords that no one ever searches for – you know, those “ego boosters” that show your site on the first page of Google. Submitting your site to thousands of web directories to get links and submitting your site to the search engines to get indexed are two techniques no serious SEO even considers anymore. Webmasters still believe that exchanging links is the magic answer to higher rankings (they do still play a minor role in Google PageRanks), and many are still obsessing over duplicate content penalties. All these techniques are today used by the inexperienced SEO and by the “old school” DIY who fail to understand the dynamics of Web 2.0.

The New SEO 2.0 Trends

Web 2.0 is a social entity, and obviously SEO for Web 2.0 needs to be social.

Building social networks on Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, YouTube, FriendFeed, Twitter and the like, is only one aspect. If you build them, the followers will not necessarily come. You have to give visitors a reason to become members of your community, and more importantly, you have to give them a reason to click on the links you submit to their attention if you want to fully benefit from the “network effect” so many web marketers are talking about today. Twitter is the perfect example of how this “network effect” can be beneficial. For example, Dell managed to make $3 million in revenue using Twitter to announce special offers and to communicate with their consumers.” (flagrantly plagarised from the SitePoint Blog just for you)
http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/The-Difference-Between-SEO-Web-2-0-and-Advertising.html )

DIY SEO Hints:
•   Make sure your phone listings also include your website link
•   List your business website with Google Local Search, add a map, links and description
•   Write articles, press releases, list with directories in your niche and local directories
•   Link your internal pages to each other
• Get a blog!
•   Use Social Media!

Notice the emphasis on the last two!

“Let’s Talk About Link Types

Link Reputation:
Link reputation is just that, the aggregate or culminating characteristic that an internal or external link has acquired.

Each link is viewed as a vote, get enough of them from the right sources and your website gains trust; that trust directly translates into link weight which you can invest into the page or pages of your choice via internal links.

Once a page reaches a certain degree of trust, all of the latent aspects of the (a) content (b) title meta data (c) H1 tag, bolded text, etc. and the various keyword combinations that exist on that page as well as the anchor text linking to that page are consolidated and that page can rank for (d) all of the above.

Authority / Trust:
To view the most trafficked and trusted websites online, just type in WWW into a Google search (with advanced filters set to 100 results). Every one of the sites listed there in descending order all represent the most authoritative sites online.

They are in such a lofty position since they are (a) linked to often (b) referenced often through citation or (c) visited frequently. This trifecta of link popularity and peer review augment the process of page and domain authority.

Getting a link from any website in the top 100 most trafficked or authoritative sites online (using the WWW keyword) could catapult your websites trust to a new level. The more authoritative pages your website has, the more trust, rankings and strength your overall domain can accrue.

How you spend that popularity (what we dub internally as ranking credit) and equity is up to you and ultimately determined by (1) the quality and topical theme of your content and (2) who you link to.

Once your website becomes a hub site (to other spokes in the wheel), each link is a valuable commodity which can be used to elevate other pages in your own website, pass traffic along to those who find that page (from search engines or through navigational means from other sites via links).

This is why it is particularly important to customize your website templates to prevent link loss through replicating too many shingles (text such as recurring navigation in the header, sidebar and footer).

By keeping the pages on topic and selectively using optimal anchor text, primary and secondary navigation and being selective with how you funnel the tiers within your website, you can sculpt link equity wisely within your website.

Trust is the last thing you get and it takes links from the right sources, quality content, popularity and time.

The real secret to link building is to start from within your website first, look for lateral opportunities to acquire links from trusted sources, use syndication wisely (RSS, Article Marketing, Directory Submissions, etc.), add a nice blend of social media, PR (press releases) and when possible get as many themed relevant links from others from within your own industry to balance your websites link profile.” (Again I have taken the best from another post on Site Reference here: http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/Link-Building-SEO-Link-Types-and-Tactics.html#ixzz0sJiuZ0x5 )

If you have been told that onsite SEO is more important than offsite SEO, that you must keep submitting your site to directories on a daily basis, that you must keep finding the best keywords and updating them weekly – you are talking to someone who has not upgraded their SEO education for a long time. These days SEO is more about what you do offsite than onsite, about 60/40 so get your site right, your keywords right and then get out there and be social!

Only submit to the newer directories which allow you to update all your information, add images, products and more, these are the backlinks that will count along with your social media linking. Facebook is the biggest site on the web, don’t you think this might mean that if you put a link back to your site on FB, it might carry a LOT of authority?

SEO is all about staying up with the times, I personally asked Matt Cutts (yes he answered me!) on Twitter the other day if anyone could really, honestly promise you first page of Google for your keywords, his answer was an unequivacle, “No! no-one can.” Paraphrased: Our newer algorithms are changed almost daily and semantic search is becoming more relevent by the minute.

What’s semantic search? Web 3.0 – where your past searches will influence your current searches for each persons IP address, how can anyone promise the first page of Google or any other search engine if all past searches that each individual person makes will influence their future searches? Think about it!

The people who are promising you this will not promise you first page of Google for your keywords, they do promise you first page for certain minor keywords in a local search, not the same thing at all! It is certainly time to be smarter with your time and smarter with your money, spend both wisely on what is working and what is going to continue to work.

How Social Media helps in getting good Google Rank (globalthoughtz.com)
Six @ Six: 6 Evolving Search Optimization Tactics from SMX Advanced (bulletproofblog.com)
Search engine optimization (SEO) (slideshare.net)

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, Google, Google PageRank, Matt Cutts, search engine optimization, semantic search, Web search engine

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Corporate Social Media Must Haves!

AnnieInfinite — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 05:21:43 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

After a conversation with one of my best clients yesterday, I was shocked to hear that some businesses and corporations still seem to think that social media is just a passing fad. Social Media is in fact taking the world by storm and proof of this is that some of the biggest corporations are not only taking it on they are excelling at it! Look at big brands like Coca Cola, Burger King, Ford, Dell and of course the meteoric success of Starbucks all using social media well.

There are of course some brands who are missing the mark big time and the reasons for this are many, with the main reason being that they are using an old mindset to use new tools.

Old mindsets that miss the mark are:

Social Media is just a passing trend: not with the numbers on social media steadily rising every day and more social media sites popping up weekly.
Social media is too time consuming: a social media strategy needs only to set one or two times a day to be on social media and choosing the right sites on which to put your profiles is a part of the strategy.
Social Media is viewed as just another advertising channel: social media is anything but this, in fact we must look at it in an entirely new light. Social Media for corporations needs to be put in its own more autonomous category altogether as part of a larger marketing strategy.
They think that it isn’t worth setting up a central strategy: Social Media is about having a global strategy and global audience, but this must be both created and monitored by the international head office of the corporation.
They aren’t trying to build communities: using your social media profiles as just another place to advertise, sending out link after link or sales pitch after sales pitch with no conversation is not what social media is about at all.
They don’t see the long term view: social media is exponetial and can grow very quickly, BUT it can take little while to generate the trust and respect needed to allow fans to connect with a big brand and this takes time!
They can’t track it properly so they don’t trust it: the metrics are there, but as old mindset marketers everywhere bewail – none of it is entirely definitive – this is people and trend driven and unless big brands are keeping up they will go down.

What Corporations who miss the mark are missing:

Social Media is SOCIAL: it’s about building relationships based on trust and respect for the person handling the profiles, this means one very important thing – you MUST have trust and respect for the person you have handling those profiles. Do they post in ways that authentically represent the brand? Do they have the integrity and sense of enthusiasm necessary to show passion for the brand? Are they incentivise to create a worldwide audience? Starbucks could not have done what they did with social media if they hadn’t had someone handling their social media who filled this criteria, who is handling your social media strategy?

If this was farmed out to young Sally because she understands Facebook and Twitter, you may want to rethink this. Social Media is a profession and it needs a professional to handle branding and dissemination of your marketing messages and brand awareness, if this is not possible it needs to be someone who is passionate about the brand and has the best interests of it at heart. Social media is fast becoming the ‘voice’ of the world, you not only need to know what they’re saying about you, you need to be listening and responding. Because it is the ‘voice of the world’ who is going to be deciding if your corporation makes it or not, yes social media is just that powerful. If you doubt this just take a look at what is happening with BP right now, or what happened with Nestle, Pampers and of course the makers of Mortrin.

Social Media Requires Transparancy: now this is a big one for many large corporations, the idea that the marketing message is going to be in the hands of ‘the people’, and worse that they may recieve negative comments on their social media profiles where everyone can see them. Here’s a hard fact – both of these things are happening anyway and with no listening ear or social media presence what can you do about it? Nothing! The lessons from Domino’s and other brand who were caught out on social media are profound, when you can hear and converse with your market, when you are in a relationship with them you can create enormous good will and word of mouth by admitting you were wrong and finding a way to settle any disagreements with style and flair!

Not only this, but this kind of transparency also helps to create brand advocates and even evangelists who see your brand as trustworthy, just because your brand was there on the spot admitting you were wrong and settling the dispute online right in front of the world. You can gain such amazing charisma from these small acts of kindness, proving that your brand is still listening to the little guy. This is your opportunity to take the BIG out of BIg brand and bring a warm and fuzzy feeling to your customers that will translate into bottom line win/win for all.

Social Media Means Sharing: Yes, we’re back talking about ‘warm and fuzzy’ things again. Sharing means listening, communicating and collaboration with your customers, which also means you will be right at the coal face and able to ask your customers what they want from your brand. Talk about the simplest way to ‘test’ the market, think of the opportunities to raise your brands worldwide profile! Starbucks have this down pat, asking their audience to ‘design’ the next coffee or the Technorati asking their audience to help them design their new logo. This kind of sharing means trust is a two way street and this builds even more trust, this kind of mutual trust and admiration can only translate in higher profits.

Social Media is About Being Authentic: Now this comes back to a point I made earlier in this post about who you trust to handle your social media branded profiles. Because social media requires an authentic mindset from everyone and I mean everyone, corporations need to have someone who understand who your brand is, what the brands vision and mission is. What personality your brand has, because your brand needs to be HUMAN! People want to do business with people, social media is to blame for this as it makes every brand more accessable. This is key! Only humans can be authentic, corporations cannot, the human you have as your voice on social media needs to be authentic and authentically representing your brand.

Social Media Requires Consistency: There is no set and forget in social media, someone needs to be online daily or at least very regularly, in fact the bigger your corporation the more often you will need to be there. This will mean you must have a strategy, a team of people who know what they’re doing and scheduling, goals and outcomes in place. Social media is constantly changing and growing and you will need someone in charge who is on top of what’s happening and what’s trending and what to do next. Someone who understands that social media is all about trickle feeding your social media profiles consistently, answering questions and complaints daily, praising and rewarding your brand advocates and evangelists and coming up with innovative and creative ways to engage your online audience.

Social Media for Corporations needs to be set up by someone who understands your brand and how best to use the different social media platforms for maximum effect, which ones will work for you and how to create initial and continuous engagement for your corporation. Corporations need to start now, social media is not a trend that will die out, in fact it is a steadily growing trend that sees no end to its exponential growth, look at Facebook now topping 500 Million users by mid-July – the world has found its voice and it is has no intention of losing it again.

Get ready for a whole new world or get left behind.

http://statistics.allfacebook.com/pages
http://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-tools/

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Business, Facebook, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter

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Ins and Outs of Facebook Pages

AnnieInfinite — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 05:25:53 +0000

Ins

1st of all BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! Now you can remove the creator of your page and this is big news because in the past if you allowed an employee or consultant to create a page for you they owned it for life! Now however you can remove them as admin and retain ownership of your branded page this also unlinks you from your branded page if that is something you want to do.
Follow the steps below:
While logged in go to the fan page you want to unlink from your personal profile.
Click “edit page” under the profile image.
If you (the creator) are the only admin, add a 2nd admin that you want to transfer the fan page to.
Refresh your page if the 2nd admin doesn’t automatically show up.
You will see a “remove admin” link under the creator’s name…simply click the link and the 2nd (or additional) admin will now have control over the fan page and you the creator will not have access to the Edit Page area.
Refresh your page.
You will be taken back to your Facebook home page since you no longer have access to the fan page you were editing.

There is some debate about branded Fan (Like) Pages – whether to combine it with your personal account or not. One of the reasons it is a good idea to combine them both is one I have mentioned before – being indexed by Search Engines. You will get more SEO from a combined account than you will from an unlinked account! Also it is easier to ‘Ignore’ a friend request by asking the person to ‘Like’ your page instead and you will get referrals from real world and FB friends when they know what you are doing and what your skills are.

Make sure you have the main information in your Info page ticked to allow it to show up under your profile image and make sure that the little box provided under your profile image includes your keywords as the search engines use both of these to index your page.

Facebook Social Plugins for Pages are a great way to optimise your branded page and get the word out there about it via your other sites and profiles use them to full effect. They can be found at: http://developers.facebook.com/plugins or
Go to your Page
Click on Edit Page
Copy the Profile ID onto a notebook page on your computer or just write them down – this is the numbers after the id= in the URL
Scroll down until you see ‘Promote Page with a Like Box’
Click on this link and follow the instructions
Copy the code and paste into an HTML box on your on your Profile or any of your sites or blogs

Set up a Welcome Page, this is becoming easier, we used to always use FBML or HTML apps for this but now there is a new app called… wait for it… Welcome Page! This app still uses html script, but it has the added functionality of tracking your Welcome page hits and is a might easier to use than the others. So give it a try.

Tagging yourself or other users or pages with the @ symbol just like on Twitter, during your posts is another way to be seen, however there is a word of caution here, please use this function with discretion and finesse. Tagging means that the post will not only appear on your wall, but the personal wall of the person or page you have tagged and if done too often can be seen as spamming. I was one of the first people to realise that this function applied to pages as well as people and when I first began to use it I was beseiged with requests from other users and IT consultants for the secret to placing my posts on other pages walls, and there it is just tagging the page in my post.

Use a small HTML box on your Wall Tab (200px wide) to feature upcoming events, launches or special announcements on your Page for maximum exposure.

Add a ‘Web Profiles app which allows you to show your other points of contact including your site, blog and other social media profiles as badges on your Wall Tab.
>
Favourite other pages on Facebook to your own FB Page this acts a little like backlinks on your site, now that being said don’t go overboard, but once you do this you can go to that page and leave a comment that your page has favourited their page – once! Hopefully they will take the hint and reciprocate, if they do not you might want to unfavourite them or if they have a lot of fans leave it in place as you may find it brings you more fans just by association.

Outs

The Facebook Privacy Debate: This debate is ongoing and will continue to be as FB administrators and creators try to keep ahead of the online game. My take on this is: if you want to keep your private stuff private – don’t put it on the web at all. Choose carefully and add just enough to show your humanity without allowing your profiles anywhere to become filled with your most private photos or information. The thing is whether it’s Facebook or not the web never deletes anything properly – “What’s on the net, stays on the net.” (Annie Infinite 2010) Try looking up someone you know has been on the internet for a long time, just Google their name and you will see things from 10, 12.. years ago, information they might rather not have you know, or embarrassing things etc..HINT: this is a great way to find out more about the kind of person you might be dealing with in business or personally.

Now that any admin can remove any other admin on Branded FB Pages you need to be very careful who you allow to be an admin, you wouldn’t want to be removed from your own Fan Page!

Since the latest changes to FB Pages included modifications to the Info Tab, (I have had a lot of clients and others asking what they can do, my first recommendation is to just fill up the areas you are given with as much information as possible, not just the information that is asked for. My second recommendation is to add either Extended Information app or the HTML app as a tab to brand your page with more information or a Welcome tab (see Ins) and See this post for more about using the HTML or FBML apps: http://www.thezenbull.com/blog/index.php/facebook-for-business-are-you-missing-out/>
While not strictly speaking an Out this is required reading, do read the FB Promotion Guidelines and make sure to stay within the boundaries. If you don’t you’re out! You can get your page reinstated, but why go to all that trouble when it is easier to do the right thing by everyone, including yourself.

and you just have to read this post by Wong Ching Ya: 31 Facebook Applications to Enhance Your Facebook Page

Older TZB posts mentioning Facebook Pages:

http://www.thezenbull.com/blog/index.php/what-facebooks-new-likes-and-interests-means-for-marketers/
http://www.thezenbull.com/blog/index.php/how-to-grow-your-facebook-fans/
http://www.thezenbull.com/blog/index.php/facebook-pages-goals-fans-and-engagement/

The Zen Bull

More Meat, less potatoes!

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: engagement, Facebook, Facebook Apps, Facebook Fan Page, Social Media Marketing

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A TZB Collection: Best SEO Advice

AnnieInfinite — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:21:47 +0000

: Image by Getty Images via @daylife

There is a LOT of advice out there, some of it pure gold some of it ok and let’s face it – some of it pure drivel.

I have numerous RSS subscriptions to the ones I know are good to great and I thought you might like me to share the best of the best with you on certain topics each week, this week seems to be SEO week and here are the posts I thought were most relevent to you regarding your Search Engine Optimization:

Noone Can Guarentee #1 Ranking on Google
This first link is I believe the most important one as I had a (very short) conversation with Matt Cutts himself a couple of weeks ago and he verified that “..no-one can guarantee you the first page of Google..“, so please read this one carefully and do not be taken in by those emails that tell you they can. Let me tell you if they can, they can only do it for local searches and for certain keywords that will not necessarilly be the main search terms (keywords) you want to use.
The Problem with SEO Advice
Expect Change..
SEO Traits Your Strategy Should Contain
Headline says it all
Matt Cutts says: Give Each Store Its Own URL
Do Categories Matter for SEO
The Second Biggest Search Engine is
… wait for it….
Tips to Double RAnkings Traffic and Conversion
3 Search Types Every SEO Should Know
The Top 25 SEO Blogs
Now you could read these blogs yourself every day, or you could trust me to let you know the most relevent posts and get them here

The Zen Bull

More Meat, less potatoes..

The Basics Of SEO (ronmedlin.com)

© AnnieInfinite for The Bulls Roar, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, Matt Cutts, Promotion, search engine optimization, Web Design and Development, Web search engine

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