Social Web School

We’ve Moved!

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 03:20:51 +0000

Exciting news, folks. Social Web School is now part of the Human Capital League, a new online community for workplace professionals. Please adjust your coordinates accordingly. Come on over and look around. Sign yourself up and feel free to Add Your Blog to the content flow. (Instructions in the top navigation bar.) See you there.

When is it OK to Delegate and Automate in Social Media?

Christine Gallagher — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 03:49:15 +0000

I don’t think I would be anywhere near as productive as I am in social media today without having tools, systems and processes to monitor and organize my expanding network. They really have been the secret to my success, and of my clients’ success. In the work that I do in social media, time management and feeling overwhelmed are always the biggest concerns that I hear—but they don’t have to be.

A Careful Balance

Automation is all about leveraging your time and energy, but often you will hear people say that this goes against the whole idea of social media being about building and nurturing relationships. However, there are ways to automate some of your social media efforts—without detracting from cultivating your authentic voice and personality when it comes to your online presence.

Identifying valuable resources, like blog posts, websites or quotes that you believe would be helpful or valuable to your Twitter followers and pre-scheduling sharing this content would be one example. The nature of tweets like these is that they are essentially one-way communication and don’t depend on you being available when they are posted in order to field some kind of “real time” response. Therefore, this kind of content is ideal for pre-scheduling in advance. A tool like Hootsuite is great for easily setting these kinds of updates up.

Keep Your Voice

The most common way to delegate in social media is via a virtual assistant, but it’s important to note that it’s not recommended that you delegate anything that contains your personality or voice. A specific example of an ideal task to delegate would be having someone track and monitor your reputation and brand via search.twitter.com or the search feature on Facebook.

When thinking about delegation, stick to housekeeping, administrative or organizational tasks not related to the conversation—for example, approving Facebook friend requests with an established criteria or using criteria to find more people to follow on Twitter. Other tasks would be to do the initial research on ideal people on Facebook to send friend requests to, pre-scheduling tweets as mentioned earlier, creating events in Facebook, researching quality blogs, sites and links that contain good content for you to share via tweets and Facebook updates, managing your Facebook inbox, adding new business-related applications to your Fan Page and more.

Don’t Get Stuck

One of the biggest mistakes that people make—especially those who are new to social media—is that they start to get stuck in a cycle of automating, broadcasting and automating—over and over. It’s very difficult to generate positive results this way. However, automating and delegating appropriate activities while still taking the time to engage in regular conversation can be the perfect blend—so that you can leverage your time and still maximize your success.

Link to Original

Time Management Tools for Twitter (techtalkformoms.com)

Social Media Outsourcing: Good Business or Fake Dialogue?

Cindy Kim — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:29:48 +0000

“Brands are the stories that unite us all in a common purpose within an enterprise, and connect us with the people we serve on the outside. These brand stories give meaning to who we are and what we do.” – Mark Thomson

Social media outsourcing has been dubbed the next big thing — which could mean placing your brand in the trusted hands of outside agencies. Social media is about building relationships between your brand and your community — about listening to the conversation and engaging in it. As agencies are claiming to be social media experts, more companies are taking what I believe to be an easy route by outsourcing this function. But how well can they truly represent your brand? And more importantly, can they do it better than you can?

I challenged my esteemed colleague @AmandaVega (her blog Http://www.amandavegablog.com) and newcomer @mkarre to a throwdown on the topic of whether companies are better off outsourcing social media. Not surprisingly, @AmandaVega and @mkarre argued that outsourcing is the way to go. Why? Budgetary constraints, lack of resources and lack of social media knowledge. @AmandaVega states: “While most companies are really good at PUSHING messages, they aren’t very good at receiving them, or interacting in conversations that fall outside of the ‘what’s in it for me’ mentality. That’s another reason to assign this part of your marketing to the outside.”

My take is this: Social media is about a conversation that can deepen engagement. By outsourcing social media, companies are diluting the message, the authenticity and the value they can deliver through direct engagement. There are a lot of agencies that do social media, and those that do it well can add value in helping you define a strategy on best practices. The role of an agency should be to provide guidance — not to directly engage for you. You know your brand, customers and community better than anyone else. As some politicians and celebs have learned the hard way, having someone else tweeting for you — even a trusted staffer — can lead to embarrassing gaffes.

Launching a social media effort requires laying a foundation and understanding which technologies are right for your businesses. Before agreeing to outsource social media, companies need to first understand what it is, why they want to do it, what their core strategic goal is and the strategy around it. When Lumension was looking to expand its presence online through social media, my team and I studied every aspect of social media to better understand what tools would be right for us — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, vimeo, YouTube, etc. We took it upon ourselves to master this arena. After we comprehensively understood WHY we wanted to do social media, we brought in our existing PR firm, Lois Paul and Partners, to get SVP of Social Media Ted Weismann involved so he could provide the skinny on how it works, existing frameworks, best practices, etc. to establish a clear social media strategy. (Note: When searching for a PR firm, we made it a priority to select a firm that understood this changing landscape so we could not only establish a strong social media presence but also incorporate it into every aspect of our marketing and PR). For us — and I’m sure a lot of companies can relate — social media is about humanizing your brand and engaging with analysts, media, business community, users/customers and prospects.

My recommendation is to appoint a staff member in-house to oversee the social media function in terms of defining and owning social media strategy, policies, brand management, engagement, education, messaging and monitoring. This person (should they work with an outside agency or counsel) should play a leading role in integrating these agencies into the fold to help lay the groundwork, identify trends and ensure your strategy and execution are on brand/message.

If you are going to outsource, consider these tips before selecting an agency:

Find out what the agency’s basic social media strategy is.
Learn the why they use social media
Look at their success stories — how do they use social media to deepen brand engagement
Talk to their customers.
Research the agency on social media channels to see how they are using it.
Talk to social media experts and what the agency’s reputation is.
Read their blog if they have one (and they should) to see if they are driving the conversation

Twitter responses:

From @ScribeDevil @CindyKimPR In-house if possible. No one knows your voice better than you, and authenticity is more important than that pro-style shine.

From @Esnelz @CindyKimPR in your case, you probably don’t need much help, most need to outsource

From @mikesunx @CindyKimPR i think social media is not different than real life, some cos care about customers some dont all, same for PR and social media

From @srsaul04 @CindyKimPR great to see agencies like @LPP_PR give guidance on social media, but important for companies to engage/influence directly.

Let me know what you think. Is outsourcing the next big thing? And does outsourcing dilute the brand experience and authenticity of the corporate voice? Join Social Media Debate Community.

Social Media Marketing Strategy Simplified: Stop Thinking Blog, Start Thinking Value (masternewmedia.org)
How to Find Content for Your Business Blog (buildabetterblog.com)

How to Use Static FBML to Customize Your Facebook Page

William Smith — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:53:19 +0000

The vast majority of Facebook fan pages carry the same, standard “vanilla” look. You’ve got a wall, info tab, pictures, video and events. Every once in a while you will come across a page that stands out from the others. Perhaps they have a custom landing page, or some type of graphical box which has an offer. Facebook doesn’t make it very easy to learn how to add that functionality, and it took me quite some time to learn the technique.

What is FBML?

FBML is Facebook’s version of HTML, the language that web pages are written in. For the most part, a knowledge of HTML is all that is needed to utilize the functionality of the Static FBML application. This particular application, which was created by Facebook and can be added to your pages, allows you to create a “web page” within a tab or box that you can attach to your page. Sound complicated? It really isn’t, once you dig in and get started.

How do find the Static FBML application and install it

Like any other application, Static FBML can be found by using the search box anywhere on Facebook. Simply type in: Static FBML and you should see results similar to these (see image below)

Facebook search results for Static FBML

In the results list you will find listings for both Applications and Pages. You are looking for the Application so click on that.

Once your on the page for the Static FBML application, you will look for the link to “add application to my page” which should be at the top left of the screen, under the logo for the application. Clicking the link brings up a popup window which allows you to select the page you’d like to add it to. Keep in mind, you can only add application to pages which you are an administrator for.

After you have added the app, pull up your Facebook fan page and click on the + sign in the nav bar above where you can enter wall messages. There should now be an option to add a new FBML tab.

Here is where things get a little tricky. Now you have a new tab called “FBML” on your page but it is blank, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to add content to it. Generally clicking on the pencil icon on any tab allows you to edit options for it, however with this particular app that only gives you the ability to delete the tab, which isn’t what we are looking for.

Editing your new FBML tab

Instead, head to your page’s administrator section (e.g. return to the wall page, click “Edit this page” from the list of options under your logo).

Click the edit button and you will be brought into “edit mode” for the Static FBML application itself. Here you can adjust the title that will show up on the tab, as well as drop in the text and/or HTML/FBML code you’d like displayed when someone clicks on the tab.

From here you can be creative. I like to generate some HTML code using an editor and copy/paste the code into this box. Some elements like video embeds you may have issues with. There are workarounds using Facebook’s own FBML specific embed tabs which will be covered in another article on the site. But basic formatting, tables, images and links will all work in the Static FBML tab you have just added to your page.

Click save changes and go back to your Facebook page wall. You should have a new tab called “Sample FBML Tab” that when you click on it displays “Hello, World” in a H1 heading.

In addition to the tab, you now have a copy of this FBML output inside your “Boxes” tab. This is another one of those hidden “features” that Facebook has added, and it is important to note because the only way to move this FBML content to your page’s wall is by first going to the Boxes tab, and clicking the pencil next to the box and selecting “Move to Wall.” No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but thats how it works for now.

This is obviously a simple customization, but you can create complex tables and add imagery that will stand out for your visitors. Here are just a few examples of the customizations I’ve seen done with the Static FBML application.

Click to visit

Link to Original Post

13 Google Personalized and Real Time Search Resources for SEO and Pay-Per-Click

Ryan Beale — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:38:58 +0000

Google recently integrated personalized and real time search into their Search Engine Results Pages. Since roughly 70% of searches occur on Google, it is imperative that Internet Marketers know and understand Google’s recent update to their Search Algorithm. After reading through many articles on the subject dating back to early 2007, I wanted to share the articles that I thought were most relevant to the topic. They are listed below in chronological order.

13 Google Personalized and Real Time Search Resources for SEO and PPC

SearchEngineLand.com: Google Ramps Up Personalized Search by Danny Sullivan on February 2, 2007
SearchEngineLand.com: Google Personalized Search, Google Bookmarks & Link Building by Eric Ward on March 5, 2007
SEOBook.com: Search Personalization Will NOT Kill SEO by Aaron Wall on January 29, 2007
SEOBook.com: How to Turn Google Personalized Search Results Off Without Logging Out by Aaron Wall on June 9, 2007
AimClearblog.com: How To Exploit Personalized Search for SEO by Marty Weintraub on November 29, 2009
SearchEngineLand.com: Google Launches Real Time Search by Danny Sullivan on December 7, 2009
Huomah.com: SEO Guide to Google Personalized Search by David Harry on December 7, 2009
AriOzick.com: Why I’m Not Worried About Personalized Search or Caffeine (and Why You Shouldn’t be Either) by Ari Ozick on December 8, 2009
OutSpokenMedia.com: Google Enables Real Time Spam and More by Rae Hoffman on December 9, 2009
MediaPost.com: How Real-Time Search and Personalization Influence PPC and SEO Campaigns by Laurie Sullivan on December 9, 2009
SearchEngineLand.com: Search and Real Time Madness by Danny Sullivan on December 10, 2009
SearchEngineWatch.com: The Demise of SEO Wont Be Caused By Personalization by Chris Boggs on December 11, 2009
MediaPost.com: How Will The Real-Time Web Influence PPC Keyword Pricing? by Laurie Sullivan on December 11, 2009

How will Google Real Time and Personalized Search effect SEO and PPC? I’m sure there are many questions surrounding this topic and how to leverage Google’s real time and personalized search for success. Many tests are undoubtedly under way as I type and I bet certain SEOs are already benefiting from the new Google Algorithm Update.

Were these links helpful? Please let me know of any article that you would like to add to this list of Personalized and Real Time Search Resources for SEO and PPC.

Link to Original

Top 10 Seo Myths (slideshare.net)
Future of Search, Universal Search and a Brands Responsibility to SERPs (blogstorm.co.uk)

5 Marketing Mantras for Entrepreneurs

Christine Gallagher — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:47:42 +0000

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently attended Ali Brown’s 3-day Shine Event in Las Vegas. Shine was a seminar all about marketing, entrepreneurship and personal development. The second day of the event was devoted to one of my fave topics—marketing.

Ali shared with us her top marketing “mantras,” and I thought they were pretty spot-on so I wanted to share them here:

1) The marketing is more important than the mastery. I first heard this from Ali a few years back, and I recently wrote an article on this very topic. It doesn’t mean that what you do in your business isn’t important, it just means that mastering marketing is just as important mastering your craft. You can be great at what it is you do—but if you are not marketing consistently, your skills and abilities won’t be enough to keep your business afloat.

2) Always be marketing. Marketing your business is necessary all of the time—not just when your revenues are down or the economy is bad. Unfortunately, many business owners are learning this lesson now in the recession. Their bottom line is suffering because in the past, they never thought they really “needed” to market.

3) Emphasize benefits over features. When you market your services or products, think of benefits as being what answers the customer’s question of “what’s in it for me?”

4) Be original, but clear. Adding your own personal flair to your marketing can help you stand out among the crowd, but make sure the message of what it is you can do for people doesn’t get lost in your quest to be unique or memorable.

5) Work your best methods. There are countless ways to market a business, both online and off: books, blogs, press releases, live events, advertising, direct mail, giveaways…and on and on. You don’t have to pick just one method, nor do you need to be doing a little of everything. As it was described at Ali’s event, “marketing’s a buffet.” Choose a handful that work for you and work them continually.

So, what does marketing come down to? Marketing is really just communication and relationship building. Your job is to use that communication to accomplish four main things:

1. Attract leads
2. Collect leads
3. Follow up
4. Close the sale

Sometimes business owners make marketing more complicated than it actually needs to be. Follow these five mantras and you’ll go a long way toward simplifying the path to closing that all-important sale.

Link to Original

Promotion 03 (slideshare.net)
Integrate Social Media into Your Marketing Strategy (kylelacy.com)

Five Fundamental Website Design Principles

Ray Gulick — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:32:10 +0000

Disclaimer: not an actual Evo
web designer.

There are lots of approaches to website design. Other designers may legitimately find much to disagree with in this short list, or have items to add (please!). But these are the over-arching principles I try to adhere to in designing sites. At least they’re the ones I can think of right now.

The header, footer, and side navigation or subnav areas should be thought of as a “frame” for website content. They should be attractive, well-organized, functional, and support the brand, but visually, they should notcompete strongly with page content for attention. If you have a boring website, the way to fix it is not to make the header and footer more exciting (which does not necessarily preclude the need to redesign the header and footer). If your website lacks excitement or interest, put your time, budget, and energy into making your content more exciting and useful.

Be semantic with content structure. When the style sheet is turned off, the content on the page still needs to make sense. If it doesn’t, it impacts our next principle:

Accessibility is not optional. Accessibility starts with recognizing that not every website visitor sees or experiences websites the same way you do, and caring about their experience. The next step is to understand how their experiences may differ, and making accommodations so they can access the content. It’s easy to overlook accessibility if it’s an after-thought: it has to be a priority.

Prioritize content. What’s the most important content on each page? If it’s important, make it prominent, because expecting people to read carefully to extract the nuggets is unrealistic. This means highllighting content by various methods, including subheads, boxed content, color, scale, and bullet lists. And white space.

Footers are useful for other things besides holding copyright info. It used to be that footers were barely used and little noticed. Blogs have changed that, and the aesthetic works well on “traditional” websites and blog-based websites. While they are still not (and shouldn’t be) a place to put content that needs to be emphasized, footers have become a good place to put tags, social media links, contact info, marketing messages, and other information in addition to the copyright statement and links to the privacy policy.

Link to Original

Should you share the same content on multiple networks?

Kelli Brown — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:37:56 +0000

This week’s question is a common one we’ve come across when clients begin using multiple outlets for their content.

I’m using Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook (fan page, group and my personal account) to promote our site and the content we post on our blog. We also use YouTube for video. When I post a new video to YouTube, should I share that video on the blog too? Should I post the link in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? We have a lot of overlap on the social networks and I’m afraid people will get sick of seeing the same content in three places.

Thanks for your excellent question! In short, my answer would be yes. But, we need to take a look at how content gets shared to understand the reasons why.

Let’s say you’re in charge of marketing, including social media, at a software company. You’ve decided to give it a shot and created a company blog. You blog regularly and get some good traffic, but you’re always looking to get more impact for the time you spend creating content. To gain a bit of exposure, you start sharing your content on three networks – Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. When you’ve got other content, you post it to a media-based site like YouTube, Flickr or SlideShare. So far, things are going well and you’re getting some success at engaging users, having posts go viral and converting a fair share of your new traffic into sales. In short, your social media is a success.

But you have this nagging worry that some of your geekier clients – stalkers, if you will – are getting the same barrage of content on multiple sites. You’re worried they’re going to get sick of you and stop sharing – or worse, stop using your software.

Not to worry – it’s not likely. While a user might connect to you on any multitude of formats (RSS from your blog, Twitter and Facebook, a fan of your YouTube channel), it’s unlikely they’re paying attention to you in each venue. Even though many of your users might be using all of the same social networks, they aren’t using all of them the same way.

Think about how you share content. When you see something you’re eager to share, do you run to Facebook or Twitter? Do you “favorite” things on YouTube and SlideShare or do you email the link to your friends (or share the link in another network entirely)? Are you active in social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious? No matter your answer, the point is this: you probably aren’t doing every one of them for every story that catches your eye.

Now let’s get back to your users. Even when the same story hits RSS, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, your users are going to share and spread it a little differently depending on their particular way of sharing content. By leaving out one network, you take a chance that someone who prefers to share in Twitter is going to copy and paste your link from Facebook, if that’s their preference for sharing. While it may not sound like much, it’s added work for a user – and a chance you may not want to take.

There’s another factor when it comes to sharing the same content – something akin to six degrees of separation. Although you might be connecting directly with the same people in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, the people that they’re connecting with might be different. With the goal being that your network shares your content, the potential market you reach once you get a few steps removed from your original post might be dramatically different from network to network. Let’s look at a diagram to illustrate our point.

How networks share content

To be sure, there’s going to be some degree of overlap in each level of connections – this is especially true if you’re target market is B2B. That said, by the time my contacts have shared my content with their contacts, I’ve already reached a huge market I couldn’t touch directly. In this way, even a small but dedicated following within a social network can have a huge impact and reach well beyond their limited numbers with a valuable message.

Link to Original

Andrea’s social media transgressions: Cloud computing (k1v1n.com)

New FTC Rules on Social Media Now in Effect – Are you Ready?

Rodger Johnson — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:17:42 +0000

The Federal Trade Commission announced new rules for social media engagement. The Commission will be monitoring Facebook, Twitter, and several other social platforms to foster greater transparency among corporations using new social tools to connect with consumers. Here’s what the FTC will be watching:

At a Fortune 100 corporation where I was the social media point man for the Global Internet Marketing team, we had lengthy discussions about sponsored conversations, one of the more touchy topics among social media communications professionals. “Most important, social media users – from celebrity spokespeople to everyday consumers – who are paid to post accurate information about a product or service will now be required to disclose their deals and could be held personally liable if they don’t,” wrote Dallas Lawrence, of Levick Strategic Communications on the Bulletproof Blog.The Associate Director of the FTC’s advertising division Richard Cleland, has said, “If you can’t make the disclosure, you can’t make the ad.”

Link of Original

10 Questions Twitter Newbies Should Ask

Zahid Lilani — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:57:08 +0000

Twitter is like sending a text message to the entire world. Twitter is what you make out of it. Twitter is the best thing since sliced bread.

I know you have heard it all and like most people, you are not convinced if Twitter is the tool you need in your life right now if you are happy with Facebook. The best way to approach the question “Is Twitter for me?” is to ask questions. Once you get the answers, relax and try to digest the information. After the digestion, you will either hop on to Twitter or…

Shari is doing a workshop for Twitter newbies and I decided that I can help her by pretending to be a Twitter newbie and asking all sort of questions, here is a list of 10 questions newbies should be asking Shari:

1 – Twitter is only for Celebrities and their fans, is that true?
2 – Why should I tell the world what I am eating?
3 – Only teenagers use Twitter, I am not a Teenager.
4 – Twitter is for bloggers to advertise, I am not a blogger.
5 – Who should I be following on Twitter?
6 – 140 Characters don’t make sense, I need more space to convey my message.
7 – I don’t like the idea of everyone being able to read my Tweets.
8 – What are some Twitter success stories?
9 – What book should I read to understand Twitter?
10 – Is Twitter here to stay?

As a Twitter newbie, what would you ask Shari?

Link to Original

The Facebook Monster Strikes Again! (allfacebook.com)
Two Geeky Methods To Do Some Quick Tweeting [Mac] (makeuseof.com)

Social Web School

We’ve Moved!

When is it OK to Delegate and Automate in Social Media?

A Careful Balance

Keep Your Voice

Don’t Get Stuck

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Social Media Outsourcing: Good Business or Fake Dialogue?

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How to Use Static FBML to Customize Your Facebook Page

What is FBML?

How do find the Static FBML application and install it

Editing your new FBML tab

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13 Google Personalized and Real Time Search Resources for SEO and PPC

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5 Marketing Mantras for Entrepreneurs

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Five Fundamental Website Design Principles

Should you share the same content on multiple networks?

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New FTC Rules on Social Media Now in Effect – Are you Ready?

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