Are you pondering the idea of content curation?

Overwhelmed by the amount of time it takes to set-up searches and look thru all of those search results? Looking for a logical roadmap….

Have you considered the idea of using two types of social media in your content curation activities?

Content curation is a great tool to drive prospects to your website and bring search engine spiders back to index and store your website. Also, content curation takes time to find quality content that would fit the needs of your business and marketing mission. Why not find some way to shorten the time in curating content?

Static social media is deployed by companies to solve the problems of their customers. Static social media can be everything from podcasts, games, white papers, or specially designed tools such as calculators or forms. These static social media tools will never change immediately until after a year. Static social media is very expensive to create and creators of this digital media will not replace the tool and its web link overnight.

Dynamic social media is content being changed out in real-time. News feeds, blog posts, tweets, videos, and photos are examples of dynamic social media. This type of content is changed out frequently and very inexpensive to produce. Most dynamic social media is what one can encounter on Twitter and Facebook. This type of digital media serves as a concentrated way to create reach with your followers, friends, and fans. Sometimes web addresses are replaced frequently because businesses are trying to track a particular type of social media using a tracking tag.

Here is the idea…READ THIS!!

For manageable content curation consider using both dynamic and static social media. This will cut back on the time involved carrying out high amounts of editing and looking for targeted content.  Dynamic social media has a low shelf life while static social media means high shelf-life. In short, one can cut down on fifty percent of their content curation activities by using both dynamic and static social media types.

Use static based social media content to create a tool kit on your web presence. This tool kit can point the way to pertinent, specialized problem solving tools meeting the needs of possible clients while establishing your website as a strong contender in content curation.

Use  dyamic social media content to act as an “In the News” feature for your industry on your website. Dynamic content will be the labor -intensive part of your task. This will give your content curation activities a real-time storytelling element about your marketing mission and how your services will meet the readers needs.

Have you deployed the above types of social media?

What are your experiences in using static and dynamic social media in content curation activities?

Do share…..

 

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Are you looking to gain some inside knowledge about social media users on Instagram ?

Instagram is an on-line photo sharing service. Unlike Picasa and Flickr, Instagram allows users through a series of  ”filters” to post pictures with the look and feel of 1970 Polaroid pictures. Like many social media tools, it allows people to friend your Instagram polaroid stream where they can comment on your photos.  Also, users have the ability to alter the pictures with various types of light elements, borders, and rotates. In addition, Instagram users can share their photos on Facebook, Twitter, and FourSquare with the push of a share button.

Outside the ideas of photo sharing and aggregating data to free media channels, Instagram offers great insights into the social media needs and interactions of your fans, friends, and followers. Remember, it is from these nonverbal insights that business enterprises will gain priceless competitive intelligence and product development over present and potential customers.

Remember, social media is developing into niche social networks that will allow nonverbal insights to be developed into psychological social proof.

These are the insights one can gain about friends, followers, and competitors from participating within the Instagram photo sharing network:

• No use of a polaroid filter= user likes the picture
• The more distorted the filter image = less popular the subject matter is with the user
• Shared images with well-defined, distorted backgrounds indicate the user is a realist
• Shared images with soft backgrounds indicate the user is an optimist
• Pictures posted with captions are great ideas for SEO keywords and website background meta-data
• Geotagged pictures will offer where the user lives and how they move within their community
• No changes to the filter and pictures indicate the user is new to the network
• Active popular pictures shared by users on this network will reflect their present moods
• Active popular pictures shared by users will reflect the media events happening on the day of post
• All the images shared by Instagram users are new experiences and new images
• Black and white pictures indicate the user see’s their on-line interactions as fair and balanced transactions
• Most users will not ask other users questions over their pictures
• Posted pictures with square borders indicate the user likes order
• Pictures altered with high ambient lighting indicates the user is extroverted
• Pictures altered with low ambient lighting indicates the user is introverted
• Highly lit images indicate a type A personality
• Low lit images indicate a type B personality

What nonverbal insights have you gained from other people’s shares on photo sharing sites?

 

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Don't be scared of putting all you eggs in one basket when creating historical culture for your fans.

Have you ever considered creating a historical culture from what your fans, friends, and followers create and discuss on-line?

Yes, I am suggesting you occasionally throw caution to the wind and give your fans what they want provided it gives your brand  heightened awareness you couldn’t pay for from any type of advertising and mobile marketing campaign.

Remember, culture is what drives most social media interactions and what your fans will remember during a point of need. Some cultures are even habit forming and become forms of social proof and gameification. Down the road your commercials, your advertising, or marketing should start to evolve into forms of social media unexpected by your fans.

For years I have been a fan of the movie Alien. One of the big plot lines in this movie was the irresponsible actions of the dreaded “Company”. It was “The Company” that sent so many of the characters in the Alien series to their deaths. The Company is a soulless and faceless organization focused on attaining its goals at any costs.  It wasn’t until the early 2000′s movie fans actually got a name for “The Company”. Now called Weyland-Yutani Corporation, it uses the slogan: Building Better Worlds.

Many thought the Alien movie series was dead until last year when rumors erupted about a new movie being created called Prometheus. Prometheus has strains related to the original Alien movie. Also, other rumors pointed to the fact that it could be an Alien prequel. Again, the dreaded “company” is a presence throughout this movie according to production notes.

Then, about a week ago, the 20th Century Fox Film Corporation released this very intriguing TED video based in the year 2027.

Further, several days ago, another feature appeared on a website entitled Weyland Industries.

It is very apparent the 20th Century Fox Film Corporation is going to give their fans historical culture about the dreaded “Company”. They too have been scanning the communities and fan blogs over the alien movies. They listened to what the fans of these movies wanted through social media monitoring and gave the fans a historical culture about Weyland Industries. Also, a very unique way to promote their new movie Prometheus.

If you choose to give your fans historical culture off their conversations, do consider the below pros and caveats:

• Do use this tactic for entertainment only
• Don’t create a fan based historical culture that openly attacks anyone
• Do allow this culture’s shelf-life to exist for no longer than a year
• Don’t allow your fans to ever control and engage this type of campaign in your name
• This will be an expensive endeavor..well worth the money
• Make a point of giving this historical culture a face or historical frame of reference
• Tell all stakeholders and employees in your company what you are doing
• Do create a page on your website telling readers and fans this is a fictional historical culture created by..

Have you created a historical culture for your businesses products or services off the on-line conversations of your audiences?

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Do you remember to use your Twitter hashtags throughout  your marketing campaigns?

Many social media users are familiar with the Twitter hashtag. For those who are new to social media, a hashtag is a way to identify and track conversations on Twitter using a product name, complaint issue, or special event title. Hashtags are created by Twitter users to allow other tweets searching for relevant conversations. The following are great examples of hashtags:  #binladendead , #tucson , #chevy, and #obama.

Your hashtag usage should be integrated not only into your Twitter campaigns but into your overall marketing strategies. Remember, most hashtags being used reflect the name of your product, your company, or a well known issue or problem. Some hashtag creations will attack the credibility of your organization.

Outside identifying and targeting conversations on Twitter, hashtags can be continued into the following :

• Create a Twitter hashtag with your name. Place on your business card. Place on your on-line profiles.
• Place hashtags in the descriptive text for all types of your shared social media.
• Create your own positive and negative hashtags and place on your website, your advertising, and your TV commercials.
• Place on promotional products.
• Place on business correspondence, billing, packaging, and Slideshare presentations.
• Leave them in replies on discussion boards allowing fans and detractors to try to reach you using these hashtags.
• Your placement of hashtags will allow stronger search engine optimization and stronger search engine results.

Your hashtags are a great portable way for businesses to increase their inbound and outbound marketing success!

What other ways do you use Twitter hashtags? Do you find that hashtags serve as wonderful portable reminders?

Do Share!

 

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Your into social media and networking and your business, your employees, and your clients are still trying to understand this evolving communications revolution. Many users of new technologies make the mistake of trying to race their competitors in pushing their usage of new technologies. Don’t race! Be relevant and focused to your solving the problems of your clients and prospects.

Whether using social media or social networking, ponder these five simple ideas when starting into this new communications revolution.

-Social media is a real-time, thinking and breathing entity. Remember what you post, share, and endorse will be on-line forever.

-Social media will take time to learn and use. Take a month to look over all the tools and decide which one fits your business personality. Learn one social media tool at a time. Take your time…

-Before adding social media and content marketing to your marketing mix, drop out the marketing operations that are ineffective. Yes, drop the failed marketing endeavor even if the competition is still doing it!

-Social media and other Internet technologies are here to stay and are growing. Social media and social networking means business! Social media means faster globalization of your business.

-Social media branding is a generalization. You need to create several subsets of objectives meeting your companies goals and needs of your customers. Your subset objectives will often dictate the social media channels to be placed into your marketing mix.

Will Dobbs is the owner of Collective Cloud Consulting in Tucson, AZ.  His business specializes in social media content marketing,  web development, web analytics, and online competitive intelligence. His blog:  http://collectivecloudconsulting.com .  Please tweet with on Twitter: @Willdobbs .

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Courtesy SXC- Your Klout score is a snapshot your spheres of social influence.

Why does Klout matter?

The question one really asking is: “What social proof could I collect as part of my social media ROI?”

Klout is an application that measures one’s influential interactions on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. Klout looks at your influence as pertains to your followers, your followers reactions to your content, and your followers influence within their social networks. Your Klout Score is determined by your actual reach, the echo or range of your content across conversations or networks, and how you are influenced by other social media participants. Your Klout Score can be based on one social network or combination of the four above.

Klout really is about social proof, social credit, and social commerce. Social credit is the concept of creating on-line based goodwill through conversations, and unique social media. Social commerce is the growing concept of using influential-think and group-think strategies to drive commerce in Internet environments. When combined, they can give you outstanding ideas to drive sales, improve products, and build strong industry presence.

Klout allows your on-line activities to be judged by a third party and allows your followers to even nominate you for being influential in certain topics. In short, Klout acts as a quick snapshot of your social networking and social media sphere of influence.

If you like to do a little research and web analytics drilldown, Klout can help you determine the following Return on Investment factors:

-Where you influencers or followers are from

-What subjects or topics drive your followers

-What type of keywords they use-general and specific

-How frequent your followers use their social networks

-What days of the week and hours of the day are best for your conversations and content release

-What types of content snippets have appeal

-The Klout Style matrix offers great nicknames for target demographic profiles

-Points to other industries where your social proof and credit will be welcomed.

FYI-My present Klout score is a 60. Klout identifies me a specialist. According to Klout, a specialist is subject matter expert with an highly engaged and interactive audience. My content is focused, consistent, and unique. My interactions point to establishing true social proof and social credit with my audiences. In the realm of social commerce, I have built a good sized network that could be very easily influenced into driving conversions based on my say so. Also, my followers know I’m into quality not quantity inbound marketing.

What is your Klout score?

Posted from Casas Adobes, Arizona, United States.

Thanks for your patience…I will need a  couple of days to rebuild. Please feel free to look over previous stories!!

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

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Business continuity issues are stacked against your business. Facebook will help you solve these dangers.

Have you considered the power of using Facebook for business continuity?

Besides, marketing empowerment and crowdsourcing ideas, Facebook offers many enterprising ways for businesses to combat the ever present  spector called business continuity.  Your creativity with Facebook and its tools will dictate how successful you will be in using this social networking application to solve business continuity problems.

Business continuity is the process of developing and using risk management principles to mitigate all sorts of issues organizations face due to emergencies, technical failures, competitors, or industry volatility.  Often, when one thinks of business continuity in organizations, they immediately think of the IT department. Business continuity is a never ending thought process and mitigation of hazards affecting the success of your products, your customer service, and reputation of your enterprise.

5 Ways Facebook Will Help with Business Continuity (BC) Issues:

-Portability: Because Facebook is a social computing application, it can be accessed from anywhere at anytime. All one needs is their log-in information and the ability to create accounts as needed. One can access the Facebook application from their home, foreign locations, or from their smartphone. If you lose your office to weather or hostile takeover, you still have the ability to talk to your clients and employees.

-Create one or multiple accounts for a particular BC incident:  Both FB pages and groups can be created to deal with a particular problem within your organization. Consider creating a FB Page for each BC incident. You have the ability to restrict access by only inviting certain people to that page. Remember, Facebook is really an informal meeting place but it could easy double for a conference environment with the latest forms of chat and video within the application.

-Backup communications directory:  When your friends, followers, and fans choose to join your particular Facebook business page or group, you will gain access to one’s personal profile. Unless, the profile info is not shared, you now have another way to access client and employee information that could have been lost during a network meltdown, or a building fire. If the information is blocked and communication is crucial, message your friend privately and ask for the information.

-Real-time communications:  Have a company emergency? Place information for customers and employees within status boxes on your company page. Or consider creating a FB page for company emergencies for your customers, contractors, or employees. Do tell your customers and employees about the page and how to find it. With a separate formal communications page, you have an easy accessible channel that your employees can access in times of emergencies as well as the media. Now consider creating multiple pages (channels) for communicating with your contractors, executives…You get the idea.

-Basic Information Page:  This is for the daring individual who isn’t afraid of hiding some confidential information in plain sight. This could be a great way to display codes or information that you understand alone. Consider placing more general business focused information onto this page. Also, consider using your basic information page as an “in case of emergency” page combined with a checklist. Many readers do not usually read down a large info page of content.

-Applications:  There are many great Facebook features and 3rd party applications built into this social networking venue. Notes could be used for official company statements. Translation feature could be used for global communication abilities.  Use the Events feature to post a proper time to meet with your employees or customers. Consider using Social RSS to re-route industry news feeds and updates to your planned BC page.  Remember, to check frequently to see if your applications are functional.

If you use Facebook for business continuity, do remember to deploy it to deal with both internal and external issues! Also, remember to watch the administration of these special business continuity pages and who you allow to friend the pages.

What are some ways you have used Facebook to solve your business continuity issues?

Do you use other forms of the social media to solve business continuity or crisis management issues?

 

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

When creating social networking, social media content, and user experiences take a moment to create personas focused on senior users or the aging demographic.

Aging users are fast becoming the principal users of smartphones, Ipads, or e-readers.  Also, within the next couple of years, aging users will be active social media users. Aging users in this post are retirees or those above the age of 67.

Throughout my content creation and web development endeavors, here are some observations learned from trying to anticipate this demographic. Keep these ideas in mind when deploying and integrating all your Internet marketing tools.

-Often, desktop icons, and social media badges and widgets will not be big enough to be viewed. Do make them twice there size.

-Often, action based shaped icons like printer shapes or email messages may not be understood. Consider placing titles above these type of icons.

-Ways to share all types of content maybe familiar to you and others. Consider creating a title above these sharing tools to explain what they do.

-Use of keywords will differ with you aging demographic. When focusing on Search Engine Management and Search Engine Optimization techniques determine what keywords they used then and now when searching for products.

-If needing to explain how your website works, consider posting these topics on your blog, and micro-blogs. In your email marketing correspondence consider pointing to places on your website where users can find this information.

-Short training videos are great ideas. Some older computer users prefer text based or infographic based instructions with screen grabbed pictures.

-When training the aging demographic in new technologies, start training them in techniques they are familiar to them, THEN start to mitigate to new techniques. For example, conduct shoulder to shoulder training on the basics of an application then move them to e-books and white papers on how to use the application in other ways.

-If clickable buttons are located on your website, make the buttons bigger and label them with the proper offer and action you want user to perform.

-If budget and talent exists, consider creating a separate website for your aging demographic.

-If creating an on-line community for aging social media users, plan, develop, and build five must need tools into the community. This will make your aging users return and become familiar with this venue.

Considering the above ideas will develop the concepts of safety and security with the aging demographic. In turn, this will increase interactions and conversions with the aging demographic.

What have you noticed about senior user demographics in Internet marketing? What have been your successes or failures?

Do share!

 

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.