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Friday Funday!
Friday again, and this post is a little late in coming today. What with downloading World of Warcraft onto a new machine (I know, I know), listening to Jack White’s Love Interruption, and waiting patiently on my invite from Gentlemint, its been a busy day. With that in mind, I wanted to share a free tip and explain my latest business purchase.
WHAT EVERY FACEBOOK PAGE SHOULD HAVE
Businesses need to have a Facebook page for several obvious reasons, but it’s easy for owners and marketers at small businesses to neglect these pages. Sure, you can be posting relevant content, asking questions to heavy users, and sharing other stuff along, but small businesses have a good way of pulling us away from social media tasks and into other important jobs. It’s important to communicate with your fans through multiple mediums since they might miss something in one place but find it in another. While Facebook still has 450 million DAILY users, many more use e-mail and use it on a daily basis. In 2009, there were 1.4 BILLION e-mail users alone.
What does this mean? Your business needs to have an e-mail capture system on its Facebook page, and preferably as the landing tab to increase e-mail acquisitions. But how do you do this?
That’s where the free tip comes in today. AWeber is an e-mail management system that has a Facebook App that allows you to create a capture form for e-mails and add it to a list. In addition to that, you can also grab other information and add it to intelligence projects. For example, I created a form on the Dark Horse Facebook page that includes 2 drop down boxes that record user ratings on different service aspects. This form allows me to not only grab e-mails, but also gather customer comments at the same time!
The monthly fee for AWeber is $19 per month for up to 500 users. This is well worth the investment. As for other services, I do not know if they have Facebook Apps but I am sure they are out there, For anyone wanting to incorporate my suggestions, there are several online tutorials from the AWeber folks themselves that will walk you through them without issue.
The other thing I wanted to talk a bit about today was the continuing importance of multimedia across social media channels and promotions. For a small business, pictures are an easy of showing your true product, service, culture, etc. while giving your fans the tools to help spread the word. Evergreen social media marketing always considers the next emerging site and/or technology, and the more I pay attention, the more new sites that seem to cater to multimedia pop up. Tout offers 15 second videos while several other microblog sites are designed solely for pictures; the trend is towards multimedia and away from text. Twitter itself is changing towards this trend.
Which leads me back to my latest purchase. Best Buy tempted me again, and this time I splurged on digital camera and memory card. $300, and the ability to hold over 5k pictures, later I can help owners with events by taping and taking HD pics and vids. This a second camera that I use, and now offers me a chance to take second perspective pictures. If it gives me the chance to have 300 unique back links that help drive traffic and community, cool.
All right, Im dozing off here, so it’s off to bed. Have a good one and enjoy the weekend!
The Return of Friday Funday!
I missed doing Friday posts, and since I am working on building the business back up, it’s the return of Friday Funday!
Today’s post is one I have been wanting to write for a long time but because I of what I was doing workwise and because I wanted to see it play out a bit, I held off on writing until a good time. Today I want to talk about intelligence, and it feels like everything has come together on this.
Thanks to my experiences with First Health Associates, I have a better appreciation for not only establishing clearer marketing goals in campaigns but truly understanding what your product offers. Without the right intelligence that provides clear understanding on what you offer and where you need to go, developing a successful campaign is harder and less likely to provide the results you are looking for.
Product intelligence is essential because you have to not only understand what you are selling, but what the consumers think you are selling. Offering the world’s best gazpacho is no treat for someone who only thinks you sell salsa. To continue to tell that person how great the soup is only makes it worse; asking instead about what kind of tomato dishes they might be interested in and how daring they are in new cuisine is a better way to create a fan.
Perception is also a key ingredient of intelligence and if a customer perceives your product to be for something other than what you say it’s for you will again find resistance to your pitch. If your gazpacho is perceived as a health oriented product, it will not do as well as one that is gourmet that is also healthy. The difference is small but important.
Intelligence is also something that you need when responding to outside forces that may or may not affect your brand. During the fall a politician from my home state of Kansas made the mistake of singling out a teenager for a disparaging comment made on Twitter (Full Disclosure: Governor Sam Brownback beat my father in 2010 for his seat). The comment itself wasn’t worth the effort, but the response from his office took on a life of its own and caused a bigger incident than I’m sure anyone in the office meant for it to be.
Reacting without some knowledge or intelligence is a good way to find yourself in a similar situation, and as a gesture to those of you who have made it this far 
I wanted to talk a bit about Klout. Klout is an online tool that measures the online activity of one’s social media influence. For an example you can see mine here: http://klout.com/#/gthomasholland.
Had the staff of the Governor used Klout before forming a response to the situation, they would have seen that this was a High School Senior who was barely active on Twitter and not worth the effort. Operating with a bit of intelligence about the situation before hand would have saved that office some work.
Klout is also great because it shows the activity style of the person you are researching. I can look up a reporter on Twitter, plug them in on Klout and see some information about how they act online, how effective they are and what kind of audience they reach. This helps in determining how influential someone is and what kind of effort I should look at using.
That’s it for today. I am getting back to writing the new e-book and bracing for the Chicago snow storm we are supposed to see today. Lake effect snow is my word of the month.