1. Expectations. Expectations. Expectations.  Whether they are Clients, Internal or External team member’s expectations need to be set. Remember your “behind the scenes” team is going to have your back to make sure the account services team represents not only the company brand, but keeps a strong relationship with the client for future services.  It is also the responsibility of the account services team to keep the expectations of the client reasonable. In turn it is the entire team’s job to keep each other in check to maintain a level of excellence internally.  This will be win-win all the way around and will cause fewer headaches in the future.
2. Deadlines. It is always a goal to make sure each project or deliverable gets to the client in pristine condition in an appropriate time frame. A smart question is, what is a good time frame? One week? One Day? One Hour? This is where your project manager comes heavily into play.  This person will be your saving grace. Find a way that best suites your team. Many people go the route of saying to the client; “Yes we would be happy to do a social media plan for you, let me get with our project manager so I can get you a date for that deliverable.”  Again, win-win.  The client gets what they want and essentially your team dictates when the deliverable will be complete.
3. Team Check Ins.  It is not just enough to give the team goals and then ship them off and hope they get the deliverables to you with the correct branding, best quality and the company award winning stamp on it. Snags and hang ups happen all the time and it is best to check in with your team on a regular basis. Plan a “standing meeting”, which is just how it sounds, where everyone takes 5 minutes in the morning, stands up, and does a quick recap on where they are. This way there is always a clear line of communication and if someone is lagging behind or needs information it is aired out first thing.

These are just 3 recommendations to a list of things that can help your agency or company engage in positive project management processes. The key is to remember that this is a team effort and everyone is accountable for their own projects. Designating someone internally to oversee projects and deliverables creates a common point of contact for the team to make sure everyone is on the same page.

What we discussed in this episode:

• First off, we welcome Michelle to her first show! Michelle is on the left (with Stella the office pug), Machelle is on the right – as you can imagine there is a lot of confusion with the two names being so close. 

• We welcome StringCan’s CEO Jay Feitlinger back from the World Trade Centers Association (WTCA) conference in Mumbai where he presented the WTCA’s new global platform we are developing.

• StringCan Interactive’s Digital Strategist Kevin Warhus walks us through a little experiment to discover – from a high level – who we are online and how we would perform a simple search. As you will see below, each of us interact online in very different ways.
These are the profiles that were created from his questions:

• Once we identified the differences in our online habits, we reviewed our online personas and discussed the importance of understanding how your ideal audience searches and interacts online.

• Kevin plays Guy Smiley (remember the game show host Muppet on Sesame Street) and hosts this month’s “Are you Smarter than a StringCanner?” He has some great questions for the team that leads to a very interesting discussion about social media and the growing audience. Can you beat us? Play along and test your digital knowledge!

If you liked this episode please let us know and review the show on iTunes, follow us on Facebook and connect with us on LinkedIn or Google Plus.

Thanks for listening!

That being said, Facebook and Instagram (their recent buyout in Sep 2012) remain the top two mobile apps out there according to a recent study from Mobidia. The below graph shows mobile app usage from March 2013 with the average smartphone users spending around 450 minutes per month on the Facebook app and 300 on Instagram. Facebook’s mobile app has a loyal following – the stats don’t lie!

Well whether you like it or not, strap yourself in because Facebook has been making a lot of noise in the industry with all of its recent changes since the begging of 2013. With a big evolution of the platform on the horizon we can expect some BIG things moving forward. Personally, our team has been pretty excited to test out some of these new features for our clients and ourselves and we can’t wait to see what’s coming next!

The Times They Are A Changin’

Some of the recent evolutions to Facebook’s platform and digital experience have really begun to take shape in the last month. Below outlines some of the major highlights for what’s changed and what’s up next. Read below for some further details and highlights within each section.

• Mobile Chat Head
• Mobile News Feed Filtering
• Facebook Home
• Mobile Pages
• Graph Search
• Profile Layouts
• Facebook Phone

Mobile Chat Head

If you haven’t checked out the new chat features for Facebook’s mobile app your phone is due for a big update. This new chat redesign makes communication seamless while surfing your newsfeed with pop-up windows, intuitive designs, and even voice messaging.

Mobile News Feed Filtering

With the newest update to Facebook’s mobile app users can also now customize their news feeds by sorting of friends, recent posts, following, photos, groups, and much more. It’s a great way to filter down the mobile experience to see exactly what you want to engage with on the go.

Facebook Home

Look, we’re not admitting we’re jealous of Android users…but as a team hooked on Apple products we have not been able to test Facebook Home yet and it looks pretty cool. Facebook launched an app exclusive for Android that provides an immersive experience right on your phone’s desktop. The app cycles through photos of friends, images from your newsfeed, and chat messages directly on your phone’s homescreen. It looks beautiful and has already racked up over half a million downloads! Check out the video below for a look at Facebook Home installed on the new HTC First Facebook phone.

Mobile Pages

Facebook has made local and mobile a big focus in the last few months. Recently they updated a global redesign of their mobile pages for businesses – giving Yelp a run for their money. As seen below, the new page layout makes engaging and finding local information much simpler and attractive. These changes are currently live for iOS devices and are expected to hit Android in early May.

Graph Search

Facebook’s new graph search feature was announced in January of 2013 and has just really begun to roll out publicly in the last month or so. This exciting new feature leverages Facebook’s Open Graph network to make searching on Facebook intuitive and personalized. The previously useless search bar (at least in this writers opinion) can now help you find out information about your friends, businesses, and followers in almost any form of question you can think of. Check out our recent article on Facebook’s Graph Search for a more detailed overview.

Profile Layouts

A few months back Facebook launched a redesign of the timeline profile layout. This new change organizes the profile to display all status updates on the right hand side and all other profile information, friends, photos, and more on the left. It’s a small change, but we feel it really helps organize the profile to make it easier to read when scrolling.

Facebook Phone

Ok…the elephant in the room. We all knew it was coming at some point, and frankly while we are not surprised we are not all that excited either. Personally, as much as I love Facebook I have no desire of dropping my iPhone for a Facebook phone. That being said, it’s a new beautiful and social experience for your phone that I am eager to try.

Facebook has partnered with HTC to make the first phone with a Facebook built into the platform and full experience of the phone. While its still a new platform, it has been getting great reviews. Here’s a video teaser of what’s to come from the newest player in the smartphone game (we apologize for this guys laughably bad hair….)

So it looks like 2013 has already been a busy year for Facebook with many more big plans on the horizon. Personally we are excited to see what comes next. We are also excited to hear what YOU think of these updates and what you think is just around the corner. Share you thought on our blog or social networks.

Images = Fierce Mobile Content, TechCrunch

Cut the Noise Podcast 001

Finally the StringCanners are Podcasting

After much anticipation the Cut The Noise Podcast is finally live! In the first episode of the Cut the Noise Podcast; Stringcan Interactive Account Manager Jason McDonald, SEM Manger Machelle Norris and Digital Strategist Kevin Warhus kick of the first episode and outline the premise of the show.

StringCan Interactive plans to release one to two episodes per month. Each show will deal with hot topic in the world of digital marketing, tactics to take your digital marketing to the next level and strategy to help you leverage the web.

 In the episode we discuss:

• Goals of the podcast – what’s happing in the digital industry
• SEM overview – What inbound marketing can do for your business
• How people search – knowing your customer and how they search online
• Who are you up against? Knowing your completion
• The new Myspace – http://www.stringcaninteractive.com/blog/how-new-myspace-works/
• StringCan on Myspace – https://new.myspace.com/stringcan_interactive
• What social media is right for you?
• The pop quiz – are you smarter than an StringCanner? This section dates the recording of the podcast – took us a few weeks to launch the podcast.
  • Major changes to Adwords
  • Jason asks Google for forgiveness
  • Find us online!
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Pintrest
    • LinkedIn
    • StringCan Blog

Thanks for listening!

Content

When generating blog article ideas, keep your target audience in mind for both the topic and tone of each article. Consider what they would be interested in reading on your site as well as how you want your blog to represent your brand on your website. Topics should be easy for users to identify and are relevant to what they are searching for, your products, industry news, etc. StringCan also recommends creating a blog content schedule to help manage topics and stay consistent with frequency.

Post Length

Keep posts between 250-1000 words to optimize posts for reader attention span, SEO, and post quality.

Post Frequency

Search engines give more authority in search rankings to your website based on how frequently content is produced and how valuable that content is to readers. With that in mind, it is a best practice to produce new articles for your blog as frequently as you can manage creating new content. Ideally, at least 1 post a week will help produce higher search credibility, but at a minimum you need to produce new content twice a month.

Keywords

When writing articles for your blog, focus content around keywords your target audience is searching on. You want to massage the keywords into the content exactly how users are searching for them, but in a comfortable and readable way. Focus on 1-3 keywords in a blog. Don’t try to force in too many keywords that don’t read well.

Pictures and Video

Embed pictures and video into your blog to help break up content and add a visual appeal to your postings. When adding images, be sure to optimize them with ALT text and descriptions to help with search optimization.

Linking

When applicable, link your content to relevant sources mentioned in the article by hyperlinking specific words. Be sure to set each link to open in a new window so users who click the links in your blog are not taken away from your site. Do not stuff articles with links – generally use no more than 2-4 links unless merited.

Responding

Closely monitor your articles for new comments. WordPress can add plugins to notify you when new comments have been made. When a reader comments on one of your articles, it is important to respond in a valuable and timely manner to make them feel like they are part of the conversation and part of your brand experience.

Sharing

Once your article is up and live on the blog, it is important to increase exposure to your content. Share your articles on your social networks to drive your fans to your website and create more lead opportunities. To further increase visibility, share your articles on social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit. The more places your content is visible, the more traffic you will earn.

Guest Blogging

To increase the amount of content and expertise on the site, leverage guest bloggers to create new content for your blog. There are a large number of authors willing to produce content for free or for a low cost in order to increase the recognition and earn links back to their site. This can be a very affordable way to consistently produce frequent content from a variety of trusted sources.

Images = YesWare.com, Wix.com