You scream, I scream, we all scream… for Facebook.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best intro to this blog post. For that, I apologize. But obviously, today I am going to talk to you about Facebook content ideas and how to make your Facebook statuses (statii?) way more awesome. Since a majority of our clients are active on the ‘Book, we’re pretty familiar with what people love, hate, and share with their friends. We’re also pretty familiar with what doesn’t work. So without further ado (and even more bad jokes), here are 5 Quick(ish) Tips for Better Facebook Content.

1. Videos

Videos are more interactive than words. That seems obvious, but your audience may appreciate the break from reading every now and then, especially if it is something that interests them. Say you’re Starbucks and you’re releasing a new ad campaign. Maybe you can give a preview to your Facebook fans to see before anyone else. It’ll help solidify brand-consumer relationships and make each fan feel like they are getting something from liking the page.

2. Photos

Again, photos are more interactive than words. It also breaks up the blocks of text you might have on your page. Whether you are a food product, a luxury brand, or a service oriented organization, you can show a lot about your brand by tossing some pics up every now and again. Show your new line of shoes coming out in the fall and ask people to comment on their favorite designs. Display pictures from a recent factory tour that you sent your fan of the month on. Put up a funny comic or two to make your fans laugh. It’s all about getting people to engage with your page in new and interesting ways, and photos help you do that.

3. Direct Your Audience’s Answers

It’s sad to say, but sometimes you need to connect the dots for your audience. They might not know what you want them to do. Just because you provide a link doesn’t mean they are more likely to click. Just because you show them a picture doesn’t necessarily entice them to comment. Guide their actions by giving instructions, like this: “Click this link if you love great chicken recipes. This Thai Chicken Extravaganza is the perfect meal to end a long day.”

4. Questions / Fill in the Blank

Posting can sometimes get monotonous on pages. It’s learning X about a product on Tuesday and seeing Y about it on Thursday. Quit just giving people facts and information. Boring Facebook pages say things like, “The Ultimate Vortex Hairdryer dries your hair in under 2 nanoseconds flat.” In truth, try something like, “The Ultimate Vortex Hairdryer dries your hair in under 2 nanoseconds flat! What are you going to do with all that extra time you’ll have in the morning?” or “Fill in the blank. I love my Ultimate Vortex Hairdryer because it gives me more time to _____________.”

5. Promotions / Free Sh*!

Seriously, people love free stuff. Like, LOVE it. Even OBSESS over it. Better yet, they love it so much, they’d hunt you down and find you if they don’t get their free stuff in a timely manner. This free stuff can be anything from coupon codes to samples to discounts, and more. But keep in mind that incentives don’t work in every scenario. After all, people aren’t going to go insane for a $2 coupon off a book-on-cassette-tape about Mary Todd Lincoln.

A friend suggested Tubalr to me yesterday and I’ve been telling everyone about it since. It’s an app that plays high quality videos back to back based on a search term or phrase. For example, “The Rolling Stones” entry brings up an endless stream of tunes and videos of Mick Jagger, his lips, and Stones’ concerts (see below). You can choose to listen to only the Stones, or similar artists as well. You can register to star your favorites if you are one who loves a customized listening experience.

Sure, it’s kind of like Pandora. Sure, it’s kind of like Spotify. Sure, it’s kind of like YouTube playlists. But regardless, it’s a simple, effortless way to get the tunes and videos you are looking for without any work on your part. Needless to say, we love simple ideas that solve a unique (and very lazy American) problem. Two thumbs up. You can bet you’ll find me over there all day, listening to showtunes The Black Keys.

I learned a lot in 2011, both about my life and my profession. Mostly, I’ve come to appreciate how work is more than just being satisfied with what you complete at the end of the day. It’s also about relationships, creative expression, stability, intellectual freedom, and yes, being satisfied with all you get done by 5 PM (or sometimes 6 PM).

I’ve also come to appreciate the sense of stability that has come back to our industry. It’s given our word of mouth team a chance to take all we’ve learned since social media transformed the scene a few years ago and change it into a formula, a practice, and a system that works for us. We’ve learned some great lessons throughout the year, some the hard way.

So we thought we’d share them all with you. After all, there’s no better way to kick off a new year than to look back on all you’ve learned in the previous year. Here’s 10 Social Media Lessons from 2011.

1. There’s no such thing as over-preparing. There IS such a thing as under-preparing and it’ll bite you in the butt.
2. Updating or tweeting every 5 seconds will not solidify your expertise. It will just annoy people.
3. There’s nothing worse than a huge block of text. Break it up! Bullet points, headers, and pics are good things.
4. Sometimes campaigns don’t go as well as planned. Do your best to fix the problem and then MOVE ON.
5. Don’t stress out over things you cannot control.
6. Think outside the Internet. Learn all there is to know about marketing.
7. Surround yourself with a team you trust. You can’t do it all by yourself.
8. Let your team be accountable for their own work. Mistakes made are lessons learned, and autonomy equals trust.
9. Sometimes you have to buck up and do that one thing you simply don’t want to do.
10. Sometimes the only thing people want to hear from a company is, “I’m Sorry.”

I walked into my friends house this week and noticed that she had gotten a new refrigerator. Cool story, right? The thing that attracted me me to this refrigerator was an 8in LCD screen located directly over the ice dispenser. The screen showed a display of the current weather conditions and along the bottom was a row of apps. Yes, refrigerators have apps now. Many were familiar, Epicurious, Pandora, Associated Press and Twitter. I punched the Twitter button, plugged my credentials and boom I was checking my Twitter stream. From a refrigerator.

If you’d told me 10 years ago that options for accessing the internet would include my phone, my refrigerator and my car dashboard, I would have laughed at you. And now ten years later it’s all true (and I’m wondering how the hell you knew it was going to happen). You have to ask do we need our fridge to check Twitter for us? Or our car? I’m a millennial, so I’m used to be plugged-in and reachable for a good portion of the day. However even I think that the fridge might be too much. How long before we are literally always plugged-in? I like Twitter as much as the next guy, but when my toilet starts automatically reading my Twitter stream to me when I sit down, I’m out.

Some of you may have noticed that all of Twitter’s apps are getting a facelift less than a year after the last big redesign. Twitter is calling this redesign Fly, but the nerds are referring to it as New New Twitter. They have a whole webpage dedicated to the new update. Check it out for more details. I’m going to quickly summate what they changed and then talk about why this matters. A lot.

Twitter consolidated everything into four tabs: Home, Connect, Discover, Me. Home is your timeline, promoted tweets, pictures, videos. Connect is everything that happens to you on Twitter such as @replies, favorites or people following you. Discover is a totally new feature to Twitter. It looks at who you follow, what you post, where you live and then delivers content they think you will find interesting. The last tab is called Me and it essentially a catch all for everything else: lists, profile, direct messages. This new layout is being rolled out to all of their apps on all platforms.

Twitter writes on the Fly website, “The new tab menu is the same across all devices. So you get the same experience on mobile and desktop—anywhere, anytime.” Twitter wants to make their service easier for new users. I’m sure most of you have tried explaining Twitter to a newbie and had trouble telling them were to start. Twitter wants to streamline the whole user experience (UX). They have also added brand pages, à la Facebook and are starting to place promoted tweets into users’ timelines. The service is now set up perfectly to insert tweets, trends, stories and brands seamlessly into the UX. It’s cleverly done.

I’ve talked before about how Twitter was struggling between its growing relevance and its quirky, simple roots. Fly is Twitter growing up. Brand pages, native photo sharing, streamlined UI/UX, an integrated revenue network… Twitter is now poised to become a full fledged platform. Facebook has taken some shots at Twitter’s market recently (the ticker anyone?), but now Twitter is stepping up to announce that it’s more than just a place for people to talk about what they ate for lunch. This could get very interesting.

The social media realm has required us to have a different set of rules. Everything from strategy to implementation has changed. That even extends to who does what in which department. A blessing of a small agency is that everyone on our social media team works closely together. And while we are all pretty well versed in the ins and outs of each client, we’ve each individually got our niche.

But while we are all well versed in each client, we’ve got to have a back up plan to ensure that all necessary work gets completed (and done the right way) if the point person on the account is out sick or on vacation. Because in social media, there are no sick days.  So here’s how we do it.

1. Check the Driver’s Manual

First things first, you need the proper documents. We work in pretty close quarters here at Cyphers, but we can’t all know every minute detail of every client. That’s where our internal social media documents come in handy. We prepare them before launching a new client and it gives our team the tools each person might need if someone is MIA. They’ve got everything from social media tone and voice to answers to common questions.

2. Have a Snow Day Phone Tree

When someone is out sick, running late, or on vacation, a communication plan is vital to ensuring that work gets done (and that the person that is out can breathe easy). Okay, so maybe it isn’t your traditional phone tree, but there is enough communication so that someone can step up and into the missing person’s shoes. All necessary team members or account executives are included in this communication plan so everyone is on the same page. All in all, discuss a plan so that each person knows how their role is altered when someone else is out.

3. Rinse and Repeat

Your back up plans aren’t always going to go off without a hitch, but once you’ve been through it once or twice, you’ll be good to go. Make changes as necessary. Also, always think of the worst situation and plan accordingly. That way, should the worst happen, you’re more than prepared to deal with it.

Having a social media contingency plan in place helps ensure that all work gets done, all social networks are managed or maintained, and that nothing slips through the cracks. It can give a proactive peace of mind to a sometimes stressful agency setting.

A few members of our Push-n-Pull team went to Social Fresh Baltimore – a social media conference – this week. Between networking and hearing some experts speak, the conference was a success. It also helped reinforce what we do here at The Cyphers Agency (and that we’re doing it right).

Specifically, Chris Barger spoke in depth about how to work with influencers (and more importantly, how to not piss them off), and since blogger outreach is something we implement on a regular basis, it was good to see we were following all of his rules. It also reminded us of how important it is to really build and sustain relationships with bloggers or influencers. It’s amazingly easy to be lazy (and bad) at communicating with this group of people, but really taking the time to invest in a long term relationship can be returned many times over. So while we’ve written about blogger outreach before, we thought we’d give you a little more insight into how we continue to do it successfully.

1. Do the “leg work” yourself. 

We rely only on ourselves to find the perfect bloggers. Sure, there are some tools that can help, but it didn’t take us very long to realize that we had to do the work ourselves to create a database of the types of bloggers we wanted. When we are ready to start communicating, we take our time to get to know them. After all, nothing turns a blogger off quicker than an impersonal pitch.

So how can you do this? Avoid form emails and take time to research the person you’re pitching. Read their blog beyond the first couple posts. Read their “about” section. Do they have kids? Are they married? Are they more formal or hang loose? Build a little profile of the person and use that to guide your communication. Pay attention to the details. Write the blog name how the blogger does, even if the spelling/capitalization/spacing is odd or technically incorrect. Make sure to pick little specific things out of a post to include in the email as a way of subtly demonstrating that you do, in fact, actually read their blog. This may sound like a lot of initial leg work, but in our experience it makes bloggers feel appreciated and catered to. It also helps us cut through all of the other clutter (or other pitch emails) they might be getting.

2. Don’t be overly promotional, for God’s sake!

Once you’ve gone through this initial step of communication, it’s important to establish and grow the relationship. One way to not do this is to ask for something right off the bat. Build the blogger up. Give them something that will benefit them. Provide information that will be important to their readers. Don’t just do this once, do this twice. Thrice even. Become a reliable acquaintance. They’ll be more willing to help you, when the time comes.

When you do ask for that help that you might need, or that article you want written, ask nicely. They’ll be much more willing to provide you with something of value if you’ve already been in communication a dozen times. Don’t just stop after you receive what you want, either. Be sure to say “thanks” – it goes a LONG way. Positively call them out on your social networks to give them a little more visibility. Follow up every few days or months, too. Shoot over more valuable information as you see fit. Really think of each communication as a step towards a long term relationship.

3. Don’t get too big for your britches (and know the consequences of your actions).

A lot of folks get stuck in the old-school mentality of public relations when approaching bloggers, and that’s a big mistake. While traditional media often relies on their established relationships with PR pros and marketers for both timely content and advertising dollars, bloggers don’t. As Chris Barger said, they built their audience without you. While we think our clients have plenty of value to offer bloggers and their audience, we keep a healthy sense of humility and realize that bloggers hold plenty of cards in this game. Like we said earlier, showing some respect for a blogger and their work can go a long way. And you don’t need to go far to find examples of just how wrong it can go when you don’t take a blogger and their power seriously – like this example [beware, there's some salty language!].

Blogger outreach can do so many things for a company or brand, but it’s bigger than just a pitch email. Know your bloggers, help them out, and realize their importance (they have the Internet as their soapbox, after all). Once you do realize these things, you can start to patch together a strong blogger outreach program.

Are you ready for a fun example of creative marketing? No, it’s not from a big national agency, nor is from a young, spry two person shop either. It’s from a group of baristas at my local Starbucks.

I walked in for my usual iced grande cinnamon dolce latte (because it’s only the manliest drinks for me) and noticed that the baristas had their tip jars arranged next to each other in an unusual way. As you can see from the above picture, both jars were sporting Post-it notes. One read, “Batman vs.” and the other read “Ironman”. The tip jars, which are likely to be near invisible to the every day customer, were visually and mentally catching. Putting money in either jar was a way to not only tip your barista, but a way to voice your opinion (this is my vote of course). And who doesn’t love a little superhero humor? I think this is brilliant.

But being the marketer than I am, it got my wheels turning. The baristas had taken a tip plea and created a benefit for themselves AND their customers. It heightened the Starbucks experience for the coffee purchaser and was a way to get more tips than usual for people behind the counter. Each day there was a new matchup and the previous day’s winner was posted. It just shows how a little thinking and creativity can create lasting impressions and experiences for your customers, AND benefit your company in a real way.

The Cyphers Agency (TCA) is looking for a social media intern to add to our Word of Mouth Marketing Department. We are seeking a dynamic, creative, fun, and interesting intern who wants nothing more than to dig into the wide world of social media.

A large portion of this FULL-TIME PAID social media internship will focus on community management for one of our clients. There will also be additional tasks and responsibilities that come with working at a full service advertising agency. These duties include general administrative tasks, research, account assistance, and more.

We are looking for someone with a thorough understanding of: 

• Basic Marketing Principles
• Internet Research
• Blogging – both in writing and familiarity in platforms
• Relationship Building
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, FourSquare, Google+, Tumblr, Groupon, Living Social, Review Sites, etc.

Requirements: 

• In college or a recent graduate
• Advertising, PR, or Marketing majors are preferred
• Must be able to work well in a team environment
• Able to work 40 hours a week (this is a full-time paid internship) for 3 months minimum
• Personal social presence and affinity for all things Internet
• Prior professional social media experience (jobs or internships) is a bonus

Wanna show you are super awesome?

• Connect with us to show your online presence – think personal blog, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Here’s how you can start:
• @ us at @AdsAtTCA, even if it’s just to say, “Hello.”
• Like us on Facebook and leave a comment.
• Send us some writing samples that show your style and voice.
• Share with us some of your favorite blogs, articles, or funny cat videos. Bonus if we haven’t read, heard, or seen them yet.
• Get others to talk about why you should be the next WOM intern. Comments on this post are a great start. Hashtags never hurt either… (#HireMeTCA)
• Show us how you’ve used social media to get results (for school, work, or personal purposes).
• Tell us what YOU think is an awesome example of an effective campaign that used social media and word of mouth marketing. Negative ten points if you say “Old Spice.”

As for that cover letter and resume, you can send it to jocelyn@thecyphersagency.com. Look forward to hearing from you!

It’s no longer a secret that Twitter is more than a fun experiment. It’s changing the landscape of communication. It’s played a part in national uprisings. It’s spread the news of an earthquake faster than the earthquake itself. It’s got the media is such a frenzy that they’re plastering recommended hashtags all over advertisements, stadiums and broadcasts. I wrote a few months ago about how Twitter is struggling with shedding it’s old quirky identity and embracing it’s growing importance. Their first commercial was a misstep. This new site they just launched is spot on.

The site is called Stories and has a series of beautifully designed stories about how Twitter was used to make a difference, big or small. The stories are fun, inspiring and show how powerful these new tools are. And did I mention they look beautiful?