The Creative Conversations series explores methods of communicating creatively, yet conversationally. This week, professional copywriter Anne McColl shares her secrets for crafting conversational copy for social media and beyond. Anne has worked with the likes of Turbo Tax, Bumble Bee Foods, WD-40 and Cricket Wireless to find the right words to tell their story and inspire people.

Your brand doesn’t have to be boring.

Every time a customer interacts with your brand, there’s an opportunity to create a connection. This applies to signing up for emails, confirming registration for a product, and even error messages. When your brand is online it’s not a question of if there will be technical difficulties, but when. You can still use the moment to create empathy.

Microsoft

Let’s start with what not to do. Here Microsoft politely apologizes and warns you that your data may be lost. Does it make you feel good about Microsoft? Maybe not.

Mint

Yes, a financial company that you trust with all of your financial data has to be reliable. But if you accidentally get stuck, Mint is ready to help you.

Twitter

The Twitter fail whale, of course, is now famous. But the folks at Twitter have the right idea. If your site is going to be down frequently due to popularity, at least keep you customers entertained with an entire error menagerie (Illustrator Yiying Lu is the creator of all of these whimsical beasts).

Mashable

Again, if you’re lost, Mashable points the way home.

The 501st Legion

The 501st Legion is a bunch of obsessed Star Wars fans that dress up like Clones. Of course they’re going to quote Obi-Wan.

Tumblr

Tumblr just might be the best micro-blogging platform out there. Upon occasion, there are too many people sharing cat photos at once and their system goes down. At least they have a sense of humor about it.

 
The Creative Conversations series explores methods of communicating creatively, yet conversationally. This week, professional copywriter Anne McColl shares her secrets for crafting conversational copy for social media and beyond. Anne has worked with the likes of Turbo Tax, Bumble Bee Foods, WD-40 and Cricket Wireless to find the right words to tell their story and inspire people.

Social media is all about, well, being social and having real conversations with real people. But when it’s time to engage customers, the language is often the same:

Join the conversation.
Follow us.
Like us.

So here are a couple of brands that are having a little more fun.

Photojojo

Photojojo.com offers you the best shiz about all things photo. When you get to their Facebook page, they tell you why you may want to like them.

TOMS Shoes

TOMS Shoes is a shoe company on a mission: for every pair of shoes their customers buy, TOMS donates a pair to a person in need. Their Facebook page asks customers to join the movement.

Erika Napoletano

Erika Napoletano is Redhead Writing – a speaking, blogging, social media powerhouse. Never one to be shy with what she’s sharing, she invites her readers to stalk her.

Virgin America

Virgin is flying high with social media. Catering to a business demographic, Virgin was the first airline with Wi-Fi fleetwide and outlets near every seat. Their tech customers have responded by referring to their favorite airline as #nerdbird.

Virgin invites customers to join on Facebook:
And don’t forget to share: drop us a line on our wall or share a pic from your flight. (We like it when you talk back.)

And for those on Twitter, there are also hints of swag for those mile high tweets:
Brush up on your trivia to win @VirginAmerica t-shirts, or send us a tweet at 35,000 feet. (We’re big on retweeting. Just saying.)

Red Bull

Yeah, Red Bull wants customers to like their Facebook page. At least they’re not subtle.

So have you seen some particularly fun calls to join in lately? Let us know.

When moving a web site from one domain to another domain or subdomain, permanent redirects (known as 301 redirects to the web server) are vital to keep existing search engine links working. There are a few ways to do this, but I’ve found the easiest way is to set up the old domain to use a special file that the web server looks at for per-folder configuration information. This file is named “.htaccess” and is placed in the folder you want the server to modify it’s configuration for. For WordPress, I put it in the root folder with the core WordPress files.

Inside the .htaccess file, add the following lines:

#Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{http_host} ^interactivemarketingcafe.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^www.interactivemarketingcafe.com
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://brandswithfansblog.fandommarketing.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{http_host} ^brandswithfansblog.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^www.brandswithfansblog.com
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://brandswithfansblog.fandommarketing.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The first two lines set it up to do rewriting of URLs, uncommenting (removing the #) on the first line if redirection doesn’t initially work. The middle three lines match the old domain name (with or without www), and redirects it to the new domain or subdomain, keeping everything after that intact. The last three lines match a different domain, so you can do multiple domains within one file. In the hosting set up, the old domains could point to the new domains, or be on an old or separate hosting account, and do the redirection to the new domain on a different hosting account.

Using this method, we have the old web links (i.e. interactivemarketingcafe.com/ten-tips-to-a-successful-social-media-pla/) redirecting to the new domain (i.e. brandswithfansblog.fandommarketing.com/ten-tips-to-a-successful-social-media-pla/), using wildcards matching anything after the domain. Easy and quick.

For any links that may not have a new corresponding page, use a permanent redirect on the new domain to redirect them to a new corresponding web address, or if none, to the home page. When using WordPress, there is a great plug-in named Redirection, that handles redirects as well as logs and tracks Page Not Found errors (401 errors), with automatic redirection to the home page, it’s highly recommended.

This is the first post in a new series we’re kicking off with professional copywriter Anne McColl exploring methods of communicating creatively, yet conversationally. Anne is an interactive copywriter who has worked with the likes of Turbo Tax, Bumble Bee Foods, WD-40 and Cricket Wireless to find the right words to tell their story and inspire people.  

When you’re surfing the Internet, is there anything as uninviting as an entire page of light grey text in 10-point font? Click, click, your reader is gone. People are scanning, looking for the information they need. They don’t want to read. The idea is to present your content in chunks – in small digestible pieces – that will leave them wanting more. Below you’ll find some helpful hints to help you do just that.

1. White space is your friend

Don’t be afraid to hit that return button and leave a space between text, photos and subheads. Give those eyeballs a break.

2. It’s all about the subhead, baby

Your great headline pulls readers in and the subheads let them know what the post is about and persuades them to dig deeper. As a matter of fact, readers should be able to understand what the article is about just by reading the headline and subheads.

3. Soap operas have the right idea: serialize

Get ‘em hooked. If you have a lot of information, you can break up a super long blog post into a series. Or create a series on Twitter. The San Diego Opera did a lovely series on the history of opera (Or have you seen Fandom’s Tip of the Day which feeds quotes from a Tumblr).

4. Make a list or use bullets

• Make the copy scanable.
• Let your readers know there is an end in sight.
• Lists are a good way to get some white space in there.

5. Provide your own bite-sized pieces

Of course, you already have social media widgets at the top or bottom of your page to make it more shareable.  But you can go one step further and provide your own tasty morsels to make sharing even easier. Sally Hogshead, speaker, creative muse, and author of Fascinate, provides small tweetable bits at the end of her blog posts.

Here are a few tweetable bits for sharing this delicious post:

Do you like your ice cream chunky? You can consume chunky content too. <url> via @fandommarketing @annemccoll

Turn your blog copywriting from a long, rambling narrative to a chunky conversation piece. <url> via @fandommarketing @annemccoll

6. Words and pictures belong together

It’s true. Now while we all know that Playboy Magazine has exceptional writing, it’s the pictures that keep the readers returning again and again. So forget those all-text posts. Head on over to Creative Commons, find a good photo and then attribute it (No, Google Images isn’t an acceptable source for photos). Better yet, shoot your own.

 7. Make your ending rock

Don’t fade away with a weak ending. Spend as much effort working on your ending as you do the intro to your post. It will leave them scraping the bottom of the carton and clamoring for more.

How can you get website work done without knowing how to code or hire a programmer? The answer is plugins. If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog (not using the free wordpress.com version) you have a world of features available to customize your site. WordPress is a free, opensource blogging platform and plugins are tools created by the community making it easy to enhance your website in just a few clicks. There are over 18,000 plugins in the WordPress directory! Plugins are built by individuals with no vetting process, and therefore are not all created equal. It is important to choose those that have been tested, reviewed, and highly rated by the community. Here we have highlighted our top ten list of tried and true plugins that we use on a regular basis to incorporate  must have WordPress blog features for our own and and our clients’ brand blog sites.

Encourage Sharing

Plugin: AddThis

Why? Makes your content easy to share, and provides reporting on how many times, which pages, and what services people are using to share it. The widget places sharing buttons at the top and/or bottom of blog posts or static pages, and allows you to customize the buttons and sharing messaging to include your Twitter handle. The AddThis plugin also integrates to bit.ly and Google Analytics.

Get RSS Subscribers

Tool: Feedburner

Why? Give visitors a better experience versus merely a raw feed. Feedburner allows you to customize your branding and messaging and provide your audience the option to subscribe to blog posts by email. While there are plugins to automate the feed, the best approach is to add a text widget to your blog sidebar containing an RSS image linked to your Feedburner URL. And, add an email subscribe form to your sidebar by copy/pasting some simple HTML code that Feedburner supplies.

Alternative plugin: For those templates with RSS buttons built in that you can’t edit manually, this alternate plugin will detect the ways to access your hard-coded feed and redirects them to your Feedburner feed.

Measure Success

Plugin: Google Analytics for WordPress

Why? Tracking site traffic and what people do on your website is important to managing the goals and value of your blog or website. This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, with features to custom variables and automatic click out and download tracking. You will need your Google Analytics account set-up to get started. And, this plugin does not take care of any advanced tracking required for conversion actions, special buttons, or goals.

Moderation Security

Plugin: Akismet

Why? Protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. To get started: 1) Activate the Akismet plugin, 2) Sign up for an Akismet API key, and 3) Go to your Akismet configuration page, and save your API key.

Let Readers Rate It

Plugin: WP-PostRatings

Why? Allow visitors to rate your posts to determine the quality of your content. It’s a great feedback loop from your readers and has become a standard blog feature. You may or may not need to modify your template to get this to display on your blog post and alternatively in the summaries of blog search list/home/category pages. This plugin adds an AJAX five star rating system to blog posts.

Easily SEO Your Articles

Plugin: All in One SEO Pack

Why? Search engine optimization is an important benefit to blogging. Your blog gets fresh content out there for search engines to index and inevitably drive visitors back to your website. Easily customize page meta-data (title, description, tags etc.) right from you post/edit your blog in WordPress with your SEO keywords. No special programming, coding, or HTML needed.

Show Off Your Tweets

Plugin: Cbnet Twitter Widget

Why? Put life into your website with a real-time feed from Twitter. Display posts by your brand or a hashtag. People who visit your blog are interested in networking with you on Twitter and this is a great way to show you’re active. This plugin makes configuring a feed in your sidebar super simple. Alternatively, you can go to twitter.com to and copy/paste a pre-made HTML code into a widget text box placed in your sidebar.

Gain Facebook Fans

Tool: Facebook Like Box

Why? Collect Facebook fans from your web page in one click, without ever leaving your site. Showing friendly faces from your brand community adds credibility and an instant personal connection with your site visitors. Determine your sidebar width and then visit Facebook, link above, to customize your like box, grab the pre-made HTML code and then copy/paste it into a widget text box.

Keep the Conversation Flowing

Plugin: Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

Why? Keep visitors engaged in a discussion even after they’ve left your website by allowing them to subscribe to email notifications on post comments. It includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts or suspend all notifications. Once installed, the feature should instantly show up in the comments section of all your pages.

Make It Mobile

Plugin: WordPress Mobile Pack

Why? People more than ever are browsing the web and reading your blog articles from mobile devices. This plugin detects mobile devices and displays your website in a mobile friendly format to smartphone, iPhone and tablet visitors. Activating this plugin will install a selection of mobile themes and your site will be listed on mpexo, a directory of mobile-friendly blogs.

Learn More About WordPress in San Diego

If you have any questions about plugins for your site, leave us a comment below or follow @DowntownRob, Fandom’s own WordPress hosting specialist, and he’d be happy to chat. Or, if you are near the San Diego area and would like to learn more about managing your WordPress site, join our Meetup group which holds WordPress work groups every six weeks. We’d also love to hear about your favorite plugins that didn’t make it in our list.

It has been awhile since I posted last. About two months actually. And, I feel the guilt that bloggers do when we stray from our commitments. There is good reason for it which I want to share with you here before we get back to our regular schedule. It’s not that I have writer’s block, nothing to say. I have a lot to share but it wasn’t important for me to first kick the year off with this update. I’ve been busy closing out one stage of my life, being a worker, and moving onto the next, an entrepreneur. And, in that process I struggled with all the decisions that I’ve seen other business owners tackle in how to position their brand, personal brand, business blog and community in relationship to one another. It resulted in the rebranding of this blog from Interactive Marketing Café (IMC) to what is now called Brands With Fans. Here’s why I made that decision.

Time Is Precious

I considered leaving IMC alone as a not-for-profit free standing publication, and launching a separate brand blog for my business. I never blogged to generate leads or sales and I don’t want that to be the primary motivation for blogging now. Quality content that brings value to your audience has to come from an unselfish place. I have witnessed that approach working in favor of businesses and individuals. However, I am one little person (and yes, I’m little in real life) and I do not have the time or resources to write articles for yet one more publication. After considering what I’d write about, it would be the same stuff, so creating the other blog just didn’t make sense.

SEO Matters

When it comes to matters of search engine optimization, there’s nothing better you can do for a brand website than to fill it with fresh, keyword rich content from a blog. It was a no-brainer to determine early on that SEO will be in my arsenal of marketing tactics. But, moving the IMC blog to my Fandom Marketing brand website would have meant losing my blog theme/design as well as losing that feeling of being an independent publication with an untainted community. Plus, I’d just redesigned IMC in 2011 and was quite satisfied with it. To cover my bases, I asked my SEO friends about the best way to structure a blog to bring SEO benefits to my brand website. The answer lies between using a subdomain vs. a subdirectory. The experts agree that the best approach is to put your blog under a subdirectory of your brand domain, e.g. yourdomain.com/yourblog. I opted for the second best option, using a subdomain yourblog.yourdomain.com instead. Our new URL is brandswithfansblog.fandommarketing.com. I set up a short domain brandswithfansblog.com that redirects to the homepage to make it easier for you to remember. The subdomain will still provide some SEO juice to the brand website while keeping the independent publication intact (no need to change my design for business blogging).

Branding the Community

Another big decision that needed to be made was branding. IMC presented both a blog title and design issue with respect to the Fandom Marketing brand. It was shiny, slick, green, and did not scream social media marketing. Fandom is friendly, people oriented, red, and crisp. It took me down a path of seriously considering what I want my company to stand for and the values that a community could be built upon. This reached into decisions about our Facebook page where I had built a small following for IMC. I came to the conclusion that the community is not really about the brand at all but a shared belief with others that people build brands. It’s the ideology behind “social marketing” which I view as a unique perspective on business. Not media. To capture our values, in hopes of connecting with others who share the same belief, I rebranded the IMC blog and Facebook page to Brands With Fans. The blog and Facebook page logo, look and feel are a spinoff of Fandom Marketing. Our brand hashtag is #brandfans which we use in our Twitter feed display (see right sidebar) and Twitter chat.

What You Can Expect Moving Forward

Brands With Fans blog be back on the regular schedule of posting weekly social marketing strategy, tips and advice. I will be incorporating new contributors from my team of talented social marketing specialists at Fandom as well as guest bloggers from the community. There will be improved content with new topic tracks and series of articles. Most importantly, here is our promise; we will keep it pure with no hard selling or over promotion. Sure, you will find a Fandom Marketing banner in the sidebar or mentioned occasionally but, it will not trump the reason we’re all here. To have a meeting of minds and to reach our potential for awesomeness through the support of a community.

A Zillion Ways to Connect

• Subscribe to upcoming blog articles by RSS or by email
• Interested in guest blogging? Email andy at fandommarketing.com
• “Like” the Brands With Fans Facebook page
• Join my Dirty Little Social Media Questions Facebook group
• Follow @melonie or @fandommarketing on Twitter
• Join the #brandfans Twitter chat
• Subscribe to Fandom’s monthly newsletter for free social marketing resources, events, offers and company updates
• Follow Fandom Marketing on LinkedIn or connect with me personally
• Join my Social Media Questions LinkedIn Group
• Circle up with me on G+
• Learn more about my social marketing company or me by visiting my bio
• Leave a comment and let me know what you think

There’s more to social marketing than Facebook and Twitter. There is a universe of online platforms that crop up just as quickly as they die. Here’s are a few of our favorite online brands and platforms. Some of them we couldn’t live without. What are yours?

When we think about audience, customers immediately come to mind. They are what we focus on as marketers day in and day out. They pay the bills and help meet every companies reason for being – to make money.

Uncover Your Hidden Audience

If you are one of those marketers whose head is beginning to nod in disagreement then you understand what I’m about to tell you. Making money doesn’t make you profitable. Other stakeholders such as employees or a supply chain partner also contribute to profitability either directly or indirectly. They are as impactful to your business as your customers; in some instances without them your business wouldn’t exist.

Broaden Your Content Strategy

Have you neglected key audience segments in your brand communications? As a new year approaches it’s a good time to consider who your audiences are and how you can connect with them. Whether through social media or email marketing, or a special section tailored just for them on your website; there’s a place for all of your brand stakeholders in your next content strategy.

Now, that’s big business.

Is Your Brand Neglecting A Hidden Audience?

The title of this article is a little bit misleading, there is no such thing as “other marketing” once you come to the understanding that social media is not a separate entity unto itself. It is marketing. It is communications. It is PR. It is website design. It’s technology.

That being said, here are three easy ways you can eliminate the gap between social media and your other marketing activities. In turn you will leverage social technologies to make your “other” marketing activities much more effective in driving reach and interest.

1.  Email Marketing Integration

Social Sharing  in Email

Benefit: Reach and Referral

Depending on which ESP (email service provider) you use, you can integrate social sharing to your next email newsletter or promotion. It works just like it does on website pages; the sharing buttons are displayed in the email template and upon “tweeting this newsletter” the recipient shares a link to the Web version of your email. Your ESP will need to have two features to accomplish this: 1. View HTML/Web version of the email, 2. Social sharing. If they do then implementation is as simple as a setting on your email template. Silverpop, and other services like ConstantContact and Exact Target offer these settings. Check with your ESP to find if they do and which buttons to flip on to make it happen.

2.  Website Integration

Every website should have a social component to it or you can consider it outdated. I know, that’s an ugly word that will make any marketer (and believe me, their visitors) cringe. In lieu of a redesign or having to overhaul your technology, here are two fairly simple things you can add to your web pages without breaking bank or your developer’s back.

Social Sharing Buttons

Benefit: Reach and Referral

Example Sharing Buttons

People share content, not pages. Keep this in mind when considering where to place a social sharing button. You know the little icons added for your convenience to share this content with your network at the top and bottom of this blog post. They come in many shapes and forms, and you can customize them to a large degree. Essentially it’s a snippet of code that you copy and paste into your website template. Ideally at the top or bottom, or near the content that is deserving of being passed along to other people. Not in the footer or side bar. My favorite sharing tool is Addthis.com or Sharethis.com.

Subscribe Tool Bar

Benefit: Grow your audience via collecting subscriptions across brand communication channels

Example Subscribe Tool Bar

A brand communication channel is any medium you use to talk to your audience in which they can opt-in to. Traditionally you would think of email marketing. However, becoming a Facebook fan or following your brand on Twitter holds the same merits. If your website lacks buttons linking to your channels you are missing out on your low hanging fruit. This is your audience, get them on board.

Implementation is simple. You’ll need to identify a section of your website template that can handle a set of small linked images. Ideally this will be in the header, sidebar or footer. Be sure to communicate that this is where to follow and connect with your brand (so it’s not confused with sharing). Some standard titles:

Follow Us

Connect

Join Us

Subscribe

Items to consider including in your subscribe tool bar include: Facebook page, Twitter page, LinkedIn business profile or group, YouTube, Flickr, RSS feed or Blog, Email opt-in form, or live chat.

3.  Offline Marketing 

Put It In Print

Benefit:  Grow your audience via collecting subscriptions across brand communication channels AND nurture customer loyalty 

I love it when I get my bill at a restaurant when it comes with a friendly little insert with their Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter information. Even better, a special offer for connecting with them on these channels. Don’t forget to promote not only your website, but your key social media channels such as Facebook or even Foursquare if you want people to check-in right now at your venue (or event). Two items to include in print: a recognizable icon and your handle or full URL. That way they will get the visual cue and also not get lost searching through a sea of Facebook Pages that may or may not be yours.

The concept here is pretty simple; make it easy for people to share your content and subscribe to your brand however they want to do it.