1.  Use Images

Communities love images.  Rather than just posting status updates that require reading, post a picture to generate conversations.  Images are also much more likely to be shared than text based posts.

2.  Have fun with Holidays

Holidays are a great way to connect with fans and can make a page much more fun and enjoyable.  There is an infinite number of holidays to post about, so find the ones that best fit your brand, page, and community.  Carol’s Cookies took advantage of March Madness, and turned it into something directly related to the product – the cookies.

3.  Get Your Fans Involved

Contests are a great way to get your fans involved on your Facebook page.  Most people are much more willing to participate and comment if there is an incentive for them to do so.  Carol’s Cookies asked fans to post a picture of a dessert they baked for a chance to win a Carol’s Cookies apron.  Giveaways drive an audience, so use these to your advantage.

This was the winning post!

4.  Respond to Private Messages, Comments, and Posts

Fans want to feel that their comments and concerns are appreciated.  If someone posts on the Facebook page, it is best to respond in a sincere and timely fashion.  Commenting and messaging back is a great way to show appreciation, increase engagement, and create discourse between the fans and the company.    Having good relationships with your fans is the easiest way to generate loyalty.

5.  Use Humor

Humor is also a great way to increase engagement on a Facebook page.  Humorous posts and images always get attention from fans; furthermore, if someone reads something they find entertaining, they are more compelled to share the post on their own Facebook.

Today many consumers are more loyal to their favorite blogs than they are to their favorite magazines. People choose the blogs they read based on the topics discussed and the tone of the content.  Popular bloggers are doing a great job of sharing their personal experiences, creating enticing visuals and inspiring their readers’ purchases in the process.  If a blog features a product or service, readers see it as valuable information.

If blogger outreach sounds like something that would benefit your brand, your next question should be, “how the heck do I get started?”

We’ve simplified the blogger outreach process as much as possible for you in the eight steps below. Just remember that running a blogger outreach campaign is no simple task. Regardless, it can be a great way to organically earn credibility and attention for your product.

1.  Establish Goals

Your goals set the stage for your blogger outreach program.  Are you hoping for brand awareness?  An increase in website traffic? Clicks? Conversions? People to join your newsletter or sign up for a free trial?  Are you looking to earn awareness for your product in a new target market? These goals must be carefully established before moving forward as they will shape the strategy and approach of your blogger outreach program.

2.  Create a Strategy

The first step to a social strategy is defining the “who.”  You should have a deep understanding of your target customer personas and how they digest information online.  After you understand this, you will need to craft a story that bloggers will want to tell.  This may require doing a giveaway, sending out free product or providing bloggers with an experience they can write about.

3.  Build a Detailed List 

Once your customer personas and blogger requirements have been established, a list can be created of communities that target the appropriate audience.  Set requirements that will help you determine who makes the list.  For example, What are the minimum traffic requirements for bloggers you work with?  Are they required to have a certain social following?  Would you like to work with bloggers who have an email list only?  Do you prefer to work with bloggers who post lots of photography?   Do they need to be located in a certain geographic area?  Not only will this justify your efforts, it will provide you with a way of benchmarking results down the road. Ex: Do bigger blogs always perform better or do smaller blogs with a more tight-knit community garner a larger response?

4.  Craft Your Initial Message

After you’ve built your list, it’s time to get ready to reach out to the bloggers.  Write a friendly email to each blogger  that acknowledges a familiarity with their community.  This message should clearly and consciously indicate your ask to work with them and why you feel it would be valuable to their readers.

5.  Begin Outreach

After you’ve edited your initial message a few times, press send and start communicating with your bloggers.  Be willing to clarify any questions, provide additional information and brainstorm angles with the blogger that are most relevant to their community.  Also understand that each blogger operates his or her media outlet differently.  Most will require free product and/or some type of payment to work with you.

6.  Establish a Blogger Agreement

Once you’ve had a few conversations and agreed to move forward in working together, we recommend putting together a blogger agreement.  The purpose of the agreement is to approve the post angle, review the communication kit, negotiate pricing, and to establish an expected publish date.  Agreements aren’t meant to be intimidating, rather, they are meant to clearly communicate expectations for both parties.

7.  Amplify the Conversation

After your bloggers publish their posts about your brand, be sure to share their posts on all of your social media channels.  Sharing these posts will show your appreciation, increase inbound links and give further credibility to your product.

8. Track Performance

Once posts have been published, track to see how traffic, social followings and sales conversions have been effected. You can also monitor social mentions, hashtags, referral traffic, and social shares.  This process will help you gain deeper understandings of your audiences by showing you if the appropriate target audience was reached.

If you have more questions about blogger outreach campaigns and how they could work for your brand, leave us a comment below or get in touch!

Here are the 5 mistakes I see brands making most often on Pinterest: make sure your brand isn’t guilty!

1) Using lackluster images

Pinterest is visual by nature. Pick the most engaging image you can, and embellish with colorful text and descriptions.

2) Under-utilizing keywords

Optimize your boards by assigning them to a category and writing a description. Use detailed keywords to make sure the right people can find your pins, but don’t over-analyze it – users can tell when a company is pushing a product and are immediately turned off. Keep it casual, the way you would talk to a friend – you’ll be better off.

3) Limiting your posts

I often see brands sticking to just one genre – that’s what boards are for! Just because you’re a food company doesn’t mean you only have to pin recipes – broaden your horizons to any and all topics that you think your target audience might be interested in. Have a landscaping company? Pin home design and cleaning tips too. Own a yoga studio? Have boards for inspirational quotes and fashion. As long as your topics are categorized by boards, your users will be able to pick and choose which ones apply most to them.

4) Not Networking

Don’t be scared of the competition. Find bloggers or other companies that you admire (and your followers might too), and band together. By posting each other’s content, you’ll increase your visibility. I’ve even signed up for giveaways sponsored by a group of companies – they required me to follow 5+ Pinterest accounts before I could enter the contest. And some of those people ended up being my best inspiration! You’ll get more traffic, and your users will thank you.

5) Using indirect links

This might sound like a given, but there are few things more maddening than clicking on a Pin, only to find that it takes you to a homepage – not the individual post that you were looking for. This leaves the user frustrated, searching through the site for what they were really looking for. Not what you want! Be sure that all of your pins link to the exact page or post where the image is featured.

Hope all of these tips are helpful – Happy Pinning!

Title: Production & Logistics Manager

Education: University of Illinois, Bachelors in Advertising, Minor in Business Administration

Time with EIM: Started as an intern May 2009 and have been here ever since!

Hometown: Glenview, IL

Favorite Restaurant: Ron of Japan (egg sauce!)

Twitter: @KevinCass

Neighborhood: Bucktown/Wicker Park

Favorite TV shows: Too many to list! Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Dexter are at the top of my list…oh, well, now that I’m listing, I have to say Game of Thrones too!

What do you love most about working at EIM: That’s a tough question. The people, high quality and diverse work we produce, and the overall atmosphere. It may sound cheesy, but there is a sense of “we are all in this together,” here. Everyone is always working as hard as they can, while still trying to find ways to help teammates. I really enjoy working with everyone here; they are some of the smartest, most passionate, and unique people I have ever met.

What makes EIM the best digital agency? Well, most of my work here has been in operations and web dev/production-heavy projects. In terms of those types of things, I would say our process and creative is what sets us apart. All of our work is unique, and I love that about EIM. You won’t see a cookie cutter site come out of here.

What do you think the next big thing in web development is? I am not sure if it is the next thing, but something big that is definitely around the corner is 3D. I know, I know; 3D is old news when it comes to movies and even TV now, but there is this technology in beta a developer shared with me http://famo.us/. From what I can tell (note: I’m not a developer!), this is based on javascript and HTML, and looks like it is actually bypassing the limitations of your browser and utilizing your system’s graphics card (sort of like a game would). This makes it run much more smoothly and quickly. This is potentially better than HTML5 and other technologies, as it is not dependent on a user’s browser. This is getting us closer and closer to the crazy 3D stuff you saw in the movie Minority Report and such…

Project You Loved Working On: I’ve worked on a ton of projects in my years here. I guess the biggest project I worked on recently, that was fun, was a Wausau Homes campaign and website release. When I started here as an intern, I worked mostly on Wausau. Recently, I stepped in to help with a big push, so it was nice, and fulfilling to sort of come full circle and work on a client I started with. The marketing materials and website turned out great!

Of course we provided the finest Irish libations for our employees.  Guinness and Jameson all around!

Our employees like to be as creative with their food as they are with their work!  This was one tasty rainbow.

One of our clients decided to join us as well.  Stefan Wissenbach, founder of MagicFuture.com, is always such a great entertainer.

This must have been some really great food!  What’s Erin doing with that knife?

It’s always great to get to know a new employee!  Azra chose a great week to start at Envisionit.

It’s all smiles from this gang!

Happy (belated) St. Patrick’s Day from everyone at Envisionit; we hope your celebrations were as great as ours!  Stay tuned for our next office shindig!

Enter Apple’s Lion operating system in 2011 and suddenly scrolling is reversed. You’re a fish out of water, flopping around your desktop like you’d never used a mouse before, because Apple decided to mirror it’s desktop scroll to it’s touchscreen scroll.

And now ambitious designers and developers are rocking the boat even harder. Websites don’t always move straight down when you scroll anymore. Sometimes the scrolling moves the site in large chunks. Sometimes scrolling gets you out of the bed and into the shower. Sometimes scrolling moves sites horizontally instead of vertically. Sometimes it does both.

It seems that a two-sided revolution has crept up on us, starting with Apple integrating it’s mobile-style scrolling onto it’s desktops, and more recently with designers and developers disregarding conventional scrolling to create standout experiences. With both hardware and software changes, scrolling is no longer second nature, it’s now something that requires thought, preferences, and intention.

It’s always great to see a new frontier open up for digital design. If one-page sites seemed like the cat’s pajamas, imagine the possibilities a one-page site that scrolls off horizontally, vertically and upside down! The purpose of many websites is to tell a story, whether that’s the story of a business or of a product, of an individual or a landmark event, and stories often run through paths that are not straight and narrow. With your scroll path reflecting your content’s dips and turns, the web will be a richer place. On top of that, it allows users to engage more in the site, which in turn creates more engagement in the content of the site. And most importantly it creates that intangible quality that attracts someone on an emotional level. It’s the little unpredictable delight that brings them back for more.

The revamped news feed will feature larger photos and videos displayed on users’ news feeds.  Photo captions will also be embedded within the images, rather than being displayed separately like we see now.  Also, new changes are going to make it much easier for users to connect with each other.  Links will be shared more easily, check-ins will be more integrated, and pages will be organized into categories (photos, music, friends, games, etc.).  Facebook users will now receive more relevant content based on their page subscriptions and articles linking back to companies, organizations, and people they “like.”

Overall, the new design is focused around the mobile world, and creates a site that will be compatible and usable across all platforms.  We can’t wait to see how the update looks in person!

But luckily there are several tricks that dramatically improve anyone’s web writing.

Think about what’s important

When someone lands on your site, what do you want them to instantly know? Your answer is limited to 10 words. (Cue Jeopardy music)

A mind can only process so much. First impressions need to be easily digestible. If you hit the nail on the head, the user will peruse your site further. If they get confused, they’ll just hit the Back button.

Mark Twain never saw a website that he didn’t like. Do him proud.

Edit, edit, edit

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”

-       Mark Twain

Some writing rules are timeless and this one’s a biggie – writing less takes more time.

Stay focused on your core 10-words-or-less message. Remove anything that deviates. Rewrite everything with brevity in mind. Then edit again and again.

Take your time between edits

After you write something, sleep on it, literally. Press save, go home, and take another crack at it in the morning.

Many great writers commit grievous writing sins in their first draft, so you’re in good company. The heat of writing forces your brain to multitask to a fault. You may not see a grammatical error even though you know the rule.

Even a one-hour break helps your mind relax. The errors will pop right off the page.

Got other web writing tips? We’d love to hear them! Comment below!

OK, so if it’s not dead, what’s going on? SEO has changed. A lot. Specifically, one major aspect of SEO has changed — offsite SEO or link building. In the olden days, before the Panda update, link building was relatively easy — tactics like directory submissions, comment linking (spamming?), forum linking, paid links, footer links, and all sorts of other tactics could in most cases make a big impact on a site’s search authority.

Those tactics are now mostly dead and what that means is that link building is a whole lot harder nowadays. You have to have good content that people want to link to and you have to share the content so that people actually do link to it. And there’s evidence that co-citation is growing in importance, which places even more importance on who is linking to you than what anchor text they’re using.

We’re finding that for our more mature SEO clients (i.e. those that have had all the on-site stuff optimized to the hilt), the process of SEO is a lot more about what we do from the content generation and social promotion side of things. In the agency world at least, SEO has become a multi-disciplinary exercise.

And the other parts of SEO, the on-site stuff, are still just as important. Things like keyword targeting, good architecture, internal linking, 301 redirects still need to be handled properly in order for a site to rank well. And things like usability and site speed are still just as important — and while those things might not traditionally fall under the heading of SEO, they tend to fall under the purview of the SEO Manager when there is not dedicated specialist assigned to them.

SEO is alive and well but it is a lot harder. You have to create content that people actually care about.

1. Vast digital experience with worldwide brands
2. Encyclopedic knowledge of Saved by the Bell trivia

It wasn’t easy, but eventually we found Matt Elliott.

Having spent the last 12 years agency-side, Matt has seen the good, bad and ugly of digital projects. What’s the key?

“When a client realizes that you are more than just a vendor, but a strategic partner that they can trust – that is such a huge accomplishment.”

Past work with heavy hitter brands like Capital One, SC Johnson and CareerBuilder taught him the strategic thinking that truly brings out unique and memorable ideas.

We’re excited to have him on board! Trivia night will be ours!

A very short interview with Matt:

What’s the one thing everyone should know about you?

Even though I have been in Chicago for over 12 years, I will always stay loyal to my Detroit sports teams – across the board.  Consider yourself warned.

What are three things you can’t live without:

Family, friends, and good times (preferably with the first two).

Fill in the blank: I’m really good at…

Saved by the Bell trivia.