Anya Woods is the Director of Advancement Communications for Lesley University and has shared her thoughts on a recent Facebook page development project.

I recently collaborated with our friends at Thought Labs – fantastic Facebook gurus – on the creation of a Facebook page for Lesley University. We just launched the page this week and have already seen great results, but the success of the page comes after weeks of hard work to make sure we got it just right. I thought I’d share five things we did that were instrumental in ensuring that the Facebook project wasn’t just something we could say we tried, but instead something with enough planning and strategy that we would see real and tangible success from it.

1. We did our research. In approaching the Facebook project, we started with the idea that we wanted to create a space for our Lesley alumni only. But that was just the beginning… a lot of schools have alumni pages. What was going to make ours special, what was going to make it work and keep our alumni engaged and coming back? We decided we’d need a lot of different kinds of content, not just news and events. So we created a home page with many different functions. It has events, alumni highlights, access to our library resources, photos of alumni, announcements and news, video features, and ways to donate. We give people a range of content to interact with, and a lot of reasons to keep coming back.
2. We researched and developed a strategy around our various audiences. Lesley is unique in that thousands of its alumni graduated from remote programs called cohorts, so many alumni relate to their program, but have never been to our campus in Cambridge, MA. In equal numbers, we’ve got traditional alumni who spent fours years on campus. How do we reach both audiences? How do we give them relevant information? Many schools face similar issues when trying to tie alumni chapters from other states back to the larger university. Others are looking for ways to bridge the young and more adult alumni. In any case, alumni bases are a highly disparate groups for any university.  In our case we focused on the issue of connecting locally, and addressed it by creating tabs for each of our local regions and tied all those tabs to an Alumni Chapters section of our Facebook page.  By doing so, we’ve given alumni a way to communicate with each other directly and locally, while keeping that interaction within the overall alumni page. Alumni are also able to post to the main wall tab, so they can communicate locally or with the larger group depending on preference and topic.
3. We tapped the expertise of people on campus and beyond. To understand what our alumni are looking for, we spoke to alumni, staff who have worked with alumni for years, offsite coordinators from other states who deal with remote programs, and administrators who are looking for specific outcomes from the cultivation of relationships with alumni groups. We even changed, significantly, our original plans and designs for the site based on the advice and input of these various groups. Without their help, we wouldn’t have been able to produce a page that worked for our audience and really served their needs.
4. We used fresh content and update it frequently. The page is not stagnant. And I’m not just talking about the wall. We post new information to the wall, but we also have dynamic pieces in the main landing page that will be updated frequently with new content, creating new reasons for alumni to come back and interact with the site.
5. We promoted our page everywhere, and will continue to do so. Not just because we want people to become fans, but because we hope that the content on the page will be relevant and that by providing a place for our alumni to interact they will see value in their continuing interaction with the institution.  It’s not about numbers, it’s about quality relationships. Nowhere else can our alumni message us directly and publicly and receive a candid reply from a real person quickly and openly. The value in that alone makes our Facebook page an incredibly important part of our communication with alumni. That’s why we didn’t throw up our logo on a page and start posting news items. We did our research, and created something dynamic and interesting, and devoted specifically to our alums.

In the end, we created a unique page that is tailored to the needs and wants of our alumni groups.

To check out the Facebook page, click here. If you’ve got questions about what we did, feel free to get in touch. If you love the page, contact Thought Labs to get your own!

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™

5 ways to create a successful Facebook page is a post from: Ad Your Comment Here

I’ve been into Posterous lately, for more reason than one.

Posterous is, in their words, the “dead simple place to post everything.  just email us.”

Why do I like it?  A few reasons, roughly in order of how important I view each characteristic:

1. It encourages a more robust content strategy: This is the main reason I like Posterous.  It’s all about content, which you know we like.  Here you’ve added one more outpost to the mix, and it’s primarily used to house this content, have people find it, expose people to your brand, bring them back to your brand if you want them to and so on.  The focus is on your valuable material, getting it out there and providing one more place for people to discover it.
2. Serious SEO juice: I don’t know if you’ve noticed this lately, but I’ve been seeing posterous.com posts pop up pretty high in search rankings.  The site has high authority, perhaps higher than your own website, which increases the chances that someone could find your material – and hence, your brand – while searching for something in particular.
3. Inbound linking opportunities: Because of the added outpost and SEO opportunities, Posterous gives you continuous strong inbound linking opportunities – more direct routes for people to get to your website.  If you’re not sure of the power of inbound linking, check out the HubSpot blog.
4. It’s not all about your material: Posterous not only offers another outpost for your own content, but you’re able to supplement it with outside resources in a way that’s more robust than tools like Twitter or Facebook.  While the brevity of Twitter can be useful, the depth of having full articles, or more deeply analyzed thoughts from outside parties also has it’s place.  Remember that sharing valuable information from any source with your audience adds to your own credibility as an expert.
5. Easy to use: You can post from email, your browser, your phone, the Posterous website – you can really post from (physically) anywhere or from almost every device. You can have multiple pages from the same account.  Etc, etc.  It’s pretty fool proof.
6. Measurement and analytics: Yes, you can measure “stuff” on a lot of sites.  But Posterous allows you to use Google Analytics and Feedburner as measurement tools, which  you’re likely using on both your website and your blog.  Sure, this may not be entirely unique, but it means you can draw pretty direct relationships between each web presence, and understand how each affects the other…..all in the same language.  That’s important and useful, at least to me.
7. You don’t necessarily need engagement: Posterous isn’t necessarily about building a community that will continually engage with your brand.  While those are all benefits built in to it, and of course it’s an added benefit, the focus is really on content sharing.
8. You can involve people in the process: Each page can have multiple contributors that only need to email content to get a post up.  Enough said.
9. Syndication options:  This should be pretty standard nowadays, but Posterous offers integration with Facebook accounts, Twitter profiles, etc.

How have you found Posterous helpful?

You can connect to Kate and to the Other Side Group on Posterous.

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™

9 Reasons Why Posterous is a Great Tool is a post from: Ad Your Comment Here

Kate was on Cyber Village Radio with Host Rob Thrasher last week talking.

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Kate on “Spotlight for Success” is a post from: Ad Your Comment Here

Can’t figure out where to start a “social media” marketing program?  Why don’t you start with a content strategy.  Frankly, I don’t think most social media programs should be done without a content production component, for a few reasons:

1. It’s your starting point. It’s pretty hard to have a social media program without having content to put out.  One way to get that is by pushing out other peoples’ content. But the best way – for obvious reasons – is usually to push out your own content.  See below.
2. It gives you credibility in your industry and backs up your product or service. By putting out your own content, people (end-users, customers, partners) see that you know what you’re talking about, and that you have internal knowledge on whatever space you’re in.  This content and credibility also justifies your product/service as a solution when it comes to making a decision.
3. It’s your brand. By branding your content, and developing a sense of expertise in your industry, you increase your brand image and your brand awareness, and you’re ideally able to reach a lot more people if your content is valuable enough to pass along.
4. It’s easy. This is the part that a lot of companies don’t recognize.  You already have all of this content inside your doors.  If you think about it, your company exists because it’s got at least some level of knowledge that’s directly applicable to the solution you’re offering.  You may have internal marketing documents, business plans, strategy meeting notes, or product write-ups that can easily be repurposed into content.  Not to mention the wealth of knowledge you and your coworkers have in their heads.  I’ve never actually seen a company that doesn’t have scores of content opportunities inside their walls.

It doesn’t have to be formal.  Instead of dedicating the amount of time it might take to write a white paper, why not try a few blog posts, or a one-pager on the subject?

So if you’re considering getting your feet wet in social media, think seriously about how you can add your own content to that.

What success have you seen with content production in your organization?  Do you have any examples of identifying creative content opportunities?

If you’re interested, you can get more information on how we can help you with your content production strategies.

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Why I like a good content production strategy is a post from: Ad Your Comment Here

This isn’t a rant about people who don’t develop a plan before jumping into social media marketing.  This is a rant on people in the social media marketing field – myself included – who keep pressing the point about how important strategy is to a social marketing campaign.

[For the record, I AM COMPLETELY GUILTY OF THIS]

The problem is this – we all talk about it is as if it’s a new business concept, this idea of planning and creating a strategy, and thinking about goals and measurement and the bottom line.

They way we should be talking about it is this:

“First things first, starting social marketing in your organization is like any other business decision you’ve ever had to make, since the beginning of time.  Know your goals, set benchmarks, etc.  Ok, moving on, let’s now talk about social media and how we can think about it at a strategic level…..”

The strategy part is a “Hey, PS, don’t forget that thinking strategically usually increases your chances of success for anything.”

This doesn’t mean that a company can’t experiment and test the social media waters, and it doesn’t mean that many companies will completely ignore strategy – many companies have ignored strategy since the beginning of time.   But if they really want business success…. of COURSE they’re going to have to create a strategy!

No upper-level marketer gets to their position without having strategized for each campaign or yearly marketing plan, and this is no different.  Yes, clients or teams will need to be reminded of the need for strategy.  Someone will always need to be reminded.  But we don’t need to make a business case for the importance of strategy.

The thing is, if we just say this to our team and to our clients – “Guys, we all know we need to develop a strategy around this,” they’ll nod their heads in agreement because they’re smart.  And the discussion can move on to creating a program etc.

I’ve decided I’m going to spend <5% of my discussion on this topic, and if it gets into that territory, I will treat it as a given, indisputable fact that requires no further discussion. I will of course talk about the actual STRATEGY, because that’s where the real discussion needs to happen.

Maybe I’m being harsh, and – you caught me – I probably won’t actually treat it like that in a discussion.  But I sort of want to, ya know?  The discussion has gone past the level of reminding people that strategy is important.  This is not a new thing. this “strategy.”   It isn’t debatable.

So, a call to the industry: Let’s all accept that you always need a strategy for a successful business decision, let’s tell our teams or our clients, and let’s get on with it!

*phew*

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Rant: You need strategy first…. DUH! is a post from: Ad Your Comment Here

I was just catching up on some podcasts, and listened to Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation Episode #184 with Jason Falls from last week.  I was listening intently – more intently than I normally do to Six Pixels – because not only am I huge fan of Mitch, but I’m also a really big fan of Jason, who blogs over at Social Media Explorer, and I like both of them for roughly the same reason.

They create awesomely high-quality content on a very regular basis.

So I was delighted when they touched on this topic briefly in their discussion:

We’re finding that some of the people who are really standing out may be producing lower quantity content, but it’s of way higher quality.

[Note: That was my summary, not quite verbatim].

Coming from these two, this was spot on.  Focus on creating quality content. As many of you know, I pass on a lot of content through various outlets.  Jason and Mitch are definitely in my Top 10 of “People Who’s Content I Pass Along” because it’s always great.

However, it got me thinking about how this plays out in the client-agency relationship.  As an agency or consultancy, most of the clients we’ve worked with so far have at least some level of timidity/hesitancy about instituting a social media plan, and, as a result, often need some hand holding during the process.

This means that frameworks and guidelines are put into place, along with calendars and expectations.  When it comes to content, there’s also that part of the pitch that says “MUST UPDATE FREQUENTLY!” So you inevitably need to put process behind it, which your clients buy into.

So, while the idea of having a strategy that focuses on quality content – which can often feel intangible in the business world – sounds like the best way to go (aright, it IS the best way to go), it doesn’t necessarily jive with the realities of an agency-driven social media marketing program.

We all know that value takes time. And for our purposes time costs money, usually a predetermined amount.

Let’s use a simple example. Let’s say a client social media program has blogging at it’s center, so it’s where most of the content will be produced.  As the agency, we work with an internal team of people who are the “bloggers-to-be” of the company, but we’re starting out with the bulk of the content production.   We put a “calendar” in place for posts, and here are our choices for conversations:

• “For this retainer, we’ll either give you Level One blog posts – our lowest level of value (but trust us it’ll still work) – at three times a week, Level Two posts at twice a week, or Level One – our most valuable content – at once a week. It’s your choice.”
• “Well, we like to take the value in one super valuable post and break it into three posts, each with 1/3 the value, so if you do the math, it’s kinda like having one super valuable post but you get more pieces of content up, which we told you was important.”
• “Oh, you’re wondering why we didn’t put up our first two posts this week? Well, we’re really trying to feel the vibes over here and wait for the moment when the value just pours out.  So we’ve lit some incense and we’re really feeling good that it’s going to come for Friday’s post. High-intensity value.”

Hmmm, I’m thinking these aren’t conversations that will keep us employed for very long.

So then, if we’ve decided that quality is better (which we’ve long ago decided), and Mitch and Jason have hinted at a shift towards perhaps less quantity and more quality – something that sounds like it could also be less scheduled and planned out, but we’re also bound to calendars and we’re communicating with clients who really might not wholly embrace a slightly more ambiguous quality-focused strategy, rather than a little more structured strategy.

We all get this concept, and have gotten it for a while, but our a lot of our clients may not have.

How do we have this conversation? Is it simply a matter of charging more for services? Do we as an industry simply start demanding highest-quality from our content producers (thereby offering highest-quality to our clients), no matter what? Or do we need to start having different conversations with our clients and those we’re trying to educate?And if so, how do we do that in a way that inexperienced people can still feel like there’s something concrete to grasp onto?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Your Blog Isn’t Special And You Have No Followers (socialmediatoday.com)
• Harry Rosen’s Blog & Understanding the Dynamics of Slow Social Media (leighhimel.blogspot.com)
• An interview with Mitch Joel, author of Six Pixels of Separation (trafcom.typepad.com)

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Quality vs Quantity in Content: The reality, and how to manage it with your clients is a post from: Ad Your Comment Here

Well, it’s that time of year again.  What did we all just DO?  Where is it all GOING?  Here are a few of my predictions.  Most of them I truly feel will happen, but some of them I just really really hope to have happen.

• Social Media will stop being a bunch of tools and will start being a legitimate strategy. We all know it, and have lamented it before.  Too many people have completely ignored strategy when using social media in the past few years and have just started grabbing at the shiney new objects in front them.  Social media will actually be viewed as part of your overall communications strategy, as it should be.  Which means, now more than ever, if you just start clicking buttons and throwing up Facebook pages, you’ll be behind the eight ball, and fast.

• Data will be huge. Not just to sit and prove ROI for your marketing department.  The fact that we can measure so much more in the digital space means that we’re going to see such awesome research and data analysis on things on like behavior and social trending… just plain interesting “stuff”….we’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg.\

• Social media marketing will explode in the higher ed space.  We’ve felt the energy rising on this one all year, and it’s really close to spilling over.  Simply put, if there’s any industry that has a pre-established and enormous audience that likes to be communicated to online, it’s higher ed.  Just get there.

• Social media marketing will start becoming more prevalent in the B2B space, primarily in industries we wouldn’t have imagined. Think manufacturing or construction.  More people are accepting the wide-range of possibilities that fall under “social media marketing” and realizing that there really are benefits.  They might not be Facebook or Twitter, or they might not be externally-facing, but they’re there.

• These industries will have front runners. What I mean is that a lot of the industries mentioned in the above prediction won’t enter the space en masse, rather a small group of companies will start to play around, and they’ll gain the advantage.  A lot can happen with a 6-month or 1-year head start.

• Video will continue to be used widely.  YouTube has been declared the Top Social Media Innovation of the Decade by Mashable.

• Personal Branding is going to be very important and influential. I’ve worked pretty darn hard at personal branding, and, if I must say so myself, have done at least a reasonable job at it.  But it takes work.  Oh, and personal branding online and the effects of web 2.0 on personal brand management are going to be HOT HOT issues.

• Cause Marketing will not only be used a lot more, but people will stop scoffing at it as a simply a marketing ploy, and actually accept that it’s still good for society and that companies can still be very passionate about social issues, whether they’re benefiting financially or not (obviously this doesn’t include extreme cases).

Happy New Year!

What do you think the next year brings?

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™

2010 Marketing Predictions and Hopes is a post from: Ad Your Comment Here

Ahh, the yearly round-up. Something about the coming New Years bash makes everyone sit down and write up summaries of 2009 and predictions for 2010. Reflection is always a good thing to start with before launching into another year, so I sat down to think over a few things I learned about marketing and social media in 2009. Here are my thoughts:

1) Measurement is essential, and really hard.

We blog about the importance of measurement frequently, and tell all of our clients how important measurement is to the success of their marketing and social media efforts. But despite the use of myriad tools and the delivery of hundreds of reports, measurement remains a hurdle. Not because we don’t have a lot of metrics and measurements in place or because the numbers are hard to calculate, but because the overall results, despite measurement, can often be a more qualitative sense of success then a quantitative and proven win. Brand perception, awareness and accessibility are not, at the end of the day, easily measured in strict numbers. So while we feel our work has helped clients make great strides, it is often hard to prove that in black and white without a shadow of a doubt. Marketing has always had this hard to pin down side, but with all the numbers that ARE available now, it is harder to say that in fact there really are some things we still can’t measure.

2) Personal branding is time consuming but very effective.

This observation comes both from personal experience and observation as well as from a good degree of reading and writing about personal branding and reputation management throughout 2009. Good personal branding involves work across many online channels as well as a lot of in-person efforts. By the time you factor in blogging regularly, keeping up with twitter, updating your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, attending Tweet-ups and other local networking events, applying for and preparing for speaking engagements, hosting networking events and following up with contacts, your personal branding efforts can quickly become a full time job. Managing your time effectively so as to allow time for these efforts is essential though, as a good faith effort in all these areas can decidedly pay off. There is no doubt that if you’re looking for work or clients and you spend time each week working on your personal brand, that you won’t at least make some lasting and great contacts who will help you develop professionally.

3) The age barrier to social media adoption is basically gone.

For the last few years, social media and online tools as well as mobile technology have all been discussed as they relate to the younger generations. But in my experience this year, I would argue that is no longer the case. Baby boomers and even the 60-75 year-old crowd is adopting social media in droves, using mobile devices to connect and networking in places like LinkedIn and Facebook more than the teen group early adopters. While their full understanding of how each tool works may not be at quite the level of early adopters, they are using these technologies as much as younger people. This is an essential fact to know for 2010, as marketers consider what tools and technologies to address, don’t assume that the older age groups are still lagging behind.

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™

3 things I learned about marketing in 2009 is a post from: Ad Your Comment Here

Academics hear it all the time, it’s a mantra of sorts. Publish or die. Publish research, books, articles, etc. in order to maintain your career and keep your job. As a tenured professor, you’re expected to be creating new content on a regular basis.

While publish or die has been a long standing expectation in academia, it is quickly becoming a mantra for public relations, marketing and communications professionals as well. Content creation has rapidly become a foundation for successful marketing campaigns across any and all industries. From universities to tech companies, law offices to start-ups, small businesses to international corporations, content creation is often at the core of the marketing plan.

Between blogging, twittering, updating Facebook pages, sharing on delicious, uploading to YouTube or Flickr or maintaining websites, content creation has become the mainstay of communications. In addition to being great content creators, marketers have to be creative and tech savvy, developing not only print materials and website copy, but good design standards, easy-to-use web sites and other online outposts, and video and audio content as well.

Being a good marketer is no longer simply about being a good writer and strategist. It’s about being a prolific, reliable and engaging content producer. As many marketing managers can attest, publish or die can easily be applied to our positions in any industry. I do think that in many cases, especially in higher ed programs that teach communications and marketing, this publish or die concept is rarely addressed. The focus is on more traditional and high-level marketing skills, but the core skills needed to use the new tools of online marketing are rarely taught. We should not assume that correct and effective use of these tools or the understanding of the new publish or die mantra is understood by online-savvy students. Instead, we should focus on educating a new generation of marketers who understand these tools both from a technical standpoint and from a strategic standpoint.

For example, content creation has a significant impact on SEO, and every marketer will be expected to measure and report on web traffic. When is the last time you saw a core course in SEO and SEM, google analytics and web traffic management in a marketing program at the undergraduate or graduate level? We need to teach students about publish or die standards in order for them to be successful contributors to the marketing community.

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™

Publish or die – marketing style is a post from: Ad Your Comment Here

I was on a website today (I won’t say which)…. but I left the website probably before I wanted or needed to.  Why? I just plain got lost.  And the problem was linking… way too much of it!  I know, I know… it helps your SEO, but there’s a point at which you’re degrading user experience by leading them on a wild goose chase for what they want.

I’d get to one page, wanting to read about products, and I’d follow one of the page links, which had more links and soon I couldn’t remember what the heck I was looking for to start out with.  I got tired of this quickly, so I just left.

So, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to offer a few ways to think about your website when you’re putting it together or planning the content.

1. Think linearly. When gathering information, people usually want to follow a linear and logical path to get that info.  Sometimes it’s from big-picture to details.  Sometimes it’s being led through the process your company takes with its customers.  Sometimes it’s a look at groups of offerings.  Whatever it is, think about how to lay your site out in terms of information-gathering.
2. Make sure the internal link makes sense.  Don’t add a link for the sake of adding a link.  It doesn’t do any good to be having your readers move between disjointed pieces of information, as it makes it more difficult for them to put the whole picture together.  From a technical standpoint, having your readers feel disjointed will also likely increase your exit rate (in other words, the leave your site!).
3. Make it very easy for your readers to get back to the original page they were viewing.  Much in line with #2, your readers came to a particular page to read about that facet of your company.  If they came to your services page, they want to know what you have to offer.  They probably want to know about everything you’ve got before moving on, and of course you want them to know that too.  Make sure they can get back there to get that info.
4. Don’t forget your blog and/or your social media assets. Directing someone towards a blog post or two can be a great idea.  Ideally (if you’re blogging right) they hang out there for a little while, engage in your contact, and get to know your company more.  Without overdoing it, this can be a great way to add an internal link that follows the above guidelines, but also has the possibility to really hook your viewers and supplement your content.
5. Think about lead conversion while you’re at it.  When you’re putting together a logical path for your readers to follow through your website, think also about how that goes into converting them to customers.  Would adding a particular internal to your services page add the “right” type of info for them to get out their chequebook?

Any other tips for people to think about?

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Find Content for Your Business Blog (buildabetterblog.com)
• Tips for successful link building (va4growth.com)

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™

5 Things to Make Your Website Links Linear and Logical is a post from: Ad Your Comment Here