This a little something via Shelly Kramer and her gang over at V3im.com. She in turn got it from Gary Hayes. Believe me folks, Shelly & Gary are killing it. Check them out when you get a chance.
In the meantime, check out this cool visual for Social Media:
Wrath or Anger.
Simply put, anger is an emotion. We’re all guilty of it. Your favorite sports team loses, you get angry. You find a new ding on your car, you get angry. Anger is a powerful emotion; it can increase heart rates, blood pressure and raise levels of adrenaline.
It can also turn physical in terms of body language (clinched fists for example) or even further violence. Anger is a state of being that in no uncertain terms can drive one to do things that normally wouldn’t be considered “usual.” Psychologists point out that being angry can cause loss of objectivity and self-control.
Anger is broken down into two types: Passive and Aggressive.
Passive behavior includes a lot of self-blame, self sacrifice, obsessive behavior, evasion, manipulation of others and secretive behavior such as ignoring others, insults, anonymous complaints, stealing, etc.
Aggressive behavior is more outward bound with such things as physical threats, physical violence, verbal abuse, destructiveness, manic behavior, selfishness and many other related behaviors.
In Social Media, anger has had success. We all know the Motrin Moms case by now. Motrin inserted into an add the phrase: (while carrying their baby in a sling) “…if I look tired and crazy, people will understand why.”
While they used their outrage and anger AND social media to correct Motrin’s mistakes, it’s important to point out that those involved could have easily gone down another road. Instead of organizing and pointing out Motrin’s mistakes online, it could have easily turned into a flame fest and gotten nowhere. But fortunately, the offended moms organized together and eventually won a national apology from Motrin and the respect of several communities for the use of Social Media, namely Twitter.
Where do you stand? Do you see a tweet from someone that makes you so angry that you take it personal and immediately shoot of a reply and then after the anger subsides, you regret it? Wish you could take it back?
The beauty of Social Media is the immediate impact that those 140 characters have….but as someone with a PR degree, it also can be dangerous. Hopefully, not physically, but professionally. It can ruin your career, it can ruin a company with unsubstantiated claims which can turn into a legal mess, blah, blah, blah…
The point of this is simple. Before you shoot off that tweet in anger…take a sec. Take a deep breath. Get up from your desk, put the laptop aside…whatever it takes to cool down with a more subjective mindset.
Ask yourself these questions:
• What do I hope to accomplish?
• Is it really worth the headache or is it just someone’s idiot behavior that should just be ignored?
• Should I just unfollow the person and move on?
• It is a legitimate issue?
• Would a tweet reply accomplish something…or anything at all?
As the world of social media grows and it becomes more and more a part of our lives people being connected literally all the time, it is easy to forget that our words are much more powerful than ever before.
Having a successful web presence is key in today’s business world. Part of that success depends on a few factors that are so simple that they are often over-looked. It’s no longer enough to have a great location or a great product…it’s much more than that.
So what if you have this great location and great product, but no one could find your business? Or there were no prices on this product? Or if no one was around to help customers out as needed?
My background is in ecommerce and SEO mostly. So we’ll begin with SEO. Building your company’s web presence should include the site architecture foresight to utilize SEO to its fullest. Bing has it right with their advertising. There are so many SERPS that it’s easy to get lost in the mix. So you have to stand above the rest of the pack.
Properly optimizing your site not only includes the usual suspects of metatags and all that, it also includes building backlinks, listings in directories, etc. that are relevant to your business. Be smart. Everything is an opportunity. Received an email from a happy customer? Go back and re-read it. It’s peppered with keywords. There’s a reason they are happy. They were able to easily navigate your site, find what they wanted and purchase something or find the info they needed to become a conversion.
These conversions come from proper site architecture or what’s commonly known as usability. Sure a website can look great, have wonderful design aspects, but how easy is it to use? Where is your contact info? Can a customer find it easily? Are your call-to-actions easily understood? Every visitor to your site is valuable and you want to be able to engage them as soon as possible so that they stay on the site or make the subconscious move to bookmark your site for later.
Branding still is important, if not so, even more important than any other aspect of marketing your business. How many times have you seen a site that is so graphics heavy and had little product/service descriptions, yet still expected you to use your credit card on it? Personally, I stay away from these sorts of sites. They scare me to think that that people fall for it. Granted, they’re not all scams, but more times than not, they’re like a ghost ship…gone in the middle of the night.
Everything from the logo to site design is important in building an immediate sense of trust so that customers will spend money with you. In addition, branding includes proper content and a language that is easy to understand within the first few moments of someone hitting your site.
If you think about all of this, it’s cylindrical. SEO is to Navigation/Architecture is to Branding is to SEO and so on. It’s an easy game to play, but one that a lot of companies overlook and ignore. Start with a big picture planning of which goals you want to reach and go for it with these three easy concepts in mind.
You’ll reap the benefits.
I recently went out and did what a lot of people in our industry did…played around with an iPad. Sure, I was geeking out & will have to say that basically it’s an overgrown iPhone. But the essence of it immediately grabs you as you pick up and if you have an iPhone, then navigation is not a problem.
I’ve had discussions with people about whether or not print will be dead and where these tablets and related gadgets like the Kindle were heading. While I don’t believe that print will entirely disappear soon, I believe it is gasping for breath. Imagine a product that isn’t too cumbersome, that is very comfortable in your hand and allows you to read, surf the net and occasionally do a bit of productivity….that’s what the Ipad is in my opinion. Sure it’s got its “problems.”
No Flash support, some of the applications aren’t scaled for the iPad yet and look very pixelated when stretched to fit the screen, courtesy of the 2X feature…and honestly, the resolution could be better…BUT, I think it’s a definite game changer.
The Houston Chronicle changed its outlook on the Internet a few years ago when it put forth a policy that it would write for the web first, then the paper. By the time, papers go to print, news is secondhand. So why buy a paper when you can have the same news delivered to your inbox in a more timely manner?
This is what I hear a lot from buyers of the first gen of the iPad, that they are using for reading, occasionally surfing the net, etc. This would be my primary focus. I kinda get tired of lugging around my 15″ laptop. It’s a bit heavy and when I attend an event or conference, I’d like to be able to be comfortable and not have my shoulders killing me from carrying around a bag all day.
So will the iPad kill print? Not right now, but I think it’s days are coming…People like to hold things, they like to turn pages, they like to collect….but if you can do that with one product, whether it be the iPad, the Joo Joo, the Dell tablet, the HP Slate…whichever one you get.
Mark my words….print will be a thing of the past soon.
Stacey Hood, CMO, Provenance Digital
Not that kind of engaged….I mean, engaged with my users/followers. The big deal in the marketing world is the social media engagement. Seriously, how simple of a concept? This isn’t the field of the dreams, you build it, they come…you know that whole thing. You set up the twitter account, you set up the Facebook page…but are you really engaging?
Engagement isn’t just the responding
to emails, tweets, etc….it’s much more. It’s your website, it’s your emails. Are they interesting? Is your website easy to navigate? Is it optimized for the subject matter they’re looking for? Is your content of any relevance to your users? Is it the absolute highest quality that you can offer? (By the way, relevancy helps with SEO, but that’s another post).
The moment that your user chooses to let his/her guard down and approach YOU, instead of you sending them messages is a magical moment for everyone. It’s when they, the user, invites you to speak to them. This is the time when all of the research, planning and work pays off. This is when the SERPS from Google becomes nothing but something that’s quickly forgotten. This is the time that they have decided to continue the conversation by finding you out of all of the others.
So what are you going to do about it?
