In my previous article ‘Social Media Marketing, planning your way to success’, I touched on social media marketing methods that you could implement on a free basis and how enlisting a little help from a few professionals may improve you success, but what we didn’t discuss was your Social Media Marketing Strategy.

More and more businesses are realizing that social media is an extremely effective way of marketing your products, services and the ability and importance of using social media to build brand awareness.

A couple of things that you must remember while creating your strategy is the importance of Community – this helps build belonging and trust within your social network. Flexibility – your Strategy is not set in stone. If you need to change it (which you will) don’t feel that you are back to square one – you’re not, you’re improving and building a solid platform from where you can most effectively work.

With that in mind here are my 5 Tips to creating an effective Social Media Marketing Strategy.

Don’t over stretch yourself

Twitter, facebook, linkedin, buzz, digit, myspace, bebo …………… do I really need to go on?

To run and maintain an effective Social Media Marketing campaign you need to research your social media tool of choice (depending on your market placement) and focus on your chosen few. If you try to be the master of all, you will fail gloriously.

Out with the Old, in with that new?

Defiantly NOT! The great thing about Social media marketing is that you can totally combine more than one method of marketing your wears.  Let your clients/potential clients see the colorful advert you placed in the local newspaper, they either know you already (and they feel a sense of community and belonging) or when you send them a offer through the post/email they will have seen you before and there will be a element of trust already present.

Create campaigns that complement each other, that way it doesn’t look spamy sending out the same message all the time but you benefit from the exposure.

Shout load and clear

Small to medium businesses can be very loyal to other local businesses so make sure that you take full advantage of local listings (most of them are free) including Google’s own Local business listings. Don’t forget to submit your website to all major search engines, my previous article may help.

Don’t be afraid of colour

The well known phase “A picture is worth a thousand words” isn’t just a phrase, in this case it is absolutely true. If your news topic, article subject or product can be complemented or even enhanced by the use of either a simple image or perhaps a “How to” video then use it.

The use of images and videos (some product related others friendly/silly) can break down possible barriers and make your company appear friendly, approachable and show that you care about your company and more importantly your customers.

Take responsibility

Ultimately your social media marketing will only be successful if used correctly. Make sure that you are updating, announcing, commenting and spreading the good word of your work. You can and should have multiple people inputting and influencing your social media efforts; however one and only one can be truly responsible for making sure the job is done. Assign this to someone, or even split the tasks between a few people/departments but make sure that everyone knows there roll.

Hope it helps …. comments, feedback is always welcome and if you have any question do not hesitate to contact us

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Writing a great survey is pivotal to getting useful and meaningful results that you can use to gain a greater understanding of your market – which is in the end why we are putting a survey in the field in the first place.
Taking extra special care to be mindful towards the respondents of your survey, respecting boundaries and being grateful for their valuable time is a must when building a list of qualified respondents.
In Part one we talked about the basic elements needed when writing a survey, here are survey writing considerations I like to call ‘fine tuning’:

THERE MORE!

Allow your Respondents to add comments and feedback (possibly prompted) this way they will feel assured that their point has been put across completely and will feel an increase sense of achievement and is more likely to complete one of your surveys again.

TIME IS A FACTOR

Keep your survey as short as you possibly can. Remember your objective, think about what your survey is design to achieve and create a list of questions that can achieve it. Continue to break your list down until you have a survey of as few questions as possible. In addition to this be honest with your Respondents, just them an accurate time that it will take to complete – Provide a progress bar – your Respondents will appreciate knowing how far they’ve gone into your survey. This will create a smaller dropout rate.

WELL SHOULD I COMPLETE YOUR SURVEY AGAIN?

People hate surveys and ingrained in us is a mindset that stops most people completing them. To get round this it might be a good idea to offer and incentive for your respondents for participating.

WE ALL LIKE TO BE APPRECIATED

Remember at the end of each survey to thank the respondents for their time. Everyone likes to be seen as valuable and regardless wether your survey was 3 questions or 25 it has been a commitment of time on their part so make sure your respondents get the feeling of appreciation from you.

SIMPLE BUT VITAL TO A SUCCESSFUL SURVEY

Before publishing the survey proof read the survey several times and when you feel you are totally sure, check it again!

Well that’s pretty much it I think … if you have any questions or contributions to the topic please feel free to comment or email us.

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While some of you will have been marketing your business way longer than the ‘Social Media’ age, elements such as twitter, blogging, forums and general social networking should be in it from the start and part of your business plan – resists the temptation to skip this step because while some of the activities are free to set up, there may be a beneficial twist that adds cost that you haven’t accounted for.

In the main, social media activities are free to step-up and relatively simple to implement however areas you may need to consider when taking on the Social Media Marketing world is what’s free and what has an associated cost.

Blogging – is available in a free format however often is quite restrictive on things like the url/web link. You may want to use your own Domain name (which has an associated cost). Free blogging account also has a limited amount of what we call themes (look and feel). If you have specific ideas on how you want your blog to look and feel you may wish to budget for a developer to write a theme specifically for you.
Also a consideration is content for your blog. Never underestimate the time and skill factor of blogging. If your blog is primarily a marketing work horse, you may need to consider copy writer to ensure you maximise the search engine ranking potential of your blog, this will obviously add an element of cost to your strategy.
Twitter & Facebook – at the moment totally free setup, however if you need branding (it to have your colours, logos, etc) it might be worth asking a professional company to do this for you. Also don’t forget about the time investment needed to make this beneficial to your plan.
Marketing your Marketing – sounds mad I know but you want as many interested parties as possible looking at, following, reading and forwarding your blogging and micro-blogging as possible. Sending out a newsletter (hard copy or electronic) will add cost. Updating your website to include and encourage followers and subscribers will carry an additional charge.
Monitoring – as always, with any marketing strategy……… if it isn’t working, Stop! Monitoring your Social Media Marketing efforts is a must. As far as blogging goes something like Google Analytics is a great idea and it’s free but endless you can manage this yourself it may add an unexpected cost. However you will be glad to know that both twitter and Facebook come with feedback and actively monitoring options.

In this blog article we have only just scratched the service of the kinds of tools to be used as part of your strategy but it probably gives you a good idea of where your budget will be spent.

To those who didn’t make it to the Social Media Influence Conference in London in June this year, one of the most stunning speakers was B. Bonin Bough who is the Global director of Digital and Social Media at PepsiCo. He talked at length how PepsiCo have used Social Media Marketing but the stunning thing for me was the Pepsi Refresh Project.

The Pepsi Refresh project was driven by social media and allowed the public to submit ideas for grants and allowed the public to vote for the best ideas. They have, so far, received over 30 million votes. That in itself is amazing, but even more outstanding is the viral nature of the project which has all the mainstream press and news outlets talking about it. So far it has generated over one billion media impressions in broadcast, print and online. I guess it sold a lot of Pepsi as well.
B. Bonin Bough said in his presentation, ‘That social media-led project has done more to change the whole company’s brand, for the good, than any other campaign.’

One other take-away from presentation was ‘Don’t let perfection get in the way of good.’ In this section Mr Bough talks of running with an idea even if it doesn’t quite work yet. If the technology isn’t perfect then run with it anyway.

The video clip below is of the while presentation, the Refresh Project starts at about 22 minutes in.

#FollowFriday, @rakemark, RT Me, Follow Us on Twitter- Confused? You’re not alone

Now there is not many of us that don’t know what Twitter is, but how many of us just
get totally confused or maybe even frustrated using the Social Media Marketing tool
that seems to self spawn words and rules faster than most can keep up with – quite
a few if the questions we get are anything to go by.

Twitter itself is becoming a bigger part of our lives almost on a daily basis.
This micro-blogging phenomenon has captured some of us on a personal level but has
also evolved into a business social media marketing tool and whether we choose to
tell the whole world what we ate for breakfast or not we are being asked to use
twitter in the work place and we need to get to grips with the basics.

Tweeting

Ok Twitter is the tool/website platform we use, but the text that we write into our
140 character limited box is called a Tweet.

Followers

When you set up your Twitter Account you will have 0 Followers and will be
Following 0 people. Twitter only kind of works if you change this as soon as
you get your account set-up so the idea being, you follow people that you
find interesting or informative and people follow you for the same reasons.
This cycle is self perpetuating especially if you advertise yourself with a
‘Follow us on Twitter’ Strap line on your website.

RT or ReTweet

So you have say 100 followers and you can see everything that they Tweet – some
Tweets just won’t interest you but others may totally inspire you and your need
to spread the good word and this is where RT or ReTweet comes in.

The RT button within twitter will create a new Tweet (in your account and display
it on your tweets) but tag the original Tweet Writer in there. Now your
followers can see the original tweet and may well choose the follow them as well.
So it’s not difficult to see how this activity virally spreads and snowballs.

#HashMark

You will often see a # within someone’s tweet – this is very simply a way in
which to tag a tweet to a certain topic or activity and makes searching for this topic
within the website much easier. #followfriday is a popular one !

Tweeple

One of those self spawned words I was talking about – simply means people that use Twitter.

I hope that this has given you at least the basics. Please let us know if there is any
topic that you would like us to blog about and we would be happy to oblige.

Happy Tweeting Tweeple! Don’t forget to RT this post
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As a follow-up to’ Make Your Website Design Engaging, not Frustrating’ I thought it might be useful to give you some honest to goodness practises that will help your web pages load faster without breaking the bank.

Starting with the very basics:

1. Images – very pretty, adds colour, interest and supports the textual based content on your website page, an image speaks a thousand words and all that, but also adds weight. By weight I mean the amount of data that is on the page and has to be requested and served by the web server. Now don’t get me wrong most websites have images but all too often, I come across the website that has IMAGES, Large (imposing on the page), pointless (offers nothing to the user) and Heavy (takes valuable seconds to load).When designing your website page make sure your image adds value to your page, are correctly edited and well proportioned in size for the page that they sit in and correctly compressed.
2. CSS– where possible use CSS files for layout and formatting. Your browser can cache the style and format of your page form an external CSS and loads your page a lot faster than if it had to parse through longwinded style script tags on every load.

Tables– try to avoid using tables for anything other than data, and nested tables are a definite ‘Don’t Do’. It takes the browser some time (valuable time) to work out which end tag belongs to what, match everything up and render your web page correctly.

3. Duplicated Code – If you are going to use the same piece of code multiple times throughout your website then you might want to think about putting it in an external script file. This way your browser will already have it in cache and will recall it much faster than if it has to run the script multiple times.
4. Clean Valid Code – Clean code is king. Search Engines love it, reward it and on top of all that your browser will render well scripted tags faster than any ill formed tag. If you happen to be using a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) HTML editor, take care to remove the (never ceases to amaze me) oodles of unnecessary, pointless scripting.

If you’re unsure what any of these tips mean then you should ask your website developer or you can ask us (we will be happy to help) by either leaving a comment on this post or emailing us directly, we are really friendly and tend not to bite.

Most of us (those who show any interest in the web), if we are in the industry or not will have heard about or know of Cascading Style Sheets/CSS.
Old Style coding was to style the page, on the page e.g.

But as I am sure you can imagine, not only did this make the page really cluttered, it also meant that every change would need to be done on every page, which is ok if you have 4 pages but if you had 100 pages this could make updating you website a bit of a chore.

Enter stage left CSS – Separating content from design and layout is a much slicker way to develop. It keeps pages clean and uncluttered, it keeps pages loading faster (browsers cache CSS) and makes updates not such a daunting task.

Ok, so building from your very basic web page in our previous tutorial we can now alter how our page looks from an external CSS (Style sheet)

If you are using an editor then create a style sheet giving it the name “StyleSheet.css” in the same location as your web page e.g. if you web page is on the desktop your CSS should be saved their also.

Go into your web page and add the element:

To the Head tag. Your syntax should now look as below:

Go back to your Stylesheet and enter the sytax:

Save it, reload your web page, if your web page has just changed colour then I guess you are all set!

Blog Tip: If you are using multiple style sheets on one project, don’t forget to note them at the top of your page, a reminder for you and a helping hand if another developer edits your code.

Starting with the basics of all basics, what is a web page? A web page is a file that sits on what we call a web server and is read or rendered in a browser like Internet Explorer or Opera or whichever browser you prefer to use really but one thing remains consistent – they all render Basic HTML Syntax/ our web pages.

The standard syntax of a web page is:

Open notepad, Copy the above text, save it as myFirstWebPage.html onto your desktop and run it (double click on the file). It will display a very basic HTML page displaying “My First web page”

Well done, you have written your first web page. Try changing the text within the “title” tags see what happens.

Now all we have to do is make it a little more interesting!

I plan to make this a regular blog topic, and when I think of something that I think you guys might find useful I will be sure to post it …. Requests are also more than welcome.

Blog Tip: Keep you code clean and neat, Google loves clean code and the neat thing is for when you have to de-bug – and you will learn the value of that if you don’t.

Google has launched a plug-in that for want of a better phrase transforms Microsoft’s IE8 Browser into Goggles own Brower, Chrome .

With Google’s version offering faster launch, faster searching and better compatibility we may well find that a whole in the market place as just been filled nicely.

Research released in August 2009 by Net Applications (a US based market research firm), Internet Explorer sat with a comfortable 67 percent of the worldwide browser market, while the Mozilla –Firefox Browser had a respectful 23 percent and Apple Safari’s browser had 4 percent.

As it currently stands Chrome has been making ground on Internet Explorer, so what will this new development do to the web usage trends

Google’s Chrome Engineering Director Linus Upson indicated that he would be very disappointed if the Browser’s market share has not increased to 5 percent on its second birthday and double again to around 10 percent a further year on.

Attempting to not only scrap the surface of the browser users Google’s Chrome Team are determined to knock the Microsoft Giant of the firm foothold held for many years by making its first distribution deal with the one of the hardware market leaders Sony. Although the financial specifics of the deal are being held close, it has been described as experimental. However they are already in talks to increase their distribution with similar computer manufacturers to boost distribution.

Check out all the browsers available, the good, the bad and the down and out ugly.

With the Business World firmly in an electronic era, as web marketers we need to take full advantage on the technologies that are available to us.
PDF (Portable Document Format) was developed in 1993 by Adobe Systems with a primary purpose to make the exchange and distribution of information and documents easier. Although Adobe Reader is needed to open this file format, it is totally free and is still one of the favourite freeware document formats available.
A PDF format is the perfect tool for your online and offline marketing campaigns, with the ability to add digital signatures, security and non editable content it is a handy little app but surprisingly it is the ability to easily add images and text to the same page that keeps this useful little format tops.
Creating a monthly or by-monthly brochure rich in both visual and useful content could be a very cost effective way to distribute and expose your company or products