Archive for the ‘Blogging and Social Media’ Category

Social media is all the rage these days. Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, the list goes on. People want to know who you are, what you look like, what you’re doing and where you’re going. It’s an information craze that would drive IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing computer insane.

Organizations are adapting to the ever-changing landscape of social media, though with a cautious and unassertive approach. Unfortunately, playing it safe when it comes to social media will only have you chasing prospects and customers instead of the other way around.

Below are some lightening quick ways you can shift toward a more social media focused homepage for your web site. These aren’t revolutionary changes, but they should help you to stay ahead of the pack at least until you can develop a more coherent social media strategy. The three critical areas to focus on are interaction, information and portability. (more…)

Critical to any successful marketing campaign is a way to measure results. You must know whether your actions are paying off or if they’re headed down the wrong path. Without this knowledge, you’re flying blind.

Fortunately, there are a handful of ways to measure the impact a Facebook presence is having on your organization.

1) Page Statistics

If you setup a page for your company or product, then you open yourself up to a wealth of data. Dubbed "insights," Facebook enables you to view critical visitor statistics of your page. You can see everything from the number of new fans to unique visitors to a breakdown of demographic information.

From a marketing standpoint, this information is extremely valuable. Not only can you track the effectiveness of your page, you can also get detailed information on what type of people those visitors are.

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As I promised in my last post, I deliver to you a blog success. The extent of this post really goes beyond blogging. It encompasses any sort of content you publish online whether it’s an article, a web page, an e-book and so on.

That’s because this post is about getting traffic. And fast.

That’s one of the primary goals of why we publish content. We want people. Eyeballs to read, digest and interpret our content.

However, for most of us, getting hordes of people into the door is no easy task. Usually, it takes months of maintaining a steady flow of useful content, working connections and responding to reader comments. It’s hard work but it pays off.

But seriously, I want traffic now. I want people reading this post right now.

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People are not too keen on admitting failure. We want to see things succeed and prosper, and we want to know that it was our contributions that led to that success. Nevertheless, failure is an essential exercise. To not fail is to not have accomplished anything.

With that said, I will admit that this blog failed.

I hope that got your attention, so let me clarify. The blog as a whole did not fail, but a critical element did. It’s not necessarily bad that it failed as I learned some important lessons that I’m going to share.

So, what failed? In January, I introduced a new weekly series aimed at homepage improvement. In the initial post, I laid out a plan for the series and announced that it would occur every week.

That didn’t happen.

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This probably sounds like blasphemy. To not blog goes against what everyone has been telling you. All good marketing campaigns include a blog nowadays, right?

No.

And the primary reason is clear. If you’re going to blog for your organization, you can’t do it half-heartedly. You must involve yourself in it with drive, knowledge, time commitment and the right tools. Plainly said, either do it well or don’t do it all.

Effective blogging only works if the following conditions are met. Sure, you can still blog without meeting these conditions, but you’re going to have a hard time convincing people to spend their time reading it.

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