Social media and your brand — A beginers guide

Yesterday afternoon I participated in my first webinar, which was put on by Cision. It was a pretty basic introduction to Social Media but I enjoyed it and learned some interesting things.  I created a summary to share some of the key messages that can be useful when trying to start up social media for your company/brand.

If you are not already monitoring social media, you are missing a lot of conversation and information that may have a significant impact on your brand and what it means to consumers.

Best Practices:

• Ask yourself – How does the target community consume news. Are they on Facebook? Twitter?
• Include your brand’s content in a mix of compelling external content. 1/3 – Personal brand content/promotion, 1/3 sharing other’s content, 1/3 engaging in conversation. These rules will ensure you won’t be branded as a spammer or robot.
• DO NOT ONLY POST YOUR OWN CONTENT OR PEOPLE WON’T PAY ATTENTION. Do NOT be purely self-promotional.
• Go where your audience is — don’t expect them to come to your site for information.
• In social media, there are usually people listening. The challenge is engaging them and interacting.
• People care about interacting with a person – don’t just be a brand name.

Starting a campaign:

1) Determine goal – don’t do it because everyone else is doing it. Establish as thought leader in the community, monitor mentions of the brand, develop relationships with media or riders.

2) Identify Target Community. It doesn’t have to be customers. Could be politicians, critics, media…

3) How should you engage – videos, responding, Blogging?

4) How will impact be measured?

Blogs:

• Interesting fact — 242 982 posts mentioning top 25 Fortune 500 companies in the last 30 days.

• Blogs have more of a “community” feel than traditional media.
• Can include live streaming.
• Podcasting can be streamed/linked from Blogs.
• People want to find information in a more organic way: Blogs, webinars, videos on Youtube, etc.
• Discussing metrics – in niche media, size doesn’t matter, find the “right people”
• Content can be fun.

Monitoring:

• Google Blog Search, Technorati, Twitter Search…
• Make sure only representative for your company responds. Potentialy very contradicting and unprofessional to give 2 different responses.
• Keywords: Don’t only search for your brand, look for point of need terms, competitors, etc…
• Identify 20-30 blogs of interest to your company and follow/link content to gain more followers.
• Transparency is key when dealing with negative feedback, engage your audience and show that you are listening

Tips:

• Google Blog Search: Inbound Links measures content sharing of blogs.
• Type link:theurlyouwanttomeasurecontentof in the search bar.
• Technorati: time filter available to find how many other blogs link to this Blog. Measures unique Blogposts, not every single name mention.

Twitter:

• Mr. Tweet sends you a monthly email with a list of people who have similar interests and posts as you, recommending to you people who you should follow.
• Friend people who share your interests so they push your content too.

Social News Sharing:

• Digg: Useful for finding/posting interesting content (photos, videos, articles, Blogposts, news releases). You can submit links and your own comments to the site and it logs them. Post interesting content pertaining to your brand, along with things that aren’t related to your company.
• Delicious: Same idea with a more sophisticated tagging system to organize content.
• Mixx: Bookmarking for the health care industry.
• Stumble Upon: Bookmarking client with an installable toolbar.
• Reddit: You can vote to make things more/less popular by rating content.

I love my iPhone, but don’t love Rogers!

For my birthday this year I was given the lovely gift of an iPhone. I love it. I use it for everything; email, gps, weather reports, texting, picture taking, internet, twitter etc… It is the ultimate time waster. I can install various random programs, someone which are totally pointless such as the application that makes your phone vibrate like an electric shaver and displays the image of the side of the shaver so you can pretend to shave your face. Yah, thats something I really don’t need but at least I have the option if I want it!

Anyways, getting to the point. I am currently on contract with Rogers. I like their reception, their customer service most of the time, and their selection of phones. The only thing I do not love is their price plans. I often end up going WAAAAAAAYYYYY over my minutes even with a 700 daytime, unlimited evenings and weekends after 6, and free Rogers to Rogers calling. Their data plans are what really piss me off though. Telus has a plan for 15 dollars per month for unlimited data and email but Rogers has nothing nearly as reasonable. The most cost-effective plan that they can offer is a measly 2gb per month for an outrageous 60 dollars!!! That is barely enough data to load my emails.

They say that they may have more options once the iPhone comes to Canada in July but knowing Rogers, we will still be screwed over. 

Update: Now that the iPhone has been release in Canada, there are online petitions such as www.ruinediphone.com that allow rogers customers to voice their dissaproval with Roger’s lack of affordable options and show the need for competetive pricing with other companies in Canada and especially the US.