Marketing Monday: 5 tips for getting started using Pinterest for marketing

Last summer, I wrote a series of guest blog posts for Stirring Up Success, a B2B blog run by Dawn Foods, a manufacturer of bakery ingredients and products and distributor to the bakery industry. According to a case study by Crossroads, StirringUpSuccess.com has been featured in top industry trade publications as a unique and helpful tool for bakery owners.

Here’s my fourth post in the series, offering bakeries some pointers for getting started using Pinterest as a marketing tool. Even if you don’t run a bakery, the basics apply, but I apologize if you find yourself suddenly craving a piece of cake.

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Pinterest is the hot new social network, going from almost nonexistent a year ago to Hitwise’s list of top 10 list of social networks by December to 21 million unique visitors in July 2012, according to Compete.

Pinterest allows users to visually share by posting, known as “pinning,” images or videos to collections called pinboards – it’s sort of electronic scrapbooking. Users can upload images or pin things they find online using a “Pin It” button or cutting and pasting the URL on Pinterest.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter still draw more visitors than Pinterest – but what’s been called the fastest-growing website ever has some obvious utility for bakers since popular categories on Pinterest include food and drink, weddings and events and kids.

Here are five tips for getting started using Pinterest for business:

1. Set up your account – Until recently, Pinterest was still in beta and you had to request an invitation to join. Now you can simply go to Pinterest and click the red “join Pinterest” button at the top. You will have to select five images you like before you can create an account by connecting to your Facebook or Twitter account – or in small print, electing to sign up with your email address.

2. Fill in your profile – Go to settings and fill in your details. If you want to use Pinterest for your business, use your company name, a description of your business and your specialties, and links to your website, Facebook page and Twitter account. (If you’re just getting familiar with Pinterest, you might consider making a personal account first — so you can do your experimentation without having trial and error visible for your business brand.)

3.  Create boards on topics of interest to your customers – Go to “add” in the top right and create a new board related to a specialty of your business. Start with a topic that’s consumer friendly, like wedding cake, for example.

4. Search for topics of interest to your customers – Using the search box in the upper left, you can search the captions of pinned photos for terms like “birthday cakes,” “cupcakes” or  “sourdough bread.” When you find something you like, comment on it and consider “repinning” it to your board – that is, add someone else’s wedding cake image to your wedding cake board. You can follow that board or follow the user if you want to see what else he or she pins later.

5. Add your own content to your board – Pinterest etiquette discourages being too pushy, but if you add photos of your best birthday cakes to a board about birthday cakes, that’s useful to other users. Use the caption area to include words people might search for like “birthday party” or “sweet 16.”

As with all social media accounts, you’ll do well to cross promote it: mention your Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest accounts on your website, in your email signature and on your brochures, for example.

If you’re stuck figuring out what to say, start by figuring out your strategy for social media and let that guide the kinds of boards you create and pins you post. We’ll talk more about strategy and content in a future post.

Colleen Newvine Tebeau is a former reporter and editor who then earned her MBA at University of Michigan with emphases in marketing and corporate strategy.  She is a marketing consultant who helps small and midsized organizations with strategy and tactics, including social media and communications.

Related articles

• Pinterest redesign makes social network easier to manage (mercurynews.com)
• Complementary Pinterest for “Business Guide” and new “Pins for Pinterest” course from Internet Business How To (prweb.com)
• Review: Pinterest update cleaner, easier to manage (miamiherald.com)
• Why Pinterest is Necessary for YOUR Business (tactfulsocialmedia.wordpress.com)
• 4 Pinterest Do’s for B2B Social Media Marketers (business2community.com)
• 7 Tips: How to Run a Successful Pinterest Contest (business2community.com)

Marketing Monday: Getting started using Facebook for marketing

By this point, Facebook has become so culturally ubiquitous that probably even the remaining holdouts who don’t have an account have at least seen it and are aware of the concept of the interconnected social network.

But even those who are active personally might not know how to use Facebook for marketing.

Sadly, it’s getting harder, as Facebook’s algorithm for what users see in their news feed limits the number of users seeing page content – the rough number thrown around is that only about 10 percent of those who’ve liked the page see that page’s posts in their news feeds. So even if you’ve already liked my business page, or Coke’s or Justin Bieber’s, there’s a good chance you’re missing what we’re sharing with you.

Still, it’s a huge, free channel to not just share your message but engage your fans in conversation, so it’s worth getting to know.

So here’s a guest post I wrote last summer for a business-to-business blog for bakeries, on how to get started using Facebook for business.  Stirring Up Success is run by Dawn Foods, a manufacturer of bakery ingredients and products and distributor to the bakery industry. According to a case study by Crossroads, StirringUpSuccess.com has been featured in top industry trade publications as a unique and helpful tool for bakery owners.

My first post in the series encouraged bakeries to take the time to define their business goals to help them be more effective on social media. Then we built on that with some how-tos for Facebook beginners:

Social Media Strategy – Facebook

Facebook has more than 1 billion active users so odds are good you already have an account with the popular social media site. But are you using it to find high school friends or to help grow your business?

Starting with a strategy for your social media will help guide you, as I blogged about last month. For example, do you want to use Facebook to talk to existing customers or try to reach new ones, and are you trying to make more sales or help improve customer support?

Once you have defined your social media goals, here are five tips for using Facebook for business:

Set up a page – not a profile, not a group. When you create your page, you can choose from designations including local business or brand. Facebook prohibits businesses from using personal profiles, so if you previously set up a profile instead of a page, here’s how to convert it.

Fill in the “about” section. So many businesses don’t take advantage of this obvious place to answer visitors’ basic questions about who you are and what you do.

 

Manage your page’s settings. Click on Edit Page, then Update Info and you can customize the name of your page to something like https://www.facebook.com/NewvineGrowing . You can also set up email notifications when users comment, and get the ability to either post under your business name or as a person.

Post a mix of content. Photos pop visually in your fans’ news feed, links can direct your Facebook fans to content on your website or blog, questions let your customers know you care what’s on their minds. Variety lets you see what your visitors respond to, and keeps you from sounding monotonous.

Experiment with posting at different times and on different days. According to social media scientist Dan Zarrella, Saturday is the best day to post to Facebook and the best time is noon if you want maximum engagement. That’s on average, though, so it’s important to see if that’s true for your customers.

How will you know if you’re on the right track? Facebook Insights gives you data on how many people your page has reached each day and what kinds of results each of your individual posts got. If you aren’t sure what any of the numbers mean, hover your cursor over the question mark or data point and you’ll get more information.

 

 

Marketing Monday: Five ideas for what to say on a business blog

A few weeks back, I wrote about how to blog if you don’t like to write — take photos on Instagram or chat on camera using YouTube, for example.

That post prompted several people to ask variations on the question perhaps best posed by Michael: How do I blog without looking like a douche who is bragging?

There’s an oft-used analogy that social media is like a cocktail party. You probably don’t want to walk into a room, talk only about yourself, ignore everyone else, then yell about the sale you’re having as you bolt for the door. I’ve met people who are entertaining raconteurs,  who have the ability to talk about themselves at length without seeming like a self-absorbed creep, but you have to be pretty danged interesting and charming.

Who wants to read a blog that’s all about someone bragging or trying to sell you stuff? Ick.

So don’t blog that way either.

Instead, if you’re looking for topics for your business blog, you might:

1. Share what you know.

If you’re an expert in your field, share your knowledge.

Maybe your friends know you’re a lawyer — but they don’t know what you do specifically, so blogging about some specifics might help them make referrals. You’ll give people useful links to share on their Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr etc. if they think their communities will want your content. And you can engage people in a low-pressure conversation that might lead to  sales.

One nice example is Brooklyn-based intellectual property lawyer Jason Rosenblum, who blogs about a variety of IP topics, such as Don’t Delay in Protecting your Products and Brands, which explains why you should promptly trademark your logo, for example.

2. Share what you read.

If you keep up on trade journals, subscribe to interesting email newsletters or regularly read mainstream media, put your reading habit to work for you.

Share a link and a quick summary of the article, explaining why you thought it was helpful or entertaining or whatever.

Much like creating your own content, acting as a guide to others’ content helps establish you as a knowledgeable resource.

Ragan.com points out to lots of content they don’t create, supplementing their own original material and keeping their site fresh.

3. Give people a peek backstage.

If you’re in a business where people don’t routinely get to see the heavy lifting that leads to results, show them the rest of the story.

Whether it’s photos from a restaurant kitchen or video of stocking a retail store for the Saturday before Christmas, your customers might enjoy understanding more about what you do. And if you show some of the labor that leads to your final product, it might have the added benefit of helping them understand why you charge what you do.

This goes double for anyone in a “glamorous” profession. Show a band rehearsal or an artist working on a painting in process or an athlete weight training and fans are likely to love that special access.

Some examples of behind-the-scenes blogging:

• Disney
• Google Maps
• Brooklyn Museum

4. Ask questions.

Don’t just talk about yourself — use your blog to ask questions. Maybe even offer rewards for the best answers? This is not only an opportunity to start a conversation but to get some free market research.

To go back to the cocktail party analogy, it’s tiresome to talk to someone who only talks about himself, and one way to switch that up is to ask the other person a question.

If you write a post asking for feedback, ideas, etc., say thank you, maybe ask a follow up. This is the blog equivalent of nodding to let the other person you’re actually listening.

To get you thinking:

• Online Business Hour
• ProBlogger

5. Feature your customers or fans.

If you don’t want to seem like you’re bragging or selling, how about using your blog to showcase the fabulous people you’re fortunate enough to work with?

Maybe these blog posts are a subtle endorsement, or maybe they’re just a straight-up shout out to the people who keep you in business.

 

What you blog about depends a great deal on why you’re blogging and who you want to reach. If you start by getting clear on who you’re trying to reach and what kinds of content that ideal audience might find useful or entertaining, it might naturally lead you to some good blog topics — and staying focused on what your audience wants will probably also steer you away from bragging and hard selling.

And as a little bonus: What NOT to do on your business blog, from SocialMediaToday.

Colleen Newvine Tebeau is a former reporter and editor who then earned her MBA at University of Michigan with emphases in marketing and corporate strategy.  She is a marketing consultant who helps small and midsized organizations with strategy and tactics, including social media and communications. Her WordPress blog, Newvine Growing, is in its fifth year, and prior to that, she used Blogger for three years on an earlier blog called Big Apple Bound. 

Marketing Monday: Be authentic, which doesn’t mean phony authentic or with disregard for details

I recently returned from South by Southwest Interactive, a massive technology conference that takes over seemingly every square inch of Austin with growing numbers each year.

While the marketing spending seems more pervasive — both Oreos and Game of Thrones sponsored pedicabs, as one small example — there’s still plenty of good content, ranging from 3D printing to the relationship of art and technology, from numerous panels about space exploration to the opportunity to get your picture taken with Internet meme Grumpy Cat.

One theme that kept coming up in digital marketing conversations was authenticity. Social media, among other tech tools, give companies the chance to talk directly to customers in real time, and many argue that unfiltered direct access demands authenticity.

Instead of scripted, written-by-committee corporate speak, show the humanity of your business. Let individual employees share their personal voices, don’t let the need to control the message impede genuine communication.

I’m a big fan of real, human interactions. When I think about my best experiences with big corporations, it’s typically because one individual employee went out of his or her way to help me.

But here’s where I worry that authenticity can go sidewise.

In one story, a panelist told of a client who wanted a professional photo manipulated to look like it had been taken on Instagram, a smartphone app used by amateurs to capture and manipulate photos. They wanted a pro picture to look amateur to pretend it was more authentic.

Related, if I see one more professionally made video with intentionally shaky camera a la Blair Witch, I’ll scream. Yes, there’s a time when a handheld camera works, but to fake being low budget or lo-fi seems to miss the point of authenticity.

I think you can eliminate distractions — re-read your tweet to check for typos, use a tripod for your video — and even have good production if you can afford it, and still be authentic.

To me, authenticity is about speaking as a human, like apologizing if your service let someone down, not about make-believe Instagram.

What do you think authenticity is in digital marketing? Do you think it’s actually possible?

Coverage of SXSW Interactive:

• Time magazine
• Wall Street Journal
• Wired
• Fast Company
• New York Times

Colleen Newvine Tebeau is a former reporter and editor who then earned her MBA at University of Michigan with emphases in marketing and corporate strategy.  She is a marketing consultant who helps small and midsized organizations with strategy and tactics, including social media and communications.

Marketing Monday: Building your social media strategy, part II

When someone asks me how they get can more Twitter followers, it’s hard for me to give a straight answer.

Not that I don’t know how to get more followers — there’s research showing, for example, that acting as a source of information instead of just talking about yourself will grow your audience. Hashtags help, as do including URLs and @mentions of sources.

But I think focusing only on building followers and Facebook likes, for example, misses the point.

I’m the queen of analogies, so imagine you’re opening a new restaurant. You’ve poured your life’s savings into it and cajoled your friends and family into investing in your dream, too. What do you care about most at the end of every night? Is it how many people walked past your front door and looked at your menu? Or is it how much money is in the cash register?

When you’re choosing a location for that new restaurant, you probably consider traffic counts. I’d compare your number of Facebook likes to how many cars drive by or how many people walk past your location. You have the potential to engage them in a conversation and win their business, but you haven’t yet.

In last week’s post, I offered five questions to inform your social media strategy:

1. What are your company’s goals?
2. What’s your communications status quo?
3. Who is your audience?
4. What is your competition doing with social media?
5. What marketing resources do you have?

To build on that and put into practice a plan that doesn’t stop at the number of people walking past your restaurant but actually how many meals you served and how much money you made:

1. What does your audience care about? Whether your current and potential customers are  “high-income foodies” or “recent college graduates” or “busy moms,” what do you think interests them? If you’re trying to reach both the business owner who is the ultimate decision maker and the administrative assistant who acts as the owner’s gatekeeper, for example, you might need to win both over, but they’ll each have different needs. Consider what each group of your customers and potential customers are interested in.
2. What do you have to offer that fits those interests? Do you create your own content that’s a resource? Can you share your knowledge or the knowledge of your staff? Or how about pointing out to articles and blog posts by others so you provide useful or entertaining content?
3. Where does your audience spend its time? Are you more likely to reach your customers on LinkedIn or YouTube? Instagram or Pinterest? Reddit? Ning? Unless you have unlimited time and resources, you will likely want to focus your energy on the places where you’re most likely to connect with your current and potential customers. If you don’t know, ask some of your best customers what they use and check out where your competitors are.
4. What do you want your audience to do? What’s the very next step that will deepen your relationship with them? Do you want them to visit your website, sign up for your e-newsletter, donate to your nonprofit? Think about a clear call to action like “come to our open house Monday,” and look for ways you might either connect your call to action to sharing content your audience cares about or ways to mix your call to action in between the other content you share.
5. How will you measure success? This is where it all comes together, the magic moment of determining your actual return on investment. Perhaps the most straight forward method is to make a list of easily measurable business metrics, such as weekly number of sales and weekly total revenue, and watch to see if they go up or down. Drawing a direct cause and effect relationship can be difficult, because social media is less about clobbering people with your marketing message and more about building a relationship and a conversation, but you can still watch the needle to see if you’re making more sales or bigger sales.

I think focusing on providing value to your current and potential customers, while measuring how successful you are in moving them toward buying, is so much more important than fixating on your number of Twitter followers.

Would you rather have 2,000 Twitter followers who love your business, who actively engage with you and who share your content with their friends OR 100,000 followers who will never buy from you and who don’t pay attention to anything you say?

This is an Excel template I built to plan and measure social media results. Note that it tracks both social media results such as YouTube video views and comments as well as business results like number of customers and sales.

 

Marketing Monday: Start with a strategy to make most effective use of social media

Last summer, I wrote a series of guest blog posts for Stirring Up Success, a B2B blog run by Dawn Foods, a manufacturer of bakery ingredients and products and distributor to the bakery industry. According to a case study by Crossroads, StirringUpSuccess.com has been featured in top industry trade publications as a unique and helpful tool for bakery owners.

Here’s my first post in the series, encouraging bakeries to take the time to define their business goals to help them be more effective on social media.

We have a shelf full of cookbooks, which help us figure out a plan when we cook.

Using social media without a strategy is a bit like turning on the oven without knowing whether you’re reheating last night’s leftovers or baking an elaborate wedding cake.

Just as understanding how to use a measuring cup and mixer are essential to baking, comfort with social media tools can make it easier to implement a plan. But there’s a difference between randomly throwing some ingredients together and following a formula – you need a strategy.

Five questions to help you get strategic about social media:

1. What are your company’s goals? Do you want more sales, bigger sales, new customers, more orders from existing customers, different kinds of customers? Be as specific as possible, so you can measure your progress.
2. What’s your status quo?  Inventory your existing communications, including newsletters, social media and brochures. Even in a small organization, this is worthwhile so everyone is conscious of what you have and so you don’t reinvent the wheel.
3. Who is your audience?  Describe who you want to reach, what they want and how they like to communicate. Are you trying to stay in touch with existing customers so they will tell their friends about you or find potential new customers? The way you talk to moms planning birthday parties in the Midwest is very different from corporate event planners in Los Angeles.
4. What is your competition doing with social media? You don’t need to copy what they’re doing, but you should be aware. It’s also a cheap way to keep an eye on them.
5. What resources do you have? Be realistic. If you have a small staff with no communications budget, you need to be selective about what you take on. Consider your talents and interests as well. For example,would you rather write or take pictures?

Answering these questions doesn’t mean you have a social media strategy, but it should get the conversation started.

One final thought: don’t limit yourself by only thinking about pushing out information. Social media is a two-way conversation. It can be an excellent way to ask questions, listen to what people are saying about you and your competition and to respond to customer concerns.

Colleen Newvine Tebeau is a former reporter and editor who then earned her MBA at University of Michigan with emphases in marketing and corporate strategy.  She is a marketing consultant who helps small and midsized organizations with strategy and tactics, including social media and communications.

Related resources:

• Free e-book from Radian6 on social media strategy
• Five tips from SocialMediaToday.com on building a social media strategy
• Social media marketing from A to Z on New York Times’ small business blog
• ClickZ’s six steps for social media success, starting with listening
• Chris Brogan’s 2008 post on starting your social media strategy — platforms and tools might have changed in the years since, but the concepts are pretty consistent

Learn the steps to making a red velvet cake with Sara Moulton and Cakeman Raven:

Marketing Monday: 5 easy troubleshooting tips for technology

Maybe you haven’t used computers or the Internet much, but here we are in an era when email, websites and social media are essential tools of business.

It can be overwhelming enough just to learn the peculiar language of Twitter or to find the right images to use on your blog — let alone figure out how to trouble shoot if some technological tool isn’t working for you.

I do not work in tech support — far from it — but to minimize my frustration and reduce my reliance on the help desk, I’ve developed a few tricks I try whenever technology acts up.

1. Close the program or the browser tab and restart it

If Microsoft Word or PowerPoint seem like they aren’t acting right — maybe text looks weird in my document or the option I’m looking for isn’t where I know it should be — I save my work, close the program and relaunch it.

Likewise, if a Web-based tool like Google Calendar or gmail seems janky, I’ll close the window and launch it in a new window, maybe logging out and logging back in.

2. If it’s a Web-based program like Facebook or WordPress, try a different browser

My goal is to isolate the problem and work around it, if I can.

So if I’m trying to add a photo to my WordPress blog on Firefox and it’s not working, I might try Chrome or Explorer. That will help me figure out if it’s a problem with WordPress or my photo, or if it’s maybe just compatibility with my preferred browser and the tool I’m using.

3. Restart your computer

Years ago, I worked at a newspaper where we reporters joked about how the first suggestion we’d get from tech support, no matter the problem, was “Have you tried restarting your computer?”

While it seemed a little lazy, doggone if it didn’t work much of the time.

I learned to always do that before asking for help.

4. Try starting the function again from the beginning

Sometimes I’ll just back up a little bit — it feels a little like rocking the car to get unstuck in the snow, instead of just mashing the gas pedal to the floor and digging into the problem even deeper.

Maybe I’m trying to create a photo gallery on my Facebook page but it’s not working right. Instead of just repeatedly clicking on the step I want to do next, trying to force it to cooperate, I might close the upload window, reload my page and start from scratch with uploading.

5. Google the problem you’re having

This I learned from our website manager at a job a few years ago — I’d go ask him to troubleshoot something, and as I stood there, he’d Google my problem.

Nearly every time, someone would have written an article or blog post with tips on my issue, often with step-by-step screenshots.

Alternatively, you might find via search that it’s not just you, but Twitter is overwhelmed by inauguration tweets so it’s slow or HootSuite‘s scheduling function isn’t working. At least then you’ll know it’s not you, it’s them.

What about you? What do you do when technology frustrates you?

Colleen Newvine Tebeau is a former reporter and editor who then earned her MBA at University of Michigan with emphases in marketing and corporate strategy.  She is a marketing consultant who helps small and midsized organizations with strategy and tactics, including social media and communications.

Marketing Monday: 5 tips for using email better

Social media gets a lot of buzz as the cool, exciting way to do marketing.

I get it. I’m a social media nerd. Tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn give us a way to connect with others faster and more efficiently than ever, and they’re growing like crazy.

Mashable reported that Twitter had 200 active users in December, double what it had in September 2011. That’s on par with LinkedIn’s 187 million monthly active users in November, but still well behind Facebook, the 800-pound gorilla with more than 1 billion monthly active users as of October.

But a spring 2012 study by Ipsos found that 85 percent of online-connected global citizens in 24 countries use the Internet for emails while 62 percent use it for social networking. Email still has the edge.

If you want to reach people who aren’t on social media, or people who have social media blocked at work, or if you just want to be in full control of your content and not have a 140-character limit, don’t give up on email marketing yet.

To do email marketing well, here are five things to consider:

1. What’s the goal of your email?

Why do you want to send your customers an email? What would be your perfect result?

Try to drill down on one specific goal — to book more reservations for Monday nights or to sell more of this particular product — both so you can write a clear, compelling message and so you can measure its results.

StrongMail says:

Consumer attention is hard to attract and keep, so instead of trying to pack as much information and call-to-action opportunities in your promotional content as possible, shift to create clear, single-focused messaging that speaks to the identified stages in the buying process for your product or service.

Create scannable content. Content needs to be easily read on multiple devices: in email, on your website or social media sites. The primary purpose or call to action needs to be easily identified and understood within the first page without having to scroll down several pages, so consumers know what you want them to do and can take action.

Sure, you can add some related thoughts, like a reminder of your new expanded hours or that you have an improved website, but try not to confuse or distract from your one main goal.

2. What’s the subject line?

A/B testing is fancy marketing speak for comparing two options to see which works best. MailChimp makes it easy to try two subject lines.

Have you ever been dying to open an email with the subject line “XYZ Corporation’s February newsletter?” Me, neither — that’s the company’s view of its monthly newsletter but it has nothing to do with what excites me when it hits my inbox.

I like subject lines that focus on what the recipient wants: information, tickets, photos, exclusive access, you name it. It shouldn’t sound smarmy, but it should give me a reason to pick your email out of the hundreds I get to actually read it. Make me feel good about my decision to give you my email address.

MailChimp gives pointers on writing good subject lines — and makes it easy to experiment with its A/B test tool, in which you write two subject lines, it sends some of each to a sliver of your list then it can send the winner to the rest.

Watch out for words like “free” and “sex” that will trigger spam filters.

More on subject lines from WPromote and AWeber.

3. When should you send it?

MailerMailer’s Email Marketing Metrics Report shows open rates by time of day. Click to learn more.

You can find mountains of data around what works best for email marketing on average. For example, MailerMailer’s Email Marketing Metrics Report analyzes more than 1.2 billion opt-in email newsletters from 80,000 newsletter campaigns to find that email open rates are higher earlier in the week, messages scheduled between roughly 4 p.m. and 4 a.m. get higher open rates and messages scheduled between about 4 p.m. and 8 a.m. get more clicks.

What does that mean for you?

It could mean that sending an email at 1 a.m. Tuesday will lead to better results.

But do you have recipients in numerous time zones? Maybe that will affect your results.

Are your customers in an industry with non-standard work hours — are they musicians or doctors or chefs, who don’t work a typical 9 to 5 shift? Their email habits could be very different.

You might experiment with the times that work best on average, but then adjust based on what you know about your customers.

More about timing from Deliverability.com and from Dan Zarrella’s Science of Timing

4. Is it mobile optimized?

Have you looked around lately and noticed that every single person seems to have some kind of device in his or her hands — an iPhone, an Android, an iPad, something?

EmailMonday shared these two stats:

More email is read Mobile than on a desktop email client or via webmail. Stats say 43% of email is now opened on a mobile device Litmus –”Email Analytics” (December 2012)

78% Of US Email Users Will Also Access Their Emails Via Mobile By 2017 – Forrester Research “Email Marketing Forecast 2012 – 2017″ (2012)

So make sure you’re testing your emails on a phone. Does the formatting work? Does the length seem overwhelming when you aren’t reading it on your big desktop screen? Do the call to action buttons show up?

5. How will you know if it worked?

Here’s where it pays off to use an email service like Constant Contact or MailChimp, instead of just pushing messages from Outlook or Gmail — you can see how well each email performed.

For example, a Constant Contact blog post headlined Learning from Email Metrics points out you can analyze:

• the percentage of recipients who opened your email
• the number of people who clicked on a link from your email
• how many people are sharing your email on social networks and on which ones
• how many email addresses on your list failed
• how many recipients unsubscribed

It also notes:

your email metrics are a little like stocks that you own – you don’t want to fret over them every day. Set aside a few minutes every couple of weeks to look at your stats, look for overall trends, and check on what type of things are engaging readers.

Colleen Newvine Tebeau is a former reporter and editor who then earned her MBA at University of Michigan with emphases in marketing and corporate strategy.  She is a marketing consultant who helps small and midsized organizations with strategy and tactics, including social media and communications.

Blogversation 2012: How do you use social media to uplift your life?

Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.

Today’s question comes from Lauren McCabe, mermaidchronicles.com, @mermaidtales on Twitter, originally posted on her blog under the headline In Defense of Facebook, Twitter and Every Social Network:

Lauren McCabe wants to know how you use social media to uplift your life

 

I’ve noticed something: when one of my friends deletes their Facebook account, it’s always in reaction to some disastrous incident involving love.

My friend in Rockaway wasn’t on Facebook because his ex-wife cheated on him with someone she met on MySpace. “I’m done with that stuff,” he said.

One night during my sophomore year of college, I stumbled back to my dorm room exasperated by another failed romance that started with a guy flirting with me on Facebook. I promptly deleted my account.

Social media has inevitably started to play a prominent role in this space of failed connections, and thus sometimes becomes the scapegoat. “Social media made my wife cheat,” or for me, led to another aching heart.

But before we blame social media for all our social woes, here’s a study that finds Facebook isn’t making us sad, lonely or even happy, but rather it is making happy people happier and lonely people lonelier. Just like a harp doesn’t make beautiful music, social media doesn’t make someone a cheater. The harpist makes beautiful music come from the harp. The cheater uses social media to cheat. Social media and a harp are just tools that we use to create our own experiences.

When you look at it this way, the opportunities to use social media to do something amazing are endless; especially since the most important things we do in life often require the participation of other people. People to be our clients, to support our art, to share our secrets, to join our bands, to read our novels, to love, to be with. And in this way social media can be our tool to make anything happen.

If you’re launching a business and need clients, use social media to connect with clients.

If you want to do more things in your community, use social media to keep track of events.

If someone has hurt you and cheated on you and social media was a part of that, don’t use social media to flirt. After that fateful night, I vowed never to let a man woo me on my wall again.

So here are five ways to use social media to make your life better, to forge more meaningful connections with the people you care about, and to engage your community in a deeper way.

Social media, like life, is what you make out of it. So make something amazing.

1. Rekindle

On Sunday, I bought a mandolin. I love bluegrass; when I hear it, something inside me spins all the way into the sky.

I have always played huge, clunky instruments that I have to tow around. The harp. The piano. The French horn. Things that require me to go to the instrument, rather than the instrument coming with me. I am a traveler now; I move houses and cities and countries constantly, and I need a companion. I need an instrument that can fit into a bag and journey with me.

Yesterday, twelve minutes before closing, I walked into Bywater Music and bought my mandolin. Paul, the owner, gave me the phone number of Pete, the mandolin teacher.  I walked out into the New Orleans sunset with everything I needed to begin playing. I was so happy. There is nothing in the world like getting a new instrument and sitting down to begin playing.

I took a picture of my mandolin with Instagram and posted it on Twitter and Facebook. And there from the depths of Facebook emerged people that I hadn’t spoken to in years. The old Director of American Music back at my college radio station who DJed the bluegrass show, commented “Yee haw!”

Then there was Dave, who actually gave me my first bluegrass CD, who made me fall in love with the sound of the fiddle. He jumped in, too.

Tim, whom I shared a dorm wall with my senior year, who constantly held jam sessions filled with guitars and flutes and bongo drums, asked me to send him a recording so we can begin jamming.

This is so cool. I love how people can come back into my life because we are traveling along a similar path again, because we are relevant again from our experiences.

In our lives, we meet thousands of people. They come into our lives, and then they leave. Paths diverge and they disappear into the fog of the future.

One of the most beautiful things is when your path reunites with an old friend’s, when your lives that have spindled away in different directions now come back and cross again. How much wiser you all are. How many more stories you all have to tell.

Use social media like this: to reunite with people you’ve lost.

2. Art

I love art. I create art sometimes, but mostly I enjoy supporting artists and making sure that they are able to revolutionize the way we think about the world.

There is this band, Truckstop Honeymoon, that sings a song that makes me cry every time I hear it:

In life we are married by preacher and church
In death we will be married in rich black earth

When they sing this, I can feel the weight of eternity in their voices. I can feel our desire to have something forever, and then the wrenching realization that death is the only forever we will ever have.  It is so hopeful, so hopeless, so human.

They’ll be playing at DBA this Thursday, Oct. 18 in New Orleans. I will be there, I will be there, I will be there. You should come, too.

And this is how I discovered that they’ll be here in New Orleans: a sole Facebook update last Wednesday, eight hours after they posted it.

The merman was shocked when I told him they were playing, “I just checked their website last week.”

But you can’t sign up to receive website updates, can you?

This is how you can use social media: to have more Thursday nights full of beautiful, aching melodies.

3. Travel

When we left the tea village, Mohin cried.

“Here,” he gave us two silk scarves. “They have been blessed by my Buddhist priest. For your safe travels.”

How can I describe to you how much of nothing Mohin had? How can I describe to you that he made a dollar a day and was giving us gifts? How can I describe to you how friendship goes beyond culture, beyond language, beyond words and can exist in the space between two people making each other’s lives a little less lonely?

Here’s a picture of the Merman and Mohin and a beautiful tree with a hollow that we could climb inside.

In fact, here is Merman actually climbing inside.

And here’s what happened a year ago. Someone cut this tree down. Mohin remembered our time there, he remembered the picture, he looked it up on Facebook, and he told us this in a comment on the picture. In a small way, we have become a part of this village across continents. That we can still talk to Mohin, Facebook chat with him, see pictures of him, is astounding.

Use social media to do this: stay present in that small tea town in India that changed you, and to let that small tea town in India continue to change you.

4. Politics

I like to say I’m apolitical, but really I’m not. I have strong views. I will argue vehemently with you. I’ll do it as good naturedly as possible because I love people who are different from me – I can learn something from them.

But here’s the thing: everyone in my close circle is liberal like me. Which is great, but not interesting.

Well lookey here, exactly 14 of my 785 Facebook friends like Mitt Romney’s Facebook page. And then I have a friend who is becoming a doctor to save unborn children from murderer abortion doctors, or so she says. This all makes great fodder for some fascinating conversation.

During health care reform, I had a long-winded debate in the Facebook comments section of the old boss of a surf camp I worked for. I learned a lot about the other’s point of view and I got to hash out some tough issues.

These are conversations that I would never have in person with these people simply because we would never actually spend time together, but I love that we can still debate and discuss and learn from one another, that I can still broaden my empathy and understanding of the other point of view.

Use social media for this: to remember your viewpoint is not the only one.

5. And?

How do you use social media to uplift your life? I want to know.  Tell me in the comments below.

Blogversation 2012: How do you prefer to communicate?

Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.

Today’s question comes from your Blogversation hostess, Colleen: @cnewvine on Twitter.

How do you prefer to communicate? Does it depend on the person, your goal, your mood?

My husband, John, recently declared that he’s had it with email. He gets too much of it, he’s overwhelmed trying to keep up with it, and he’d rather just quit it entirely.

Coincidentally, I’d been thinking that morning how irritating I find the phone.

Somehow my phone always rings at the most inopportune time — I’m dashing out the door, we’re sitting down to dinner, I’m in the middle of something I’d really like to keep my focus on. As a result, I often keep the ringer on my phone off and check for messages now and again.

I wasn’t always this way. Like most American teenage girls, I probably spent half my waking hours talking about absolutely nothing on the phone – so much so that my mom bought me my own phone line in my bedroom as a gift one Christmas.

Moving to New York played a part in my change in attitude.

We live in a one-bedroom apartment, which means if I’m on the phone and John’s home, I can either yammer away near him, which feels rude, or go occupy some chunk of the apartment, which feels like shutting him off from our already limited square footage. Talking outside is an option, if you don’t mind sirens, horns, the rumble of trucks and any number of other noisy distractions.

Back when we had a Midwestern house, he’d sometimes chat with a friend downstairs in his man cave and I’d have no idea he’d even been on the phone until he hung up and told me someone said hello.

Plus we don’t have a landline here and the sketchy AT&T service on my cell means managing delays and drops, sometimes having to stand near a bedroom window for clear reception. I know cellphones are new technology, but it’s annoying and distracting.

John and I agree on one thing: we prefer in-person conversation. There’s no substitute for the intimacy of being in each other’s space, making eye contact, reading each other’s body language and not having technology between you.

But he prefers the phone as his second choice, because he likes hearing voice inflections and especially likes sharing a real-time laugh.

My Plan B is email — his nemesis.

I’m a writer. I think intuitively in writing, and (I like to think) my vocabulary is better with a little time to compose.

My friends are busy, and have schedules all over the map. If I send an email, they can reply whenever and wherever they have time. Ditto for messages I receive. I have friends who are nutty morning people, and they can send me notes hours before I get up, allowing me to respond at a more civilized hour.

I like that if I have one little thought to share, like passing along a link to an article or a YouTube video, I can do that with just a few sentences.With a phone call, it would feel awkward to call a friend and just say, “Hey, did you see that band you like is going to be on Letterman Thursday?” then hang up.

Related, if I’m sharing something, the recipient can click right through, instead of saying “Did you see that article in New York magazine? Yup, you should make a note to yourself to look that up later.”

My plan C: social media. It has the same benefits of sharing links, photos and such, with a more social, interactive aspect with a fun X factor. I love when I post something to Facebook and get a response from some long-lost person I’d nearly forgotten was a Facebook friend.

That’s not to say I’m totally against the phone. I think I just treat it more like making a date. I want to have the time and be logistically in a place that allows me to focus on the person on the other end instead of my watch or my whereabouts.

Does that make me more “Call Me Maybe” than “I Just Called to Say I Love You?”