Social media marketing | Liz Hover's Diary of a Web Gal

Thanks to Matt Shepherd for tweeting about this.

The video originally appeared in a post on Search Engine Land.

I would have posted this yesterday had I not been so pissed off about my key snapping off in my bike lock and having to walk home in +30°C … and melting.

You may well have read about the Social Media ProBook (a free ebook) by now – I’ve read at least five posts today from high profile bloggers endorsing this resource.

Thanks – as always – to the ever-insightful Adam Singer of The Future Buzz for bringing this to my attention.

Adam is also one of the people featured in the book.

In fact, Adam took the words right out of my mouth when he wrote: ‘Eloqua [creators of this free ebook] … solicited insightful content on social media with something useful for all digital professionals. Reading through the contributions (including Jeremiah Owyang, Steve Rubel, Sarah Evans, among others) it’s clear this is a must-read.’

Oh yes.

I download a lot of free ebooks and most of them are – to use the technical term – crap.

The Social Media ProBook actually has substance. And contributions from very cool people. And stuff worth reading.

For my Canadian readers: you have the day off work tomorrow. This would make perfect reading in your air-conditioned home/office.

Please read Adam Singer’s blog post which has an excellent digital marketing Q&A and links to the ebook.

I’m in Alberta at the moment to deliver social media marketing presentations for the Alberta Magazines Publishers Association (AMPA).

I’ve been preparing for the presentations for a while now and gave the first one today.

I took a slightly different approach to the presentation than usual. Thanks to the AMPA website I was able to look at all their member magazines online.

One thing struck me – like a minus 44 windchill – social media is a waste of time if your website sucks.

Yes, I know, there are website naysayers who predict the end of blogging and websites as we know it. But I love a good website. And I think I can say with 100% certainty that the good ‘ole website is here to stay for a while.

Perhaps you’re even scratching your head saying ‘Of course social media is a waste of time if your website sucks.’ I think I’d just taken it for granted that folks knew that.

I’ve learned that they don’t.

There’s a tendency to jump on the social media bandwagon.

Everyone thinks they should be working it into their business. Like, yesterday!

What a lot of people don’t think about is getting their website ducks in a row first.

If your website isn’t kick-ass then don’t put a ton of effort into social media.

Work on getting your own house in order first. Social media marketing should flow from that.

A bad website is the worst reflection of your company or product.

Don’t bother with Twitter, Facebook, blogging et al until you have a beautiful, elegant website which you constantly update with interesting content.

Yes, this ‘social media thang’ is hard work folks!

Photo credit: Jonathan Wretlind on Flickr via a Creative Commons License

This post about online copywriting has been provided by Angie Stewart.

Angie is a marketing consultant from Maginus Online Marketing Agency.

She recently approached me and asked if she could write something for Diary of a Webgal.

She offered to write about an online marketing topic of my choice so I’ve asked her to tell us about writing for the web. Here’s what she had to say.

Creative copywriting is a skill that stems back since long before the internet became a business resource we couldn’t live without.

However, in the midst of the online revolution, many of us have moved away from writing for direct mail or magazine advertisements in favour of writing for blogs, social media and direct e-mail.

If you’re writing online content, you probably have one of two aims:

1. Persuade someone to buy something.

2. Create content that is interesting enough it will cause people to link to it.

So what are the main things to think about when copywriting for the web as opposed to for print?

Write for page skimmers

People generally skim read online copy much more than printed copy, this is due to the strain on the eyes cause by computer screens and the impatience that seems to be bred into today’s internet users.

Therefore, online sales copy needs to lend itself to skim reading. Keep sentences short and use lots of headings.

Ideally, a reader should be able to skim down the page reading only the headlines and get a good idea of what the page is about.

Consistency across online campaigns

Much of your online sales copy is likely to be related to your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns.

It’s important to have some consistency across the copy in your online marketing campaigns. For example, if you’re using PPC to drive traffic to your page, aligning your page with the ad can improve your quality score and therefore lower your costs. And with both SEO and PPC, aligning your page with the ad (or meta description in the case of SEO) will also improve your conversion rate.

Make it interesting

Each paragraph should encourage the reader to move onto the next. This is true for print copy, but even more so for online copy as readers, generally, have a shorter attention span than that of readers of printed copy.

Try varying sentence structure and removing any unnecessary words or phrases.

Mention what you’re talking about

For the reader of this article, it’s pretty clear that I’m talking about online copywriting.

I don’t even need to mention the words ‘online copywriting’ anywhere other than the title. In fact, I could even leave it out of the title and you’d still figure it out.

However, search engines don’t read as a human does, so to tell the search engines what your page is about you need to mention the words. Yes, it really is that simple!

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s so easy to leave your keywords out. You don’t need to repeat words to the extent that it sounds unnatural, just include them a couple of times on the page and variations of the same words if they exist.

Disclaimer: I’ve never used any services or products provided by Maginus or Angie.

For those of you who don’t know what I do for my day job, I’m the digital media manager at Canada’s National Screen Institute.

This full-time job includes managing and producing content for their website. We redeveloped the site several years ago – which is when I started this blog so I could keep a diary of the project (hence, Diary of a Webgal).

I don’t work hard for accolades. I work hard because I love my job and I work with a bunch of brilliant people at the National Screen Institute.

Which is why it was extra sweet to hear that we’ve been shortlisted for two awards for our website and our annual report.

The PR News awards recognize the top nonprofit PR campaigns of the year and set the industry benchmark for excellence across all areas of nonprofit PR.

There are lots of people that have made the NSI website what it is today. Tactica Interactive Communications built the wireframe and the final design based on initial work by Doowah Design. Tactica help maintain some of the technical stuff. I manage the content with the excellent support of many of the NSI team and bloggers who contribute their expertise.

I’m super proud that NSI’s website is shortlisted. It’s not everyday that your work is recognised in this way.

And *cliche alert* I don’t mind if we win or not – we’re up against some excellent websites. I’m just kind of in awe and that’s enough for me.

I recently came across two great resources that I wanted to share with you.

Both are insightful and practical and will help you with your social media strategy and your website content.

Adam Singer has crafted a great content marketing primer: How (and why) to create remarkable digital content, which I’ve embeded below. If you haven’t heard of Adam and don’t read his blog The Future Buzz, you should.

I’ve followed Adam’s blog for the last year or two and am constantly impressed by his perspectives. He’s put together a smart presentation here. If you’re even thinking about online marketing or social media you need to check it out.

The second resource comes via Scott Monty’s Social Media Marketing Blog in the form of a brilliant social media guide. I’ll let Scott tell you how he got it and why he recommends it in this post: The Social Media Playbook.

You can download the PDF file by clicking on the image below.