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

Remember my new internet superhero Gerry McGovern?

Well he made my heart go pitter patter when I read his latest post Great websites are boring to manage.

That isn’t to say I agree with everything he says. But I adore his sock-it-to-em style.

I manage a website and my job is never boring. Or rarely so.

Over the last few months I’ve realised something about my working style and what makes me tick: I love a good challenge. I enjoy troubleshooting. I like to fix the problem. Or at least try.

In his article, Gerry says he hates doing website reviews, checking the accuracy of older information. Well I’m lucky. I like ongoing review. I usually find it’s a good excuse to tighten up website copy.

Gerry says that “… doing interesting and challenging work is often what makes problems for websites, making them technically complicated, graphically overwrought and content heavy.”

In redeveloping the National Screen Institute website we worked hard to avoid these pitfalls. But I do think it’s an ongoing challenge for web managers to keep things simple, go easy on the graphics and always use less words than you think you need.

Gerry goes on to say “Day-to-day web management is about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty with the nitty gritty stuff. But remember: You get paid to be bored.”

That’s me – I’m there rolling up my sleeves every day getting my hands covered in grease. And rarely is it boring work. I’m sourcing free Flash slide generators, editing audio interviews, uploading video to YouTube, keeping an eye on our Twitter account, creating online ads, testing our film festival content, scouring the latest news for stuff I can post to our website and always, always thinking about how to improve things without being technically complicated and or spending much money.

That isn’t to say everything I do is on a shoestring – in one of my ‘improvement’ moments I had an idea for a major change on our website (which will roll out in June sometime). And I’m very excited about it. It’s a basic feature (yeah, Gerry might think it was boring) but it came about because of ongoing website review.

Gerry McGovern will continue to write things that make my heart go pitter patter. And I will continue to be excited about the simple stuff.

Photo courtesy of ittybittiesforyou via a Creative Commons Licence

Another delicious installment of SuperNews – pure genius, as always, from the folks at Current.

Twitter’s blowing up in this sequel to Twouble with Twitters when celebrities take over the twittersphere. Starring Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Perez Hilton, and P. Diddy as themselves.

Created by Josh Faure-Brac for SuperNews! – an animated sketch comedy series airing on Current TV every Friday night at 10/9c.

The irony? This came across my radar via @ChrisDca on Twitter.

Last week my blog got hacked.

It got hacked so badly that my host company advised I delete my blog and start over.

So for the last eight days or thereabouts I’ve been literally re-building my blog bit by bit, piece by piece.

Yes. I had a back up file but it refused to upload without errors so I ate a slice of humble pie and decided it was probably best to start from scratch anyway.

I have no idea how the hack happened although I suspect it was via WordPress.

I feel responsible for what happened.

I didn’t protect my blog adequately. And it can happen to anyone at anytime. I’m mad that it happens at all.

Evenings spent republishing posts made me neglect my person duties to my dawg Sadie Shih Tzu.

She got a new hair do on Friday and a Shih Tzu companion for a few days.

But today I decided it was time for some Liz/Sadie portraits to honour the re-publishing of my blog. See the whole portrait series.

If you’re reading this post because you were expecting to find stuff about Twitter, online branding, social media or a related topic, I apologize for the disappointment.

My blog was recently hacked and is currently in blog hospital undergoing a series of operations to fix it.

Please be patient while my blog makes its recovery.

In the meantime, you may want to follow me on Twitter.

Photo by itty bitties for you under a Creative Commons Licence

Liz Hover writes: I met designer Grace Smith on Twitter.  I was immediately attracted to the way she tweeted for two reasons: first, she’s friendly and second, she tweets some damn fine links.

I found out more about Grace and it was obvious that she’s social media savvy; She runs her own design company and has leveraged social media to help build that business.

I asked if she’d share some of that knowledge with you and provide tips and guidance on how small businesses can use sites like Facebook and Twitter to strengthen their presence online.

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Effective use of social media means focusing on building your brand and your reputation. Many small businesses hear the buzz surrounding sites like Twitter but don’t know where or how to start using social media to develop their brand.

This list hopes to compile five of the core ways small businesses can start using social media to brand their business, engage with their customers, build trust in their brand and position themselves as a valuable contributor to the community.

1. Build powerful profiles

Building consistent, strong profiles across your chosen social media sites will help people gain familiarity with your brand and they will begin to seek you out and follow you via your site or other profiles.

Your social media profiles can help your brand create a powerful presence and allows users to put a face to the brand name. It’s therefore important to craft a strong bio and consistent avatar across any social media sites you participate in.

This creates brand recognition which is one of every business owner’s core goals. Brand recognition will enable you to become instantly recognisable and developed properly will eventually lead to brand preference and loyalty.

2. Listen, engage and converse

Signing up to social media sites and setting your profiles on autopilot isn’t going to cut it if you want to establish your brand and grow your business. You need to build a profile, connect with others (most importantly with your target market) and join in the conversation.

Social media is about building and strengthening relationships, listening and interacting with others. It’s called ‘social’ media for a reason, you have to create a valuable ongoing dialogue with others around you.

In essence by adding valuable information, good creative content and engaging with others you will prove your brand is a consistently valuable resource and a thoughtful contributor to the community. This not only builds trust in your brand but people will also relate your brand with quality.

3. Be genuine and provide value

One of the core principles of using social media is to expand your network and provide value to build awareness, trust and reputation in your brand. For small businesses this means developing ongoing, genuine and valuable interactions between your target market and your brand.

By genuinely and sincerely engaging others you will develop friends and contacts who will also begin recommending your blog or website to others. From this you will see your overall traffic increase organically as people link to you and promote your content because you have proven to be a valuable source of information.

Social media is not a get rich scheme; giving the hard sell and continually pushing your own agenda will get you nowhere. Rather by regularly participating and proving to be a valuable person in peoples’ networks you will be rewarded over the long term rather than just visiting when you think you can benefit.

4. Develop an authority blog

Blogging removes the barrier between your brand and your target market by pulling the conversation scattered across your various social networks to one place where you can develop a deeper, focused conversation with your readers and potential consumers.

It also increases your reach within the online community and gives you a place to share your interest and passion for your niche, product or service.

Through a blog you can begin the process of positioning yourself as an expert and credible content producer which not only acts as an extension of your brand but helps reinforce it. In turn it will help people develop a trust with your brand, ultimately helping your business.

Essentially a blog is a representation of you online so carefully crafting your content so it supports the key messages you wish to convey is at the core of building your brand.

5. Personalise your brand

You are the CEO of your brand and it won’t survive if it’s stale, boring and outdated.

Does your brand have a personality? Or is it just a name on your business card and letterhead?

It shouldn’t be.

Your brand should be able to stand on it’s own with a unique personality that you can carefully craft with the help of social media.

As a small business your brand needs to have human characteristics which people can relate to. Your ‘brand voice’ should reflect the personality traits of your brand, for example if your brand is extroverted and edgy, does it reflect this or does it sound quiet and plain? If you are your brand (i.e. as a freelancer) then you need to be authentic, express your personality and provide value.

Spending time working on keywords which summarise the characteristics of your brand will help you develop an individual and unique voice which consumers can relate to and recognise.

In conclusion…

Engaging in social media can be an extremely fun, informative and profitable experience. It’s also an invaluable branding tool which can help to grow your network and interact with people you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

By effectively using social media sites I have been able to craft a strong personal brand which I have been able to translate into my business – Postscript5.

You can’t however be active at every social site in a consistent valuable way, so choose just a few where your customers are and concentrate your efforts there.

It’s important to remember that engaging in social media shouldn’t replace your other promotional activities or affect your actual workload. With that said, it can be a key tool to build your brand and your business if used correctly and effectively.

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Grace Smith is the owner of Postscript5, a small design studio based in Northern Ireland, UK.

Grace has a passion for Web Standards and User Interface design, and enjoys working with a variety of entrepreneurs and small businesses throughout the UK and USA.

She enjoys using her abundance of creative energy to create and develop a variety of personal projects, including CSS Loaf.

Her newly established blog at gracesmith.co.uk has been hugely successful within its short life span and she continues to write with a passion on design, social media and technology.

She also has a love of huge sunglasses!

R.D. Gavel, avowed Flashaholic and travel agent, is the owner of Whimsical World Travel, specializing in vacations to Disney destinations. She is currently at work on a new website with a focus on experiential, luxury travel, and is taking web design classes as part of a twelve-step program to overcome her Flash-dependent behavior.

Hello. My name is R.D. and I am a Flashaholic.

My addiction began slowly as I navigated through the web running up against a lot that was boring or just plain bad and a few wondrous places that drew me in and made my smile.

Yes, in the days of dial-up I would sometimes move away rather than watch the agonizingly slow page load but, today, there are few flash sites which don’t reward us for just a couple of seconds’ patience.

When it came time to start on my own website the issue became much more complicated.

How do I get the look I want and still allow people to find us? I learned that even professional web designers are sometimes not really knowledgeable about Flash. I sometimes get negative feedback about my decision to utilize Flash on our site but, right now, it’s the right choice for us.

So, how do you decide what’s best for you?

I believe the objectives of the site itself should drive the decisions. This seems straightforward enough but if you poke around a bit you’ll find that site design often has very little to do with site goals. Taking the time to consider carefully and prioritize your requirements will help clarify your design directions. While this doesn’t begin to distill all the issues you’ll confront, here are a few things to think about:

What is the purpose of the site?

While all sites might do a number of different things, each generally has a basic purpose. Decide if your site’s primary focus is business or personal. If it’s a personal site or blog, is it monetized or primarily an outlet for your own creativity? If it’s commercial, is it the main portal to conduct your business or an extension of another sales model?

Who is the target audience?

Who are you trying to reach? The demographics of your preferred visitor should play a big part in the design. This can be as simple as hip graphics for a young crowd or larger text for an older generation.

How will visitors be directed to the site?

There are so many ways to draw traffic to a site: search engines, adwords, social media connections, affiliate programs, print media, and advertising, to name just a few. What methods do you plan to incorporate?

Personal preferences

Don’t underestimate the power of preference. Your site is ultimately a reflection of you and/or your business. You should be proud of it. Liz Hover recently posted an interview here with Britt Reints which commented on the importance of doing what’s right for you. You will find far too much advice, a lot of it conflicting – go with your gut.

So, how did this process work for me?

The purpose of our site is business, and it is one of the major portals we rely on for securing new business.

I looked at many, many websites in our category and, incredibly, could find only one that I liked.

In the travel industry many suppliers offer cookie-cutter websites as a “perk” for doing business with them. In a field so crowded, where differentiation is key, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would voluntarily choose a site that was exactly like thousands of others, but most do.

Unlike many other businesses, the product that we represent doesn’t need to be sold; a decision to buy, either sooner or later, has already been made by the visitor. What we needed to do was sell ourselves; try to convey why that visitor should buy from us rather than someone else.

Our client tends to be upscale but retains an appreciation for whimsy and fun. We used Flash for a one-of-a-kind look to set us apart and make our brand unique and, hopefully, memorable. We were looking for a little bit of the “magic” that is inherent in our product and Flash achieved that for us.

I find Flash effects entrancing and was determined to use Flash for its beauty while trying to maintain site visibility for searches.

We have placed most of the informational component on non-Flash pages so that it will be accessed by search engines, and have been careful to word page headings, image titles, etc. to maximize our presence.

Rather than using promotional methods to vie for the same homogenous group of potential clients as our competitors, we decided to move into more non-traditional areas, such as photography, which are still aligned with our product but provide an added focus on the site.

The interest, buzz, and links this strategy generates allow us to reach out to a different segment of the population who might never run a search for our core product, but may well be interested if informed.  Our blog, still in its infancy, features nothing but unique content rather than a rehash of industry press releases and special deals generally found on similar blogs.

If search engine optimization is the number one consideration, then Flash might not be the best choice. While some web professionals still cling to the notion that a Flash site is completely transparent to search engines, this is no longer true. Nonetheless, a Flash site cannot currently be optimized with anywhere near the success that can be achieved with html pages.

If, however, you want to stand out in the crowd of millions, use or plan to use multiple strategies for pulling traffic, and the visual aspect of your site is important to you, give Flash a chance. Try to keep in mind that you can never be all things to all people; be true to your own vision.

I’m currently working on a new website which will feature other products in our market niche. It will require different approaches because the target customer is somewhat different and the products need to be showcased in a compelling fashion, rather than the company.  Is there going to be Flash on this site, too? Absolutely. No rehab for me.

Diary of a Web Gal is proudly powered by Flash. The theme was originally released by Roy Tanck and requires Flash and Javascript (although it doesn’t break completely if these are missing). Thanks to Geoff Stearns, the use of Flash does not affect search engine ranking. The Flash titles contain complex algorithms that change things like line breaks and font size in order to best accommodate the post titles.

Learn more about Flash.