Key Points From #csmb2c Social Media Conference (Storify)
June 27, 2012 By 2 Comments
Friday Freak Out – The Relentless Push for Facebook Post Likes
June 14, 2012 By 9 Comments
‘How long did it take you to clear your bowels today? Please tell us and Like this post!’
That is an actual post I saw from a brand on Facebook today. I jest, however it may as well be as there is a real stench around the activity on many Facebook business Pages right now.
Chasing the Edgerank
In case you don’t know, Edgerank is the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine what updates or content appears in a user’s News Feed and how prominently (or high up) it is displayed. I’m not going to go in to the nitty gritty of how it all works, but the basic premise is, that if a update receives a high number of likes, comments or shares, it stands a better chance of featuring on a News Feed.
Quality is Suffering
Simple updates, such as questions or a photo upload tend to receive high levels of interaction from ‘likers’ of a Facebook Page. Going down that route is not necessarily a bad thing, and I would even say that a blend of simple versus more complex posts is a wise path to follow, but the emerging trend of Facebook Page owners asking their audience to ‘like’ every post in order to try and influence their Edgerank score is just plain crass and really shows a lack of respect for the people that have decided to give you the time of day.
How about actually re-focusing on quality? Yes, Facebook have given less emphasis to brands in the News Feed, but taking the easy route of pestering people for likes is a crappy way of trying to combat this. Take a step back and use your creativity to deliver content that will make people naturally want to like (or comment or share) your updates. You are getting the best of both worlds here – happy fans revelling in the wonderful ass-kicking content you’re supplying them, and the real possibility of a tasty looking Edgerank score.
Likes are Shallow Anyway
It takes a split second to ‘like’ an update on Facebook. Yeah, it’s an indicator that a person has a positive reaction to your content (although on a personal level, I think I could post ‘I just skinned three kittens alive’ and it would receive some passive likes) the real quality interaction takes place when a user is inclined to comment. I don’t mean a response to questions like ‘____day is the best day to eat burgers’ but responses to content that really gets people thinking and gives you a little bit of valuable content back. That’s what Page owners should be aiming for. In my humble opinion. Stop the pestering for likes and actually use your brains people.
A Note to the RSPCA
I have never skinned a kitten. I love animals, especially cute kittens and can’t imagine how anyone could ever hurt any animal. The RSPCA do amazing work across the UK to protect animals.
Am I being over-sensitive about brands, businesses etc trying too hard for ‘likes’ on posts? Do tell.
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Email Marketing and Mobile – A Match Made in Heaven?
June 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment
What is one of the key things you do with your mobile phone? I bet checking email is well up the on the ‘most common tasks you do on your phone’ list, right? For me, it certainly is. I subscribe to the ‘Almost Timely‘ weekly email from the impressive Christopher S Penn, and every time I receive it, I read the full thing on my iPhone. Why do I do this? First things first, the layout is perfect for a mobile experience, it is uncluttered, uses imagery well and the formatting allows me to easily pick out the sections that are of interest to me. From a marketing point of view, the emails are rammed full of appropriate ‘calls to action’ meaning that the reader can easily head off to expanded content, or even leave feedback on that weeks editions on Chris’s Facebook Page. All of those points are key aspects of successful email marketing, especially when it comes to mobile.
What Can we Learn From This Approach?
Many people use their phones to sift through emails, deciding what they need to respond to, disregard, read on the spot or take time to read later. Email is so 
programmed in to our brains that ignoring its potential for mobile is crazy. Ensuring your email marketing is optimised for mobile should be an absolute priority. Why do I always read Chris’s e-newsletter when it pops up on my phone? Simple – I know that I will be able to fully absorb it when on the move, this is again due to its layout and logic. I am a massive advocate for social media and of course it has huge advantages in mobile, but the majority of the time, a user will have to actively go in to an app to absorb their Facebook or Twitter feed – with email our inboxes populate without any action from us and we automatically take the time to at least glance at the subject line (great email subject lines are a must!) before activating that sift process I alluded to earlier. As a marketer, mobile email gives you the chance to make an impression on that process and grab some attention.
Key Points for a Great Mobile Ready Email
1 – Have a mobile site – don’t wreck a great mobile experience by linking people to a non-mobile optimised site from your email!
2 – It has to work at a glance – you literally have a second or two to grab attention, so make it crisp, clear and easy to digest. And remember subject lines!
3 – Have clear calls to action – this relates to email in general, however try to always have a purpose to your emails, that can be as simple as leading people to your site for more information. This gives you something extra to track over and above open rates etc and will help you to prove the worth of your email efforts.
4 – You can have a solution that works well on mobile and static devices – Chris Penn’s emails look exactly the same on a PC, phone or tablet and work well on all.
Integrating Mobile Email Marketing with Social Media
Chris Penn does this very effectively in his weekly emails. By asking readers to head over to his Facebook Page and leave feedback or discuss the points from his emails, he is spreading his reach on to a key social platform and encouraging engagement from within his audience. Think how you can use your social media platforms alongside your email to offer a rounded experience to your customer, prospect or audience. Social network apps are very much part of the mobile experience, meaning a smooth transition between email and apps is possible.
There, you go, ignore the potential of email marketing via mobile at your peril!
Are you using email marketing and considering its implications on mobile? How is it working for you? Do you receive a great email from a brand/organisation etc that works well on your mobile device? Tell us in the comments below!
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Friday Freak Out – Web Services Making Changes That Suck (bit.ly)
June 8, 2012 By 4 Comments
If you are like me, you’ll have a list of apps/websites and services that you know and love. From time to time things need to change, push forward and indeed improve. When something changes that you are used to using in a certain way, it can throw a spanner in the works. A moment of blind panic can often quickly subside as you realise that things really aren’t that bad. But, every now and then, changes are made that perplex your brain and make you feel a little sick (ok, a slight exaggeration). This happened last week when the well established link shortening and tracking service known as bit.ly went through a major revamp.
When Simplicity is Cast Aside
I’ve used bit.ly for years, for a long time it was the best way to shorten your links for use on Twitter etc, it just worked well and the data it supplied for each link was very handy indeed. I logged in last week in order to reduce some linkage and was faced with the barftastic view below:
Yuck.
I feel to my knees and screamed to the web gods above ‘whhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, noooooooooooo, not bit.ly, he was too young to goooooo’. Ok, I didn’t, but my brain did boggle. Where is the crisp simplistic shortening interface I was used to? Too many menus, too many side widgets and a stupidly small little box to be used for yes, you guessed it, the key function of the site!!! It would appear that bit.ly is trying to become a tool for users to store and share links from. Did nobody tell them that there are numerous services out there that offer that exact thing?
Are They Listening?
The day the changes dropped, the bit.ly blog received an avalanche of negative feedback. You could almost hear the people at bit.ly cringing as their new baby was torn to pieces by a rather passionate community. That’s where the problems lie – why didn’t they go to their community in the first place and run some ideas by them? Is that too sensible? Or are the bit.ly’s of this world too damn arrogant to take such sensible steps? Facebook make regular changes that freak out their users, however they don’t really seem to listen to the negative feedback and just plough on. They can get away with that as they are really the only show in town. However that is not the case for bit.ly as there are numerous competitors on the market. In fairness to bit.ly, they are taking the negative feedback on board and making changes based upon it, but why put themselves in a such a position? Once people are gone, it can be very hard to claw them back. Social media allows for feedback on all levels, its about time businesses etc started using that feeback vessel in advance of major changes, as opposed to throwing things on the fire to see how they burn. I’m sure bit.ly will be ok, and I’ll continue to use it, however, this was a close one.
Has a service you love undergone some nasty changes recently? Have you stuck with it or moved on? Do tell in the comments below!
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Refocusing The Social Penguin Blog
June 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Hello lovely readers,
Things are going to be changing a little around here, but before I get on to that, I want to apologise. I feel that the standard of our content has slipped in recent months and that is something I want to arrest. While keen to maintain a regular flow of content for you all to read, this is not always possible to maintain at the quality level I want to be associated with the blog. This blog is very much a side project for me, it makes no money but is something I have a real passion for continuing. With that in mind, there are likely to be less posts appearing on these pages, with a refocus on real quality over quantity. I’d like to add that this is not a slight on any of the guest writers that have kindly contributed in recent months, its more a realisation that sometimes the people closest to a publication are best placed to create the content that a readership enjoys and most importantly, benefits from reading.
Thanks for reading The Social Penguin Blog and I look forward to bringing you great content in the future!
Survey Results – Small Business Social Media is Frequent, but Not Every Day [STATS]
June 7, 2012 By 3 Comments
Please note this is a guest post and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of the blog owner.
These days, it seems every small business owner owner we talk to is rushing head long into social media. But what are they doing when they get there? We surveyed 464 small businesses between January 1 and March 15, 2012 to find out. To get an idea of what small businesses are actually doing on social media, we asked them about how often they participate in social media, as well as how often they update their social media. Participation is a broad term which may include simply reading updates from others. In contrast, updating your status is very specific activity that tells us how often small businesses engage in direct, interactive activity on social networks.
We learned that for most small businesses, social media is used frequently, but not quite every day.
How Often Do You Participate?
Among the most popular networks, Facebook attracts the most regular usage. 53% of participants who use Facebook said they participate on Facebook daily.
A close second is Twitter with 44% of their users dropping by every day. In contrast, LinkedIn users are more likely to say they check in often, but not every day. New kid on the block Pinterest was running neck and neck with Google+. It is a safe bet that the visual content site will leave Google+ in the dust by next year’s study.
How Often Do You Update?
We asked participants how often they update their status on each network, using the following scale:
1 = Monthly, 2 = Several times a month, 3 = Weekly, 4 = Multiple times each week, 5 = Daily, 6 = Multiple times a day
Twitter is the most time consuming of the social networks. Average users tweet several times a week, and the most active users are likely to use the tool multiple times a day. The rapid-fire nature of the community supports that level of activity. As we talk with small business owners, we often caution them about the time commitment needed to build a strong community. Twitter is not for everyone.
On average, Facebook is a close second in terms of post frequency, but few users are updating their status more than once a day. The lower volume makes this a great choice for companies hoping to expand their reach with a reasonable investment of time.
Blogs, Google+ and Pinterest all see activity almost every week. As a passionate content marketer, I was pleased to see businesses regularly carving out time for their blog. This content provides a great foundation for other social networks to pull from.
While many businesses indicate LinkedIn is their primary business network, the average user is only making status updates a few times each month. So what are they doing the rest of the time? LinkedIn is a different beast, more like an address book then a network. The real power of this network lies in the ability to connect with specific individuals in a relatively quiet environment. We saw this firsthand as we distributed this survey, generating significanly more responses through LinkedIn messages then all other platforms combined. If you don’t have a LinkedIn strategy for your business, now is the time to build one to get their message in front of a much wider, business focused audience.
Interested in the complete report? You can download it here.
Are you a small business owner/handle social media within one? Do tell us how this report matches up with your experiences.
About the author:
As Creative Director of Roundpeg, an Indianapolis-based marketing firm, Lorraine is typically at the center of the managed chaos that makes the agency run. With more than thirty years as a marketing professional (lie, tell her she doesn’t look that old) Lorraine keeps Roundpeg popping with a never-ending stream of new ideas.
A native New Yorker, Lorraine is a Hoosier by choice, and is committed to fostering growth and entrepreneurship in her adopted city. Recognized by the Indianapolis Business Journal as one of the Most Influential Women in Indianapolis, she is an active member of the local Indianapolis business community.
When not at Roundpeg, Lorraine can be found sharing what she knows in seminars and presentations around the country. She has a BA from Queens College, City University of NY, and an MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas.
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