I’m often asked by clients, “How often should I tweet/blog/change my status on Facebook?”

There is not really a perfect answer for this, but if I were going to take a stab at it, I would answer, “When you have something relevant to say.”

Social media channels are filled with a lot of noise and quasi-adverts from many businesses. I saw this a lot in the music business when some clients suggested sending out “email blasts” and invites for any number of events that might or might not have been relevant to the list they were (not to put too fine a point on it), spamming.

This is a flawed strategy. Your recipients will hate you for it.

When people give you permission to send them email, and to a lesser extent, follow or friend you, they will only engage if you send them a GEM (something worthy and relevant) when you post something that ends up in their newsfeed on social networks or in their inbox. I have seen people blow this concept time and again in an effort to cover a lot of potential followers without thinking how offended people will be if they are fed irrelevant information. I still get invitations from people in New York who simply spam their whole list of followers for an event only a handful can attend. I see businesses mixing personal messages and observations into their social media (annoying)…if your followers can’t count on what you say to be relevant to them, they will opt out of your feed.

Everything you send out via social media channels should be weighed in terms of relevance and usefulness to your audience. There is always room to be spontaneous and even a little off-message (posting something you found someplace else), but in the end, you have to think of your social media outlets like the bins in a record store…does the content fit the genre?

I’ll be writing more about this.

I attended a fantastic event over the past weekend—WordCamp Detroit. What a great opportunity to hear a variety of great speakers and meet with lots of other WordPress devotees from in and around the midwest. I learned a lot from the presentations and all the great information presented.

As I have been filling out the post-event survey, however, it has occurred to me that the event could have been a little bit more like WordPress. Here are a few observations:

Participants as Categories
I thought it was a great idea to build in a lot of networking time to the event, however, it may have been nice to have a bit of an organizing principle attached to this plan. I started thinking how it may have been fun to be able to easily identify the people one might wish to network with by looking at a color code or even a category listed on their badges. This concept could get even more granular by tagging as well. Perhaps this metaphor could even extend to the participant roster on the WordCamp site. I think it would enhance the participant experience by providing a “sorting” that might give a bit of reference to the networking breaks. It might have also been good to stir up the seating or provide some break-out sessions for particular topics. I would have liked that.

For the record, I am:

Categories: Content, Social Media, Video
Tags: Ann Arbor, independent, creative, WordPress, Interconnectivity, eNews, PR, marketing, graphic design

In this last post from the series, The Four Pillars of a Robust Internet Presence for Small Businesses, I’m going to focus on perhaps the most important pillar of all—your personal interaction with customers and your employees.

The fourth pillar doesn’t require any sort of technical know-how, but rather, it focuses on reinforcing the existence of your online presence by talking to your customers and educating your employees about the website, blog, social media channels, online assets such as video and the eNews program. Everyone needs to be on the same page, so they can be “in the know” and share information about your website and these various tools. Talk to them about your newsletter. See if they are interested in participating in the blog. If they are, most likely they will also share these links out from their personal profiles. It gives everyone, including your customers, a stake in the outcome. In fact, if you can involve your customers to participate (using contests, opportunities to post on the blog, writing testimonials to share) all the better.

In your place of business, make sure you include information about your online destinations…with a sign-up sheet for the newsletter, the website printed on your business cards, stationary, envelopes, printed advertisements—even things like refrigerator magnets and pens—as well as other collateral material. If you visit tradeshows, make sure you distribute items with this information printed on them to let people know where they can go to get more information about your business.

Even though this fourth pillar seems pretty simple and obvious, it’s amazing how easy it is to be overlooked.

In conclusion: All four pillars of a robust internet presence are the product of your passion for your business. Hopefully these tools, as well as the development of a blog workbook to warehouse ideas, will give you what you need to mine your expertise and put it online.

Happy blogging!

In the first two posts of this series, “The Four Pillars of a Robust Internet Presence for Small Businesses,” we talked about the changeable content on your website (usually in the form of a blog) being the ground zero for crafting the business message you wish to share. In the second post, we reviewed the strategy for putting this message out into the world within a different context by sharing links out via social media channels.

In this third pillar, I’d like to talk a bit about how using an eNews program can reinforce the ourtreach from the first two pillars, but add a level of permission-based and direct messaging into the mix. In a way, it can be the most powerful channel, if done with a few important strategies in mind.

Not everyone reads your blog, and not everyone subscribes to social media
The first thing business must accept, is that no matter how much effort you put into blog posts and conversing with your audience on social media, much of what you have to say will slip through the cracks, and not many people are going to read it as a compelling narrative. People hunt and peck around the web for information they want, and you are lucky if they manage to discover your site, whether it be from a google hit to your optimized website and blog, social media or even a recommendation site such as yelp. A good eNews program, however, has the ability to turn all this effort into a narrative so that nothing really slips between the cracks, and on top of that, is MEASURABLE.

So how does this work?
Once you decide how often it makes sense to send out an eNews, the best plan is to populate it with content (articles and posts) you have already created on your blog. Thus, your eNews becomes a kind of aggregated email that highlights everything you wish to share since you sent out the last eNews. All the links are there in the eNews, so even if you wrote the blog post or had a conversation about a topic on Facebook a month ago, the link is presented again, for people to read it and catch up with what you have to say, even if they missed it the first time. On top of that, everyone who receives your eNews has REQUESTED to receive it, which is a great reason to make sure you are sharing something they are going to be delighted to get in their inbox. I use Constant Contact for most of my clients, and the metrics in the back end are great. You can see how many people clicked on which links, how many people “opt out” and don’t wish to hear from you anymore (this can be an important clue that you need to think about the eNews using the perspective of your audience a bit more), and even how many people forwarded the eNews or shared it via social media. Great stuff.

In most eNews programs, such as Constant Contact, there is also an option to attach a URL containing your newsletter in the eNews. You DEFINITELY want to use this option, as you can then copy the url into a site such as bit.ly (which also utilizes tracking information) and put this optimized link into a twitter post, and on FB for sharing. This way, you may catch a few people who are not subscribers but can use this as access to read your eNews, and maybe even decide to subscribe, if your eNews is compelling enough. One of my clients only has 200 subscribers or so, but we get over 350 page views of each eNews because of the sharing on Twitter and Facebook. Recently Constant Contact has figured out a way to automate the process for sharing your eNews via social media, but I still use the old fashioned method, as I can stagger the timing and not just take a cookie cutter approach in having all these links available at the same, exact time.

When I visualize social media, I think of it as casting for fish from a large boat…every now and then you get a nibble. With a good eNews program, that little fishing pole morphs into a drag net behind the boat, catching everything that managed to escape before.

How often should a company send out an eNews?
This is an interesting question to consider. If you send it out too often, without something compelling at its core, your eNews can quickly be regarded as “junk.” The rule of thumb would be to send an eNews out as often as you have something important to say (from your customer’s perspective, not yours). For many businesses, I think it is safe to say that quarterly will work well. For a business that has a lot of scheduled events, perhaps monthly would work better. I do an eNews for a Fish Market, and it seems like overkill that we send the eNews for this tiny business out EVERY Friday, but it works—because the primary mission of the eNews for this particular business is listing what perishable items are available each weekend. However, we also add links to recent blog posts and recipes to give the eNews and internet presence some personality, and this strategy works great for him…only 3 opt-outs in 9 months or so. People tell him all the time how much they enjoy the writing, the dependability and the recipes. In any case, this is a question you should think long and hard about before just launching into an eNews program.

Other advantages
The Four Pillars of a Robust Internet Presence work because they all reinforce one-another. Thus, your website has an eNews sign-up. Your eNews has links back to the site, and also out to your social media profiles. Social media amplifies the message you wish to put out into the world by making it shareable and recommended between friends. Twitter is great for prospecting, discovery, and even for positioning yourself in printed media (since so many journalists follow twitter, particularly niche categories). In the Fourth Pillar of a Robust Internet Presence, I’ll tell you how to tie it all together.

Let’s face it, when it comes to contemplating a blog program for updating your company website, it can be daunting. Afterall, you know SO much about your business that the idea of deciding what to write about can be overwhelming. This is why I have developed a “Blog Workbook” for clients. The Workbook acts as an organizing principle so that you can warehouse ideas and eventually put them into a grid or schedule. The Workbook, however, is really just a tool that will train you to “think like a blog” and eventually you won’t really need it anymore, but upon starting your endeavor into the world of blogging, it is invaluable.

So what is a Blog Workbook?

When I meet with a client to start the process of developing a meaningful, relevant internet outreach program for a business, I make a point of asking a lot of questions. I ask about the ebb and flow of business throughout the year (seasons), I ask about the products and services their business provides, I ask about the inspiration which fuels the business owner’s passion for their work, the events that occur throughout the year, their geographic location, the other businesses they like, frequently asked questions, their vendors and even what kinds of things they read or see in other places that tie into their business. In short, I ask them to elaborate upon all the things they might share with their customers and clients in person.  This is the beginning of putting together a blog workbook for each client.

The Initial “Content Meeting”

When I meet with a client and present them with their customized Blog Workbook, each page has a different heading. We go through the workbook as I ask questions, jotting down ideas as they come up. For instance, if the first page is about Events throughout the year, we write down the time year the event is taking place, and what kind of ideas we might have about how to generate excitement about that event on the blog. Events can also include geography-related events…is there a festival in your part of town at any point in the year? How can we tie what we are doing into that event?

I also delve very deeply into the “Frequently Asked Questions” category…finding out the things people want to know about, and sketching out how those might be addressed in blog posts, or even with video. As an answer to any of the frequently asked questions, it’s always a good idea to also think of a way to address “what makes my business DIFFERENT” and really reinforce that message.

An overlooked tactic for coming up with good content for your site is finding content from other places and sharing that. This can be a newspaper or magazine article, a link to a podcast, or even news from one of your vendors. Not only does it acknowledge and help spread the word from the original source (they may like that and reciprocate), it also becomes easy to track things you might like to share if they are relevant for your audience.

Building an audience

Another page to include in your Blog Workbook is a profile of the type of audience you wish to build. It’s always good to keep this in mind as you develop the content you will be sharing. A subset of your audience can include potential “message multipliers”—the people and outlets you believe may want to share your content. Often you can come up with reciprocal arrangements for having access to one another’s audience.

Developing a content schedule

As you flesh out the workbook and have discussions in your weekly content meetings, eventually you may come to the conclusion that it is best to consolidate “themes” into your scheduling grid: For instance, August can be “back-to-school” month (if appropriate) where the content you are publishing hits on that particular theme. You can also designate different days of the week as a way to determine what kind of post you are going to put up, such as Fridays being the day for a post about “Frequently Asked Questions.”

As for deciding how often to post, the best rule of thumb is to try to be consistent. Some clients feel comfortable with publishing substantial blog posts only once a week, while some other people have short observations and things to say every day. It’s really up to you to determine your comfort level and stick to the schedule.

Part of my job as a content developer is to help facilitate consistency by cracking the whip on deadlines and helping to augment ideas and edit posts (adding links, etc.) as they go out. However, the Workbook as your original organizing principle is key to developing a strategy that will work for your individual business.

Now that you have a website with changeable and updated information on it, it’s time to think about your social media outreach program. While it seems we are inundated with a landslide of places to be on the web and it’s almost dizzying to think of all the work involved in setting it up and monitoring it, it is important to remember that if you have followed the plan in Pillar #1 (Your website and content), you have already completed most of the work that will be required for your social media outreach.

Social media channels are simply conduits designed to share your website content in places where people may interact with your company in a different way…rather than relying on potential customers finding you by doing a search on Google or Yahoo, social media channels can facilitate word of mouth recommendations from “friends” if you are providing shareable content and links that people can pass along.

While there are many platforms for social media, for the purpose of this article we will focus on “The Big 3”: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Facebook is in the lead as the powerhouse of web marketing and social media. Its growth across age demographics is explosive and it is currently the most highly-trafficed place on the web. Facebook is also a place where customers have the opportunity to engage with your brand by leaving comments on your page, share your information via links on their own profile, generate content about your brand (photos, possibly even contests), participate in calls to action and possibly follow links from Facebook back to your site to sign up for your eNews program or look for additional information about your business.

Facebook also has a very flexible, built-in PPC (pay per click) ad program if you would like to explore how that may work for your business. There is also an “insight” feature which includes some trackable demographic information about “friends” of your business which can be helpful.

Despite the popularity of Facebook, it may not be appropriate for all businesses, particularly if the only content you intend to share is “sales messaging.” In fact, using Facebook in this way could actually backfire, so it’s really important to strategize about your goals, as well as the relevance of a Facebook page and its content to potential fans before setting it up.

Twitter is the fastest-growing and most far-reaching of the social media platforms. What it lacks in depth (comments on Twitter can only be 140 characters) it more than makes up for in reach and also by its amazing capacity for searching. Twitter is the place to prospect and discover communities who might be interested in hearing about your business. On Twitter, the niche-ier, the better. However, it is also very important to have a consistency on Twitter if you want to amass a following. Random hits from time to time are all well and good, but the most important thing you can build on Twitter is a community who sees your message as being relevant and worthy of following.

I have found one of the best advantages of having a relevant and consistent Twitter feed to be that the people who are using Twitter with great frequency are journalists. They are looking for leads and sources for their articles, so by having a good Twitter feed and being present, it is likely that your business may have the added channel of being the subject of an article in a publication, which may in turn increase your awareness throughout an entirely new audience. (Also, in most cases, any article will become another shareable link you can add to your blog, Facebook, Twitter feed, eNews, etc.) that will position your company as an expert or leader in your field of endeavor.

(More details about Twitter here and here).

Youtube. While a picture might speak a thousand words, you can amplify that principle by an infinite amount when you employ video. Not only is video one of the most shareable pieces of content you can use for your business, it is something that is continuously discovered again and again, particularly if you craft video content in such a way as to give it the potential for going viral.

A few tips about video:

• Keep is short and succinct. Don’t be afraid to edit it down. My advice would be to keep it under 3 minutes as a rule.
• Don’t worry about video being too slick and “produced.” Sometimes just a short authentic video on a Flip Camera will resonate with your audience a lot more than a professionally shot and edited video.
• Share the video on your website, on Facebook, on Twitter, and include links to the video in your eNews.
• You can recycle video content from year to year…if you make a video about your Christmas retail season for example, it might be worth sharing again and again over the years.

Other social media platforms such as Linked-In may not be appropriate for all types of businesses, but it can be quite useful in areas where you want to define yourself as a thought leader in your field.

Here’s a great guide for developing goals by Neicole M. Crepeau, called Six Steps to a Social Media Strategy.

Still feeling overwhelmed? Here’s a great article I came across today from Jason Amunwa: Five Ways to Avoid Social Marketing Overload

Who is going to monitor all of this? Some great suggestions and best practices in this article about How to Avoid A Social Media Disaster on the Pictage Blog

Pillar #1: Your website and the content it requires to “work”

Your website should be ground zero for all the things your company has to offer. Most businesses have a website, but the question you need to ask yourself is, “Does my website work?”

For a website to “work” it needs to have a function beyond being a static destination that lists the basics (hours of operation, a description of the business with a few photos, and contact information). A website that is set up for dynamic and robust outreach effort must have the following:

• content that changes from time to time (the easiest way to do this is by having a blog or a “news” area which lists updated information)
• a depth of interesting information about your business that includes niche keywords
• a newsletter sign-up (so that you can retain contact information from interested parties)
• links to your social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, You Tube, etc.) to give people a variety of ways to discover and interact with your business

The easiest way to make your website as flexible and updatable as possible is to use a platform that can be used by you and your employees, (such as WordPress) so you are not held hostage by your web developer to make any changes. Make sure, if you are looking to update your site, that you ask your developer the following questions:

• Can I make changes and updates myself or will I need to call you?
• Will this site integrate with a social media outreach program?
• Are you going to help me with developing content, or are you simply building me a site?

If the last question is something your developer throws back into your court, you need to think about the addition of having someone help you with the development of online content to feed your online efforts. This is a lot less daunting than it may seem if you look for a person who specializes in creative content for web outreach. Unfortunately, this is something a lot of companies overlook.

Why is it important to develop content?

Because the content on your website is an extension of the passion you have about your business! Unfortunately, most successful business people are busy enough without worrying about blog posts and website updates, which is why you should consider a web content specialist. Not only will a content specialist assist with planning outreach, promotions and opportunities, they can help you with reputation management and a PR outreach to “message multipliers” and “influencers” including the press.

What does a content specialist do?

They begin by learning about your business and mining your expertise. Primarily they speak with a business owner, observe their interaction with customers and assess what kinds of customers the business would like to reach. In my own practice, once I meet with a client to determine goals, I develop a customized content workbook for all of my clients to help them begin to “think like a blog.” It has been my experience that most business owners are bubbling with passion about their business, so it’s up to someone like me to harness this enthusiasm, warehouse it into a grid and a plan, and find ways of sharing it with the public at large. I have had the experience of taking people who don’t even use the computer, and setting them up to think about what they want to share over the internet. While it may take a lot of meetings initially to discover aspects of the business, over time it becomes easier and easier. It’s also great to get the feedback from customers as the whole process begins to take hold.

Pillar #2: Social Media

Stay tuned for Piller #3: eNews and Pillar #4: Integrating your online efforts in person.

OK, I know we’re in Michigan and this state has pretty much been redlined for the time being when it come to investment money. People are reluctant to spend anything, and this has been a constant battle in terms of finding work (truth be told).

So, in a light-hearted attempt to convince any potential clients otherwise, I would suggest it could not only be a lot of fun, but a SMART way to spend a few dollars in investing in the “smart-grid” of setting up an effective online presence, including a proper platform for social media, blog and eNews.

Because my background is in the music business, I can’t help but include this charming track from the 30s by Dick Powell, just to reinforce the idea…though it won’t take plenty of money, we can still have a swell time

The depression-era vibe captures a lot.

LISTEN HERE:Dick Powell: With Plenty Of Money And You

The short answer to this question: Nothing.

Too often, when I mention a blog as a strategic component to website development and an integral part of any social media outreach plan, clients dismiss the idea thinking it will be “too much work” or some kind of tedious exercise in TMI journaling, make-work and minutia.  However, nothing could be further from the truth!

Another barrier to open-mindedness as far as a blog is concerned, is that clients often think it will result in some kind of stressful deadline pressure similar to that of writing a term paper (has anyone had this dream lately?) But blog content doesn’t need to be the Sword of Damocles dangling over your head if you use a few tools (or even a workbook) to begin to “think like a blog.”

Here are a few advantages a blog platform can provide:

SEO: A blog platform provides changeable content—which makes “the Google” happy. Not only will this help with reinforcing keywords, but more importantly, it can provide the contextual web content that will boost your organic search ranking in the categories you wish to improve.

It provides a depth of content (the long tail) which will potentially result in the positioning of your site (and you) as a source of relevant information and expertise in your particular field.

Blogs are about sharing events, recipes, links to news and articles, passion for your business or even something that is not necessarily germane to your business, but shares something that may be of interest to your audience.

A blog also provides a permalink to the specific post, which makes it easily shared via social media and directs readers to the specific bit of information you with them to see. This is an integral feature of a successful social media program, as social media requires fresh content to keep interest and awareness moving along.

You might also want to think of a blog as an incubator for articles to include in an eNews program. After a year, you may want to cull through your posts and even put them into a longer form publication or book.

WordPress

Using WordPress, a blog platform is simple to build and maintain—either experimenting on your own or hiring a professional. WordPress is a FREE application available on the web. One can host a blog on the WordPress site, or rehost the software on your own server for more control and customization. It has a variety of available features, plug-ins, analytics, widgets and the like to provide the functionality you will require.

I’m currently taking a few classes about html and customizing CSS out at Washtenaw Community College and was astonished the instructor was not familiar with WordPress. In a way, WordPress renders the idea of learning to build a website using html, frames or tables as quaint (ridiculous?) …kind of like showing up for Driver’s Ed and learning about the care and feeding of draft animals. (Of course, learning html and CSS is useful in that you can use these tools to customize WordPress).

So, in conclusion, if you are serious about a social media plan and a powerful presence on the internet, it’s a MUST that you include a blog—otherwise your website is simply an expensive digital brochure.

Sometimes I drill down a bit into specifics, but I came across this post from Ed Vielmetti at AnnArbor.com and he does a really good job of explaining Twitter hash tags, which I referred to in my last post.

It spells out the great ways you can dial up “news to use” whether it be breaking news, information about disasters, geographic-constraints, or even just highly specified information about topics relating to your own interests. It’s also a potential treasure trove of potential message multipliers and relationships to cultivate due to common purpose and interests, so give it a try!

Ed’s comprehensive article and tips here.

More do’s and Don’ts from Mashable.