Creative Concepts

What’s a QR code, you ask? QR codes (the QR stands for “Quick Response”) are those funny-looking little black diagrams that look like Rorschach tests, and they’re springing up everywhere, from direct mail pieces to billboards to product packaging. They’re easy to use, once you know what they are, provided you have a smartphone – you need to be able to snap a photo of the code, using special software (search your app store for “code reader app”) which you install on your phone. QR codes have been in use for years in Asia, where they’re used for everything from purchasing sodas from a vending machine to getting the nutritional information on a sandwich.

And they’re making their way here. In the past few months (though they’ve been here for a couple of years), QR codes are gaining popularity on packaging, outdoor advertising, and in magazines. You probably can’t open a copy of People, Time or Fortune without encountering a QR code in an advertisement, and possibly within an article as well.

If you’re one of those advertisers, or you have other places to put a QR code, what’s a smart marketer to do?

Content Plays

You can use QR codes to make consumers aware of other content you’ve created, like a blog post, recipe, or video. This is a terrific way to get consumers to pay attention to all that great stuff you’ve already got socked away.

Tips and Tricks

Don’t use valuable advertising or product packaging space for copy, place a QR code instead, and send your buyers to a page where they can learn the ins and outs of your product. Or give them a landing page with a bunch of recipes. Or the “Top 10 Things To Do With Your New [insert product name].”

Signups

You can use the QR code to bring users directly to a signup page where you can collect their info for an email list, register them for a promotion, or RSVP them for an event. Just be sure that the form is not too complex, because people will be typing on their tiny mobile keyboards.

Coupons

If your product sells at retail or online, use QR codes to offer coupons. When users scan a QR in a magazine, on a product package, or even in an image on Facebook, take them to a page with a barcode coupon they can use in the store. All they have to do is bookmark that page in their mobile browser and they’re ready to go. Even better: collect their email address before you send them the coupon via email.

Two important thoughts on how to implement QR codes:

• Remember that people scan QR codes with their mobile phones. Therefore, whatever page you land them on MUST be mobile-optimized. Don’t take them to a huge page with tiny text that they have to scroll down to get to your content.

• A good QR-content match is one where a user, after scanning the QR code, lands on a website or video which helps you further their insight or involvement in your product. Ideally, you’re not taking them to a different version of the ad; you’re bringing them somewhere enhanced or special – they should feel like they’re getting to see something that others don’t.

Are you currently using QR codes to market your business? Have you thought about using them? We’d love to hear about your examples and ideas in the comments.
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Being a social business is tough. There’s a lot of content to create and curate, and a lot of friendly back-and-forth that has to happen every day to keep your customers engaged, loyal and energized about your brand. And, of course, never enough hours in the day.

My secret to maintaining a solid social media presence for clients? The Social Media Editorial Calendar. This sounds like a big, complicated thing, but it’s really not. You can create one for your business; all you need is Excel and an hour or two over a few days to brainstorm and get it rolling.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Platforms

Outline all of the social and content platforms your business uses regularly. In many cases, this includes a blog, Twitter and Facebook. It could also include YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr, Tumbler or other platforms. You should also include any platforms you don’t currently maintain but you’d like to maintain – your calendar could phase new platforms in over time.

2. Topics

Determine the key topics you wish to incorporate into your content. You can go very narrow and on-topic for your business, or you can go broader in the hopes that you can attract people who may not be aware of your company. For example, if you’re a small accounting firm, you could focus your posts on tax issues, bookkeeping issues, and other financial/accounting-related topics; alternately, you could focus your content on the issues your ideal clients face more generally. So if you mainly work with artists and freelancers, you could post about a wide variety of subjects which could be appealing to them: finding work, improving your personal brand, how to manage money effectively, etc. Whichever way you go, don’t worry, this is not set in stone. You can broaden or narrow your content over time.

3. Categories

Determine how to bucket your topics in a handful of key content categories. This is an important step which many companies overlook. They start writing on a variety of topics, and eventually get off track because they lose focus over time. If you choose your categories at the outset (or add them in to make order within your content), you’ll always have a guidepost for your content as you can determine which categories are underserved and post in those categories. Category examples for the accountant example above (the broad version) could be: Managing Your Money, Getting Gigs, Your Personal Brand, Arts Happenings (interesting things around your local area or national), and Real Freelancers (stories of real people). You might also have a category for Company News (your company news) and maybe for Case Studies (your clients).

4. Focus

All of the content you create should fit into one (or maybe two) of your categories. If your content fits into more than two categories, that particular post or video may be too broad, and you may be able to break it into two or more posts or videos. If you find yourself having to break up a post or video, that’s not a bad thing – you get twice as much content for the work you’ve just done!

5. The Calendar

Now comes the fun part, and the part where you break out Excel. Create a little grid, like this (click to embiggen):

(Don’t worry if yours is not colorful. Just make sure it has all the info.)

Here’s how you use each column:

Category: this is the category the content piece fits in to. Every item you post should fit into one (or two) categories.

Blog Topic: if your piece is a blog you’re writing, you can define the topic here.

Blog Title: When you write the piece (or as you think of it), add the title. The title may not come to you until later, so leave it blank if you need to.

Twitter: If you’re posting something to Twitter (your own or someone else’s), add that item here. Remember, your Twitter items should still fall into one (or two) of your categories.

Facebook: If you’re posting something to Facebook (your own or someone else’s), add that item here. Ditto on categories.

Links/Photos and Notes: These columns are like a “scratch pad” for whatever links, images, or notes you want to jot down for upcoming items in your calendar. You could include links to blog posts that sparked an idea, an link to (or note about) an image you know you want to include, or thoughts about clients you want to include in a case study post.

Due Date: Use this column to set a firm date for when the final draft of content you create is due to be posted into WordPress (or finalized as a video, etc.). This is important if you have other people creating content, but also helpful so you can stay ahead of your calendar. This date should be 1-3 days ahead of your Date Scheduled, to give you some room to review, edit, and/or move around if something more important comes up.

Date Scheduled: The date you want your content to appear in your venue or platform.

Date Posted: After your content piece goes live, note the actual date posted here. This way you can see how often you post and on what categories, when, as you look back across your work.

6. Brainstorm

Now grab a cup of whatever you drink, sit down, and fill in your calendar. Maybe enlist help from colleagues. Start with the content you’re going to create: blog posts, videos, questions on Facebook, etc. Add your topics in, week-by-week, taking care to balance the categories and the day of the week you’re posting. (How often to post is the subject of another conversation entirely, and varies widely by company and platform!) Think creatively, and think about what you can really execute on. None of this is set in stone, so just get it all out there for now.  Here’s what the start of a filled-in calendar could look like (click to embiggen):

7. Execution

On the day-to-day, your social media editorial calendar should be a roadmap to your social content presence. Ideally you’ll stay out ahead of it somewhat, filling in new ideas as you get them and removing those which you’re never going to actually get to. Hopefully you’ll stay a post or two ahead (at least) so the pressure of “what do I write today” is off, making social content much more enjoyable overall. And feel free to move things around, too; if there’s breaking news you have to get out there, you can easily push today’s post out a few days and substitute the news.

That’s it! An editorial calendar in seven easy steps. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Please let us know in the comments if you can add to our ideas or if you have questions. Good luck!

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If you’re a Facebook user, by now you’ve undoubtedly gotten used to seeing ads on the right side of your Facebook pages. Once the province of big brands (who paid tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to appear on your Facebook home page), they’ve been accessible to everyone for a year or two now, yet I’m surprised at how few brands and companies are taking advantage of this amazingly targeted advertising opportunity. You can use Facebook ads to advertise an outside website (like your own blog or site), or to promote your Facebook Page to people who could Like your page. Even if you’re not yet ready to advertise, you can use the very insightful Facebook Ads platform to understand the universe of users on Facebook who are in your target.

To get started with either demographic analysis or advertising, first go to: www.facebook.com/advertising. Once there, click on the green “Create an Ad” button on the upper right side. You’ll be taken to a screen where you choose a destination and ad type. For the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to assume you’re advertising an outside URL (like your website) and that you’re going to run Facebook Ads. (Sponsored Stories, the other ad type, are very cool, but that’s for another post.)

If all you want to do is browse Facebook demographics, you do not need to enter any creative, just skip to Section 2, Targeting. This is where you can start to learn how big Facebook’s reach could be for your exact target market. By selecting various locations, interests, ages and more you can winnow down to the precise demographic you’re interested in. At this point, you may not be ready to advertise, but wouldn’t it be great to be able to tell your boss that there are 262,000 women ages 25-50 within 50 miles of Stamford, CT who are interested in cooking? (Or wherever your business is or with whatever demographic criteria you choose.) That level of information is not available anywhere else, at least not without paying thousands of dollars for market research.

Play with this tool (for free!) and you could learn a lot about who you’re trying to attract to your Facebook page, or you could extrapolate that to the general public (assuming that 51% of Americans age 12+ have Facebook pages).

If you do want to give Facebook ads a test, it’s very easy to setup and manage on a small scale. You can test with just a few dollars, though I recommend a $500 test budget initially so that you can really give it a fair shake. And there’s no need for fancy banners or creative – it’s really something anyone can do themselves. All you need is a 25-character ad title, 135-character body copy and a small image (110×80 pixels or larger, which is a 4:3 ratio). All of that goes into Section 1 of the ad setup page (first image, above).

In Section 3 of the ad setup, you’ll be able to specify whether you want to pay for clicks or impressions; I recommend clicks, so that you’re only paying for traffic to your site. You can set a daily budget and also a cost-per-click (Facebook recommends the range of per-click cost that matches your demographic; you should generally stay within their recommended range, and you may find you want to change your criteria to lower the cost.)

Note that some days you’ll spend up to your desired budget, and other days you may not spend anything at all; that’s because Facebook’s platform is a bid driven, meaning that you may get outbid in your demographic for a period of time. When my spend starts to wane I usually just wait it out for a few days, but you can also tweak your demographics a bit, which may get the spend started again. Raising your bid will also help, of course, as it will put you farther up the ranks in the bidding system.

Are you already using Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments. Or let us know if you have questions about how understanding Facebook demographics can help your business.

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If you’re at all active in social and digital media, you’ve by now heard that there’s a new game in town: Google+. And if you’re not active, you haven’t heard – and you’re probably not going to jump on the bandwagon for a little while. Sure, there are more than 20 million users in Google+ already, but they’re mostly early adopters, techies and communications professionals. The masses of grandparent and college students, and your high school sweetheart, probably have not yet made the leap from Facebook.

However, Google+ is clearly shaping up to be an important platform for marketers. Most brands already have a strong Google presence – think about all those listings you work so hard to generate in their search engine, and many of you probably also have a YouTube presence. Some may even have a Google local listing, and maybe you also pay for ads. It’s not going to come as a shock to you that Google will almost certainly give brands with Google Plus presences a well-placed listing in relevant search results.

But not just yet. Google+ has been actively discouraging (and even deleting) accounts from brands. They say there’s an official brand type of page coming, so they’re not letting companies have presences just yet. So you’ll have to wait a while before you can get really excited about it.

In the meantime, here are a few likely plusses to consider about Google+; mind you, this is based on current info about the consumer pages, and I’m speculating that these things will carry through to brand pages as well.

• Google+ is, in its default setting, public. That means that all that good content you create will likely be available to all your customers, not just those on Google+. So it’s a bit like Twitter in that way, and that’s going to be good for your search engine visibility, too (if you do it well).
• There are easy-to-use options to share your posts more privately with different groups of people (though it remains to be seen if this feature carries through, and how it can be easily managed, for company pages).
• Google+ posts allow for much longer form than Twitter, and longer than Facebook – in fact, there’s no limit to the length of a G+ post. So you can treat it as a mini-blog for your brand. (But don’t go overboard!)
• Threaded conversations, like those on Facebook, allow for more interaction and engagement.
• You can choose to turn comments on or off for a post, which might be great for important company news, recall information, etc. – but could be a slippery slope, because social media is, well, social, and people have come to expect engagement.
• It’s easy to integrate a Picasa account for photos and YouTube for video. (This might be a problem for some brands, though, who already use Flickr as a primary photo platform.)

It’ll be exciting to see what Google+ does for brands and how they roll out their company pages. For brands who already do content well, Google+ could be a huge boon. For those who are not yet in the content creation and curation game, they may very well have to get started once they have access to Google+, otherwise they may lose valuable search engine slots to companies who are on Google+ and doing it well.

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Have you heard of Instagram? I know, I know, there are so many new social platforms and networks, how can we possibly keep up? But Instagram is one you should know. Why? Because it’s visual. And so many businesses are visual. Trust me here…and read on.

First, a few words about what Instagram is and does. It’s primarily a photo-sharing network. It’s become particularly popular because it started as an iPhone app, rather than a web-based network, and so it caught fire because it made it easy to share photos, taken with your phone, instantly with your friends and colleagues. Instagram has its own network and also allows you to post pictures to your Twitter or Facebook followers, or to other networks including Flickr, Tumblr or Posterous. You can also email directly from the app itself. There are other cool features, like slick filters which can make your photo look like it was taken in 1977. Generally a lot of fun.

Brands are already using Instagram in some really cool ways. Check out these examples and maybe you’ll be inspired.

Brisk at SxSW

Brisk invited fans to submit photos via Instagram in advance of the South by Southwest (SxSW) event this past March. They collected thousands of photos, all tagged with the #briskpics hashtag, and selected a few dozen of them to appear on special Brisk Tea cans at the event.

Jamie Oliver

This celebrity chef has amassed nearly 39,000 followers by posting pics of the food he’s serving at his restaurants and places he visits in his travels. Instagram is perfect for any visual business, and food is no exception.

ABC News

ABC has an Instagram account (abcworldnews) with more than 3,000 followers. They’re one of few news organizations using the service, but they use it well, posting pics from events of the day.

Gucci

One of the world’s top fashion brands, Gucci has taken advantage of the visual medium to showcase fashion, celebrities and trends. They have a much smaller follower base than Jamie Oliver or ABC News, but that’s to be expected from a luxury brand. I’d bet that their followers are primarily their shoppers – or those who really want to be their shoppers. Imagine the powerful brand loyalty they’re creating?

There are a slew of Instagram add-on apps and services, including:

• Postagram: a service to turn your Instagram pics into physical postcards (they’ll even mail them for you!)
• Instagallery: An Instagram gallery browsing program, beautiful on the iPad.
• Instamap: Lets you browse photos by location, like when you’re traveling – great for sightseeing and identifying what you’re looking at.
• Plus a whole host of Web-based Instagram apps, including Extragr.am. These allow you to view and share Instagram photos via the web.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and take pics, and share! And think about how Instagram can benefit your brand.

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What’s EdgeRank, you ask?  It’s only the single most important concept for brands looking to market themselves via Facebook.  I am going to help you understand it so you can make the most of your brand’s Facebook effort.

When you log in to Facebook as yourself, you land on your home page. That page has two viewing options – Top News and Most Recent (look in the upper right hand corner under the search box).  The default view, and the one which the vast majority of people use, is Top News.  In fact, something like 95% of people never view their news feed any other way.

So what’s “Top” News? It’s the content that Facebook has decided is the most important for you.  Not your best friend, not your colleague, and not your spouse.  Everyone on Facebook is going to see different status updates, even if they have the same friends – and how that’s determined is governed by EdgeRank.  It’s an algorithm. But please don’t stop reading, even if this next graphic scares you:

What this means is that for any status update (from an individual or from a brand – both are EdgeRank-dependent), there are three things that determine whether any given Facebook friend or Fan will see it.  For this explanation, we’re going to assume you’re posting as the brand.

You probably already know that gathering Likes and Comments on your updates is important – all three parts of EdgeRank help you understand why.

1. Affinity: How close is the user to the brand? Do they Like or Comment on the brand’s updates often? Visit their wall regularly? Share their content with others?  If so, the Affinity score will be higher.  If they rarely engage with the brand, Affinity will be low.

2. Type: What kind of update is it? Facebook seems to weight media (video and photos) more strongly than regular status updates, and updates with links more strongly than those without. And a Comment is more valuable than a Like. So don’t just post a lot of plain status updates – spice them up with links, photos and videos, when you can. Also, check out other Facebook services, like Places and Facebook Questions – they also seem to rank higher and are more frequently seen in people’s feeds.  And this is where getting people to Like or Comment on your status quickly (and a lot) helps, because an update with a lot of engagement is ranked as a higher type than an update without.

3. Time: Facebook wants you to regularly update your status. And they reward you for it. Recent content with quick initial activity will often appear in your fans’ feeds.  If your content is stale, it may never appear, even if it eventually gathers a few Likes and Comments.  But this also explains why you might only see some friend’s or brand’s updates 18 hours or a day after it’s posted – because it took that long for it to become important to you, meaning other people had to like it or comment on it before it made it into your news feed.

The bottom line for what EdgeRank means for marketers: create great Facebook content that people will interact with, as quickly as possible.  Purposefully create content that will generate comments. Update frequently. Optimize your page so people are more likely to interact with it.

If you’re authentically creating content that your fans enjoy, EdgeRank should come naturally. But it sure can’t hurt to know the details so you can gain a little bit of an edge yourself.

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Tis’ the season – for conferences! Springtime seems to be prime time for events and conferences, so why not use social media to help you get the most out of them?  I’ve been relying on a bunch of new (and older) tools and platforms to maximize my conference-going and networking. Some of these tools may be new to you, too.

HootSuite: This is my go-to app for managing my own Twitter and Facebook presences, as well as those of my clients. The HootSuite iPhone and Android apps and website allow for easy creation of a new stream that searches for the hashtag of the event you’re at – so you can quickly scan to see what everyone else is doing and saying.  I also use HootSuite to livetweet events, with the event hashtag, of course.

Foursquare: Not everyone wants to broadcast their location, but for those of you that do, Foursquare makes conferences a lot of fun, particularly for a conference like SxSW with multiple events happening at once. Seeing where your colleagues and friends check in can help you make a snap decision on where to go next. I also use Foursquare as a simple way to catalog my travels – where I ate, what hotel I stayed at, etc.

Hashable: Available as an iPhone app (or use on the web), this site allows two people to make quick connections via Twitter, which are then augmented with your contact info online.  At the recent Mom 2.0 Summit, a friend of mine made two important connections for me within the space of 30 minutes, both using Hashable.  I love this for its speed (no long-winded intro emails necessary) and ease-of-use via the iPhone app (though the website is just as user-friendly).

QR Codes: This is a bit on the heavy geek-tech side, but it’s a cool icebreaker. Use the ZXing Project QR Code Generator to create a 2-D barcode with your contact information in it.  Then store that barcode as a photo in your smartphone. If you meet people who carry a smartphone, suggest that they snap your QR Code (from the photo) using a QR code reader (I recommend the i-nigma Reader) to quickly upload your contact info to their phone. You can also print the QR Code on a business card (mine has one) but that takes more advance planning!

Group Texting: If you’re traveling as a pack, or want to make plans with people as you go, try out one of the up-and-coming group text services. These apps and services allow one-to-many texting, saving you lots of phone calls and making quicker connections than email. And, at a conference with bad mobile web reception (who hasn’t been in those black-hole ballrooms?), texts will usually get through.

Once you’ve got all your social media tools in place, think about the physical tools you use, too.  Take a Sharpie pen so you can write notes on any business card, even a glossy one – those notes may be really helpful to you when you’re struggling to remember who’s who.  Bring rubber bands or binder clips to band together cards based on day, or event, or types of contact. Oh, and don’t forget the comfy shoes!

Whatever you do, remember that networking is all in the follow-up – so whether you use Twitter, Facebook or good old-fashioned email, don’t forget to follow-up with your new contacts as soon as possible after the event.

Are you in riding the spring conference carousel? How have you used (or do you plan to use) social media to help keep it all together? Please let us know in the comments!

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