Creative Concepts

Creative Concepts Strategies for Finding the Best Blogger for Your Brand

October 26th, 2011 by Susan — No Comments

Last week, I spoke at the M2Moms conference in Chicago; I spoke to a wide range of brand managers and PR people who are sincerely interested in working with bloggers to get the word out about the products and brands they promote. Over and over, they asked how to find the best bloggers. The short answer, of course, is to do your research — there is no one-size-fits-all directory of Great Bloggers.

There are a variety of Best Of lists available; Babble Media’s Top 50 Twitter Moms is a perfect example of a really useful list. Their list covers a variety of categories (Most Controversial, Most Helpful, Funniest) and points to some of the most prolific mom tweeters on the web. If you’re planning a Twitter-heavy campaign, this list would be a good place to start. A simple Google search for “best mom blogs” turns up multiple lists — all of which are a good jumping off place for tracking down that perfect blogger. (You can substitute any term for “mom” — food blogger, craft blogger, dad blogger — depending on what exactly you’re looking for.)

Once you’ve found a list, take the time to actually read the blogs. This seems like such a simple directive, but it’s one that many PR people and brand managers often skip. Rather than pitching your brand or product to everyone on a list because they are on the list, pitch only those bloggers to whom your pitch will be relevant. There are lots of terrific mom blogs out there, but not all of those moms have babies; indiscriminately pitching a campaign for baby products to every mom on a particular list is a good way to convince bloggers you have no idea who they are — and, even worse, that you don’t really care.

Reading the blogs you’re planning to pitch is also important because you want to be sure the blogger’s voice and tone are a good match for your brand or product. Look for bloggers whose online persona is a good fit for whatever you are pitching. Look also for bloggers who are already writing about brands and products similar to yours; a blogger who writes frequently about the environment, for example, would be a terrific match for an ecologically safe cleaning product, but a poor match for an SUV campaign.

How can you measure a blogger’s influence? A quick way is to look at his or her Twitter profile. A blogger with a huge number of followers may very well be heavily influential on Twitter, but be wary of making a hiring decision solely on that number. A blogger who follows 200 people but is followed by 2,000 may very well be more influential than a blogger who has 25,000 followers but follows an equal number of people. In other words, a blogger who is speaking to a loyal group, even if they are on the smaller side, may do more for your brand than a blogger who is not genuinely engaging with his or her followers.

Photo via DonnyGamble.com

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Creative Concepts Asks, What Can Geolocation Apps Do For Your Business?

October 19th, 2011 by Heather — No Comments

Smart phone users experience many benefits by virtue of being digitally connected. When using mobile while spending the morning shopping with friends, getting a bite of lunch with family, then treating yourself to an indulgent treatment at the spa before opening night with the spouse, users can:

Redeem coupons sent by email or text
Compare product pricing among merchants and a retailer’s online shop
Use secure, cashless payment systems like Dwolla
Track meal points, look up calorie counts, and search for a vegan or gluten-free restaurant
Get directions and schedule appointments
Post photos and tips on social networks in real time
Buy tickets, text the baby sitter, and call for a taxi

Another often considered media for the smart phone are geolocation apps like Foursquare, Scvngr, and Gowolla. For users, these apps primarily serve as a form of entertainment through the earning of badges and progressive status achievements and the interactivity among connected friends. However, brands are increasingly finding ways to tap into the small but growing segment of online Americans who use check-in services which Pew reported to be 4% in 2010. The study went on to explain Americans age 18-29 represent the highest demographic and somewhat surprisingly, 10% of those who use location-based services are Hispanic. Men outnumber women 2-to-1 in their check-in activity.

Card merchants like American Express are forging deals with apps like Foursquare to sweeten the participation pot. By combining gamification with spending, card merchants along with retail and personal services providers can take advantage of our culture’s growing deal-seeking, information-sharing trends.

Cardmembers can find exclusive specials on Foursquare when they connect their AmEx card to their Foursquare account. After synching them up, everyday check-ins can bring bigger perks in the form of unlocked specials which are credited back to corresponding expenditures on the card. Who wouldn’t want to tout their latest to-die-for shoe purchase to their friends?

For AmEx, the result is increased spending in the form of unplanned purchases, higher receipt values, and opportunistic transactions. In other words, once your account is synched and you check in your favorite clothing store as usual, you may be tempted to buy something you hadn’t planned on or buy more in order to take advantage of the special. Or you just may use your AmEx to buy the item (to earn the special) when you otherwise might have used your debit card. In a test run earlier this year, AmEx reports a 20% increase in spending among those participating in the program than those who did not.

But what if your restaurant, shop, or venue doesn’t accept American Express? How can you benefit from the mobile, tech-savvy market? Here are some low-fi ways to experiment:

Set your store/restaurant/salon up on Foursquare. Post notices from your Twitter and Facebook account to let customers know they can now check-in each time they visit you.
Put simple signage up inside the store. Be sure to communicate a benefit to check-in like periodic deals, perks for achieving certain status, etc.

What else might you do to capitalize on the geo-location craze?

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Creative Concepts Notes What to Do and What Not to Do When Pitching To Bloggers and the Media

October 12th, 2011 by Robin — 1 comment

This link is a great example of every PR person’s worst nightmare: a journalist (or blogger in this case) makes fun of your pitch, shoots you back a snarky response, and it doesn’t end there as you continue to make more mistakes and they continue to broadcast it to their followers! Have you had this happen to you? Do you never want to be on the receiving end of being called out online? Below are a few very easy ways to avoid this situation – even for the greenest PR person out there.

Do not send out your client news to anyone and everyone – really know your media outlet, know what it reports on, know its tone, know its past stories. This sounds really simple but I know so many PR People who pitch a good story to the wrong place – wasting everyone’s time and energy (and their reputation for the future).
Listen for media-feedback, and then incorporate that into your pitch moving forward—or perhaps even your current pitch. The writers, bloggers, and producers out there know what they want to write about –and know what their bosses what to see printed or on air.
Determine if no means not now – or no means “NEVER” This is subtle—but a PR person who actually speaks with his or her intended target will get a sense of whether he or she should stop sending this person pitches forever—or keep them on a list.
If No means never, don’t keep trying them with different angles of the same story. They could just be a media person who does not want any noise (or news even) from PR people. That’s THEIR problem. Leave them alone!

This brings me to my last but also very important point. Person to person contact is very important in communicating news. That, I hope, will never change. Really good, actually NEW information is difficult to obtain by Editors and Bloggers. Public relations can help get the word out about a little brand that is trying to break into a bigger category or a company that is sharing industry news which can ultimately generate new ideas and then stories for the media. Clever, well-thought out Public Relations campaigns are designed to inform and deliver news so please do follow the above points and make yourself (and the PR industry) an invaluable part of the news cycle!

Photo via Top Rank Blog

Creative Concepts Shares How to Create an Editorial Calendar

October 5th, 2011 by Stephanie — 1 comment

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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Creative Concepts Tips on Choosing — and Using — a Social Media Platform

September 28th, 2011 by Susan — No Comments

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook — social media provides so many ways to reach out to consumers and clients. How do you know what format is right for your brand or business? The first step is understanding how each of these social media platforms works.

Twitter: Twitter is a microblogging platform; you have exactly 140 characters (about the length of a text message) to convey a quick bit of information. Twitter is frequently compared to a cocktail party — there are a variety of conversations all going on at once, and you drift in and out of several at a time. Twitter can be used to direct followers to blog or Facebook posts, or to offer quick snippets of information.

How to use Twitter: Your brand needs a distinct voice to be heard in the crowd. Don’t just share links to blog posts or contests; talk about more than just your brand.

Facebook: Facebook is the online coffee shop, where friends meet to catch up and find out what’s new and cool. Facebook allows you to share multiple mediums — blog posts, photos, videos, quick snippets of information — with fans, in a format that is more detailed than Twitter’s. Keep in mind, though, that your Facebook updates show up in your fan’s feed in between updates from their actual friends; like Twitter, think of this as a conversation, not a billboard.

How to use Facebook: The best Facebook feeds are those from brands who are able to personalize their business. Successful brands have a voice — and sometimes a face — behind their Facebook updates, someone who makes the brand feel like a friend, not a company.

Blogs: A blog is old school social media at its best. Blogs allow you space to talk in detail about your brand or product, to provide consumers with in-depth information or inside scoop. But keep your blog posts relatively short — no one wants to read a dissertation-length treatise on why you’re the brand leader — and make sure you’re posting consistently. You’ll never create a following if your posting schedule is something akin to “once in a blue moon.”

How to use a blog: Keep blog posts focused and tightly edited; provide readers with enough detail to keep them engaged and informed. Make sure that your posts have a voice and a point — and, ideally, some type of narrative. People love a story, because it gives them a way to relate to you — or your brand.

No matter what platform you choose, there are a few general rules to keep in mind.

Updates — no matter what their length — should be well-written and grammatically correct. It’s ok to draft a Tweet or Facebook status update in the way you would draft a blog post; just because you’re limited to 140 characters doesn’t mean you can’t carefully edit what you’re writing.

Engaging in a social media forum means being social — take time to engage with your fans, followers and commenters. And don’t stop at responding to conversation they direct at you; engage with them on their own ground as well. The cocktail party analogy is useful here — no one likes the guy who only talks about himself. The same is true for brands.

Finally, if you’re going to use social media to reach clients and customers, make a commitment to do it right. Designate or hire someone to manage your blog and update your Twitter and Facebook feeds. In order to create a significant online presence, you need someone who can be online for a significant amount of time each day.

Engaging with consumers via social media requires a commitment of time and resources, but the return is amazing: you will create a community of fans who are loyal to and enthusiastic about your brand. And that’s absolutely worth the effort.

Photo via Twitter.

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Creative Concepts Shares How User generated Content Now Has Longer Legs

September 21st, 2011 by Heather — No Comments

For years, Zagat’s was the de facto resource if you wanted to get the skinny on restaurants and accommodations. Marketing-speak being what it is, savvy travelers and selective diners turned to Zagat’s to learn what real travel advisors (patrons themselves) had to say about ambiance, service, food quality, presentation, and price-value perceptions.

Problem was, as travel became more of an “everyman” activity, the old publishing model couldn’t keep up with increased needs for timely, rich information. Proliferation of web-ready devices built on the early Zagat type of objective scoring model to include user-generated content, allowing it to achieve scale. Today we have access to on-demand information from our handhelds, filterable by location, price point, cuisine type, rating, and many other criteria.

With loads of information from multiple sources immediately available to help orient our search, it’s still the insider’s scoop we seek. All the flowery menu descriptions in the world don’t matter much if the real experience doesn’t match up. We want to know what people had to say yesterday about the service or noise level, or whether the venue’s advertised prices are worth every savory bite.

Service companies from restaurants, hair and nail salons, accountants on to catering companies should factor reports from Open Table, Yelp! and other portals into their ongoing marketing (including mobile marketing!) and operational planning. As consumer adoption of mobile devices continues to grow, so, too, will the production of user-generated content like ratings and reviews. Consumers generally feel very empowered and justified in their quest to share firsthand experiences with the world. Thanks to smart phones, now people can act right in the moment to immediately impact the prospective customer in a cab around the corner tapping on his phone.

Serve my appetizer with my meal, instead of before? You can bet it’ll be in my review. Fry my hair with the keratin solution? I’m sure going to let all my friends know with a Facebook share.

As cross-channel commerce platform BazaarVoice has reported, consumers place more trust in the opinions expressed by peers, family members, friends, and even other unmet consumers than they do in the sanitized, self-serving brand messages pushed out by brand-side marketers. The additional decision-making capability afforded smartphone-carrying consumers means that user feedback just got more powerful.

A few things to consider for your business:

Take steps to proactively search brand mentions around the web, both in social as well as regular search venues. Systematize the collection and results reporting of findings, both positive and negative. What previously unknown issues are occurring with regularity? How can these accounts be used to improve your employee training or procedures?
If the opportunity exists to directly address reported problems, be sure to do so. There’s nothing like a page full of complaints with no brand response to send the message that your company doesn’t care about its customers. Some of the greatest brand ambassadors were once dissatisfied customers whose issues were taken seriously.
Be mindful of public perception of your brand image, and use that information when developing awareness or lead generation programs. If your direct mail or email marketing message centers around how great your stuff is, but 90% of online reviews suggests it stinks, the disconnect will likely mean eroded positioning or low conversions for you.

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Creative Concepts Followed Hurricane Irene Online

September 14th, 2011 by Melissa — No Comments

As the major news channels in the world focused on the facts and figures behind hurricane Irene’s impending arrival last week, I chose to get my information on her through my friends, followers and followees on Facebook and Twitter. Instead of getting the facts about her wind speed, trajectory or the latest clip of Mayor Bloomberg talking about evacuation, I got the inside track on how people were feeling and what they were seeing, via pictures, video and words.

The New York Times featured a Twitter ticker with updates from contributors to the paper on their thoughts and insights on Irene. New York City-based celebrities announced to their legions of followers what the view was like from their apartments high in the skies of Manhattan. And then there were my friends on Facebook–including my husband–who were making light of what was quickly turning into a scary situation. There’s nothing like a little humor to help ease the nerves.

Rather than just hearing accounts from random people-on-the-street, I was actually getting updates from my friends. It was refreshing and at the same time entertaining and informative. This was crowd sourcing at its best. Various TwitPics showed New York City in its pre-Irene stages: Times Square eerily looking like a ghost town; empty shelves at neighborhood grocery stores; and the windows of Bloomingdale’s boarded shut.

When Irene finally did touchdown in New York, Twitter was afire with updates from locals alerting the rest of the world what they were seeing. The #irene and #hurricaneirene hashtags were a flurry of everything from humor to public assistance and general information. Even those with power outages were able to get updates via smart phones and iPads. If there were ever an event to showcase that social media is more than just a passing trend, Hurricane Irene was it.

Photo via @danthegiftguru

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Creative Concepts Shares the Benefits of Facebook Advertising

September 7th, 2011 by Stephanie — No Comments

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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Creative Concepts Teen Insights On Texting

August 31st, 2011 by Jerelyn — No Comments

Thank god for my cellphone. I might not have a complicated data plan, or a Blackberry or an iPhone, but texting works and it’s important to me. It’s nice to have some contact with the outside world, trust me. For me, it’s a way to stay in touch with my friends, especially during the long summer months when everyone decides to drop off the face of the planet. I mostly use my phone for texting because talking on the phone has gone out of fashion, at least for my generation. Let’s be honest, I really don’t have a conversation with anyone on the phone unless they’re over 40. It’s just a plain old hassle, and every time I pick up the phone and someone talks nonstop for thirty minutes, I flinch and think this is why texting is so much more convenient!

You could say that texting is a teenage epidemic. According to my driving instructor, it’s so extreme that teenagers argue they can text and drive because they are so good at typing quickly that they don’t have to take their eyes off the road. I mean, yeah I love texting, but please, that is such bad logic… I don’t text on the road, but I text to coordinate with my parents, coordinate with friends, and admittedly, to gossip with friends over what crazy things happened over the weekend. Once I was texting in the halls at school and a psycho teacher ran up to me and blared “Texting alert, texting alert, texting alert!” right into my ear…needless to say, I don’t text during school, or at least not within view of that teacher. While looking for some stats on teen texting, I found a 2010 survey by The Nielsen Company which found the average teenager (13 to 17 years old) sends or receives 3,339 texts per month which is something more than 100 per day or about one every six minutes in a 10 hour day … that’s a whole lot of interpersonal networking!!

Photo via Michael Smith’s Principal’s Page Blog

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Creative Concepts’ Tips On Shopping for a Social Media Expert

August 24th, 2011 by Susan — 2 comments

We all know that social media is the way to connect with customers, but as a business or a brand, how do you know who to turn to for help? Everyone seems to be a social media “expert” these days, but not all experts are created equal. There is an art to using social media successfully, particularly to promote a brand, but having a Twitter account does not make someone an expert. Here’s how to vet your expert or agency and get the best possible help with your social media outreach.

Be wary of any social media “expert” who isn’t already using social media, and using it well. Your consultant or agency should be able to speak, from experience, about all of the outlets that he or she is recommending your business engage with — as well as being able to recommend outlets you hadn’t thought of (after all, this person is the expert). They should also be able to explain, in simple, understandable terms, how to use these platforms, and how to choose the ones that will be of most use to you and your customers.

Ask for details on how they will use social media to grow your brand. The agency or consultant should be able to articulate goals and timelines — 500 Facebook fans in the next 30 days, for example, or 10 Foursquare check-ins per day at your brick-and-mortar location, or three blog posts per week featuring your brand or product — as well as offering strategies for achieving those goals.

Have your expert submit writing samples. Social media relies heavily on the written word; if your consultant will be updating your brand’s blog, Facebook page, or Twitter feed for you, be sure that their writing is up to your standards. You are looking for interesting, relevant, grammatically correct content. If the consultant or agency has a Facebook page or Twitter feed that they can share with you (either her personal accounts or another client’s), look those over carefully; feel free as well to ask for sample posts relevant to your brand.

Keep an eye on the conversation. Hiring a consultant to manage social media outreach for your brand doesn’t mean that you’re off the hook. Follow your brand on Facebook and Twitter; read your business’s blog. If you see something that’s not working, let the consultant know and if you see something you really like, let them know that, too. But remember: they may be the social media experts, but you’re the brand expert. Together you can create a voice for your brand and a community for your business.

Looking for examples of businesses and brands that are succeeding at social media? Some of my favorite Facebook pages are listed below including a few clients of Creative Concepts; these brands have a clear voice and an excellent sense of community, and always offer well-written, engaging status updates.

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