We advised Arts Umbrella on promoting the event on Facebook and Twitter, and put together a list of prominent Vancouver bloggers that could potentially blog about Indulge: The Art of Beauty. We also recommended ways to leverage an online ticket giveaway to drive awareness about the event.
About Indulge: The Art of Beauty
On May 15, this exclusive spa and fashion event will take place at Holt Renfrew with proceeds supporting programs in the Arts Umbrella community. Guests will have Holt Renfrew all to themselves, and they will receive one of five luxury spa services provided by Holts salon and spa including; a deluxe hair treatment package, a luxury mini mani, a personalized style consultation and photo shoot, a professional make-up tutorial and chocolate tasting and, for the men, a wardrobe refresher and whisky option. While guests are being pampered they will also enjoy spring fashion demonstrations, refreshments and live performances provided by Arts Umbrella’s pre-professional performing arts students. As well, all guests will receive gifts provides by Holt Renfrew, Metro Vancouver BMW Retailers and other generous supporters of the event.
Tickets are $200, and include one of the above luxury spa services. For full details on the event, visit the Arts Umbrella website.
About Arts Umbrella
Arts Umbrella’s mission is to inspire kids for life through the arts. They are a not-for-profit arts education centre for youth ages 2 to 19 and reach more than 24,000 people annually with the benefits of arts education. Arts Umbrella is committed to delivering the highest quality of arts education to young people, regardless of their socio-economic circumstances. More than 12,000 youth access their programs annually at a reduced rate or free through various bursaries and outreach programs.
We’ve really enjoyed having the opportunity to work with Arts Umbrella; they are a truly fantastic organization. We hope you have a great time at Indulge: The Art of Beauty!
Google+ recently changed around their website and we’re here to walk you through the redesign. Their new focus is on customization, photo and video, and a new hangouts interface, as well as a complete overhaul of the original look and feel of the site. Fans of Facebook will recognize many similarities between the Google+ redesign and the new Facebook timeline. Coincidence? We think not. Without further ado, we bring you the major changes to Google+:
Cover photo and profile picture. The entire header section has become more prominent with the redesign. Your profile photo is now larger and has moved to the right side of the page. Take a moment to make sure your profile photo doesn’t look grainy with the new layout, the new dimensions for the image are 250px X 250px. You also now have the choice between one large cover photo, similar to Facebook, or keeping the 5 image photo strip. If you choose to switch to the cover photo, the dimensions are 940px X 180px. To change your photos click ‘edit profile’ at the top of the page when you’re on the ‘profile’ application. Then, click ‘change photos’. From here you can edit the images that appear on your photo strip, or switch to having one cover photo by clicking on the images next to ‘choose a template’.
Emphasis on photos and videos. Similar to Facebook, Google+ has enlarged the amount of space photos and videos take up on the page. Now visual posts are ‘full bleed’ meaning they take up the whole page width from left to right. Take advantage of this increased real estate by sharing company photos and videos that really highlight your brand.
Customizable ‘navigation ribbon’. Instead of static icons at the top of the page, there’s now a dynamic ribbon on the left hand side. You can customize this ribbon by dragging applications (what Google+ is now calling the various features on their site) up or down to rearrange the order they appear, as well as hiding apps you use less often in the ‘more’ section. Google+ has also added ‘quick actions’ which, when you hover over a certain app on the ribbon, reveals a set of shortcuts such as adding photos right from the home page.
Easy access to top circles. This handy new feature allows you to place your top circles at the top of the homepage where you can easily switch back and forth between them to see what’s new in your various networks.
To edit which circles appear on this bar, go to the ‘circles’ application on the navigation ribbon. From there, drag and drop your two most important circles so that they are beside the ‘drop here to create a circle’ icon. The two circles that are first in your list of circles will also appear as the two circles on your circle tab bar. From the tab bar, you can access the rest of your circles by clicking on the ‘more’ button.
Hangout overhaul. The ‘Hangout’ application now has a prominent place on the navigation ribbon, but you can only access it when you are using Google+ as yourself and not as your business. The new hangouts page includes a constantly updating list of invitations from people in your circles, easy access to public and ‘on air’ hangouts, and a rotation of popular hangouts, tips, and other special features. Use this new feature to keep an eye on hangouts that are relevant to your business, and don’t be afraid to host hangouts regularly for your business. The more often you host hangouts as a business, the better your chances of being featured on the new hangouts page.
Easily switch between your personal profile and your business profile. When you log into Google+ you do so with your personal profile. To access your business page, click on your name or profile picture in the upper right corner. A drop down menu will appear, click on your page’s name to go to your page and begin using Google+ as your business.
Trending on Google+. Similar to Twitter, this feature allows you to see what’s being talked about most on Google+. Before the redesign, you could only find this content by doing a search on Google+, now it’s front and centre on your home page when you’re logged into Google+ as yourself, or you can find it under the ‘explore’ application on the navigation ribbon if you’re logged in as your business page.
Watch this space to see what’s trending on Google+ and, if it’s relevant to your business, share interesting content about the topic to help others notice and circle your business.
Want more information about the redesign? Check out this video from Google:
Contact us if you’re interested in setting up a Google+ page for your business. We can help you with Google+ page set-up, training, implementation and more.
Setting goals before you jump into building your online business presence is incredibly important, as is putting in place proper tools to measure your success. Below we offer some tips on goal setting and discuss our favorite monitoring tools.
Tips for Setting Social Media Goals
Start small. Nothing is more discouraging than setting an unreachable goal and then being surprised and disappointed when you don’t reach it. Not to mention, inflated social media expectations reduces your credibility and increases your risk, which we can all agree is something we don’t want.
Set a realistic time period for reevaluation. It takes time to establish a great social media presence online, similar to how ‘overnight success stories’ don’t actually happen overnight. Give yourself a year to test out your social media strategy. At the end of the year, take some time to fully assess whether you’ve been participating in the right online communities, whether or not social media has positively impacted your business, and what areas you need to tweak to perform better in the following year.
Monitor your progress regularly. Don’t wait until your one year trial period is up to take a look at how you’re doing and to tweak your strategy to better meet your goals. We recommend taking some time once a week to do an overview of what you’re doing well, and areas you could improve. Taking this time to evaluate your online presence will allow you to catch any issues quickly before they grow into bigger problems.
Measuring Your Success
There are hundreds of ways to monitor your success online. Here are a few of our favorite tools (bonus: all of them except Hootsuite are free to set-up and use):
Facebook Insights: Facebook recently revamped their analytics and the new metrics are great for tracking how well your page is doing. Key traceable metrics include; understanding and analyzing trends regarding growth and demographics, consumption and creation of content, and information regarding the engagement and viral reach of specific posts.
Google Analytics: Installing analytics on your website is a critically important step, and one that many people skip. Without having tracking code installed on your website, it’s the equivalent of putting up a billboard downtown. You’re unaware of who many have seen it, and whether or not people are visiting your business as a result of your advertising. The same can be said for your website; there’s no point building one if you don’t have tracking installed to tell you how many people are visiting your site, what pages they view, how long they stay, etc. Google Analytics can do this and much more, including the ability to link to Adwords. We also love how easy it is to compare your progress month over month, or year over year.
Google Alerts: Another great feature by Google, alerts send an email to your inbox with the latest internet content surrounding your area of interest. You choose the keywords you want to monitor, how often you want to receive the results, and what email address to send them to, and Google does the rest. Great keywords to set up Google Alerts with are your business name and your product names, that way you’ll know when people are talking about you online and can respond to them.
Social Mention: A great social media search engine that searches the internet for user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and more. The results are extensive and appear in real time.
Twitter Counter: A great Twitter monitoring tool that let tracks how well your account is performing on an hourly, weekly, monthly, 3 month, or 6 month period.
We’ve only covered a few of the hundreds of listening and monitoring tools available for businesses. If you’d like to find out about how to specifically use these and other applications for your business, we’d be happy to set up a training or coaching session with you. Contact us for more information.
Many businesses fail when it comes to social media. Why? Because organisations don’t give due consideration to strategy before they start. A social media strategy can be as long or as short (on the back of a napkin!) as you want it to be, but it should take into account and reflect:
Your brand, message, corporate mission and vision
Your target audience
Which tools you will use and who will do what
Quantifiable goals and tools to measure success
Content – how will you add value
What needs to be done and when
Here are 9 important factors that you need to consider when building and implementing your social media strategy:
1. Your strategy on-line must be reflective of your overall business strategy
Successful social media strategies augment your existing business plans, reflect your brand, goals and target audience.
2. Take a holistic approach to Internet marketing
Your Internet marketing should include your website (as the back bone), email campaigns, SEO, SEM, online ads and mobile marketing. Each component should cross pollinate with the others (i.e. your website should be social media ready, and the words you use in your website content should be similar, or the same, as they keywords you use on Facebook, Twitter or your blog).
3. Choose your social media tools wisely
There are thousands of social networks and you can’t use them all, so choose 2 or 3 and use them really well. When deciding which tools to use, consider which tools your target audience is most likely to use, which tools best reflect your offering and which tools you will have fun incorporating into your online strategy.
4. Start small and grow
Identify one area of business and run a pilot. Doing so will allow you to test the waters in a manageable way, allowing you to prove concepts and build.
5. Social media education
Education should be an ongoing consideration and component of your social media plan. Educate your staff and executives as to what social media is, how to use it effectively from a business perspective and make sure to keep abreast of new tools and methods.
6. Make it measurable
What you can’t measure, you can’t manage. Take time to consider what are your goals from implementing social media, quantify these and determine which tools you will use to track effectiveness. There’s a wide array of social media measurement tools out there and many of them are free – use them!
7. Create a social media policy
This is important. Every employee should know what is expected of them, what to post, and what not to post, when using social media on behalf of the organisation. Creating policies that build best practices helps ensure that everyone is on the same page.
8. Content is key
When it comes to social media you need to remember that it’s not about you but, instead, about your audience, and this is especially true for content. Make sure that your content adds value for your audience, doesn’t overtly sell and makes people want to share it with their networks too.
9. Listen
Social media listening should be ongoing from day one. Listen for mentions (and respond!), keep an eye on competitors, peers and luminaries.
Here at Out-Smarts, one of our core services is working with clients to build and implement effective social media strategies. You know you need one, so contact us now!
A social media dashboard is an essential tool for any digital marketer. We’re partial to Hootsuite, ‘the leading social media dashboard to manage and measure your social networks’, and a local Vancouver based success story. Here’s why we’re head over heels for Hootsuite:
1. Schedule posts. This is probably right up there as one of our favorite Hootsuite features. Social media newsfeeds move quickly and what you post at 8am might not be seen by the potential client that logs into Facebook or Twitter at 2pm. Besides sitting at your computer posting constantly, how can you be sure your updates are appearing in front of important consumer eyes? You schedule your posts. Hootsuite makes this easy with their scheduler; you can schedule one post at a time, mass upload posts via CVS using the bulk message uploader, and see all your scheduled posts in the Publisher calendar.
2. Team management. If you’re more than a one man (or woman) show, you probably have multiple people managing your various social media accounts. Hootsuite is great for keeping track of who’s replied to comments, answered questions, posted to various accounts, and it also tracks what time everything was done – to better spread out your postings throughout the day or week. Another perk is that you can give multiple users access to your various social media accounts without having to reveal private information, such as passwords.
3. Analytics. Hootsuite has its own built-in metrics and analytics. We blogged about it last April when they revamped their offering. Check it out, there’s lots of analyzing power built into the dashboard.
4. No logging into multiple accounts. Having everything in one place is a huge time saver. Without Hootsuite, we’d be logging in and out of social media accounts for clients all day long. We can imagine you feel the same way trying to manage your time with social media because, let’s be honest, it can be a full time job. We can testify to that too; it’s how we make our living! From your Hootsuite dashboard you can send, schedule, track, like, comment, reply, and view photos on multiple accounts on Facebook – personal and business timelines, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.
5. Hard to miss comments. This ties into number 4, sometimes things get lost in the shuffle when you’re logging in and out of multiple accounts. Using Hootsuite, you can see everything all in one place. It’s easy to see whether someone has commented on your Facebook post, or sent you a direct message on Twitter. It’s also easy to see if a team member has already replied, or whether you need to get on that right away.
6. In the cloud. There’s nothing to download with Hootsuite, it’s entirely online which is great for business owners and employees that are frequently out and about throughout the workday. You can log in, check the status of your social media accounts and post updates from anywhere with an internet connection.
7. Inexpensive. Hootsuite offers users an impressive package for the affordable price of $5.99 a month for the Pro version. For a smidge under $6, you can link unlimited social profiles, add 1 free team member, you get a free analytics report, Google Analytics and Facebook Insights integration and more. If you want to add additional team members, it’s $15 a month each – which is still an excellent deal.
8. Add RSS feeds. If you blog, you can add your feed and your posts will automatically be posted to your various social media accounts. You can add unlimited RSS feeds with the Pro version ($5.99 a month).
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, here’s an article on why you should not use Hootsuite. We’ll let you be the judge – do you think Hootsuite is a reasonable investment for your business?
If you write a regular blog then you’ve no doubt suffered from blog writer’s fatigue. Blog writer’s fatigue is similar to writer’s block and it gets us all from time to time: you wake up one morning and you have no inspiration – can’t think of what to write and can’t be bothered. Thankfully there is a cure. Here at 11 tips that will inspire you and get your creative juices flowing:
1. Read, read, read – open the newspaper, read articles in magazines and on-line publications and books: you’re sure to find inspiration for a post.
2. Share the responsibility – get other members of staff, partners and even customers to contribute to your blog thus providing a fresh viewpoint for readers.
3. Think outside the box – cover a topic that is peripheral to your business – one that you wouldn’t normally cover in a typical blog post but that is still relevant to your central subject.
4. Just do it – stop making excuses: you’ve started a blog and you see the benefit in terms of increased traffic – it takes discipline and commitment to have a successful blog so just quit the complaining and get it done – it’s worth it.
5. Take inspiration from every day experiences – have you had an experience in your every day existence that strikes a cord? Share these experience in your blog. It could be as simple as a positive customer service experience or a negative one that made your blood boil.
6. Ask friends – this is my favorite one and one I use often. If I am stuck for an idea for a blog post subject, I’ll ask friends and colleagues for suggestions. You will be amazed by the ideas a fresh mind can come up with.
7. Attended and event, trade-show, presentation, movie or read an inspiring book? – review it in your blog.
8. Been on vacation? – I like to use travel as an inspiration as it gives me the chance to review how things are done differently in other places and to share these new innovations with you.
9. Learned something new? – if there have been new developments pertinent to an old blog post there’s no reason why you can’t write an new post based on a previous one giving your audience an update on developments.
10. Post a blog in another medium – written blog posts aren’t your only option. Get creative with a short video clip to post to your blog or embed a YouTube video that relates to your business and audience. Even easier, find an infographic that is related to what you do and post that (Pinterest is a great source for infographics so check out our collection there – it may inspire you).
11. Reward yourself! – if your having a day when you’d rather have teeth pulled than write a post, then give yourself and incentive and reward yourself when its done. I have a penchant for chocolate so Cocoa Nymph here I come.
The 11 tips above should counter this symptom of blogging but remember that your blog posts should add value. If you run through this list and you still can’t find inspiration don’t blog for the sake of it – your audience won’t thank you so spare them – take a break and come back to it in a fews days when you are fresh.
If you think that blogging isn’t right for you then consider outsourcing this to us – it’s just one of the services we provide.
We really like this breakdown from Power Formula of how the typical LinkedIn member uses the site. How do you use LinkedIn, and are you taking advantage of the benefits it offers your business? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
working with Arts Umbrella to help promote their upcoming event, Indulge: The Art of Beauty hosted by Holt Renfrew.
