Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networks right now.  It allows you to pin, organise and share images online.  It is very visually stimulating and fun.  Watch this space for a more in depth post all about Pinterest and feel free to follow me there.

We’ve been exploring online tools that allowyou to create simple graphics.  We like Gimp, Aviary and Pixlr – there’s also “lite” version of Photoshop if you can find it.

Edge Rank Checker is a tool that allows you track the effectiveness of your Facebook pages but beware – it takes ages to generate your reports and pages with low fan counts will be skewed.

Mobile apps we are loving include: Ego (check web stats on the go), Flipboard (Social Magazine) and Evernote (to help you remember everything).

Want to customize yor Facebook page?  We’re currently evaluating Shortstack, FaceIt Pages, North Social and Page Modo.  If you have used any of these and have a preference we’d love to get your feedback.

And now some social media tools:  Echofon (never read a tweet twice), Buffer (add posts  and “automagically” post them through the day), CoTweet (manage mutliple Twitter feeds).

Enjoy!

The big change: Facebook Sponsored Stories will now appear in user’s newsfeeds. Facebook says this won’t be nearly as intrusive to their 800+ million members as it sounds. The ads will be marked as “sponsored”, they will be strictly regulated so that users will see no more than 1 ad in their newsfeed per day, and they will only contain content about friends or pages with which the user is already connected. This gives your ad better odds of being seen by those who would be interested in your business – the types of people you want to like your business page.

Also, Facebook users can’t opt out of sponsored stories, everyone’s getting them. They can, however, delete individual ads from their newsfeed, but that’s less likely to happen because the ads only show information about friends or pages they already interact with on Facebook.

Why this is so great for marketers: It allows you to get your content front and center on people’s newsfeeds, mixed in with all the organic content generated by people’s friends and page likes. Also, the ‘sponsored’ tag on the lower right hand side of the ad is unlikely to be noticed until after the user has processed the ad. If it’s even noticed at all. It’s a pretty small tag, as you can see from the screenshot below.

Another potential benefit for marketers is that this is another way to target Facebook’s 800m+ users, half of which return to the site daily. With sponsored ads appearing in newsfeeds and the right sidebar, as well as traditional Facebook ads, the amount of potential daily impressions for ads will skyrocket. This could go one of two ways for advertisers, 1. Ad prices will decrease because of increased supply, or 2. Ad prices could increase because the addition of sponsored stories could increase demand for Facebook ads. Time will tell which one ends up being true.

Either way, there’s bound to be the usual protests surrounding any change on Facebook, but we have a feeling that will die down pretty quick. Personally, I don’t mind seeing relevant ads on Facebook, and I don’t think it will make a big difference whether they appear on the right sidebar, or within my newsfeed. Highly targeted ads are nice because they inform me of deals or pages I might not have known about otherwise. However, Facebook will need to be careful about maintaining a good ad to organic content ratio. Sponsored ads would quickly get annoying if they began overtaking the newsfeed. I know I can’t be the only one that would think that way.

Dealing with Hackers and Spammers

Having a WordPress site is loads of fun. Being able to create content, make your own edits and upload images and documents without having to contact your web designer is an absolute delight. However, dealing with hackers and spammers is not that great. Granted hackers and spammers do attack non-WordPress sites, but they seem to be targeting these more frequently. There are of course ways to protect yourself.

How do you know if your site has been hacked? If you notice weird spammy words in your website content, in your Google search result or if you’re site redirects to a strange url, then you’ve been hacked. If you’re not 100% sure, try Sucuri SiteCheck. It will scan your site for malware, blacklisting and out-of-date software for free.

How did this happen? Hackers either managed to figure out your FTP password or they used a vulnerability in either the WordPress core files or a plugin.

Here are a few things you can do to prevent this from happening:

1. When creating FTP passwords use a generated word that cannot be pronounced, uses a few symbols and a mixture of upper and lowercase letters. Of course these passwords will be more difficult to remember, but using a tool like 1Password or LastPassword can help.
2. Make sure to upgrade your WordPress site every time a new version comes out. These updates usually include fixes to vulnerabilities and are very important.
3. Make sure you upgrade your plugins as well for the same reason. If you have lots of plugins and aren’t using them all, don’t just deactivate them, delete them.

If your site has been hacked, then you’ll need to clean up the files. I normally delete the WordPress core files (everything but the wp-config.php and wp-content folder) and re-install everything. I also do a manual scan of the theme files to make sure that hackers haven’t messed anything up. If this feels a bit intimidating, you might want to contact Sucurri Security. For a small fee they can clean up infected sites and you can also hire them to scan your site and keep an eye on it annually.

If you’ve been blacklisted by Google or spammy words appear in Google search results, you’ll need to log into your Google webmaster tool and submit your site for reconsideration once it’s clean.

Although spammers are less harmful, they are equally as annoying. If you’re site is new and you haven’t publicized your email address, you might want to install the email address encoder plugin. This plugin will simply scramble your email address making it harder for harvesters to grab it. If on the other hand your email is already out there, then I’m afraid that once it’s on a spam list, there’s not much you can do.

Spam comments can also be detrimental with more and more evidence pointing to the fact that these are not simply generated by robots but actual people. The first thing to do is to install Akismet which will do it’s best to trap spam comments. But Akismet alone is insufficient.

Be warned against comments that seem harmless. They might praise your work or congratulate you on your blog and let you know that they are bookmarking it right now. These types of comments are simply tests to see if you will accept them or not. Once you’ve approved them, then they’ll attack your blog much more fiercely.

Finally, one of the most effective ways to reduce spam is simply to close comments after a few weeks. Most readers leave comments on newer posts. Closing off comments automatically after a few weeks is very simple. Log into your WordPress admin, go to settings > Discussion and check the box that says “Automatically close comments on articles older than __ days” and enter the number of days you want to use.

I just did this myself recently and the influx of spam comments has been reduced dramatically.

1. Not taking social media seriously

There’s over 800 million people using Facebook, and over 200 million Twitter users -  not to mention, a similar number of folks on LinkedIn, and yet many businesses still dismiss social media as a flash in the pan.  Your business has the potential to take advantage of this massive online hub; ignoring it is a huge folly. You don’t have to start with a presence of your own if you’re not comfortable.  Using social media to listen to, and learn from, others in your industry can be a valuable research method, and it is also a great way to get a feel for how social media is used in your sector.

2. Ignore it and hope it will go away

Back in the early nineties when I sold Internet technologies, lots of companies weren’t convinced that the Internet would take off, so they ignored it and hoped it would go away. Many were left scrambling at the last minute to catch up online and some didn’t survive. A  hundred or so years ago many naysayers dismissed the phone. The same story is now replaying with regard to social media. Don’t stick your corporate head in the sand – social media isn’t going away and the sooner you accept that, the less risk to your business.

3. It’s only for small business

I’ve read a few articles recently that write off social media off as a tool that’s only useful for small to medium sized businesses. Many large, established businesses use this as an excuse because they have done things the traditional way for so long that they know no other way. However, pioneers like Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines and Ford are proving that social media can be a driving force for larger organisations too, if it’s done right.

4. The Intern can do it

Many organisations get a young intern to maintain their social networks because this person has hundreds of Twitter followers, or is on Facebook all the time. However, just because you are familiar with using these tools socially doesn’t mean you know how to use them for business.  I am not saying an intern can’t do it, but you should make sure that they understand your goals, mission, audience, brand and such first, so that they can represent you appropriately online.

5. Failing to consider company strategy

Point 4 leads me nicely to point 5 – not approaching social media from a strategic perspective. Only 8% of companies surveyed in a recent Forrester report are using social media in ways that tie in with their corporate objectives.  Again, companies often embark on using social media for the sake of using it rather than using it from a strategic perspective.  Before your company  sets out on the social media path you should ask – who is your target audience, what is your message, which tools are right for your business given your brand and mission, and how can you use social media to augment your everyday activities. If you do that, your social media efforts are more likely to amount to something.

6. It’s all about you

In the old business world, marketing was all about corporations; all activities centered around the product and service, and not the consumer. Every message had to be vetted – which took time and meant the the company was in control.  Many organisations take this approach to social media, and then wonder why they are spending lots of resources but have few results and little return to show for it. They aren’t succeeding because they need to re-engineer their approach. These days, it is not about you, but rather, it’s about your audience and every social touchpoint should reflect that. To be effective in social media you need to focus on your target audience, be able to move faster, and to communicate in the moment before content gets outdated.

7. Blatant selling

This is the biggest faux pas you can make with social media. Never use social media to blatantly sell. It is okay to promote your offering, but in your face selling is off putting. Here at Out-Smarts, we use the 80-20 rule – 80% of our posts are aimed at adding value, and only 20% are promotional.

8. Failing to set goals and objectives

As with any other business function, you should set goals and objectives before you start rather than haphazardly setting up your social shop  (as it were). What is it that you hope to achieve? You may want to build community with your target audience, extend your reach to new communities, use social media as a conduit to extend the reach of your content, drive traffic to your website, etc.  Whatever your goals are, you should document them, quantify them and make sure that they are achievable.

9. Failure to measure success

Many companies have no idea whether their social media presence is benefiting them or not, nor are they able to respond to what is being said about them online. Once you’ve determined your goals, you should put in place tools that allow you to measure your success and to listen effectively.  These might include free tools – for example; for web traffic analysis you can use Google Analytics, to measure your Facebook following use Insights, for Twitter use counters or paid tools like Radian6 that allow you to monitor and measure engagement.

10. Failing to take a holistic business approach.

Up until recently, many businesses have looked on social media as a stand alone approach rather than considering it as a way to complement and augment their entire marketing strategy.  2012 is going to be the year when the penny drops and companies realise that the best social media projects are those that complement their real world activities.

1. Create a Custom iframe Tab for Your Facebook Page

2. Tumblr: The Easiest Way to Blog

3. 10 Easy Ways to Get More Links to Your Website

4. Add Social Media Icons to Your Sidebar Without Using Widgets

5. What You Need to Know About Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines

6. Using Social Media for Recruitment – Part 1

7. Connecting Your Social Media Accounts

8. Steps to Change Your Twitter Handle

9. How to Protect Yourself on Facebook

10. How to Get More People to Like Your Facebook Page

There you have it, our top 10 most read blog posts of 2011. Happy reading!

Free

Like most social media tools, creating a YouTube channel is free. All you need is a gmail account and you can create a channel and start uploading videos.

Advertising

If you feel Google Adwords and Facebook Ads are getting too expensive for your budget, or you’d like to broaden your advertising reach, YouTube offers paid advertising and is generally less expensive than both Google and Facebook. With YouTube, there’s two types of advertising, 1. Within YouTube search, you can bid on the keywords you feel users would enter into the search bar to find your video. When users search these keywords, a thumbnail and description of your video appears in the results. 2. Promoted Videos run on the right hand side of a YouTube page (similar to paid advertising with Google), and can be set up through Google Adwords.

SEO

Google owns YouTube, they’re bound to put an emphasis on video in the organic search results if an applicable video is available online. Try a search yourself, there’s a good chance you’ll find relevant videos in your results. To take full advantage of the SEO benefits of video, remember to tag your videos with relevant keywords and terms you think people would use to find your video online.

Viral

Make a video funny or creative enough to catch the eye of the online world (no pressure!), and it could go viral; resulting in your video being seen by thousands of people. The exposure for your brand is priceless.

Demonstrate Expertise

Informational videos about your industry, or videos showcasing why you offer your customers a superior product, are a great way to showcase your knowledge online. Giving away great tips online gives potential clients a teaser of how good you are at what you do, and can translate into them contacting you for more information.

Humanize Your Business

The stuffy, corporate business model is out. People want to get to know the people behind a brand, and a great way to do that is through video. If you’re camera shy, find someone within your company that isn’t. Or, if you’re a one person show, you can post a powerpoint or slideshow video and narrate it as you go.  And, don’t be afraid to show off your personality!

Measure your effectiveness

One of the challenges of marketing offline is the difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.  If you put up a billboard downtown, it’s difficult to tell how many customers you acquired because of it. With YouTube, you have access to Insight reporting which quantifies views, demographics, popularity, and the community surrounding your YouTube presence.

Website traffic

The end goal of social media is driving traffic back to your website and to convert fans of your online content into customers and clients. When you’re active on YouTube and posting videos, commenting and rating others’ videos, sharing, etc, you generate interest in your channel. If you’ve included links to your website in your channel and the description sections of your videos, you can drive traffic to your website and increase your chances of making a sale.

Need help setting up a YouTube Channel for your business? We’re great at it! Contact us for more information.

According to a recent Comscore report, 14 million Americans scanned a QR code using their mobile device in the month of June.  So people are using them but it is interesting to note that the main demographics were males aged 18-34 in the high income bracket – so be cautious in using these if your target markets differ from these.  Another recent report in this CNN article in the US surveyed students and only 2 out of 10 even knew what a QR code is.

QR codes are a great marketing tool in theory but using them is far from a seamless experience.  In the last week I scanned several QR codes and have been frustrated by the lack of compatibility between the QR scanner on my phone resulting in the appearance of error messages rather than taking me to the enticing, targeted websites I expected to see.  Of the 10 or so codes that I scanned only one worked seamlessly to launch the intended web site – the rest I gave up waiting on and couldn’t be bothered to download another barcode app that would work.

Here’s an example: I ate out recently and saw this QR code being used in at the MAC Shack in Kerrisdale so in my quest for QR knowledge, I decided to scan it to find out what my prize would be.  Sadly I never found out because the app failed to launch properly, I ended up frustrated, annoyed and hungry for more.  It didn’t put me off my mac cheese thankfully (nothing could) but it did give me some food for thought.

In this case, I only wasted a few minutes tinkering around trying to get it to work but for the marketer who devised this campaign, their time in putting this together was rendered useless (I’m assuming that I wasn’t the only one that tried to scan it in vain). There are far better ways to build your audience (tried and tested ways) that work.   Not only that but from a marketer’s perspective when your audience is expecting something and they don’t get it (or it fails to work), what does that say about your organisation.  It’s all about the optics.  If you can’t get it right then why bother wasting your audience’s time.

Sources in the telecom industry tell me that the next generation of phones will be able to scan these automatically so the problem of unstandardized apps may go away but in the meantime, marketers should give close consideration to their audience and to making sure that their QR codes work seamlessly with as many of the readers as possible.  Otherwise, it might be better to consider more tried and tested methods to grow your community.  Don’t get me wrong, the potential for QR Codes is huge and one day they will be a marketing tool that you can’t ignore but for now not so much.

Not a bad view!

We’re feeling all grown up here at Out-Smarts – like we’ve come of age or something. After almost nine years in business we’ve made the  leap from the virtual office to a bricks and mortar premises and it feels good (I knew that it would).  It’s a big milestone for us and we are just settling in – adapting to life in the office is going to be fun.

When Out-Smarts (Outsmart Sales and Marketing Co. as it was called then) was founded in 2002, I had the idea that it would be neat to be location independent and be able to work from anywhere. For the last 9 years I’ve worked from coffee shops, beaches, parks, arenas – you name it.  As we grew; Corrie, PJ, Jan, Sam, Prianka and Jose all work(ed) from their virtual locations, aka from home, and it worked really well for us.

So why did we finally cave in to the more ‘normal’ work set up, and have we taken a step back in time, or what?  We haven’t, we still have home offices and spend time meeting in coffee houses and being virtual, but there comes a time with a growing team that it  becomes more productive to be sitting close to your colleagues. As well as to have a boardroom to bring clients, and a place to train.

The boardroom

When our friend and mentor over at Raspberry Kids, Sue Sinclair, mentioned that we should check out the space Xomo (her husband’s company) were subleasing, we were initially wary. However, when we came to see the office and found that not only does it have a Skype screen in the boardroom, but also a touch screen too (not to mention Indian food on Thursdays and beer Fridays) we were sold on the spot.

We moved in last week, sharing the space with the lovely Leigh Striegler, our design partner from Olive Design.  Our office has wall to wall windows, a view of the mountains and, even better, Granville Island is just steps away (so we will never go hungry).  We’re still moving our furniture and equipment in (and around) and settling in – we have no art on the walls, yet.

Celebrating our first office

Some things change and some remain the same.  Out-Smarts is still a progressive organisation (lifestyle means a lot to us!).  As long as the work gets done and our clients are uber happy, it doesn’t really matter when or where we are, but it’s extra nice to go into the office and find that your colleague has baked a cake to celebrate (not so easy when you’re virtual).  Did I mention that Corrie is a cake master?

Our new office is located at #202 – 1650 West First Avenue. You should pop by for a visit.

In a previous blog post, I talked about the 3 pillars of business – Visibility, Connection, Delivery.

But where does engagement fit? Aren’t connection and engagement the same thing? I get this question a lot…and it’s absolutely critical to your business that you not only understand the distinction between them, but that you also develop your strategies and actions with these distinctions in mind.

If you haven’t got a good sense of the basic 3 Pillars of Business, I would suggest that you start your reading there, and then come back here for more learning. Today’s post is dealing only with Connection and Engagement.

I’m going to use Facebook Pages as the example in this post, but keep in mind that these principles apply to all strains of your business where you are communicating with your target market, prospects and existing clients.

Let’s assume that you have a Facebook Page set up. If you don’t have one, you’ve probably ‘Liked’ one, or have seen some that you can refer to here. A Facebook Page is essentially another platform to create Visibility…people know that you are in business and that your doors are open. But it’s much more than that!

If you’re like most business owners, your main focus for your Facebook Page has been to generate LIKES…lots of Followers who are willing to read your posts and are interested in what you have to say. Sometimes they will ‘Like’ your posts. In that case, they have established a CONNECTION with you.

However, this is where it gets interesting!! Business Pages gathering ‘Likes’ believe that they have now established permission to ask for the business from their audience. If you have ‘Likes’, you have a connection, and the next step is to sign the deal and start delivering your service, right?

Not right…not even a little. I’m guessing that those ‘Likes’ on your Page are not converting to Leads. If you see yourself here, you’re probably wondering the value of social media at all. Here’s why it’s not working – you haven’t actually ‘engaged’ your followers!

A Connection is established when someone indicates, in the moment, that they are in agreement with you and identify that you share something in common. But only in that moment. They aren’t all in, by any stretch. They just think that whatever happened in that moment was worth ‘Liking’. Then they move on…NO engagement.

Engagement is only established when someone expresses an interest in continuing the conversation to get more information, more depth, more understanding…they are curious, you have a connection and they are ready to take your relationship to the next level. This is no longer about the moment. Engagement is about the future. Someone who engages you is interested in establishing a relationship into the future! If you do a good job of engagement, you are well on your way to success…because engagement is the source of your fans.

Never confuse Followers with Fans.

On a Facebook Page, followers click ‘Like’. On the other hand, fans add a comment…and they expect a response. They want to establish a 2-way relationship…they have invited you to engage.

Comments are your opportunity to establish more depth in your relationship and really step up. Comments are your chance to be remarkable. Without engagement, you have limited opportunity to create a relationship of any substance.

If you have only established connections, your relationships are 1-way, they are fickle and vulnerable. Your followers can disconnect anytime they want…and they won’t even tell you why. They just quietly disappear.

If you have successfully engaged your fans, they are vested, interested, opinionated and eager to support your success. If they are happy, you know. If they aren’t happy, you will also know. And isn’t that what all successful businesses have – an opportunity to show their fans how committed they are to being remarkable and building even greater loyalty.

So the next time you design a communication initiative, identify your desired result. Connection is the precursor to Engagement. Engagement is the precursor to the lasting success of your business and your ultimate success is dependent on the strength and enthusiasm of your fans.

What are your thoughts around this?