By now we’ve all seen the best selfie ever. (See below in case you have been living under a proverbial rock.) How could you not love this photo? The spontaneity, casualness and silliness of it made it go viral instantly. So much so that it not only set the record for the highest number of retweets (more than 2.5 million right now and 700,000 in the first hour), which was Ellen’s goal, but it also crashed Twitter.
Ever been checking out a brand’s Facebook page and noticed that their posts are obviously being written by a couple different people? Yikes! That’s no good. With strapped marcom budgets, reduced staff and large workloads, many brands rely on several different people to post to their social pages and profiles. How can can a brand ensure that all the people posting on behalf of the brand are singing in the same voice rather than their own?
Each person posting needs to understand and embrace the brand’s personality. Is the brand formal or more casual? Is the brand fun or serious? Ultimately, the brand’s personality needs to be determined by the executive team and everyone, from the top down, needs to buy into it. Once the brand’s personality has been established, the marketing team needs to figure out how to marketing materials will reflect it.
All marketers know that SEO is important. But what’s a marketer to do if he/she doesn’t have the ability to update website content and metadata on the fly to improve rankings? Sounds like crazy talk, right? How would a marketer NOT have that access? Sometimes websites, especially very complex ones with many integrated systems, live in IT instead of Marketing and any changes to website content or metadata need to follow a formal request process. So what’s a marketer to do to improve SEO? Head to Google+!
I know, I know. You’re saying, “WHA??? But no one uses Google+ except for IT peeps, marketing/social media geeks and photographers. Why would I spend my time and effort there?” It can certainly be frustrating to invest the effort in a social platform where audience growth is slow and engagement is few and far between. While G+ doesn’t have nearly the usage that Facebook does, there are still millions of people who use the social network each day. According to a recent New York Times article, Google says that the platform has 540 million monthly active users, which does pale in comparison to the 1.2 billion who visit Facebook. But the real value of Google+ is in the SEO weight it carries.
We’ve all encountered negativity in the social space. It often comes in the form of nasty reviews, personal attacks, brand bashing, even bullying behavior. But it can also come in the form of a frustrated customer seeking assistance for an issue or answer to a question.
First let’s address the haters, bashers, trolls and bullies…
A while back when I had more time on my hands, I used to blog about issues, often politically-charged ones, that were near and dear to my heart. One post that was inspired by several back-to-back incidents of horrible parenting I had witnessed garnered one response that crossed the line from critical comment to targeted personal attack. Although the comment was posted anonymously, given the content of the attack and the poor grammar, which was a thinly-veiled attempt to disguise the commenter’s identity, I know exactly who authored the comment. I did post a response, but what I realized afterward was that I didn’t need to. Why? Because my supporters came out in full force to defend me. Turns out there were many people who read my post and agreed with me and were more than happy to put my attacker in her place.
In our Audience Insight class during my Master’s program, we learned about the theory of self-discrepancy and how the differences between our actual selves (how we really are), our ideal selves (how we want to be perceived) and our ought selves (how we think others want us to be) apply to consumer behavior. For instance, we often make purchases based on our ideal or ought selves rather than our actual selves. This theory got me thinking about how we present ourselves online. Check out this infographic based on an Intel study. It’s clear that many people lie on social profiles for the purpose of improving how they appear to others.
TechDigest
As you post on social sites and/or on your blog, do you present yourself as you actually are? Or do you present yourself as the person you’d like to be? Or the person you think people want you to be? Or do you fall somewhere in between?
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A MarCom Brainstorm 