My silly body @vineapp experiment
Something fun for Friday! Bit more work and it could be quite nice, what else could I do with it?
Interest in Pinterest
Pinterest seems to be the latest booming social platform out there so I find myself asking the same question is there space for it in a B2B Marketers social media strategy. For those of you who have missed this one Pinterest is essentially a book marking tool where user can categorise things that interest them, this is a highly visual experience, users can also take photos on their mobile device, but essentially it’s a curation tool over anything else. Yet another book marking tool I hear, and you’re probably right but it seems to of exploded into the market place and is reported to be driving more traffic than google+, YouTube and Linkedin combined. Even with their invite only policy their numbers are growing rapidly (approx 4 million as it stands) and they have just received an additional 27 million investment, so there are definitely people out there who think this will work. Interestingly the numbers they are heavily skewed toward females which currently have around 80% of the usage.
I think there are some obvious advantages to using pinterest within your marketing strategy, the obvious place to start would be the more you can get you online content pinned the stronger your SEO will become (add the pin button to your site). Other uses may include content distribution particularly for anything visual, infographics is probably an obvious one here but what about product images, event photos from your attendees networks. There are also opportunities to collaborate with other users, this could be used in-house as a news board to highlight industry news or as an curation exercise displaying your knowledge of the industry through what you decide to pin. Open boards themselves do provide you with a method of creating a niche and mixing 3rd party content with your own is a great way to boost SEO and get your content into the correct niche space.
While all these are solid ideas for methods to use it i do wonder if the platform has legs right now, for me, it’s falling down in places that for me would turn it from essentially a book marking tool into more of a fully fledged network, primarily it’s really hard to find and follow people, they have focused more on the content than the people creating/curating it, but perhaps we don’t need that for this platform, perhaps the reason this has been successful so far is for it’s intelligent simplicity.
The platform itself at the moment seems to be a gold mine for the consumer retail industries at first glance of the network you notice just how much product is sitting on the site, much of it focused around fashion, this probably has quite a bit to do with the current demographic.
I’ve given pinterest a go, the app is sitting on my iPhone, but for me it sits on my last screen where it will probably stay,if I don’t decide to delete it, I’m more interested in creating content that people want to share, and already have my book marking tool which I have been using for years I’m going to be hard pushed to move from it to pinterest. While I believe there is use for it’s application in the b2b space, it’s not really been designed for that so retro fitting these networks can often mean your neglecting the ones that really matter to your business.
New Facebook Page Timeline
This was written by one of my colleagues which went round internally, she kindly said I could post it here to give you all an update. Anyway you can follow her here @tinyterrapin.
Facebook Pages changed yesterday and this will may affect some of your client’s pages. Pages are now able to use the ‘Timeline’ format that a lot of you are probably using for your personal profile now.
The main changes are highlighted below. There are also a few companies who have said they are uploading training videos.
If your clients are using Facebook Tabs, please recommend that they don’t change over just yet as Facebook are working on some bugs. There are known bugs with the Tabs not refreshing once users become a new Fan of the Page.
HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF HOW IT CAN LOOK: http://www.facebook.com/cocacola
Look and Feel
You can now have a cover photo that fills the width of the Page. The profile avatar image is now square too (this is the image that shows when you post). The Timeline is split into two columns and the further down the Page, the older the posts are. The Timeline is divided by month and year, a viewer can skip to a particular date. You can highlight Milestones on the page to help create the brand story. There is no longer a left hand side navigation (therefore Tabs are not as easy to find – see below)
Reduced Tab visibility
Tabs will now appear in the boxes underneath the cover photo.
Only THREE tabs are viewable at a time.
No default landing Page
This is likely to be a issue with some of our clients as I know that a fair number of these have been created. Messaging will become even more important as the top posts will be the first thing a visiting user will see. You can NOT set a Tab as a default landing page – Advertising will be the only way to do this!
One post can be Featured content
You can select ONE post to Feature at the top of the Page. (You can ‘pin’ content in the same way that you can make a blog post ‘sticky’ so that it stays at the top of the page). You can only ‘pin’ an item for 7 days or until you pin another post. Example: Brands could use the ‘pinned’ post as a call-to-action to highlight the new position of the tabs, increase Page Likes etc.
Current Tabs and applications are now out of date!
The width has increased. Applications will need new icons that appear as one of the three Tab spaces
Private messages between the brand and users
Brands will be able to send and receive private messages with users. This is a big deal !! It will really help brands to be able to interact with customers and also take customer service queries off of the main timeline.
All of the above is very exciting but will also mean a lot of brands who don’t update their Page regularly with new content or who don’t reply to users will have terrible looking Pages. The emphasis is now even more on creating a story, creating new content and engaging the users.
Ascots First Tweet Up (I think)
I am organising ascots first tweet up and I wanted to put a bit of a spin on it with a crowd-sourced youtube viewing part of the evening, it’s explained a little more below.
Why have a decided to run a TweetUp in Ascot? Well a number of reasons:
- It’s close to where I live
- I know the owner of the venue (which is lovely by the way)
- I’m not aware of any tweetups going on in the ‘burbs’
- I thought twitter is probably mature enough now that theres a good chance of getting a gathering together in Ascot
- I know some fellow twitter people in the area that I know are interested in such a gathering @beckysocial @jaime_keenan @teampalmhills
- I wanted to see if I can make it work, and if it’s a success run another
- But most of all, I wanted to connect the digital with the real world and chat with some like minded individuals
- Date for your Diary 28th Feb the rest of the details are here http://ascottwtup.eventbrite.com/
- You can follow the hashtag here #ascottwtup
- Follow me for all the updates @brandjoe
A Tweet Up with a difference
At this tweet up we’ll have a YouTube screening for an hour of the event, anything you want to see, simply provide up to 3 links to YouTube videos that you think will be interesting to everyone else, these can literally be anything you like (as long as they are from YouTube). The videos you find might be:
- Comedy
- Short movies
- Educational
- Music
- Sports
- Business
- How to’s
- Animated infograhics
- Mishaps
- but the list is endless
There’s only one rule – they cannot be self promotional
On the day of the event we will then show a selection of the best submissions.
Anyway come one, come all, I just hope some of you can make it!!
My Twiffic Little Christmas Present for You
Some of you may of already guessed by this post it has something to do with twitter, and you’d be right, it’s all about how to streamline the social media status process and give your audience some value.
If you follow me on twitter @brandjoe you may notice that I fairly regularly post a “What I’m reading:” tweet (above), I thought I’d share with you how I do this, I took about 5 mins to set up and it means it’s nice and automated. Plus you won’t have to think about tweeting too often, it also means that my followers are getting some form a value from me, rather than just tweeting inane BS, that noboby has any interest in.
So here’s how to do it, firstly you’ll need a Google Reader account and a Twitterfeed account. Once you have these go to your Google Reader and the settings and click on the “Folders and Tags” tab, now set “your starred items” to public as shown below.
Now “view public page” and you will be able to access and copy the RSS link from that page. Access your twitterfeed account and set it up so that your starred RSS feed pushes to your twitter account.
It’s best to select the “Advanced Settings” (see below) when creating your feed and I personally choose to only push 3 tweets every hour (anymore I think people just get annoyed). Also you may add a prefix and suffix to each tweet my prefix’s are “What I’m reading:” (from Google Reader) and “Worth a Read:” (from My Blog)
I use suffix hash tags:
#fb – this pushes my blog only tweets to my facebook status using the “selective twitter status” app in facebook
#in – pushes the tweets to linkedin (reader starred items) which you can set up in the linkedin profile settings
So that’s it your all set up to go, now google reader does provide it’s own method to share posts, but this is not nearly as simple and streamlined as my method (well at least I don’t think so).
So all that’s left to do is test it, simply star an item that you have read or you think will be of interest to your audience and then watch it automatically appear in your status streams. An Example Below:
Hope you All have a Great Christmas and NewYear!
Wrapping up 2009, 2010 to come
Sites mentioned:
www.bethehurricane.com – marketing communications agency and my new employers
www.palmhills.co.uk – boutique hotel in Ascot
www.carolinesandry.com – personal trainer to the stars, author and presenter
www.recruitmentrevolution.com – recruitment the smart way
www.brandjoe.com – me
www.ustream.tv/channel/brandjoe – my new streaming show full of interestingness goes live in 2010
Other props must go out to:
www.strikedesigns.co.uk – my old design company – cool guys always worth tapping up whatever design project you may have.
www.foxycakes.co.uk – my wifes new employers and damn nice cakes – trust me
I will start producing more content in the NEW YEAR so watch this space – it’ll starting filling up quickly ;-)
BrandJoe (soon to be HurricaneJoe)
SmokinSigs
SmokinSigs is a webapp from Strike Designs and Brand Joe. We’ve collaborated to create a new communication tool on a personal level and a new channel to market in the business arena…. and at the moment that’s all I can say as we have a competition on for 30 free pro accounts for life. 30 lucky people who can guess exactly what this new web app will do will win these accounts… for all the details please visit SmokinSigs
My Slideshow on Social Media
This covers social media within the B2B arena but can be applied to B2C and will give those who have little knowledge about Social Media and marketing your business a good insight to what’s available and how to go about it.
The Presentation has audio which last approximately 30mins …. so turn those speakers up!! Remember you can follow me on Twitter @brandjoe or email me joe [at] brandjoe [dot] com or contact me direct from the site here
Giving away 50 free invites to E
What is E?
E is a service that integrates all your existing social services into an E•ID, which you can share with anyone in the real world. To exchange E•ID’s, you just need an internet-enabled mobile phone like an iPhone or Blackberry. When you exchange your E•ID’s, E makes sure your contacts get added to your other social services like Netlog, Twitter, Last.fm, Soocial, automatically.
I think this is a really handy service and I have been given 50 free invites to test it out amongst my friends real life and online. So here’s what you do:
