Tag: social media specialist

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Facebook Apocalypse | Actionable Tips To Negotiate The Fallout

Facebook set it’s house on fire by changing how the newsfeed works – so what do we all do now?

There’s some things in Social Media Marketing that will always be true. I’m going to start with those, as many publishers and brands will really need to go back to the basics to make sure they are still reaching their audience.

These are simple, but often overlooked and there’s only 3 main ones…

1. Strategy

What do you WANT from your Facebook activity? What does success look like for your accounts?

Is it sales, brand awareness, leads, customer service?

Think about what you actually want to achieve by being on Facebook in the first place. What’s the best way to achieve your goals, bearing in mind Facebook is saying they will be preferencing “meaningful” content that evokes deeper thought and attracts long comments.

I’ll outline a few formats I think will still be viable under this newsfeed change in the next section.

2. Audience

Your Facebook page isn’t for you.

Let that sink in.

It can be ABOUT you, but it’s supposed to be for your AUDIENCE. Facebook’s trying to put the Social back into Social Media.

newsfeed

What does going back to basics here look like? Stop creating content you like, and put your efforts into content that means something to your audience. Keep it relevant, put some thought into who your audience is, what they’re day looks like, when they want to hear from you and you should see success with Facebook’s new focus – creating a meaningful experience, keeping you safe from the newsfeed update.

Dive into your insights and check out who your audience are (you might be surprised) and always keep them central to your content creation (or curation)

You may need to post less often to achieve success here, but putting the extra thought into your content, and cutting down on your frequency could definitely help your newsfeed visibility.

3. Community Management

This one has been around as long as Facebook itself, but it’s lost a bit of shine, at least to me if I’m honest. I’d say this was mainly due to the amount of effort it takes to run a community, the fact that you can’t really measure community ROI, and the declining organic newsfeed reach which pushed all us former Community Mangers into the realm of Paid.

Having said that, it’s always been important to answer the questions, queries and issues of your fans and customers on your Facebook page. It’s Social after all!

In the announcements by Facebook in the previous week they’ve stated that simply replying to all your comments isn’t enough. They say they don’t care about page-to-person interaction (I have a hunch they still keep tabs on it, like they do with answered messages in Messenger, but I have no proof) they only care about person-to-person interaction.

So if you already have a community of active commenters, who participate in thoughtful conversions about the topics around your brand – this is going to be a huge advantage! If you don’t it looks like trying to build one is the key here.

I’m not going to lie, starting from scratch is going to take a lot of effort on your part, especially if you’re a small business. For larger businesses this will mean they might decide to dedicate a Social Media team member to “conversation starter” rather than simply moderating comments or providing customer service.

It also makes me wonder about the Telcos. If you’ve been on a Telco page lately (or ISP for that matter) you’ll find long, detailed accounts of people’s greivances. Is this what Facebook will end up preferencing in the newsfeed? Might be good news for NFPs and cause related communities?

I guess we’ll have to wait and see…

Another thought pops into my head about trolls. Will brands now ‘Fake Troll’ themselves to get longer comments? Yuk. Let’s hope not.

Ok, so that’s my 3 back to basics tips. Bring Sexy Social Back with a re-think about your strategy and why you are on Facebook in the first place, ALWAYS post audience-first, and have a plan to engage your community.

How are you going to stay ‘newsfeed visible’ though?

It’s all very well and good for the answer to be “create better content” but HOW?

Here’s some tips I think will still be effective on Facebook, depending on your niche and audience.

Facebook Live

Facebook Live generates heaps of interaction. I wouldn’t say long comments per se, but it’s an awesome way to get your content seen in the newsfeed. If you haven’t thought about how you could go live with a tutorial, or something that helps your audience then the time is now.

AMAs

Ask Me Anythings would be a good way to get people thinking, writing longer comments and having meaningful interactions in their newsfeed. As a brand or business owner there’s surely things you know that your audience would be interested in. You could always invite guests in your niche to answer questions for your audience to keep it interesting.

You could even schedule these as Facebook Lives! Double whammy.

Facebook Groups

This newsfeed update will affect groups to a degree, but they tend to inspire more thoughtful dialogue as people feel safer to share in a group of likeminded people.

Perhaps your brand could benefit from it’s own group?

Facebook Events

As well as groups, events get a lot more interaction than pages. If your brand hosts events you can use them to help keep the interaction from the event off the main page and in one spot where it’s easily manageable, but more importantly you can promote them too (as long as they have more than 15 “attending” responses)

The final one is pretty obvious…

Facebook Ads

There’s a way you can get your important content into the newsfeed. You can pay for it to appear there.

Facebook did announce they were running out of ad inventory, but everything they’ve mentioned so far in this newsfeed update hasn’t included ads.

But don’t be fooled into thinking you can just boost a post that wasn’t written with your audience in mind and achieve success.

I think this newsfeed update has made sure we all know Facebook is getting serious about the social aspect of Social Media, and with potentially more brands moving into the paid realm, ads may get more expensive.

Over to you readers, what do you think? Have you seen any changes on your newsfeed yet? I’d love to know!

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Facebook Zero | OMG! | Algorithm Armageddon

Facebook Zero, the algorithm armageddon!

If you use Social Media for promoting your business, chances are you follow a couple (if not tonnes) of Social Media related publishers, and you would no doubt have seen a huge reaction from the community about the latest announcement from Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg (below) where he states they’ll be changing the way they select posts to display to users in the newsfeed.

This update is stated to prioritise user to user interaction and focus on quality of engagement – which appears to mean time spent and meaningfulness, favouring longer, well thought out comments over tagging friends in memes or simple reactions.

Cue freakouts over Facebook page reach.

Facebook seems to be taking aim at the passiveness of users simply scrolling the newsfeed and not interacting, and publishers – including those looking to game the system with engagement bait (which Facebook announced they were cracking down on a couple of weeks back)

BUT there’s so much we don’t know!

Facebook Zero – Really?

Social Media Examiner was one of the first (naturally as probably the most well know Social Media publisher) to get vocal and ask if this was “Facebook Zero” in an 11 minute live video (below)

Would pages get any organic reach? Are we all doomed to the naughty corner? Are our Facebook pages going to be put out on the lawn with the big TVs and DVD players?

Let’s just calm down and look at what we know for a sec, which to be honest isn’t much.

If you’ve been in this world a while you know for a fact every time the newsfeed algo is tweaked people lose their minds, and each time we adjust, measure, test, refine and evaluate our accounts to try and work out a way to stay relevant and SEEN by our target audience, followers and fans – both organically and using paid distribution.

Let’s remember we all use Facebook differently!

You get the newsfeed you deserve.

I have quoted this before, a friend of mine said it to me once and it’s so true. If you hate your newsfeed – I’m sorry to say you did that to yourself. There’s so many options to unfollow people who annoy you, unfriend people you have no interest in, hit “see first”on pages and people you like, and generally reacting to things you’re actually interested in.

Facebook’s smart at figuring out what we like – but it’s not flawless. If you hate cats – stop tagging your friends in cat videos. Facebook thinks you like cats and will show you more cat content, pretty simple right? If you want to know more about the newsfeed read my post here.

You see, Facebook’s ONE JOB is to learn what you like and optimise your experience to that so it can keep you on the platform longer. Mainly to serve more ads (to make more money) but also to make sure you aren’t using the other platforms (except Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp since it owns those)

But so what, Carma? What’s this got to do with this new Facebook Zero announcement?

The curated newsfeed

I, and probably many other Social Media Marketers might not be typical users – but we know one thing, and that is that Facebook has made a pretty big assumption in the basis for this update: that we want to see more content from our friends in our newsfeeds. For me this is not the case (soz friends)

People think the newsfeed has become a crowded place for ads and page updates, and they aren’t seeing enough posts from the people they care about. I don’t find this the case, as I’d rather read a breaking story from ABC News than another “creative” engagement, pregnancy or gender reveal announcement.

Adam Barrell of The StoryLab Perth put it this way:

Facebook used to be about sharing your whole life and connecting with friends. Now more than ever Facebook is used to engage with pages and publishers. People want to explore and find new things to read and engage with.

When I want to engage with friends and family I use messenger to share photos, articles and arrange catch ups.

Wasn’t Facebook meant to make the world more open? And now Zuck is telling us we’d much prefer seeing posts from friends and family the most?

Just make a Tab/filter that users can select to just see friend posts – don’t go changing the algorithm again.

 

Good point! Bit hard to connect the world, when people wont accept a friend request from people they don’t know…always too many degrees of separation!

 

And Jon Loomer (Facebook Ads Legend from Jon Loomer Digital) described it like so:

Not everyone uses Facebook the same way. I purposefully see more brand and publisher content in my news feed than posts from friends. That’s only partly because I’m an antisocial jerk. But it’s mainly because I care most about political and sports news.

That’s the stuff I actually want to see. I don’t comment on those posts. I don’t provide “long and thoughtful replies.” Will I stop seeing that content?

If I do, that would kind of suck. That would be bad for my Facebook experience.

 

Jon posted a long and very considered post this quote was taken from, you can read the full post here.

 

So why this change?

Facebook has been trying to prompt us, as users – not publishers, to post more original content since this has been declining. Also it’s no secret the kids don’t think Facebook is cool…PLUS they’re running out of ad space.

Facebook knows it needs to tread a very fine line between showing you what you like organically and what advertisers might think you like. This is why better targeted ads with higher relevance scores perform better. As users we accept there’s ads, we just don’t wanna see ads for things we’re not interested in.

In theory this change prompts less but deeper connections to the people we’re friends with, with less page posts cluttering it up, and would help achieve Facebook’s goal of making us feel better mental health wise than passively (maybe obsessively) scrolling our newsfeeds. We’ve all had one friend say they felt happier after quitting Facebook (or Social Media more generally) so essentially it’s a retention strategy.

Will it work?

IMO? No.

For the way this update appears to work (once it’s rolled out – again we don’t really know til it happens) would be based on the fact that people want to post more, or at least the same amount of original content they do now. Your newsfeed will always be full – so if your friends aren’t posting photos, live video, links, events etc then what will make up the rest of your feed?

Page posts and ads, right?

You probably already interact with the people you want to hear from, so their posts will get upweighted, but beyond that who are we going to see posts from? Old high school acquaintances? No thanks (no offence JFSHS class of ’96)

You can leave me with my newsfeed full of tech pages, recipe videos, and Social Media publishers thanks.

But what do you think?

Will this clear up your newsfeed for more friend action? Good or bad? If you’ve got some thoughts drop a comment, I’d love to know!

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Hiding, Pushing & Growing

Hiding, Pushing & Growing

My blog is normally about Social Media or Digital Marketing – but I wanted to share something a bit different today. I want to talk about evolution. Not the “we walked out of a swamp” sciency stuff. The personal kind.

I hope you indulge me a personal piece that I was prompted to write after hearing business owners complain about their business progress.

Most businesses don’t start and then get overwhelmed with orders. That’s just not the way the real world works.

Hiding

You might not know this about me but I’m a hider. I sometimes wish I actually was a chameleon…because when I get scared I like to hide and pretend that everything’s fine, and working for yourself you have to get used to a certain level of scared.

Scary Stuff

This type of fear can be hard to get used to, but in reality I don‘t see freelancing, consulting, or working in your own business to be essentially any more ‘risky’ than having a full time job.

People who’ve recently been made redundant can probably feel me. Tradesmen who have their own businesses would get it, and anyone from the mining sector would definitely understand. Being employed is not a static state like it may have once been.

So if it’s no more risky then what’s the scary part?

Relying on yourself alone to collect a steady income.

It’s not because the work isn’t there – it’s that it’s YOU, and often only you as an entrepreneur, micro-business or whatever you call yourself that has to drive everything. From the strategy, to the implementation, to the admin…it’s all you.

Eeek!

I’ll be the first to admit this lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but with the future of work facing new challenges from technology and automation every day one can’t hide from the fact that this model will be more and more common.

So why am I sharing these thoughts with you here?

Because I get it. It’s a challenge. And if you’re running a small business or your out on your own it’s a constant juggle – it’s not without its perks. But I also wanted to highlight that if you’ve started this journey that you might have to hang on to see results.

You need to push yourself (because no-one else’s going to!)

My Story

If I reflect on my own journey over the past (almost) two years I’ve been through many phases. I had plenty of my own clients and some agency contracts. My client load fluctuated (for many reasons) and at the moment it’s the contracts that have kept me going.

Many can relate to this. It’s frustrating, it’s often daunting. It’s definitely the cause of some financial insecurity, but it’s certainly shaping and teaching me along the way.

I’ve recently done some things that scared me – and I want to encourage you to hang in there and do the same; to just keep on pushing, the next phase of your businesses is just around the corner.

Pushing

I took a gig delivering Social Media workshops. I have done loads of this type of training before, but not in a formal setting with attendees I didn’t know. I was nervous as to how I would be received. After the first session and some tweaking of the content to better fit the audience I had great success with these projects. I got more confident in what I knew and my ability to communicate my knowledge to a varied and inexperienced room increased dramatically.

I learned to better explain how what I do grows a business, to people who don’t usually talk my lingo. I learned a LOT about the challenges business owners face when trying to do their own marketing.

One of the reason my first session was not as successful as it could have been was that I pitched my ‘beginner’ course too advanced. I had forgotten just where the beginning was. I was worried that my audience would see me as a fraud, so I concentrated too heavily on “adding value” rather than keeping it simple enough for non-industry, non-tech savvy people to get the most out of it. It was my insecurity that they wouldn’t learn enough from me that saw me endeavour to teach them too much.

The reality was – they weren’t ready for so much so fast.

Once I refined the course the next time I delivered it, it was a smash hit (if I do say so myself!).

Qualified?

Another project I tackled recently was to talk to some uni students about Social Media as a career and how I got started. My presentation involved an overview of useful industry skills that they need to expand on before they’re ready to join the workforce. I took an experiential learning approach and gave them a practical activity to start – followed by plenty of Q&A.

I was really nervous about this too, I mean these guys were studying marketing. I didn’t study marketing. I barely got through 8 months of an Arts degree! Would I have anything useful to share with them? Or would they find out I was a fraud! But I went along, and I had a blast! I even did it again with another student group a couple of weeks later.

Same theme. Same result. Same self-doubt. How crazy! I DO know what I’m doing. I live off my skills, it earns me a great living. It’s funny how our internal dialogue always want to self-sabotage. But I pushed on.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Get

I sent an email to a connection who was looking for a full time employee, essentially doing what I do and asked them if they’d consider taking me on until they found the right person to join their team full time.

I met with them and I got some contract work, causing them to re-evaluate their need for a full time position in that role. Excellent for me and a smarter outcome for the business, they recognised the role they needed to recruit for was a different one.

Never be scared to ask; we are all in sales. Don’t ask, don’t get.

Video – oh no!

I was contacted by Al Jazeera (not a terrorist organisation) to contribute a 1 minute video about a current issue around Social Media Marketing that had hit the mainstream media.

WHAT? A video? Ew.

I want to be confident enough to do more video content and live video, “but I’m not ready!” I told myself. (There’s that self-doubt again!).

I said yes. I had to webcam myself talking for one minute. Doesn’t sounds like a long time; 60 seconds is hardly an epic. Most people would have shot it, sent it, and moved on pretty quickly.

Not me. I took 40 takes (give or take, lol), then I sent it. And my doubt convinced me that they probably wouldn’t use it – because what after all did I have to offer?

They used it!

Growing

Now I have to stop worrying about whether I have something to offer or not. It’s time to get on with it. There’ll always be something to worry about, but I think I’m done with this self-doubt. At least for now.

And the result?

There’s been bigger meetings, with more lined up, meetings old me would have been scared to take.

I’ve expanded services without having to haggle over small fees I may have charged in the past.

But the most exciting lesson I want to share with you is that if I can do it in my business – you can in yours too! We all go through professional ups and downs, that’s life – but if you have skill, passion, integrity, experience, and be authentic to you, you’ve got the recipe to succeed.

You just have to push through the scary barrier and keep going. What’s just round the corner is up to you!
While there’ll always be an ebb and flow – you can swim, so the tide needn’t be scary.

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2017 Digital Marketing Predictions | Part Two | The Interviews

Digital Marketing Predictions…

They’re everywhere! I published mine, and then I thought – one person’s predictions are not enough! We need more data! Let’s ask some people I know who work in Digital Marketing and see if they’d like to share their 2017 Digital Marketing predictions with me (so that I could share them with you)

So I did. And they did! I sent some questions as prompts and this post is a collection of the responses I received.

I hope you gain some insight into the direction/s Digital Marketing is heading!

Digital Marketing Clayton Smith

Clayton Smith – Social Media Manager

Founder of Smith Social, Clayton offers an end to end Digital solution to small businesses in Perth.

Fun fact – him and Carma are birthday twins!

Me: What were the main platforms you concentrated on in 2016 as a Digital Marketer?

Clayton: Facebook, Instagram & Email Marketing

Me: Will this change in 2017?

Clayton:

No. In the world of small business, using social media as a marketing tool is still a developing idea, especially in Perth, WA. When you have a very limited marketing budget, very little time and little knowledge of digital platforms, investing in social and digital can seem daunting. So, the two main platforms of Facebook & Instagram get all the focus, where small business owners know the vast majority of their customers will definitely be.

Me: What are some emerging trends you noticed in Digital Marketing in 2016?

Clayton: Live Video arrived and it’s kind of a big deal. Email Marketing keeps on keeping on. 

Me: Do you think these will continue?

Clayton: Absolutely!

Live video, as well as semi permanent video (snapchat style where content disappears after a set amount of time) has arrived and it is kind of a big deal.

The ability to live broadcast from anywhere in the palm of your hand is as amazing as it sounds. So amazing in fact, everyone is still trying to figure out what’s happening, and like any goldrush, the miners who made it to the goldfields first had a much better chance of finding gold. Every social platform is flying headfirst into video and the businesses and brands who took advantage are reaping huge benefits. I just listened to an international digital marketing podcast with a massive listenership where they interviewed a Sydney chocolatier who has built a following. Some guy from Sydney with one little chocolate shop! WHAT? That’s amazing. Once again, those who get their pickaxes in the video dirt first have the best chance to strike follower gold. Get live people!

Email Marketing – If live video is the wild west of digital marketing, email marketing is the well trodden, boring city road. It isn’t anywhere near as exciting, BUT, email subscription is still the most direct digital marketing channel we have, and although people’s inboxes are crowded, if you have done the work and developed a good relationship with your subscriber by providing them quality content that they want to see, you will still convert and convert well.

Me: Do you use video content in your Digital Marketing?

Clayton: Minimal

Me: Will this increase in 2017?

Clayton:

Yes. Getting a small business to start doing video is turning out to be tricky, just starting a regular consistent blog is a tough challenge for most. Let alone video content, and don’t even think about live video.

Unless of course the business owner themselves is already doing it, that’s a different story. It’s power cannot be ignored though, and I will be pushing clients to get started with video content.

Me: Did you use bots in your Digital Marketing in 2016?

Clayton: No.

Me: Will you be using them in 2017?

Clayton:  

Not likely. Small businesses do not have the enquiry traffic that would warrant investing in bots, especially when a selling point of most small businesses is the one on one, bespoke personal service they can provide.

Me: Do you have any predictions on the overall state of Digital Marketing for 2017?

Clayton:

Live Video, 360 live video especially, will continue to lead the way on social platforms, with the platforms themselves looking to better monetise video content.

The Snapchat Vs Facebook/Instagram Battle will be the best and biggest show in town, and it will be fascinating to see who makes what move next. Mr Zuckerberg has shown he is not scared to rip off Snapchat ideas and incorporate into his own platforms, making it an interesting challenge for Snapchat to continue it’s incredible growth rates. I think Snapchat will need to evolve to differentiate itself from the Big Blue Book, both to draw new users in and keep their young follower base interested at the same time.

I will put my money where my mouth is and have a guess at a much better “Discover” experience and some sort of ability to post a link in a video as well.

Me: Are there any trends you feel have been exhausted and will drop off in 2017?

Clayton: Hopefully dabbing?

Digital Marketer Lloyd Birch

Lloyd Birch – Digital Development Specialist

I was given my first computer at a very young age, the first thing I did was take it to pieces. I’ve always been enthused by computers and technology. At school I loved business and marketing, most intrigued by consumer behaviours. My goals have always been a mixture of these elements, creating digital marketing with the consumer in mind.

Growing up in the era of mobile internet and the boom of internet on the go, devices are a huge part of my life. Utilising this, I always aim to create content that looks beautiful and is easy to consume no matter what device is being used, as I’d expect this myself.

With my experiences in website development, promotional email creation, search engine marketing, social media marketing and everything else digital that you can imagine, I aim to produce usable design that is consistent across all platforms.

Me: What were the main platforms you concentrated on in 2016 as a Digital Marketer?

Lloyd: Web, Email, LinkedIn, a little facebook and twitter.

Me: Why LinkedIn?

Lloyd:

I Moved into a B2B market. LinkedIn seems to be making strides to better market itself as a selling tool, it’s still full of recruiters that hound people like a plague which is it’s major downfall as a professional social media space but there are much better tools to gain information and target advertising which is an improvement.

Me: Do you use video content in your Digital Marketing?

Lloyd:

Not currently. I don’t personally like video advertising but can see it’s merit in certain marketing platforms.

Video advertising is shifting from being a marketing led sales pitch to being a more adhoc story based approach. People don’t seek out advertising and feel invaded when marketing is thrust upon them, so a more story based approach works well. The best use of video advertising I’ve seen recently was a cleaning product called Vanish (UK) that asked people to record their own tips and tricks for using their product. This community and story based approach advertises the key USPs of their product without being a corporate sales message and created a community of interest. Also, bonus, it was probably really cheap to do!

Me: Did you include Facebook LIVE (or live on other platforms) in your Digital Marketing in 2016?

Lloyd: No

Me: Will you be adding it to your content types in 2017?

Lloyd:

Facebook isn’t on my radar in the B2B industry, but I also think Facebook Live as an advertising tool is a lot of investment for potentially very little gain if the video isn’t backed up by a larger viral campaign. I personally believe the novelty of Facebook Live will fade away.

Me: Did you use bots in your Digital Marketing in 2016?

Lloyd: 

Due to the nature of B2B marketing, there is much more emphasis of knowledge rather than data, therefore bots don’t have a huge part to play as it requires a human touch to understand and act upon the information gathered. B2B is very granular but very small marketing pools can produce large yields, so it makes sense to have a much more human approach to marketing.

That being said, I am in the process of producing automated email sign up campaigns to automate the release of information initially as repetitive human content distribution isn’t time effective.

Me: Do you have any predictions on the overall state of Digital Marketing for 2017?

Lloyd:

I think 2017 is going to be the year marketing gets quicker, shorter, and more regular. With the increasing use of multiple channel advertising and more targeted campaigns people are becoming more consumed, therefore less responsive, and it seems to be a trend that right place right time marketing is more persuasive than loyalty or brand retention due to the huge amount of competition and consumers are becoming more likely to try new products or services they’d never considered before, a lot of this is driven by big data from grassroots such as reviews ratings etc as people see other people as more trustworthy than brand marketing, which has always been the case but it’s becoming more readily accessible every day.
There’s also lot of distrust going around lately! Especially social media, it seems to be more and more of an avenue to air grievances. People like to hurt a brands appearance publicly when they feel the services aren’t up to scratch. Maybe because having a one to one discussion with the company in private doesn’t satisfy consumer grievance.

All this is good for small business, the barriers to entry are becoming more and more relaxed every day. Big businesses are seeing their brand recognition doesn’t mean as much as it used to, in some cases the bigger the brand is the more the diseconomies of scale are hurting their public perception as a faceless entity focused on profit rather than satisfying consumer need.

Me: Are there any trends you feel have been exhausted and will drop off in 2017?

Lloyd: 

I think one trend that will drop off in 2017 is brands attempts to hijack new and upcoming social media tools, as the rate at which these tools crop up and brands are trying to encompass all forms of media, usually with little success as they are not prepared to adapt their marketing strategies to cope with the different approach each platform makes. An example of this would be snapchat and boomerang for Instagram.

As companies jump on the bandwagon and try to ride the wave of the latest craze, few companies stop to think whether the platform is appropriate for their target audience or communication style and this leads to wasted investment. Many companies are now not as willing to jump on the hype train as they weigh up the return on investment of new and upcoming media channels.

Many businesses are now creating marketing plans that focus on a select few modes of communication based on whether they reflect the communication style of the business and target audience so that they can effectively manage their resources rather than try and be across all platforms.

Alana Christidis – Digital Marketing Specialist

Alana is a Social Media enthusiast from way back. She enjoys creating Facebook advertising strategies just as much as lurking through memes.
As an avid consumer of content, she loves finding new, exciting ways to share a brand’s story.

Me: What were the main platforms you concentrated on in 2016 as a Digital Marketer?

Alana: 

Facebook and Instagram with a heavy emphasis on advertising – and I can’t imagine that changing too drastically in 2017. 

With the introduction of awesome features like Stories, Instagram was a really fun, engaging platform that did really well in telling a story for brands.  Facebook was my predominate focus, especially in advertising. I really focused on generating ROI with killer ad strategies. 

Me: What are some emerging trends you noticed in Digital Marketing in 2016?

Alana:

Augmented Reality was a big emerging trend in my opinion. As someone who opens Snapchat every day just to check what new filters I can use and celebrated like a crazy person when I caught a Dragonite in Kings Park playing Pokemon Go, I think that we’re going to see more and more opportunity with it in 2017.

Me: Do you use video content in your Digital Marketing?

Alana:

Video was a big player in my content strategies. In a sea of articles and photos, video stood out and got a lot of engagement as a result.

Super short, bite sized videos quickly grab attention when no one has time to read your 5,000 world article. This year, my focus will be on quality over quantity when it comes to my content – rather than smashing the posts, create quality pieces.

Me: Did you include Facebook LIVE (or live on other platforms) in your Digital Marketing in 2016?

Alana:

While I didn’t personally use Facebook Live in my Digital Marketing, I think it’s a fantastic method of communication for brands to tell a story and get real time engagement – if it’s done right! Brands need to be aware that swapping to the front camera on their phone and um-ing through a script isn’t amazing content just because it’s live. It’s just awkward to watch.

Be authentic in your storytelling and in my eyes, you have a winning piece of content.

Me: Did you use bots in your Digital Marketing in 2016?

Alana:

I haven’t used them but I sure love talking to them. The use of bots is only going to grow this year. It’s such a smart way to improve customer interactions and increase conversions in the process. Since messaging apps have surpassed social media platforms in terms of users, it’s natural that people are looking to messages to communicate with their brands.

Me: Do you have any predictions on the overall state of Digital Marketing for 2017?

Alana:

The decrease in social media automation and the growth of storytelling. People are looking for authenticity when it comes to the brands that they follow and humanistic exchanges.

With the exception of bots, I think digital marketers will move away from automated, robotic feeling responses to their consumers and the inevitable blunders that come along with it and move to more personalised exchanges.

Me: Are there any trends you feel have been exhausted and will drop off in 2017?

Alana: 

I think Twitter’s struggle to remain relevant is going to become even bigger this year. With the continued popularity of visual content, it’s hard to see how they will keep up.

I also really hope people stop screenshotting their Snapchat filtered photos and posting them to Instagram.

Kelly Nelson Digital Marketer

Kelly Nelson – Marketing Consultant

A marketing professional with over 13 years experience having worked in a number of different industries including state & local government, mining, construction, IT and not-for-profit.

Kelly has worked in Scotland, Canada and Australia and specialises in online marketing and social media.

Me: What were the main platforms you concentrated on in 2016 as a Digital Marketer?

Kelly: Social Media, Email marketing & Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Me: Will this change in 2017?

Kelly:

No. I think these are the big players in digital marketing – these platforms have been around for a while and businesses continue to see results when using them.

Social Media is continually evolving and changing and it’s a really exciting platform to work with. Businesses know that they need to be on social media to gain exposure, they’re just uncertain on where or how to start.

Email Marketing is still a great platform to use. It’s free, personable and is delivered straight to a captured audience (depending on how you created your database!). You’d be surprised how many people still sign up for newsletters while visiting an organisation’s website or place of business.

I think SEO is still an underused, unknown (but very valuable) digital marketing tool. Clients often don’t understand the importance of having an optimised website until it’s mentioned that it’s an easy way to get your website found by your target audience. Additionally, many digital marketing platforms direct online traffic to an organisation’s website. Once your potential customer is there, you want them to stay! It’s so important to understand what they want and how they may navigate your website.

Me: What are some emerging trends you noticed in Digital Marketing in 2016?

Kelly:

The increased use of video and imagery (including GIF and memes) in social media.  The increased use of a marketing strategy and well defined target audiences.

Me: Do you think these will continue?

Kelly:

Yes. Many people use social media on a mobile device, in short amounts of time, such as sitting on the train or over a quick coffee.  Digital marketing content that is relatable, quick to skim and arouses emotion (whether it be laugh out loud or pull at the heart strings) is more likely to be engaged with and go viral. Video and imagery do just that.

It’s refreshing to see more organisations having a defined marketing strategy, campaign and target audience/s. There used to be a time where digital marketing was a ‘free-for-all’, whereby content was wishy-washy and an organisation’s brand had to be everywhere, all the time. Perhaps the slower economic climate has allowed management and marketers to take a step back and analyse their business objectives and how this ties in with digital marketing.

Me: Do you use video content in your Digital Marketing?

Kelly: Yes

Me: Will this increase 2017?

Kelly:

Yes. As I mentioned earlier, people are more engaged with content that is quick to look at and watch. With the increasing use of mobile devices (and wearable devices such as GoPro), more videos are also being created and shared by users. There’s been numerous additions to Social Media platforms to enable the use of video content, including Facebook advertising, Facebook LIVE, Instagram and the phenomenal growth of Snapchat. Plus YouTube is still HUGE. Video is only going to be used more in 2017.

Me: Did you include Facebook LIVE (or live on other platforms) in your Digital Marketing in 2016?

Kelly: No

Me: Will you be adding it to your content types in 2017?

Kelly:

Yes. The digital world is forever changing, therefore Digital Marketing has to evolve with it. However it’s still important to reassess each digital media platform to see if it would suit your businesses needs and if it captures your target audience.

Me: Do you have any predictions on the overall state of Digital Marketing for 2017?

Kelly:

I think wearables (e.g. Apple Watch, activity trackers) will start to emerge more in Australia in 2017. Wearables are one of the hottest consumer commodities in the US. People already track their physical activity (eg 5km run) and share on Social Media. It will be interesting to see what companies do with this data, and how they can use it to market their product and target potential customers.

Virtual Reality (VR) will also be making its appearance soon! Mark Zuckerberg has already demonstrated using Messenger in VR, so it won’t be far from Facebook

Me: Are there any trends you feel have been exhausted and will drop off in 2017?

Kelly:

Display advertising including banners, ads and pop-ups. I feel that these are really annoying and wonder if people really actually read what’s there? I tend to ignore them. I hope they will drop off but I doubt it. Wishful thinking.

Businesses thinking that they don’t need to spend money on social media because it’s free. Well it isn’t anymore! The social media arena is busy, busy, busy and the majority of businesses will need to add social media advertising into their marketing budget in order to gain targeted exposure.

Paul Ramondo – CEO Ramondo Media

Paul Ramondo teaches entrepreneurs how to use Facebook Ads and Digital Marketing Funnels to generate qualified leads and sales from their websites.

Me: What were the main platforms you concentrated on in 2016 as a Digital Marketer?

Paul: Facebook, Instagram & Snapchat

Me: Will this change in 2017?

Paul:

I plan to go all in on Facebook as a paid media platform and will scale back the time and effort I invest into Instagram. I also plan to keep my marketing and personal branding efforts on Snapchat consistent (just got the new Spectacles… they’re super fun and present awesome new opportunities for unique first person storytelling – come give me a creep if you’re curious – U/N = paulramondo)

Me: Why?

Paul: 

In a nutshell … Facebook Ads’ ability to provide concrete ROI is unparalleled by other platforms, and I only see it improving from here.

I’m also really excited to see how much Facebook expands its product offering this year as it continues to swallow the internet as a whole…

Happy days though… More platforms owned by Facebook + more Facebook product offerings = increased average time on site per user + more data about those user’s behaviours.

This means the total supply of media for ads will increase (driving costs down for advertisers – ceteris paribus). It also means advertiser’s ability to pinpoint and target desired audiences will increase simultaneously

Me: What are some emerging trends you noticed in Digital Marketing in 2016?

Paul: 

The lines separating our digital and “real” lives continued to blur as disruptive tech (like Snap Inc’s “Spectacles”) have started to become ubiquitous.

Me: Do you think these will continue?

Paul: Yes, exponentially.

Me: Why is that?

Paul:

I think we’ll continue to society’s obsession with on-demand, document everything, eyes glued to smartphones increase as these trends become more habitual and second nature than ever before.

This of course will be met with increased advertising as brands both big and small scramble to capture people’s attention long enough for them to hear their story.

Me: Do you use video content in your Digital Marketing?

Paul: Yes – (mainly) Facebook Ads, YouTube and Snapchat

Me: Will this increase or decrease in 2017?

Paul: 

Increase. I’ll be investing a lot more time into creating immersive content experiences for my audience through video as it is by far the best way for me to generate a return on my time and ad spend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Casey Bryan – Search Specialist & Blogger

Casey Bryan by day is an SEO geek at White Chalk Road in her role as a Senior Online Marketing Account Manager looking after a portfolio of local and national clients.

By night she is a wine blogger for travellingcorkscrew.com.au, making sure no wine goes un-tasted

At White Chalk Road where I work as a Senior Account Manager our speciality is Search Engine Marketing (SEM), we are one of very few boutique agencies in Perth who focus solely on SEO and Google AdWords. We understand how vital these online strategies are for businesses small and large and there’s no doubt in 2017 many more websites will put more time, money and emphasis on these channels as they provide positive ROI.

We all know how quickly the digital landscape changes. With more and more businesses actively doing SEM it means competition is ramping up so being on top of your game is a must in 2017. What you were doing for SEM 2 years ago simply won’t cut it today.

In 2016 there were countless changes, from penguin 4.0 (focus on toxic links) to the possum update (local search) and of course there was the big Mobile-Friendly ‘Mobilegeddon’ update in May which caused everyone to rush out and make sure Google deemed their websites as user-friendly for visitors on mobile devices. That’s just a handful of the SEO changes and then there’s the Google AdWords updates; from the new extended text ads to no right-hand side ads in the SERP’s to paid local search ads. There’s no denying you have to constantly be on your toes and ready to adapt your strategy when working in SEM.

Me: So what do I think we should be aware of in 2017 with regards to SEM?

Casey:

1. Secure Websites

By this I mean, shifting to HTTPS and making sure when you make the move, you don’t loose any of the hard work you’ve put into improving your organic search results. In terms of a ranking factor, if you have an HTTPS website rather than HTTP you will have a very small advantage however there’s no doubt this ranking factor is going to get stronger whether that’s in 2017 or 2018. My advice is to move sooner than later as it’ll be less pages to redirect, thus making your job easier. There are risks with moving to HTTPS so make sure you know what you’re doing.

2. Mobile Website Optimisation

We live in a mobile-first world and this is not going to change in 2017. In 2016 we finally saw mobile overtake desktop as the primary device users are on when accessing websites and that teamed with Google’s plan to move to mobile-first indexing means you NEED to be all over your mobile marketing.

3. Website Page Speed

Ain’t nobody got time for that! Both your desktop and mobile versions of your website must be as quick as possible in 2017. This has not changed since 2016 however with mobile becoming even more important this year, then the need to keep things as quick as possible is a strategy we should all live by moving forward.

4. Website Content

Again this shouldn’t be news to anyone online – good quality, unique content is what the web is all about. The more of this type of content you can put up on your website the better, if you don’t have a blog/news section then add one now! This content is not only good for your readers/customers but it can skyrocket your SEO results. All websites should aim for at least 1 piece of new content a month, minimum 600 words – the more the better really but it needs to be useful and interesting content. Make the content as shareworthy as possible so readers want to share it on social media and link to it. Natural link-building doesn’t come easy but by gosh it’s worth it!

2017 is going to be a big year for search. I am excited to be a part of it with the White Chalk Road team alongside building up my blog, Travelling Corkscrew, which welcomed over 75,000 organic visitors in 2016!

So there you have it folks!

A broad range of backgrounds, experience and niches produced different views of where Digital Marketing is heading in 2017! A big thanks to Clayton, Lloyd, Kelly, Alana, Casey and Paul for taking the time to share their thoughts with me (and you guys!)

If you have your own predictions and would like to be featured I’d love to hear from you, or if you just have a comment or question use the comment section below, I’m always welcome for feedback 🙂

Time will only tell what 2017 holds for us in the Digital Marketing world, but it never hurts to have professional insight into future trends to help you target your marketing efforts!

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My 2017 Digital Marketing Predictions

Everyone’s doing a 2017 Digital Marketing Prediction post!

Which is fine because none of us can see into the future, we can only make guesses as to where Digital Marketing will grow (and where it won’t) so we can try to focus our attention in the right places to maximise returns.

Here’s my big three Digital Marketing predictions:

BOTS

Bots are only going to get bigger. More and more businesses will engage bots to take some of the heavy lifting from their digital customer service. If you’re not sure what a bot is you can check out this article from CNET. Chances are you’ve spoken to a bot before, you might have known it wasn’t a human, or you may not have. Bots will continue to improve and will be used by more companies world-wide.

LIVE

People love live. I think partly because we’re so sick of the falseness of Social Media, lies of politicians, and stagedness of infomercials – and partly our FOMO and our desire to be the first to know. We want to see something NOW and we want to see it how it REALLY IS. Live video gives us both of these. The way people used to flock to their Twitter feed when a news story broke, will now be the way people rush to find someone live on Facebook or Instagram (or perhaps Twitter – who knows, they did announce a new live feature)

VIDEO

Video and live go together, but there’s also another aspect I wanted to touch on. Explainer video is going to get bigger. Businesses that couldn’t afford video production will bite the bullet and get animated or stop motion videos on their websites and social channels. I must say I’m not the hugest fan of my Facebook newsfeed being full of video. But I have a weakness for those stop motion recipe videos. You know the ones…you see them on pages like Thrillist, Tasty etc. like this handy cocktail recipe below.

You can see by the views I’m not the only one who loves these. As well as my top three Digital Marketing Predictions, here’s some other aspects of Digital Marketing that will stand the test of time:

Customer Journey Mapping

Basically this just means tracking your customers through their buying journey with you. Which pages of your website did they land on first? Next? How many visits before a purchase?  What prompted them to buy that final time? The more of this type of data you have the more streamlined you can make this buyer journey, essentially increasing your conversions.

Email Marketing

I sometimes cop shit about my views on Email Marketing – but it works and I stand by that. There’s a reason it’s the only service I offer outside Social, and not only is it effective, but it’s Social’s best friend. Businesses would be smart to continue to capture emails, and to improve their automation and segmentation to make sure the right people are seeing the right messages at the right times.

Authenticity

As mentioned above, people are a bit sick of “fakeness” and want to see the ‘real you’ of your business. You’ll stand out of you embrace what makes you different, rather than try to be like the others. Go live, post behind the scenes, people will appreciate the glimpse into your real world.[/fusion_text][fusion_text]

Platforms I think worth the investment in 2017:

LINKEDIN

I think LinkedIn is getting better. The app works better, and although there’s some glaringly obvious problems with LinkedIn I do think it’s a worthwhile use of your Social Media time allowance.

INSTAGRAM

Instagram will go from strength to strength, regardless of what people think about its copycatting of Snap. It’s easy to use, it’s growing it’s user base rapidly and for the most part it’s a very positive platform in terms of overall sentiment. In short people just enjoy being on Instagram, so it will develop in 2017, and it completely worth your time invested.

FACEBOOK

Facebook cops a lot of flack, but when you think about where it came from, and how it found an untapped need and embedded itself into our lives it’s actually quite remarkable. Facebook is not going anywhere in 2017. Sure, it’ll make some moves to clean up the “fake news” stories (or at least appear to) and hopefully there won’t be anymore ‘metrics fails’ we have to endure, but in general we’ll get more and more features trying to keep us happily spending time on the platform so they can sell more ads. And the ads will get better too.

Instagram and Facebook appear to be moving together – great news for marketers, and I think this will continue. With the combined inbox feature now rolling out, the upkeep on two platforms gets easier removing the need for people to choose between them.

SNAP (But only if your target market are under 30)

Snap (formerly Snapchat) is already a HUGE platform and I think it’s a great place to showcase your products on the following 2 conditions.

1 – You GET it:

Don’t think that any normal ads you’ve done anywhere else are going to work here. They wont. Understand the platform and how it’s used. Make something that suits it, that speaks the language and it could be a great success.

2 – Your target demo are young people:

Don’t get me wrong, I know people who are older than the main Snap demo who use and love it, but they are an exception. If your brand is not appealing to young users don’t even bother.

Things I think (hope) will decrease in popularity:

Vanity Metrics

Seriously, stop it. Your likes don’t mean anything (past a certain couple of set-up stages) A post that gets a lot of comments but contradicts what your brand is about is still a shitpost. So stop shitposting!

Marketing like it’s 2012

See above and add in all the tricks used to make people interact with content. They don’t work anymore. The only thing that works is knowing your market, having a strategy, and working on it consistently.

Booma-bounce

I don’t know what you call these so I gave them a name that’s as stupid as they are. Please stop doing a bounce on Boomerang! Fine if it’s your personal account (not really – but you do you) but I personally can’t stand them. Boomerang is awesome for certain things, jumping into a pool for example, anything that flows one way can look cool in reverse, but your cutesy bounce does not look cool. Sorry – it just doesn’t, and I like to think I’m that type of friend who tells you if there’s something in your teeth.

What will improve:

Customer Service

Customer service on Social is going to get better. Small businesses are doing a great job these days at getting back to you with helpful information about their products and services. The big end of town also does ok, since they can afford a team to handle the bulk. But there’s a big middle here. Improved technology like bots will definitely help the customer service aspect of Digital Marketing.

Not only that, but user journeys should improve too, becoming more personalised (again due to improved technology) and therefore reduce the need for people to reach out via Social channels.

Corporates “getting it”

There’s a growing number of businesses that are getting it. They know their Digital Marketing needs a strategy, metrics, time, effort and money to achieve their business goals. The more this is understood the better the marketers servicing these needs can be at their job, as they get back to the business of doing, rather than arguing about how to make your post “go viral” or some other cool thing my cousin’s friends’ sister did that made her totally Insta-famous.

Overall?

The early adopters are going great. They may need a refresher on their strategy – but these guys knew digital was here to stay and they got to build audiences back when it was easier (and free) Businesses like this will continue to go from strength to strength whether they outsource or have in-house digital teams.

The middle gets bigger. Just like all of us, the middle is expanding! Some of the previously mentioned early adopters may have dropped behind, being hoodwinked by a smooth-talking salesman, or simply not found reward for their efforts. Similarly there’s small businesses working really hard on their digital marketing and not yet reaping the rewards. This middle level of digital success is where most businesses will find themselves.

The newbies are either new businesses competing for a share of the spoils; or businesses that thought investing in digital marketing was a fad, a waste of money, not ‘right’ for their business, or were just too risk averse to put themselves out there. I think the second group are the ones to watch. The reluctant. The begrudging. The haters of change…I think we might be in for some surprises from some of these tortoises. He did beat the hare after all!

So? What did you think of my 2017 Digital Marketing Predictions?

Do you agree? Disagree? Have your own Digital Marketing predictions I didn’t mention? I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a comment 🙂

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Engage Bali by Socialbakers: Part Two – The Main Event

Engage Bali Day Two

If you just want a “feel” for what Engage Bali was like I recommend you watch the video above.

In the below sections I’m summarising what I thought the main points of each speaker was, and it’s quite long, since there were so many. I have included as many links to videos and slideshows if you want to drill down into any of the speakers content. And I’ll update as more becomes available.

Strap yourself in – we’re going to Bali![/fusion_text][fusion_text]Day Two of Engage Bali started pretty much the same as the previous day, waking up in paradise and having a quick breakfast. I wish now I had’ve taken photos of the breakfast options! I’ve been to a lot of different countries around the world but never before seen a breakfast spread like this one. I was missing normal coffee though…

Day Two of Engage Bali was to be made up of 17 speakers and 4 panel discussions, followed by networking and dinner. On a humid Saturday, when your body clock is telling you you can take it easy (not saying I don’t work Saturdays – I freelance after all, which includes regular weekend work) this was going to be a long day!

I chose a seat in the second row and got prepared to get down to business! First up was Jan Rezab, founder of Socialbakers. The crowd loved him – and so did I![/fusion_text][fusion_text]

Jan Rezab – Founder, Socialbakers

Jan had a treasure trove of stats, tips and tricks for a Social Media nerd like me! Here’s my key takeaways from Jan’s wonderful presentation:

The state of Social:

Brands are growing on Social Media – but Media companies are killing it!

  • Media companies know how to create great content, but you also need to be an ad specialist to get your content seen.
  • Monitor the top 5 Media companies in your market for content trends.

Photos are still the dominant content type.

  • Even with the rise of video, it hasn’t taken over – yet.

Frequency is important:

  • Impressions – Reach = Frequency.

Make sure you stay informed about changes to the Facebook algorithm

Tips, Tricks and Facts:

Make beautiful content

Instagram has regional scale and can kill Snapchat

Video,Video, Video – but don’t measure it but the views!

  • A view is not a good metric. Measure Viewthrough rate (VTR). Organic Vs Paid video have around the same viewthrough rate.
  • Average Snap 1-2 secs. Average FB Video 3-5 secs. Unlink YouTube video no waiting for the ad to finish.
  • 85% of video is played without sound and 95% are autoplays. Not putting captions on your video is a missed opportunity.
  • Brands are beating Media at video VTR

There’s no such thing as a yearly marketing plan anymore.

  • Accept changes/new features and adjust as you go.
  • You can’t fail if you are looking after Customer Care and Engagement. People want help with their issues and problems, they want information.

Jan sees an opportunity for Twitter to become THE customer service channel.

Only 16% of questions asked by consumers on Facebook pages are public!

2016 is the year of Bots!

No-one wants new apps!

  • 65% of people did not open the app store/Google Play store in 2015. That means NO NEW APPS were downloaded.

Can we please stop using fan counts as a metric! It’s 2016 FFS!

Define your goals

Look for the big moments in your Social journey and analyse why they worked.

Watch the video of Jan’s keynote below, or you can also see the slideshare HERE.

Robert Lang – SEO, Socialbakers

Next was Robert Lang, CEO of Socialbakers. Here are my takeaways from Robert’s presentation:

Is the term “Social Media” outdated?

I think so, although I’ve been thinking about it for ages and I haven’t come up with an alternative I think covers the whole scope of what Social Media means to us.

Did you know Facebook’s 2015 revenue was $80 BILLION?

Whoa.

AND they have 60% of the market share! Measuring “time in platform” Facebook is leading the game.

Is Tinder a Social Media platform?

I don’t consider it one – but I haven’t used it so I’m open to feedback from others.

Will 2016 see the end of free Social Media?

I mean, it’s already happening…but I think we’ve got a little bit longer to go on some platforms.

Facebook judges the quality of your content every time you post or advertise.

How RELEVANT is your content to the target market? We know ds have relevancy scores, but we can assume ALL content have this same hierachy to reach the newsfeed. Content is rated by Facebook (and perhaps also Instagram) uy the first 100 impressions. Has anyone interacted with it? Clicked, reacted, commented, shared…? If not it’s not likely to be shown to any more people as your content is deemed to be of low quality.

Don’t boost bad content! EVER.

If you think you’ll get more engagement by boosting awful posts or making terrible ads – you’re incorrect. You will actually damage your pages overall relevancy score. Maybe it’s time to spring clean your history?

Connect Social Media to your business objectives

Period. Otherwise what is the point?

Focus on producing quality content and posting it at the correct times (Socialbakers can help you with that)

Be Bold and invest in things that work with your audience.

You can see the slideshare of Roberts presentation HERE

Sabeen Ahmad, Director of Digital Strategy – Publicis

Sabeen Ahmad was next. Sabeen is the Director of Digital Strategy at Publicis, and she had a lot to share. This is probably why she had to talk so fast to fit it all in!

I really enjoyed Sabeen’s presentation and meeting her afterwards! She was one of the wonderful examples of women smashing it in the digital marketing field, which is an inspiration to me personally.

Think Social, Act Global.

Sabeen took as through the AT&T campaign #catchjeremy as an example of how you can stage a stunt, with Social Media as the hub, and use it as advertising that’s global, relatable and effective.

Here are my main takeaways, but as I said there was a LOT of content covered – so please check out the slideshare which I’ll link to at the bottom of this section.

Everything is a business problem.

What is my brand trying to achieve?

The 5 Questions make an appearance again:

  • Why are you doing this?
  • Who is your audience?
  • Where are they?
  • What do they like?
  • How do you reach them?

Make a plan – use all the tools at your disposal.

  • Step into your customers life. The more you understand the better you can market.
  • Track the customer journey
  • Use influencers
  • Decide on the metrics you’ll measure
  • Create content that achieves your goals

Keep your efforts Efficient and effective.

Check out the slideshare HERE.

Daniel Morel, Chairman & Global CEO – Wunderman (retired)

Daniel Morel, retired Chairman & Global CEO of Wunderman was next up – and although his presentation wasn’t strictly about Social Media it was definitely one of my favourites! He’s a veteran of business strategy, and had some awesome insights!

Daniel’s favourite number is nine and so he made nine points in his speech.

Do you want to be RIGHT or do you want to be ELECTED?

1- Aim low and say yes to everything

2- The formula – don’t make (too many) enemies!

S = 100 – (Nb year x P)

P < 1%

S > 80%

For those of us not mathematically inclined – For every year of business you can piss off 1% of your colleagues and still work with 80% of them.

3- If you aren’t the lead dog, the view is always the same (bums of the lead dogs)

4- Out of many – one

E pluribus unum. “we must hang together, or we will assuredly hang separately.” Ben Franklin on signing the declaration of independence. Build consensus, otherwise you can’t win.

5- Don’t be a Lady Mary

This is a Downton Abbey reference that was a bit lost on me, but the meaning is business MUST be predictable.

6- Amateurs discuss strategy. Professionals study logistics.

I love this one! It’s all well and good to have a grand plan – but it has to be able to work.

7- Leadership is not about being liked

Leadership is defined by results, not attributes. People follow results.

8- Leading from the front

Leadership doesn’t kill you. Engage – give your pound of flesh.

9- Data Monster

Be aware of the amount of data, and who’s feeding the data monster.

Lars Silberbauer – Global Director of Social Media & Search, LEGO

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Everyone knows of LEGO. We all know the pleasure of creating with it, and the pain of stepping on one. Their Social Media is amazing, and a fantastic case study for marketers who are looking to entertain and delight their audience, and encourage fans to share photos and become brand advocates.

Lars Silberbauer was definitely a big drawcard for me to attend EngageBali. I wanted to know more about LEGO’s Social strategy, and the man who was behind it. You can watch the video below – his slides are really good, and well worth the watch!

LEGO, Lars explained, produce a lot of content, they’d want to- they’re the world’s most watched brand (on YouTube)! The aim of this content is to engage the creativity of people, and prompt them to share it. LEGO are a 24/7 operation who have diversified their team around the globe to make sure they are always available to their fans. Lars also explained that one of the reasons this works so well is that global brand need diversity. We are a mixed bunch, us humans – and you’ve heard the saying “takes one to know one” right? When building teams make sure you have diversity in mind. They also don’t let people loose on their Social channels without them first gaining their Social Media Drivers License.

Lars explained that having a connection to your customers was like a relationship.  LEGO wants to hold you! They aren’t here for a fling. They want to be in your life. He has an interesting definition of Social Media: “Social media is nothing…but a set of technologies that enhances our social nature” It’s all about PEOPLE.

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When people build with LEGO, they want to share their pride in their creations. Lucky LEGO, having an awesome, long standing brand people just love to love.

But what are their goals? LEGO has a two-pronged approach, Monetisation & Brand Strategy, and Lowering Cost & Minimising Risk.

Lars then took us through his $100 marketing campaign. He decided to spend $100 to prove that even as a market leader you need paid Social as part of your strategy. I won’t go into the strategy of this campaign, you can see the video if you’re interested in finding out what happened to George.

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Then he went on the explain the Kronkiwongi. What an excellent example of getting people to change the way they think of and use your product! I loved hearing about this campaign!

Parents were thinking of LEGO as a set you buy, with instructions of how to build the bricks inside the package, into the picture on the outside of the package. Because, as Lars explained,  once you’re 3 years old, your creativity levels only decrease. Our imagination gets stale, because we stop using it as much. But kids know better! LEGO asked children to build a Kronkiwongi. And they did. You have to see the video, even if it’s just for this part (it starts at 17.49) LEGO worked closely with Facebook on this campaign, and sent Kronkiwongi kits to influencers in the space. This was a very successful campaign, but at the end of the day, it’s not all about metrics, or money. It’s about PEOPLE.

Lars’ top tips on Social Media:

  • It’s about creating relationships – no one night stands!
  • There’s no trick or short cuts
  • It’s a lot of hard work that needs to be:

Timely

Relevant

Brave

Personal

  • Don’t just invest your money – invest yourself.

I’d thoroughly recommend following LEGO’s Social accounts, and seeing how they engage their fans. This was truly one of my favourite parts of the day, and indeed of the whole conference!

You can also see him appear on the Panel Discussion too.

Nina Spannari – Head of Digital, Canon (Australia)

Firstly – Nina is just like the rest of us (a LEGO fan) and presented Lars with a Canon camera made from LEGO! Marketing genius.

I really enjoyed Nina’s presentation. Another wonderful woman in the digital field, doing inspiration work for a global brand!

Whether you are aware of Canon Australia’s Social accounts, one look will show you there’s a lot of success there. They have an engaged fan base, who love the product and love to interact with the brand. But its more than that. If you are a bit of a photog, you’ll know camera brands are very important to people. If your Australian think Holden V Ford, people have a favourite and they’ll defend their choice – and I don’t think this has waned much with the rise of smartphone cameras. Nina addressed people’s constant access to photo taking technology (I’m not calling your phone’s camera a camera, it just isn’t) by saying “the best camera is the one that’s on you” Fair enough!

So since mobile technology is stealing our “quiet times” what a great strategy to position your SLR camera as a way of getting them back! Switch off, disconnect, and let your lense follow a rabbit into wonderland. Canon is your companion in this, nurturing the creative process.

They focus (lol!) on the post purchase experience, develop (another lol) love, skills and the relationship you have with your camera – and the brand! The 3 key pillars of Social Media according to Nina are:

  • Inspire
  • Enable
  • Celebrate

She then discussed some of their campaigns. The first was about content Curation.

“No one sees it like you” doubled their Instagram following in 12 months, adding around 8k each month during the campaign, eliciting an average of 9k interactions per day on Instagram alone, and 1k views on YouTube every hour (With Jan’s advice from earlier in the day it would be interesting to see the VTR for this) so I’d say that was pretty effective! If you haven’t seen it you should check out their Instagram, it’s pretty bloody good!

Nina showed us some video I have been unable to locate about Canon’s collaboration with Perth prominent photographer Jarrad Seng, and a beautiful campaign where photographers are briefed to create a scene from either a child’s imagination or a dream (I cant quite remember which)

I also had the pleasure of meeting Nina, who’s a lovely lady that was also missing “proper” coffee 🙂

See the slides here, and if the video goes up I’ll update to include that too!

Veronica McGregor – News and Social Media, NASA

Veronica McGregor is the brains behind the Social of NASA. Let’s just stop and think about what that means. Do you follow NASA on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or elsewhere? If the answer is no then you should definitely open another tab and check them out, right now! Unless amazing photos from the depths of space aren’t your thing.

NASA is obviously in a world of its own as far a content goes. No-one else has images of Jupiter’s moons, and their content is never going to be stale either, it’s always advances in their technology, or their missions so their content team is probably spoilt for choice!

There’s so much great information in this presentation, and I’m sure you’ll want to watch it for yourself, so I’m going to keep my wrap-up brief. I’m just going to tell you the two things that really stood out to me about what Veronica shared with us, and that is:

100% of NASA’s Social is Organic.

One. Hundered. Percent. Now even with what I said earlier about their unique content that’s still pretty amazing. Their Social is ALL in-house and none of it is sponsored. The sheer scale of their accounts are amazing, and to have not ever paid a dollar – well, that’s awesome.

People Power took over during the Government Shutdown

During the Government shutdown NASA was one of the departments that had to stop working. So they were unable to update their Social channels, so what happened? Their fans took over, and posted on their behalf! You know you’ve got an engaged audience when they’re willing to step up and fill the void!

You can find out more about how this happened in the video. It’s pretty amazing.

On a personal note Veronica was a lovely lady, another fantastic example of women in our field being awesome. She stood for selfies, (a LOT of them, including one with me) gave out stickers, (yep! I got one) and made herself available to everyone. I invited her to Perth and have said I’ll drive her to GinGin Observatory, (which she knew of, apparently they had helped out from time to time when they need someone in the Southern Hemisphere) if she takes up my offer.

edited_1475923280893

 

The you can see the slides here!

Piotr Jakubowski – Chief Marketing Ojek, GO-JEK

Piotr Was fantastic! I don’t know that much about Indonesia, but the examples of the campaigns his business was running really touched me. They were emotional, but not in a sickly sweet way. They showed what seemed to be a very real side of life in Indonesia, and  told the story of GO-JEK, a service similar to Uber.

There’s not a lot of relevant facts and figures for you to take away from this one. It more cuts to the heart of what good marketing is – and that’s real. They develop a real connection, to real people. They know their market so they aren’t afraid to be open and honest about who they are.

You can check out the slides here.

Beverly Jackson – VP, Social Media Marketing and Content Strategy, MGM Resorts International

Beverley Jackson is another fine example of females leading the way in the business of Social Media. She explained through her presentation the logistics of one of MGM’s current marketing challenges. Shifting demographics. She told us about a hotel that MGM is redeveloping, that has an older market – but the refurbishment will attract a much younger one with different interests. The challenge of keeping both groups engaged while the build is complete so they can continue to trade during the transformation is a tough one!

She explained a campaign they had done where they made a group of young Scottish lads enjoying a birthday trip, where they completely made the trip with free concert tickets, and other surprises to make the birthday a trip to remember, and gain customer advocacy for life!

There’s some amazing nuggets of wisdom in Beverly’s speech. Including that you can die from lack of entertainment, and her content mixologist recipe is pretty awesome too! But the main takeaways from her presentation are to define your goals, purpose and objective – and create your campaigns around them.

Be true to your brand, and over-communicate to your fans.

And finally – credibility silences noise.

Dennis Owen – Group Manage Social Media, Cathay Pacific

Time to get serious for a minute, do you have a Social Media Crisis Management Plan? Well, you’re going to wish you did, and probably make it an agenda item in your next marketing meeting after reading about the presentation from Dennis Owen from Cathay Pacific.

Dennis explained to us an issue that happened on board a Cathay Pacific plan. All ended well, but it doesn’t always – which is why you need your plans in place to kick in the minute a crisis starts.

He explained how Social Media has changed the game when it come to crisis management, where you used to issue a press release, or hold a press conference – now you must be social-first. The reason for this is that people involved in the crisis will most likely be publicising the event live. Your crisis or communications team might not even know about the issue until your Social Media monitoring picks it up! So you start already on the back foot.

So here’s some things to know from Dennis:

The crisis will pass – but the Social proof that it happened never will. What’s on the internet stays on the internet.

Be social-first with your responses.

Know who was first to “break” the story and try to get to them. That’s where the media will be heading – so get there first and control the narrative as best you can.

Communicate, communicate, communicate! The comms are more important than the crisis itself (from a brand point of view, obviously not to the victims…)

Have a plan in place and implement it quickly.

Find an expert to advocate. They have more credibility than your brand in a crisis. Shut down speculation, it’s the enemy!

He also had some tips for building up your Social Media Crisis Toolbox:

Check how other businesses in your industry have dealt with crises.

Make a checklist. You will be busy and distracted at the time. You need to have a list!

Don’t create a second crisis with the handling of your crisis.

Hit Social first!

Monitor and respond in real time is appropriate

Test and learn!

Unfortunately there aren’t any slides or a video of Dennis’ presentation. But it got me thinking. How many of you have a crisis management plan?

Michael Bouda – Senior Brand Manager, Jägermeister

I’m not really going to go into this one in much detail as I found the content a bit too ‘dude-bro’ for me, which is not a reflection on the campaign, more than the fact that I am so far removed from this demographic.

The one thing I will state though is that I really liked the way this brand invented it’s own influencers. It’s a tough ask, advertising alcohol in Australia (compared with many other countries, and especially in WA) and I thought the invention of the cartoon “pack” and the positioning of them as influential was quite genius if intentional, and incredibly well handled if it happened by accident.

It would be interesting to see if this sort of campaign could work for other brands, and how it might have differed had it have been a female demographic with similar content.

Tanbir Rahman – Head of Digital, Huawei Technologies

Tanbir Rahman spoke to us about launching a product, the P9 Huawei smartphone – using Social Media. He had some excellent insights and the slides are also available here.

Paul Moore – Head Content Producer, Tennis Australia

Paul Moore talked about producing content for one of the world’s biggest sporting events.

Roy Simangunsong – Country Business Head, Twitter

Roy Simangunsong talks about how companies can use Twitter, and gives examples from the local Indonesian market. See the slides here.

Wrap up…

I hope you’ve enjoyed my wrap-up of the days speakers! There was so much going on that I haven’t covered absolutely everything – I just hope I’ve done the event justice. It really was an amazing few days in an amazing setting!

If you want to get some more info leave me a comment, or better yet – stay tuned to Socialbakers and make sure you go to their next conference, whether that’s #EngageBali (I would DEFINITELY go back if they do another Bali event) or one of their others.

I also wanted to say a quick thank you to the Socialbakers team for looking after me. Sometimes events can be a bit awkward when you’re by yourself, especially in between the formal schedule! The Socialbakers team made sure I was included in everything, and they were so nice and helpful that I really felt like we’d known each other for ages!

I also met some wonderful people, not just the speakers mentioned in this epically long blog post – but regular folks slogging it out in the Social realm for various agencies and businesses in different parts of the Asian Pacific region.

My next mission is to get some feedback from some of them to add to my own, so stay tuned!

I hope to see you in Bali 2017!

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Engage Bali by Socialbakers: Part One

Engage Bali by Socialbakers – Social Media Summit

Over the weekend I attended the #EngageBali Social Media Summit by Socialbakers, held at the Grand Hyatt in Nusa, Bali. #EngageBali was my first Social Media conference and I was really excited to attend and learn some new things, meet some social media professionals and enjoy the luxurious surroundings of the resort.

I was not disappointed!

I flew in late on Thursday night, and was lead through the expanse of the resort to my room. Wow!

We really were learning & networking in paradise!

Friday was our day of workshops. I had downloaded the Engage Bali app and after much deliberation signed up for “INCREASING YOUR SOV – HOW DUAL BRAND STRATEGIES CAN INCREASE MARKET SHARE” with Holly Stewart from Seek for the morning session and “FACILITATING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE” with Olivier Girard from Digimind for the afternoon session.

Armed with the sim card given to us by sponsor Telkomsel (super handy!) I managed to find breakfast, eat a quick bowl of noodles (I love embracing different breakfast cultures) and headed into the main conference area. The Telkomsel sim wasn’t the right size for my phone – so I went to see them and in 1 minute flat they had punched it into a microsim and fitted it to my phone. Yes! No data roaming fees 🙂

I picked up a free bubble tea and headed to my morning workshop.

Holly is clearly very knowledgeable about Social Media Marketing and the focus of the session was using a Dual Brand Strategy.

Dual Brand Strategy

For the non-marketers reading, this means creating or acquiring a secondary brand as a strategy to help you maintain share of voice (market share) that wouldn’t necessarily appeal to your main brand.

Think of Coke and Mount Franklin. Coke know not everyone drinks Coke, but they can still drink Coke brands when they’re drinking water – ie. Mount Franklin. They maintain market share, it doesn’t hurt the main brand (not sure if anything could in this example) and they can reach new audiences who would have dismissed Coke.

Clever, right?

Background

There are some challenges involved in running a dual brand strategy. The main one is not to cannibalise the main brand in building the secondary one. But we’ll get back to that in a bit.

Seek is a transactional brand. People looking for work go to Seek to find job ads. So who are their target demographic? EVERYONE.

Ugh. That’s tough! How do you appeal to everyone? According to Holly at any given time there are:

 

looking-for-work

So at any given moment up to 75% of people are looking for work!

To further complicate this: Low skilled jobs are easy to fill, and high skilled jobs much harder to fill she said. Makes sense.

Traditionally Seek has been among a small field in the online jobseeker realm and has occupied 80% of the market. A great place to be for a brand! But they were starting to face increased competition from new players.

How would they maintain their share of the market? This is where the dual brand strategy comes into play.

How does the Dual Brand Strategy Work?

Since people wanted to make sure they were getting all the available information users were looking at more than one job site. Seek had to make sure they weren’t losing ground to one of the others that “scrapes” jobs from all over the web. They stopped these scraping sites being able to access Seek – so if you visited them, you could get all the other jobs – but not the ones from the biggest jobs marketplace and would have to look there separately.

Seek introduced JORA, their secondary brand. JORA was able to scrape the job websites, but it also had access to the Seek.com jobs – meaning it had ALL THE JOBS, which when you’re job hunting is what you want. One site to rule them all.

But you can’t just launch a secondary brand on a whim.

Holly explained the following phases:

  1. Engagement
  2. Traffic & Conversion
  3. Segmentation & Relevancy

Your brand has to be ready. Listen before you launch! She said that with 30b pieces of content fighting for your attention in the newsfeed, it’s not easy to gain attention for your brand. In Australia 1 in 3 internet minutes belong to Facebook owned sites (Facebook, Messenger, What’s App, Instagram…) and that a dual brand strategy can help open up new segments.

It was all about mapping your customer journey, and using what data you have to either include or exclude potential customers.

I think this is where we lost some people.

I’m not sure everyone was fully across segmentation and the ability to exclude audiences via pixels and custom audiences. I have some photos of Holly’s slides (which aren’t very good quality photos, but it might help me explain the strategy)

So here goes – you can use the data your brand has to grow your supporting brand through targeting and exclusion.

If you were a bank and someone had been to your main site to look at credit cards (which would know because of the segmentation set up on your site) you could target them with a credit card offer from your supporting brand.

Then follow them through the customer journey, making sure the secondary brand is seen as the alternative voice at each touch point through the journey.

You’re drowning out your competitors, and with this the chance of losing your market share to them decreases.

Pretty simple concept, right? It’s a bit more complicated to implement – but the idea is a simple one!

measure-it

How do you measure it?

Holly identified the metrics to use to measure if your dual brand strategy was working:

1. Increase your brand share (growing secondary brand)

Measure: share of visits/share of wallet/share of attention

2. Decrease competitors share

Measure: Measure: share of visits/share of wallet/share of attention

3. Brand Health (don’t cannibalise your primary brand)

Measure: Brand study metrics

4. Brand Lead

Measure: share of visits/share of wallet/share of attention

You can see the slideshare of Holly’s presentation HERE.

After Holly’s presentation we moved on to an exercise in groups where we came up with a strategy using what we had just learned to create a pitch for the brans we were allocated, which was a good way to cement the learning.

I learned a lot from this session, even though I don’t currently work with any multi-brand clients – to know how one group of marketers can go about finding market segments is always interesting!

And the negative targeting, and the workflows associated with this process means it’s a well established method in Seek’s repertoire, which we can assume means if set up correctly it works!

What I also found interesting was seeing how diverse the APAC region is. Although I think Australia is still an emerging market for Social Media, with many brand still resisting or implementing their strategy like it’s 2012, there are some people (like Holly) obviously leading the pack too. But we’re very different from Asia! Their population density means they have huge audiences that devour content and these content machines need to be fed! Some of the small teams in attendance had audience numbers and publishing schedules that would make an Aussie marketer choke!

Morning session done, we headed to lunch, and the hotel had not let us down!

After lunch (and another bubble tea) we proceeded to our afternoon sessions. As I mentioned in the beginning – I had chosen after much deliberation on the Digimind session about Data Intelligence.

I did not find this session as in-depth as the morning session, and think it was more of an overview of what Data Intelligence is and a little bit of background.

Digimind is a tech vendor, Olivier said, and has been in business for 18 years. That’s a lot of listening!

social-intelligence

So what is Social Intelligence?

There’s a huge amount of data on Social Media that can be used to identify trends and support marketing teams. But there are also many challenges.

  • Anyone, anywhere – so much data!
  • All demographics – who are you looking for?
  • Influencers
  • New Platforms
  • People have choices & preferences

So he outlined some Digital Intelligence Best Practice tips:

1.Understand your audience (which will be a theme over the weekend)

What is their “digital maturity” how tech savvy are they?

2. Teamwork & Diversity

He said it was better to interpret data from a diverse base to be able to see the data from different approaches.

3. Make a contact person

If it’s one person’s responsibility they’ll be more engaged.

4. Apply SCIP principles (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals)

They are not hackers! There’s a limit to what they can access.

5. Focus on the right scope

There’s so much data – “let’s try to structure that”

6. Ask Questions

Find out more about what the data is for

7. Make your goals very specific

It’s easy to exclude irrelevant data in the scope, than after the data is collected. You can always expand the scope next time

8. Add your insights

And importantly –

9. Present the data in an interesting way

 

looking-for-work-1

 

So, what can be measured?

The 5 Ws – What | When | Who – Influencers | Where – Platforms | Why – Sentiment

 

Something else I got from this session; whether you engage and the success of your engagement in crisis management is not only based on your content, but timing!

Olivier gave an example of how 2 brands that supply the same product fared in a crisis management situation. One brand chose to engage. The other decided to wait it out. Surprisingly the brand who did not engage came out unscathed. Now I do how some hesitation that ignoring crisis’s is ever a good idea from a Community Management point of view, but you can’t argue with data!

Again there was a workshop to reiterate the learning.

You can see the slidershare of Olivier’s presentation HERE.

And that was day one!

There was some networking, where I met up with Helen Cripps from ECU (who I had previously met at an SMPerth event), Sasha from Fanfare Media, and Matej and Claire from Socialbakers, among others. But the structured part of the day was done.

Time for some R&R!

I hope you enjoyed this first instalment! It’s been fun digesting it all and sharing it with you!

Stay tuned for Part Two – where I’ll get into the main event. I can’t wait to share with you the speakers insights! When you have the brains behind the Social Media of brands like LEGO, NASA, Canon Australia, MGM Hotels, Cathay Pacific and more – plus businesses who’ve achieved success by an in depth understanding of their audience, like Go Jek there’s no way you can’t pick up some valuable insight!

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2 of my all-time favourites: Social Media & Learning!

Engage Bali 2016 Social Media Summit

Engage Bali is a Social Media Summit by Socialbakers, who are a Social Media Management tool. I don’t currently use their tool for my client work, but I have often read their reports, especially to get Australian specific data!

One of their features that really interests me is their performance optimisation tool, that uses “predictive analytics” to determine how your content will perform! Thier announcement post has a detailed explanation of how it works.

One of the other things Socialbakers do that’s pretty rad is put on a summit for Social Media Marketers. Normally the big Social media Summits are either in Europe and the US, so it’s a big undertaking to make it when you’re from Perth.

Since the announcement of Engage Bali, I knew this time would be different! Being only 4 hours from Bali, with frequent and cheap(ish) flights this was much more realistic for me – and the idea to go along to my first Social Media Summit was hatched.

engage bali

It’s very exciting! If you’ve read some of my previous blog posts, you’d know that I love my stats! I truly believe that good Social Media Marketers are equal parts creative and analytical. Also with my love for learning (I’m currently completing an Advanced Diploma of Business and the Digital Marketer courses, among others) this really appeals to me.

I can’t wait to see how the world’s top Social Media minds are using Social Media to reach, inform and delight their audiences! If you want to see them it’s all on the Engage Bali website.As a freelancer, I’m privileged to work with some very diverse people – but I am aware that we can easily become stale in our own little bubbles.

As a freelancer, I’m privileged to work with some very diverse people – but I am aware that we can easily become stale in our own bubbles. We are all occasionally guilty of doing things the way we think is right and not investigating new functionality or features. Sometimes we think that’s just the way things are, then you find out someone else has tackled the issue completely differently to you did!

I’m even more excited for Engage Bali because the amazing people at Socialbakers have allowed me to attend free of charge (bonus!) and also asked me if I would host one of their panel discussions – how terrifyingly wonderful!

I can’t wait to bring you updates of what I learn during the day of workshops on the Friday, and the full day event on Saturday. I’m going to be a busy girl!

Have you ever been to an industry conference? Do you have any tips for me – a conference noob? I’d love to hear them! You can leave a comment here of hit me up on my Socials.

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LinkedIn: Now More Than A Digital Resume

LinkedIn has moved on from being thought of as a ‘digital resume’ where people only log in to update their skills when searching for a new role.

These days it’s a great place to publish your original content! It’s a must if you’re trying to build your personal brand and position yourself as a thought leader in your field.

Most of you would have a LinkedIn profile, and have probably at one time or another posted a status update.  If you do it regularly, that’s awesome! You’re already half way there. You know who’s who in your sector. You already have connections and followers.

Use LinkedIn Published Posts to extend this to building influence beyond your connections. Published posts go to LinkedIn’s Pulse platform. Here they can be swept up and read and shared by anyone, whether they follow you or not! And not only that, each time you publish a post your own connections will receive a notification that you did so, encouraging them to come and check it out.

Top Tip: Use tagging. People on Pulse don’t follow you necessarily – they follow subjects that interest them. Think about your tags carefully, you are only allowed 3.

LinkedIn also has a product called Slideshare where you can post publications. These are similar in essence to the old PowerPoint Publications but more image-focused. You can publish your own LinkedIn Slideshare content and depending on the quality and category can be seen by tens to hundreds of thousands of people. Pretty cool huh?

Top Tip: Use content that has performed well as a blog post and re-create as a Slideshare. It’s a bit of work to make them look good and you don’t want to risk it on un-tested content.

LinkedIn Groups can be a great place to publish valuable content to your industry peers. Just make sure it’s a group in which you contribute to the discussion, dropping in to post a link to your latest post is considered a bit rude if that’s all you ever do.

Top Tip: Seriously, don’t be that guy who drops in once a week to post a link to their latest article – the rest of the group secretly hates you.

LinkedIn Pages are a good way for your company to have a business profile on LinkedIn, and your content can be shared there. LinkedIn Pages have a post max of 400 characters, so not really any good for articles – just a blurb and a link with an eye-catching image is all you need. If it’s not your company you’ll need to submit your article to the page admin/s to post for you should they deem it appropriate to come from their corporate voice.

Top Tip: You can advertise from LinkedIn Pages. Targeting examples that work well include roles within industries, i.e. Assistant Manager in Human Resources.

Whether you choose LinkedIn as a place to publish original content or not, you can add your links under publications on your profile. This way people will be able to find them if they are LinkedIn stalking you; which they will if you start getting some attention.

Top Tip: You can set your LinkedIn to private so when you stalk people your name is not listed, however this might not be the best idea. The first thing you do when someone checks out your profile – is look at theirs in return!

These are my top no-fuss tips to using LinkedIn for your personal branding. Do you have any to add? I’d love to hear your feedback!

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I’m not a Social Media Expert

Am I a Social Media Expert?

I have tried to write this blog post about five times now. One I canned because it sounded too judgy. One I lost to a website glitch…actually make that two. If I can’t communicate what I’m trying to say this time I’m going to give it a rest because it’s obviously not worth saying.

But I am NOT a Social Media Expert.

So I guess that sounds a bit stupid, since helping people with their Social Media’s what I do for a living! But let me explain. A rose by another name might not smell like a rose, since so much of how our brain interprets data is based on our perception. Take Vanilla – yum! We all know it smells and tastes like sweet bliss; ice cream, custard, cakes – but if you eat an actual vanilla pod – YUK! It tastes like bark. Gross bark even. There’s probably better bark out there for eating.

I wanted to address the plethora of self-proclaimed Social Media Experts, and that includes; Ninjas, Evangelists, Gurus and all the other buzzword-laden things people refer to themselves as. After much internal debate, I’ve settled on “Social Media Specialist” and I want to tell you why. I specialise in Social Media. I can do other types of digital and traditional marketing – and sometimes I do depending on the needs of the business I am working with, but my speciality is Social Media Marketing.

But what’s wrong with Expert?

In my opinion, I don’t think you can ever truly know enough about Social Media and all that encapsulates to call yourself an expert. There’s a few reasons. The first is that there’s SUCH a vast array of platforms, theory, experience and knowledge that is needed to cover the breadth of what we refer to as Social Media. I mean, there might be a handful of these people. In the world. Not tens of thousands as their Twitter bios would have you believe.

Social Media Expert - Ninja

Not only would it take so much Social Media knowledge that even if you got to Expert status (if that indeed is a thing) you would then have to STAY there! The landscape changes daily and you would certainly have your work cut out for you to stay current!

Break it down

Evangelist/Guru – too “god-like” for my liking. Whatever god/s may or may not be out there, they certainly won’t be selling subscriptions to Social Media training videos. I would like to think they would have more pressing issues to deal with.

Ninja – Unless you are in fact a Ninja. In which case go ahead and call yourself one! I don’t know much about Ninjutsu, but I would bet that the training it takes to become a ninja includes no mention of Instagram filters, comment moderation or keyword listening. If you are a ninja and I’m wrong set me straight in the comments 😉

Snake-oil Salesman

In all industries there are reputable and not-so-reputable practitioners. Marketing is no exception! But the difference from specifically Social Media Marketing is that it’s still pretty new and there’s no standardised role descriptions or qualifications.

Take the example I have used in trying to explain this in real life of a chef. Chefs complete an apprenticeship to become qualified. During this apprenticeship they have to master certain skills to progress and are watched and evaluated both in the kitchen and the classroom.

At the end of their apprenticeship you can hire a chef assuming they possess certain skills, knowledge and experience. But this isn’t the case for Social Media. There’s no standardised course. There’s no prerequisites. Literally ANYONE can call themselves a Social Media Expert. Literally. Anyone.

This is as much a problem for me as anyone trying to hire someone to help them with their Social Media Marketing! How to I compete with a self-professed Social Media Expert? How do you know you’re hiring the right person for the job? It can get pretty confusing.

And this is part of the problem. Social Media can be confusing. The jargon is unfamiliar to the average business owner, and they can easily be lead down the garden path by people who talk a big game but actually know very little about Social Media.

So what can you do about it?

If you are unsure about someone you’ve met, just take it slowly. If they’re rushing you, you might be getting a sales pitch with no substance. Anyone who’s great at Social Media Marketing will likely be in demand, and rushing you won’t be on their agenda. They are patient, as Social Media returns on investment can take time, so can attracting the right clients. If someone has a sales target to meet, you don’t want them. You’re just a number. Remember that you’re entering into a long term relationship, where this person will be responsible for the way your brand is perceived. Your business deserves individual attention from the person who will actually be carrying out the work. More like your local friendly shopkeeper, than the checkout chick at Aldi.

Ask questions! If you don’t know how engagement is measured – ask. If they can’t explain it to you the don’t understand it well enough (thanks Einstein!) If they make claims like “I’ll increase your sales by 15% in 3 days,” ask them what will happen if they can’t. Do you get your money back? Will they keep trying until they do?

You can always get a recommendation from someone you trust, suggest a trial period before signing on to a longer contract or ask to see examples of their work (provided you know what you’re looking for) Do the accounts they manage have integrity? Good engagement? Or a bunch of paid likes and fake followers? Or tumbleweeds.

Make sure the person you hire to guide your Social Media Marketing efforts understands your business. The hierarchy, the products, your locations, the tone, your main target demographic and the segments you’re hoping to branch out into. If they can’t see the wood for the trees your relationship is doomed for the get go.

There are generally warning signs if you look. And I suggest you do. Often the outsourced Social Media Professional is the first person from outside the business who’s ever spoken for the brand! Don’t risk being swindled by someone who seems really cool, many of us aren’t cool at all! But we’re Chameleons. We know how to pretend, change tone, mimic our audiences – because you have to.

There’s no point getting caught out Dad dancing…

 

 

Now, before I get “called out” I’m not saying everyone who uses the terms Expert, Ninja and Guru in their titles are bad people, or not great at their jobs! It just doesn’t ring true for me and I wanted to explain why. Obviously the world is a very diverse place and I fully support people’s right to call themselves whatever they want. I just long for a scale to measure against so people won’t be getting ripped off by those who talk a fast game and don’t deliver on their outlandish promises. It’s sad for the business owner, and not only that – it makes my job harder when I come along since the trust takes time to build back up.

 

 

Thanks for reading my blog! I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, or you can stalk my Social Media channels on the links below. If you really loved it sign up – I don’t send email updates very often, but when I do I make sure they’re packed with useful tips, tricks and tools to make your Social Media efforts better and easier, so you can get back to what it is you do best – run your business!