Social Media

Why It’s Important to Share Non-Industry Related Content – Happy International Women’s Day!

Today, March 8, 2012 is International Women’s Day, and we wanted to take the time to share why we feel it’s important for companies to take a minute out of their usual business affairs online to show appreciation and care for events, and issues that are celebrated around the world that they believe in. International Women’s Day has been observed annually since the early 1900′s as a form of celebration of respect, appreciation, and love towards women and their political, economic, and social achievements. Women have come a long way since the inception of this day. On the digital front, women are represented across all disciplines on advisory boards, executive management roles, and consulting teams, in addition to being investors, and entrepreneurs for some of the largest online companies, including Facebook. As a digital media company, founded by a woman, with mainly a female executive and management team, we at Magnify Digital wanted to take a moment out of our day to celebrate our achievements and say Happy International Women’s Day to all the amazing females who have helped shape the digital landscape.

As businesses, we often get caught up tweeting, liking, commenting, and sharing only industry specific content, however, sometimes it’s important to show your audience that your company, made up of individuals, also care about issues and events that are celebrated if it makes sense for your organization. It can also be a nice release from all the serious digital content out there! We wish you all a fabulous day.

Maryam Mehrtash
@socialmaryam

Tags: digital campaigns, facebook, female, International Women's Day, March 8 2012, Social Media, strategy, Twitter, woman

What if You Had No Control of Your Brand? Oh Right. You Don’t!

A brand may consist of elements such as a name, image, design or personality. A company may have absolute control of these elements, but it is impossible for a company to control how people perceive or interpret these brand elements. As a result, it’s also impossible for a company to control how people think of its brand.

If that is the case, why do people spend so much time and money trying to?

We know a brand plays an important role in consumer purchases. A consumer might choose to buy a brand named product because they think it’s popular, it’s more credible or it has a reputation of doing the best job at whatever it’s meant to do. They might even choose to avoid a popular brand  instead choosing to buy a lesser known brand because they think the popular brand is over-rated. Branding and the consumer’s perception of a brand played a part in these purchase decisions.

The goal of branding is to create positive sentiment between the brand and the consumer so that when a consumer is ready to make a purchase, they choose the company’s brand.

The tricky part with branding is if the consumer does not recognize your brand, all the positive sentiment they may have associated with your brand is lost. This is why it is important to ensure branding consistency online and off.

Online Brand Consistency Checklist

Here is a quick online brand consistency checklist:

1. Do the company profiles use the same display name or handle?
2. Do the company profiles use the same colour scheme, logo and design?
3. Do the company profiles have a consistent URL path (vanity URL)?
   (eg. /magnifydigital)
4. Do the company profiles publish messages with the same personality or tone of voice?

Although a company cannot control how consumers think of its brand, it can influence how they perceive the brand through the experiences the consumers have with the brand. This influence will be stronger if there is a consistent brand presented across online and offline channels.

Happy Branding!

Victor
Digital Strategist

Photo Credit: tkraska

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Tags: brand, branding, consistency, Social Media

5 Tips To Help With Your Transition to Facebook Timeline

Every week we hear of changes happening on the social media front whether it’s a new feature being added, a merger and/or an acquisition happening, or a new application being developed. Okay, who am I kidding it’s more like everyday. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with it all while trying to keep your job, raise your children, spend time with your friends, exercise, etc… you get the point! As part of my Human Impact series, I want to help our readers keep up-to-date without feeling left behind, or doing a ton of research, by leaving you with a few helpful tips. On March 30, 2012 Facebook is launching the new Timeline feature across all Pages and Profiles automatically. Currently you have the option to transfer to Timeline earlier if you wish to do so. Here are 5 tips to help with your integration to Facebook Timeline for your Pages Profile:

1. Be Creative. Create a meaningful Cover Photo that represents your company and your brand and is more than just your logo. Find an image, a quote, or a picture that tells a story about your brand. This is an opportunity to show your company’s personality and tell a story. The company logo can go in the smaller box overlapping the cover photo, similar to where a profile picture would go, or can be integrated into your Cover Photo.
2. Update Your Info. With this new layout there is prominent real estate for text just below the profile picture where it says About. Make sure to use this space to write something meaningful about your company since it’s front and center. Also, consider going through your Timeline to check out what pops up from the past. Make sure to hide anything that you feel is completely not relevant to the brand anymore or if you feel that company milestones are missing, this is your chance to add them, such as founding year, acquisitions, office locations, and important travels.
3. Utilize Your Apps. Since your apps are at the top of the Page, in visible square boxes, they are kind of hard to miss. Facebook makes it mandatory to have Photos as one of the 4 visible applications, so choose the other 3 wisely. Use this opportunity to showcase your products and services. Create customized apps that advertise your company or attract fans to engage. In total, Facebook will allow you to post a maximum of 12 apps.
4. Pin Your Posts. Facebook allows you to pin the most important posts to your Page so that they are highlighted at the top of your Page. To pin a post, select the pencil icon, and click on “Pin to Top.” Pinned posts will appear on the top left side of the Page for 7 days, after which they will return to the original date of post.
5. Stay On Top Of Your Engagement. View your activity at the top of the Page when you are logged in as an admin. This allows you to view how many people have “liked” or commented on your Page, read any new messages, and analyze your statistics via Insights. You can hide this section by hitting the Hide tab on the top right hand corner of the screen when you are done.

Hope your transition to Facebook Timeline is a smooth and stress free one!

Maryam Mehrtash
@socialmaryam

Tags: branding, cover photo, digital strategy, engagement, facebook, features, pins, Social Media, timeline, tips

5 Tips on How to Effectively Create a Social Good Digital Strategy

Many corporations are jumping on the social good band wagon in attempts to attract a more altruistic audience base. From the Pepsi Refresh Project to Kohl’s Cares Scholarship Program, companies are spending millions of dollars towards social good digital strategies in an effort to show that they care about humanity and it’s not just about the bottom line. With anything, there are strategies and initiatives that get implemented very well and some that can become complete public relations disasters!

Here are 5 tips to effectively create a social good campaign, with all good intentions:

1. Be transparent. There is nothing worse than cooking the social good numbers, not even lying to the tax man. Let people know exactly where the money is going, and how it’s effectively making a difference. Show the numbers.
2. Be consistent. Do good that makes sense for the company. Whether it’s consistent with the messaging, the mission statement, the branding, or the actual products and services you create make sure the good you are creating is consistent and not just random.
3. Think long term. Think how you can implement social good in your overall strategy, and not have it as just a one-off. Your consumer base will respect you more if you follow through on a long-term plan versus trying to create media buzz off of a one time campaign. People will take you more seriously.
   
4. Be open to criticism. Have an open heart to criticism and embrace it with grace. Whenever corporations create a social good campaign, there is almost always at least one person who doesn’t like what you are doing. Have a plan that is constructive and not defensive. Really dig deep into why you are doing this, and what potential criticism you can get in order to be open to engage in effective dialogue surrounding the cause.
5. Use multiple platforms. A social good campaign isn’t just a Twitter campaign or a Facebook campaign, it’s about spreading a positive social impact. Create a website, start a following on multiple channels, start a dialogue, and take action off-line. To create social good you must do more than just click a button, to be effective you must take action and empower others to do the same.

Next time you think about creating a social good strategy hopefully you’ll keep this 5 tips in mind!

Maryam Mehrtash
@socialmaryam

Tags: charities, digital strategy, facebook, kohl's, pepsi, social good, Social Media, Twitter

5 Tips to Manage Your Inbox

Considering we are in an age when the majority of business is done over email communication, it is important to know how to manage our inbox in order to separate the good from the not so good. Here are 5 tips on how to manage your inbox.

1. Have a separate email account for subscriptions, online memberships, enewsletters, or sign ups. Basically, anything that requires you to give up your email address when you are signing up for something. This way you don’t get a daily ingestion of special deals, and e-newsletters to deal with.
2. Make sure you have your junk email filters activated. Once you activate the junk mail feature, make sure you customize the filters to suit your needs.
3. Use filters and set “rules” to manage incoming emails from certain people. When you set up a rule that a certain email from a specific person should go into a specific file you can get to that file whenever you need to and know that all the emails in that file are from a certain person.
4. Disable email notifications when you are working. It’s nice to know when you have new mail but if you are trying to focus on getting the task at hand complete you might want to disable email notifications so you don’t get distracted every few minutes.
5. Delete emails that are not important completely off the server. We all save emails thinking one day we might want to go back to a certain conversation or may need it to reference, but all we are doing is keeping unnecessary information making it difficult to sort through when you really need to search for something important.

We all have a lot of information headed in our direction on a daily basis, why not learn how to manage some of this information so we can be more efficient and effective with our time!

Maryam Mehrtash
@socialmaryam

Tags: communication, digital strategy, email, filters, inbox, management, Social Media