https://www.box.com/s/34a87a034554f228f545

Have a cover image professionally designed for your business. 851x315px

Upload a profile picture that clearly brands your business. 180x180px

Update your About Section to include a clickable link and an enticing description of your business

Change the pictures of your apps so that they are more compelling and better represent your brand

Decide whether you want to allow messaging from your fans or not.


Go through all the sections in the Activity Log to get used to this new way of viewingyour pages’ content.

Go through all your past posts, pictures, videos etc and hide what you don’t want displayed and highlight what you do.

Create memorable Milestones (843 x 403px) for your company and date them so that they appear where you want them to in your new Timeline.

Pin a post each week with links and engaging content.


Star your most memorable posts so that they attract attention and keep fansengaged.

Keep track of your pages’ Insights on a weekly basis (through your Admin Panel) – increase what’s working and get rid of what’s not.

Post daily to your page with relevant information to help and entertain your fans. Images are proven to be 2x as effective, getting a lot more interaction than just post.

I am afraid but Social Media is not the damn thing that will save your business from crashing.

What does social media really do for you?

It multiplies you reach, harnesses the power of global communications, mingles you with the party, connects emotionally with your audience, makes use of the social web to empower human interactions and also gives you real and measurable results.

What the heck! This is meaningful, I suppose you want to be on the top of the wave, I have got a question, why?

Perhaps you want do it for some of these reasons: reach more potential customers, align our marketing strategy with the online channels, find a niche inside the networks, less spent on marketing and advertisement, connect with our real customer, generate more traffic towards our website/blog, increase business leads or skyrocket the conversions rate.

This is me or the reasons shown below are so cool? I think that at least they make sense. Are you with me? Let me be clear and direct, there’s no magic formula, neither golden egg, sorry… Is there any other way? Sure, it starts from simplicity, launching and shipping right on their noses, experiment with campaigns and platforms uses, accepting failures as usual, but not mistakes – meaning failing more than one time at the same thing. Trying different is what matters in Social media, it means walking new paths, trying differently until you make something happen. Social Media is not what God sent you to save the world – actually are people – but an opportunity to a new media and marketing dimension. You only need to approach it as it was a strategic planning and goals definition. Do you get it?

The Key – Staying Human

Social Media can be understood in different ways, there will be people that it will talk about platforms or tools and there will be some – the crazy ones – that will say that it’s about people. I believe that Social Media is a means of expression that makes possible for customers, communities and brands “staying human.” That is to say, they will connect and establish relationships and thus, interactions among people through transparency, commitment, empathy, humility, consistency, coherence and closeness.

Staying human means going beyond the Social thing. It’s about how the information technologies we have available, together with the media innovations can help us building professional-personal relationships in situations and contexts where we were not be able to do it years ago.

            USERNAME

Claim your vanity URL!

If you haven’t set your vanity URL, go to www.Facebook.com/username.

STAR UPDATES

Highlight Stories!

Hover around updates and click the star icon to highlight stories.

     VIEWS & APPS

Rearrange views and apps!

Your photos, events, and custom apps are now easier for people to find.

RECEIVE & SEND PRIVATE MESSAGES

Private Messages!

Respond to personal messages.  You can’t message them, they can message you.

                                      MANAGE

Manage effectively!

Manage Page through the Admin Page.

notifications/new likes/insights

POST DAILY - Regular updates engage your fans

Post Daily!

Post daily to your page – at least once or twice a week.

Pin!

Pin important stories to the top of your page.

Milestones!

Start adding your Milestones.  Date you first opened and memories that are applicable to the business.  Add photos that are indicative of those memories.

Tip #1 Profile Picture-Use a logo that people associate with your business.  Cover Picture-Use a photo that captures the essence of your brand and showcases your product.

Stay tuned for a tip a day!  Enjoy

Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

So, how can a site and service like this help with meeting and exceeding your non-profit’s project goals? So glad you asked! A recent article from one of our favorite sites, ThinkTraffic.net shows you a fine handful of ways to prepare, plan, and launch the drive to to secure funding for a project which your non-profit believes in.

Click through to read the in depth article by Brian Kwong, project owner of, “Kickstarter Rockstar“.

You can find that article by clicking on “5 Critical Steps to Getting Your Creative Project Funded on Kickstarter”

We just heard about this very cool Kickstarter project where the developers of an adventure video game were asking for $400,000 and are quickly approaching the $2,000,000 mark! Check out their sales pitch video at http://kck.st/A9k3jH

We’re referring to the Facebook Timeline Page. Essentially this new feature is technically only available to members for personal use. Currently the functionality does not exist to allow Business Pages access to one’s personal timeline.

This of course won’t stop us from sharing with you, our favorite business owner/operators, how you can still use this feature on your personal Facebook accounts while getting much traction for Facebook pages you might control. The key tips boil down to just four easy to implement (and really not very hard, technically speaking) steps that will have your business’ Facebook page dancing all over your Timeline.

We don’t want to spoil the excellent article written by Copyblogger contributor, Andrea Vahl, and instead will only list the main steps here in order to entice you to click through to her article on Copyblogger.com:

1. Using the Subscribe button
2. Adding a great Cover photo
3. Crafting your About page
4. Adding activity and Life Events to your Timeline

If the Facebook Timeline concept causes you confusion, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Good news awaits you when you click through to the full Copyblogger article.

You’ll discover how to share with the public–good for all that juicy business news you want to share with the world–and what should only be accessible by friends and family–what happened in Vegas, of course, another story altogether!

Get creative with the Timeline’s cover photo, enhance the “About Me” page to include your work or business information for the entire world to see, and learn an amazing tip for promoting events big, bold, front and center.

Andrea Vahl’s, “4 Simple Steps to a Facebook Timeline that Tells Your Marketing Story” must read article should provide your business with a well received boost to its online social media marketing strategies. And if you’d like to learn more about how your business can grow and prosper with the help of an experienced and savvy social media marketing maven, click over to CynthiaWagner.info and see what your business is missing out on.

That’s the good news

Now, as Google+ rapidly approaches the user count threshold of Twitter, many of the online marketing gurus indicate your business efforts should also include spending time in the latest social media marketing world.

In fact, according to CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark in his recent article, “Why Google+ is an Inevitable Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy“, not only should you spend time in the social community developed by the top search engine in the world, you should probably spend much more of the time you devote to online social media marketing there over either Facebook or Twitter.

Really?

Sure. Without divulging too much of Clark’s fine article, the one little spoiler we will share with you relates to how Google+ could effect your search results. By developing a deep community and contributing more of your quality content to said community, Google gets a direct indication of all the good stuff you and your business’ website puts out into the world. This, most decidedly, constitutes good things.

Don’t take our word for it, however. Click through and read the short article by Brian Clark, founder of content marketing juggernaut, CopyBlogger.com.

This is a step in a direction that might make advertisers, brand managers and marketing people feel a little uneasy, because it means they may have to start thinking deeply for their brand rather than just counting hits.

One of the main benchmarks for tracking brand awareness was in being able to track how many “fans” or followers to a brand page managed by the company or agency.

Facebook pages are now like a revolving door. That means they allow many more people to come into the page and write on it, creating a catalyst for building a brand culture on the social networking site.

People can come in and leave a comment and can never be seen again. But the move could mean greater things for marketing, and one social media manager told us that the emphasis on “Likes” has really hampered proper brand interaction and conversation on the web.

“If a social media manager is using likes to measure the impact of a Facebook page or brand, they are measuring the wrong thing,” says Stuart Tracte, Social Media Strategist at Definition 6. “They should be measuring conversions. How is Facebook impacting you overall business goals? THAT’S what I want to know.”

We had already reported that just over 41% of people who Like a brand drop that brand page by “disliking” it after any type of marketing or advertising campaign ends. Facebook seems to be putting a crimp in the assumption that sites like Facebook make it easier to run marketing campaigns because they are social and that numbers alone actually mean something.

They do not. Semantics mean something, obviously.

Facebooking for, and engaging with, a brand is now about meaning and resolving issues. It’s about quality of posts, tone and managing the creativity of the brand’s image and its engagement style.

“A comment requires some level of thought and engagement. Measuring likes is a simple way to measure potential reach, but means very little when it comes to the bottom line of any brand,” says Tracte.

Article from ReadWriteWeb.  Author Douglas Crets.  Published September 21, 2011.

If you want someone to take a specific action, you have to actually ask them to take that specific action.

But, it seems like social media marketers have either forgotten CTAs, or rejected them altogether.

A researcher by the name of Irving Kirsch at the University of Connecticut did an interesting experiment with hypnotically suggestable people.

Half of the subjects were put under full hypnotic trance and given a stack of 30 post cards.

They were given the hypnotic command to mail one card back to the lab each day for 30 days.

The other half of the subjects were simply asked nicely, given social requests without hypnosis to do the same.

Can you guess which group mailed more postcards back?

The second group ended up mailing more cards back. Social requests can be just as powerful as full-out hypnotic suggestions.

So why are social media marketers afraid of them?
The power words of blog commenting

When I studied blogging, I found that blog posts that included the word “comments” typically got more comments than blog posts that did not.

Most Commented-On words from most to least
Giveaway
recap
review
jobs
recruiting
events
gift
money
interview
comments

This is very simple, very powerful stuff.

If you want readers to comment on your blog, you have to ask them.
The power of the call to action

The most powerful evidence of the power of social calls-to-action is how effective “please retweet” is.

About the Author: Dan Zarrella is HubSpot’s Social Media Scientist. This post contains data from his upcoming webinar The Science of Social Media, taking place this Tuesday, August 23rd. Sign up now!

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=167050096692154&notif_t=event_invite#!/notes/facebook-pages/feature-launch-photo-tagging-for-pages/10150168953654822

Apple guidelines restrict the use of Apple devices as prizes in contests, a powerful promotional tool used by publishers, authors and publicists to gain attention for projects.

“iPad, iPhone and the iPhone Gift Card may not be used in third-party promotions … The use of ‘free’ as a modifier in any Apple product reference in a prominent manner (headlines, callouts, etc.) is prohibited. Additionally, ‘free’ as an modifier of Apple products in a less prominent context is strongly discouraged unless it is clear to the end consumer that the third party, not Apple, is gifting the product in return for some transaction. (Ex. ‘Sign up for a checking account and we’ll give you an iPod shuffle.’ or ‘Win an iPod nano when you refer a 10 friends to [INSERT COMPANY NAME]‘).”

It’s not a matter of talent — you’ve written great stuff in the past. But lately, when you go back to the well for a fresh idea, it’s coming up dry.

This happens to the best of us — even veterans who consistently produce quality content have their off days.

Yet they continue to write.

They may grumble about how hard it is to get going and create something solid, but they still do. Again, and again, and again.

They aren’t super-human, and they don’t have magical content-producing powers. So what is the secret?

They do it by pulling out the well-worn toolbox of strategies for creating awesome content.
Steal content and ideas

If you’re flat-out exhausted and out of ideas, then get them from somebody else — either content, or ideas, or both.

I’m not talking about real stealing, of course — it’s more like “borrowing with the author’s blessing”.

Done right, this can produce some valuable content that the authors you “stole” from will thank you for using!

1. Curate content. Find your ten favorite websites, and then find your favorite post on each of them. Publish a post listing these top ten posts, and explain why you like them. You don’t even have to think about being creative, and everyone you feature there will appreciate it. This is what we do with our Best of the Web feature, and there are lots of other examples.
2. Ask friends for ideas. If you’re tapped for ideas, then reach out to your friends and colleagues, and ask them what they’d like you to write about. You can do this with offline friends, or with like-minded online entrepreneurs. If you’re not already part of a mastermind group, then reach out to a few bloggers that are about as big as you are, and suggest starting one. I’m in a mastermind group with Jon Alford, Paul Wolfe, and Caleb Wojcik, and they’ve all been a great help to me.
3. Ask your audience. You can kick the last strategy up a notch by reaching out to your audience. This can be done in several ways — it can be as simple as running a “what would you like me to write about” post (which is a bit lame), or it can get more interesting by asking for their input on a problem, as Marcus Sheridan did to create his tag-line, or by asking a question so that you can compile their answers into another piece of content, like nittyGriddy’s free blog posting schedules e-book.
4. Do an interview. There are lots of reasons why interviews are great for blog content, but right now let’s focus on the simple fact that it’s a lot easier to write a handful of interview questions than it is to write an entire post! Plus, it can be a great way to connect with really interesting people. (I got to interview Randy Komisar, who is my hero in the business world – and all I had to do was ask!)
5. Solicit guest posts. This is a great source of content, and it’s easier than most people think – find a handful of blogs that are your size or smaller, whose content you really like, and invite them to write a guest post for you. They’ll be flattered, and happy to get exposure to your audience. They’ll work hard to bring their A game, and not only will you get a great post, but they’ll happily tell their contacts about it, and bring you a few new readers in the process.

Create content without creating content

If you have to create your own content, then there are a whole bunch of ways to do it without “creating content”.

In other words, you can write something great without having to be creative or original.

This doesn’t mean that the content won’t be good — only that you’re going to rely on creativity and originality that has already been percolating in your mind.

6. Create a best-case study. Think about your favorite blog, company, or product, and write a post about why you like them so much (like Marlee Ward did about Rise, Pushing Social, and IttyBiz). Explain what you think they’re doing right, and what others can learn from their example.
7. Create a worst-case study. Same thing, but focus on a blog, company or product that you hate. This can be even more interesting, particularly if it’s a popular offering. Explain your frustrations with it, explain why it is successful anyway, and explain what you would do differently.
8. Write a review. Think about a product that you like, and are happy to endorse, and write a review about it. No need to get too creative, just explain what you like about it, and why. And then write what you don’t like about it, and why — easy peasy. You can kick it up a notch by contacting the company and asking them to donate a product that you can raffle off to blog commenters, like Kristy Hines did with an IBM ThinkCentre M90z.
9. Explain your success. Think about a time when something went really right for you, and write a post explaining how you got it to happen. Don’t just brag about successes — explain all of the steps that you took to get there. Draw out the lessons that you learned from the experience, the lessons others can learn as well. This is what I did when I shared how I landed Guy Kawasaki on Problogger.
10. Explain your failure. If there’s anything that people love reading about more than a great success, it’s an epic business failure. A post about your most challenging experiences is likely to be powerful just by virtue of how intense the original experience was for you, and you don’t have to make up anything original or creative — just tell it like it is (or, was), and explain what you learned from the process.
11. Link to old favorites. Go through your archives, and make a short list of your old favorite posts that newer readers probably haven’t read. You can even do a quick deconstruction, and explain what you were thinking when you wrote the posts, what worked, and what didn’t.

Borrow some name recognition

Okay, so maybe what you really want is to find a great original idea to write about, but it just isn’t happening.

In that case, all you need is a creativity jump-start; a useful constraint that can send you off in the right direction.

The idea is to take two unrelated things, and force them together into a really interesting post. It’s really easier than it sounds.

Start by picking something that your readers are interested in, and then pick something unrelated, that your audience will be familiar with.

Merge them together into a post with a headline that goes something like:

* 5 Things Depeche Mode Can Teach You About Effective Online Marketing
* The Grateful Dead 4-Step Guide to the Magical Influence of Content Marketing
* The Eminem Guide to Becoming a Writing and Marketing Machine

Are you starting to see the pattern?

Just to get your brain going, here are some of the things that you can plug into the “fascinating hook” part of that equation:

12. Use a movie. Use either the name of a movie, or a character from that movie. Think about the last movie you’ve seen, and think about what you can learn from that movie about your topic of interest. There’s always something there, if you dig deep enough. It doesn’t have to be a recent movie, either — it can be an old favorite, like the Princess Bride, which Brian references in his Inigo Montoya’s Guide to 27 Commonly Misused Words
13. Use television. Same idea, but this time pick a television show that your audience is likely to watch. That’s what Jon Morrow did in his super-successful Mad Men Guide to Changing the World with Words post, and I did the same when I wrote Desperate Housewives on Writing, Storytelling and Selling. For extra credit, you can make a list of the top five TV shows you can think of, and do keyword research to see which one is hottest.
14. Use a book. Just make sure it isn’t a book about your subject matter (“What How To Win Friends and Influence People Can Teach You About Winning Friends and Influence People” is kind of lame). As long as it’s off-topic, you’re good to go. It doesn’t even have to be the book, it can be the author (“What Tolkien Can Teach You…”), a poet, or even a line out of a poem.
15. Use a comic. There’s a reason why they’ve been remaking movies about Superman, Spiderman, the X-Men, and half a dozen other, more obscure comic book characters. Unless it is a spectacular failure, you can pretty much count on a certain volume of sales at the box office. By the same token, if you lean on the super-powers of one of these characters, your post should perform just as well!
16. Use a celebrity. This is a blanket category for any kind of icon that your audience would recognize. It could be your favorite pop star, movie star, or blogging star (whether it’s a big name like Brian Clark, or an equally awesome but slightly lesser known blogger like Jk Allen) … as long as your audience would recognize the name, it should be solid.
17. Find out what’s trending. While we’re on the topic of celebrity, take some time to see what else is currently trending. Visit google.com/trends, click on the “More Hot Searches” link, and pick something from the list.

Get inspired

The last thing you can do when you’re fresh out of ideas is to recharge and get inspired.

This may sound difficult when you’re looking at a desk covered in crumpled note papers with lousy ideas, but it can be done.

There are at least four ways to do it.

18. Go for a walk. This is the generic advice that you’ve probably heard a hundred times before. If you just can’t do it anymore, then take a break, go for a walk, and get some fresh air. It’s not quite that simple, but it’s close: we all have routines and practices that are good at triggering high performance mental states. It’s just a matter of finding the right triggers for you.
19. Go to the theater. The theater is a fantastic source of ideas — much better than just going to a movie, because there’s so much more atmosphere, and so much more happening, which means there’s that much more for you to deconstruct and draw analogies from. Find a show in your area, get out of the house, and come back refreshed and ready to start writing.
20. Explore new cultures. No, no, I’m not suggesting you book a vacation every time you’re out of ideas. You don’t have to fly half-way around the world — why not start with an authentic restaurant? Go somewhere that you aren’t familiar with, and really pay attention to the experience. All of this is fodder for analogies that can get your creative juices flowing.
21. Tell your story. This is if you’re ready to kick yourself into overdrive, and write a post about an experience that is powerful and deeply personal. For this, you’ve got to dig deep, and pull up a formative story in your life — share a real crisis that you overcame, and how you became a better and happier person for it. This isn’t an easy thing to do, but you don’t really need original content, because it’s all stuff that has already happened to you. And the results are stories that stick with people for a long time, like Danny Brown’s failed suicide attempt, Jon Morrow’s childhood fight for survival, and Brian Clark’s subdural hematoma.

About the Author: Danny Iny is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing, the definitive marketing training program for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and non-marketers. Visit his site today for a free cheat sheet about Why Guru Strategies for Blog Growth DON’T WORK… and What Does!.

This article will assist you in gathering the building blocks for a strong online community.

#1: Know Your Audience
Every business should begin its focus on its audience, the customers. No online community can exist without a firm foundation and if your online community is to truly succeed, you need to know the demographics of your target audience.

What are demographics, you ask? Demographics are the characteristics of your audience. These characteristics are helpful in assessing the changing trends of audience behavior and narrowing down a wide audience into smaller segments.

General categories of demographics use age, gender, life-cycle stage, income, social class, lifestyle, education, religion and location and are collected by varying means of market research. These categories help give shape and definition to your audience and clarify who they are, what they do, their habits and more.

If you know who your audience is, your business will be better able to understand the needs of and what drives the audience.

#2: Know Their Needs
How does a business find out what its audience needs? Ask questions! Engage with your audience to determine what they want, need and desire from your business. This is not a once-and-done type of inventory. Audiences are comprised of dynamic individuals and with time their needs will change organically. Also, external factors applying pressure to the collective audience will also cause ebbs and flows in needs.

By asking and being open to the response from the audience, your business can benefit from knowing not only generically what is needed, but you can gather insight on trends and benchmarks; potential problems or issues; research and development opportunities; product, process and service improvements; crisis communication plans and more.

How can you get in front of your audience to ask about their needs?

David Canty, director of loyalty at JetBlue Airlines, explains how JetBlue discovers the ever-changing needs of the dynamic members of their TrueBlue community, “We are constantly in dialog with our customers, whether it be online, through email, or face to face. We host a number of customer events all over the country and we use these forums to have ‘human’ conversations about what we are doing well, where we can improve, what would they like and more.

TrueBlue Community lets members make friends and make plans, discuss restaurants, sightseeing and travel tips.

“During one of our tactical promotions, ‘All You Can Jet’ (AYCJ), we noticed that the customers who participated were looking for ways to communicate with each other, and this was the foundation we used to form a community,” Canty said.
AYCJ pins

Use your AYCJ pass for business, pleasure, to visit your favorite cities or meet with a client.

Above all else, your customers are feeling validated in knowing that their needs are being heard and quite possibly acted upon. That validation can unite the audience with a sense of common purpose.

#3: Know Your Business
All effective and successful businesses are customer-centric. Without your customers, your business wouldn’t exist. So intimately knowing the needs and wants of your audience can help shape and purpose your business and its future plans. Giving your customers a role and voice in the direction of your business lends itself to creating a sense of community.

As the focus and leader of the community, it is imperative that your business plan is known and understood by your leaders and staff. How can you expect to rally a community of customers around your business if you don’t know your own business?

Start with a strategic plan with the goal of mapping out the future based on the needs of now and the lessons learned from the past. Do you know what your business’s plans for growth, contingencies, expansion, product and service development, reduction and possible shuttering are?

You should know these answers about your business!

#4: Know Your Stuff
Knowing these answers about your business can lend itself to building credibility as a business within your online community. Audience members learn to trust those representing businesses that know what they are talking about.

You can build that trust by using your knowledge base to answer their questions, listen to their feedback, troubleshoot their issues and—if you can—fix the problems they have with your product or service. Every conversation you have with an audience member is an opportunity to build or destroy your business’s credibility!

Don’t be afraid to ask yourself the following questions about your community-building efforts:

* Are we fostering mutual respect or disrespect in our response?
* Is there ever a time to admit that we do not know what the answer is and that we need to do our homework before answering?
* Is there a time to admit that a competitor may be a better option for a customer’s needs?
* Is there someone else in the business who can answer a question or respond to negative feedback better than I can?

Remember, how you respond to negative comments and complaints is just as much a credibility opportunity as how you respond to the compliments and positive feedback!

#5: Know Your Limitations
While your business can certainly respond to many of the needs of the online community, is it wise for the business to dictate all of the interactions of the audience? Not always.

Consider the possibility that you may not always have the best answer for building the community and may need to let the community build itself. Your customers have the potential to be your best brand ambassadors.

The audience members should be encouraged to build relationships and connections with one another and grow dynamic interactions within your online community. The benefit to you, you ask? Your business is the commonality in the community.

Who can better attest to the viability and relevance of your product or service than the customers? You as a business representative are admittedly biased in your opinions of your products or services and this is limiting. Unbind your community and encourage it to explore the possibilities in the experiences of other audience members!

#6: Know How to Appreciate
Recognize and appreciate your community members for participation, brand loyalty, solutions orientation, patronization and for any number of other activities that merit appreciation. Your appreciation will encourage them to come back and visit your online community more frequently, to encourage their sphere of influence to join and even lend itself to increasing their purchasing behaviors with your business!

A few examples of demonstrating your appreciation:

* Encourage active and knowledgeable community members to engage with newbies.
* Reply to questions and inquiries in a timely manner with solid answers.
* Prizes, giveaways, vouchers, coupons and more are always a good way to reward and recognize your customers.
* Ask for their opinion and feedback! People love to contribute.
* Most importantly, say THANK YOU!

thank you

When asked how JetBlue shows their appreciation for their community members, David Canty explained, “We don’t necessarily differentiate between community members and non-community members. They are all customers and both are valuable.

“We do actually travel the country and arrange for dinners, sporting events, lunches, town halls, performing events, etc., to which we invite some of our best customers. We use these events to ask questions and listen to what our customers have to tell us. These events will usually include myself and some of our executive team members including our CEO, Dave Barger. They do not have any scripts—they are human interactions and conversations and we find them hugely valuable.”

Canty went on to say, “We have multiple ways by which we gather feedback. We have a “Speak Up” link on our website JetBlue.com, and every single email we receive is answered by a human being—there is no script.
jetblue help contact

Speak Up is much easier than picking up the phone.

“We also send out 30 surveys for every single flight we launch, and in these surveys we ask customers about their experience throughout the travel ribbon. We collate all the feedback and report it on a weekly basis internally and we can track the feedback to specific flights, airports, in-flight crews, etc.

“We’re constantly keeping our finger on the pulse and ensuring we listen to what our customers are telling us. If we are failing in any way, we must address it and ensure we live up to our promise of bringing humanity back to air travel.”
The moral of this community-building tale?

Building community around your business online supports the community-building you’re doing offline. More and more customers are beginning their purchasing decisions with online research. Don’t miss this opportunity for your customers to speak for your brand!

An online community of brand-loyal, well-appreciated and encouraged members and customers speaks volumes for the relevancy and credibility of your business.

Tags: appreciation, audience, business community, community, demographics, feedback, insight, jetblue, online community, reward, social community, stephanie gehman, strategic plan, survey, thank you

About the Author, Stephanie Gehman
Stephanie Gehman is the marketing manager for Harrisburg International Airport in Pennsylvania. She writes, blogs, speaks and teaches on the full gambit of traditional and emerging marketing touch points. Other posts by Stephanie Gehman »

Contrary to reports of its demise, email is alive and kicking. And email marketing is what works as the most effective and profitable “last mile” to turning prospects into customers and clients.

That said, all of us are far too familiar with email newsletters that waste our time, pitches that annoy us, and downright spam. Those don’t work quite so well, at least not long term.

What works is a value exchange — your valuable information for your prospect’s valued time. Your subscribers need to know they can trust you … that you’re not a soulless self-promoting spam-bot.

So, we’ve put together a nifty 7-part tutorial that will get you up and running with the basics of email marketing done right. No charge, and we don’t even ask for an email address. Silly, right?

Check out Email Marketing 101 here. And if you find it valuable, go ahead and share it with a friend on Twitter or Facebook. We’d certainly appreciate it.

EdgeRank is the other reason why you may not be seen. Top News is filtered by EdgeRank. Your post may not qualify for Top News.

Here is how EdgeRank works:
1. Each time someone else comments, “likes”, interacts, or shares your post Facebook give you a “credit”. If you like a Page or comment, you do not get a “credit”
2. Comments get more “credit” than just a “like”. So if you like something, say something about it if you want to continue to see them on your Wall. Like them and comment!
3. Be as current as possible!

My suggestion to you is to get busy by supporting those that you want to see more often! A good way to help yourself with visibility is to stay current, engage your friends and “likes*, Use outside sources, an example would be pictures, and videos, share your links when you can*.

The asterisk* means it will be in an upcoming post real soon!

Companies need to have a regular presence on Facebook if they want to make a difference in their marketing. leads, and bottom line. A couple hours a week is reasonable to start, however when you start adding in the other Social Media opportunities the hours add up. Having a dedicated person to traffic comments, posts, pictures, and other Social Media opportunities truly needs to be considered!

So, you have a social media presence. Perhaps you even have some tools in place to measure your team’s activity and interactions through social channels. That’s great! But how can you feed what you learn from social media interactions back into your team’s work effort?

Social media needn’t be an end in itself. It’s one thing to “engage” and “lead thinking” in your social network. But social media really starts having a direct benefit when you can tap into the information it’s providing you and feed it back into your business, and your team.

One way to look at the social media picture is to ask the team members who use and manage your social media presence two basic questions.
What Are Our Contacts Saying?

The ongoing review of what contacts are saying — an essential part of engaging with social media — reveals trends that can be invaluable to your team.

What are contacts are saying about your organization, product quality, service levels, team members, marketing approaches and public presence? Are they happy to engage with you? Are they telling their contacts about you?

This kind of information can be fed directly back into strategy (for example, if customers are complaining about your phone support, perhaps you need to review call center opening hours) and your team’s task lists (if clients have identified a bug that’s not yet documented on your product site, that can be added to a team member’s priority list).
What Aren’t Our Contacts Saying?

This may seem a silly question, but with a little effort, you can identify gaps in your strategy, and opportunities to improve both your offering and your contact relationships.

How do you work out what people aren’t saying about you? Look at your competitors’ engagement with their audiences. What are customers, suppliers and industry players saying to or about peer organizations that they’re not saying about yours — and what does that mean?

Also compare the information you obtained from investigating the first question (what your contacts are saying about you) against your social media goals. If you’re meeting those goals, there won’t be any gaps between what you expect to see in your social media engagements, and what’s actually happening. If there are gaps, you’ll know something’s missing, and further research and discussion are necessary if you’re to lift your game.

Identifying what customers aren’t saying is only half the problem. The other half is your team’s interpretation of what those gaps mean, and the practical approaches you devise to address them.
Making It Work

In large teams, teams where the social media effort involves multiple parties, or teams where the person who looks after social media isn’t a leader or manager, scheduling a regular, focused discussion of these questions is probably ideal.

This kind of semi-formalized approach to feeding the knowledge obtained though social media back into business strategy allows you to understand the value your social media contacts can add to your business. It may also give you the objectivity to consider those findings — and possible responses to them — from a strategic viewpoint.

For example, if a customer complained about product quality, how does this information compare with the broader research you’ve done into customer satisfaction? What processes do you — or could you — have in place to respond to these comments? The same questions could be asked about your most loyal advocates, assuming you want to maintain that position in their minds.

How does your team understand and interpret the qualitative information that social media provides to you? What techniques are you using to feed this information back into business strategy, and/or team member to-do lists?

According to a recent MerchantCircle survey of 8,500 small businesses across the U.S., more than two-thirds of small merchants are using social media to market their business. At the same time, one-third of these companies say that lack of time and resources is their top online marketing challenge. Together, these two data points underscore a growing need for social media support among small businesses.

But hiring a social media consultant may not be as straightforward as hiring other types of professional service providers, such as a web designer or an accountant. For one, you may not be clear on the value or immediate impact of social media relative to other marketing channels. You might already be handling this yourself and aren’t sure if it makes sense to get help. And unlike one-off projects such as a website redesign or tax preparation, social media support is typically an ongoing monthly expense.

Here are four questions to consider when deciding whether to outsource your social media:

1. Can effective social media drive your business growth?
Just like with any other marketing effort, it’s important to look at the potential impact of social media on your business goals before investing time and money in the process.

For some small business owners, social media is the lifeblood of their business and warrants the time investment. Randa Yezak, founder of women’s apparel company Southern Jewlz, spends at least three hours a day on social media marketing.

“I have a young clientele that utilizes Facebook all day, every day,” says Yezak. ”When updating between my Facebook, online store or e-mail list, Facebook is always first!” This approach has helped Yezak grow her fan base to over 11,000 Facebook users.

But while investing in social media might make sense for an online merchant or local restaurant, a small tax preparation service or local plumber may have more difficulty justifying the time and effort. These businesses may get a better return on their time and money by ensuring that their business shows up in online searches, or by engaging with customers for positive reviews.

2. How well is your social media working today?
Assuming that social media is important for your business, chances are you’re already engaging and seeing some results. You’re posting regular updates, you’re connecting with fans and followers and you’re getting creative with your social marketing. Some small business owners strike the right chord from the start and see their social media fan base skyrocket, and they want to continue driving this on their own.

Yezak attributes a big part of her social media success to the personal connection she creates with her customers.

“The majority of my customers are just like me. I’m a 23-year-old business owner with a funky boutique, so I always make everything sound really fun and sassy,” says Yezak. “I have not justified hiring a consultant yet, because I like to stay up-to-date with Facebook myself.”

For many business owners, though, it can be tough to continually come up with new ideas and programs to engage fans on their own. It’s also not easy to keep up with the ever-evolving capabilities of Facebook and Twitter — and stay on top of new third-party tools and features — and still have time to run your business.

An experienced social media marketing consultant has the advantage of thinking about social media 24/7 — with multiple clients, they’re also sharing the cost of staying ahead of the curve. They not only know what works, but they also have the luxury of experimenting and trying new things with different clients.

3. Could outsourcing free up your time to focus on business operations?
While there are many ways to find efficiencies in your social media efforts, the fact remains that effective social media takes time. You need to respond quickly to fan queries and thank people for their retweets and posts. You need to monitor your social media channels for complaints and immediately attend to these. And these are just the basics — actually engaging, growing and monetizing your fan base can take several hours a day or more.

Even if you’re pretty savvy when it comes to social media, you wear many hats as a business owner… and you probably want to have a life outside of work. For some businesses, the choice to outsource social media comes down to the relative value of their time.

“A big part of our growth will come from new product development and expanding distribution channels, and this takes a lot of dedicated focus. At the same time, we want to make sure that we’re building a thriving community, engaging customers and broadening awareness of our products,” says Trisha Layton, marketing coordinator at PROBAR. “We believe we get much more leverage on our time by focusing on the things that we can’t outsource and working with trusted partners in areas where a consultant can be just as effective, such as social media.”
4. How do you measure ROI?
The costs for social media support can vary widely — some social media consultants charge a flat fee per month for an agreed-upon scope of work, while others charge by the hour, at rates varying from $50 to $100 or more per hour. Whatever the cost, the bar for success will be set much higher when you’re actually paying someone to do it. Make sure you’ve established some measurable goals to ensure that your social media spending is moving the needle for your business.

Examples of common social goals and ways to measure these include:

* Fan base growth: Hitting 1,000 fans or followers over a set period of time
* Customer acquisition: Getting 50 redemptions per campaign on social media offers
* Support of direct marketing: Adding 200 names to your e-mail database per month
* Engagement: Achieving 20% participation by your fan base (e.g. Facebook “likes” and comments)