A little while back, I got an intriguing box in the mail at work.  Now I don’t know about you, but if a box arrives addressed to me, I have to open it! There’s something about it being in a box that screams “I’m important! Open me right away!”

So I did. (Notice the QR code on the top of the box? We’ll come back to that in a minute.)

When I opened the box, I was greeted by this handwritten note. It was personal, cute and handwritten! Now I’m not sure if it was actually handwritten or just done in a handwriting font, but it looked like the real thing to me.  I wonder how many they sent out and how long it took to write all the notes?

I set the note aside and opened the tissue paper.  Inside was this adorable little guy. (He’s still sitting on my desk because he’s so darn cute!) He was the aforementioned Pete.What a great little gift and a great way to keep my attention!

Remember that QR code that was on the top of the box? When I scanned it, this is what I saw on my phone. This is what a promotional mobile page should look like! First off, it’s formatted for mobile, very important. It’s engaging as soon as you land on it, relevant to the campaign, encourages me to continue my engagement with them through social media, and has a nice clear call to action.

So, well done Proforma! This is a company that gets how to integrate traditional marketing with social and online tools for a really engaging experience! When they followed up their package with a phone call, I made time to talk to them and book an appointment.

After all, that’s what it’s all about!

I came across a great example of social marketing the other day. It’s a iPhone app by the makers of the latest Mission Impossible movie Ghost Protocol. The app is called Action Movie, and it lets you insert special effects, complete with sound, into your own video clips, then share them in social media or save them to your camera roll.

And why is it so brilliant? Because it’s FUN! People play with it, post their videos and tell their friends, and pretty soon everyone is making their own special effects video clips. And everyone who uses the app sees some subtle advertising for the movie.

Social marketing at its best! Here’s a video I made with it.

A new Twitter hashtag showed up in Calgary a couple days ago, #FBLTyyc, otherwise known as Facebook Like Tuesday. The idea behind the hashtag is that you post a link to your Facebook business page, ‘like’ everyone who has posted their link and they’ll like you back. Everyone gets lots of new followers and everyone’s happy. Or are they?

On further inspection, it looks like the one who was trying to get the party started was a plumber here in Calgary. Now I guess if you’re a plumber, it makes sense because everybody needs one of those at some point, so the more news feeds you show up in the better. But for most of us, it just isn’t logical and maybe that’s why the hashtag didn’t really seem to gain any momentum.

Think about how this would work in the real world. One day you get a flyer in the mail from ABC Store that says “hey, if you come and visit my store, I’ll visit yours.” So you pop over to ABC Store, who sells something you have absolutely no interest in, look around for a minute to be polite, then walk out again. That afternoon, the owner of ABC store walks into your store and does the same.

Did anyone really benefit from this? No, you both just wasted your time. So why do the digital equivalent?

While having a large number of followers will certainly let you hit more people with your message, if they’re not interested it will just be tuned out.  Why not be a bit more selective in who you go after, start a conversation with them, make offers they will be interested in and cultivate their business that way. Now you have an engaged following, even if it is slightly smaller, who will be interested in and looking for updates from you, and who you have a much higher chance of doing business with.

- Nancy -

I have to say, I love this new social, connected world we live in.  Whether it’s chatting with my dad (and  even my 91 year old grandma once!) on Skype, seeing pictures of my cousin’s brand new baby on Facebook (who I might not get to see in person for a while since they live in Ontario), or connecting with fellow communicators on Linked In and Twitter to share ideas, it’s just so easy to chat, stay up to date and get new ideas.

And I’ve learned a few things along the way:

1. There is no one right way to do it.  The biggest thing anyone who knows about social media will tell you is that it has to be genuine and real.  To me, that means you have to do things your way, not try to fit into someone else’s cookie cutter idea of how you should do it. So if you want to keep your Facebook friends limited to just your nearest and dearest, go right ahead.  If you want to connect with business associates on Facebook and they’re ok with it, that’s up to you. And when you talk to people online, particularly those you may not know off-line, just be yourself!
2. Manners matter. Yes, saying thank you makes a difference.  Thanks for following me, thanks for retweeting me, thanks for answering my question. I don’t know about you, but I’m more likely to retweet people a second time who said thank you the first time. And that leads me to my next observation…
3. Getting comments feels good, so give them. Do you remember how exciting it was the first time you got a legitimate comment on your blog or had someone retweet one of your tweets?  It feels good when people take notice of what we put out there, and value it enough to share it with their friends.  So spread a little of that good feeling around! Comment on blog posts if the author says something that resonates with you (like this one?). Retweet tweets that you found helpful or valuable (just this morning I retweeted a link to an iPhone app that solved a problem my husband and I had been discussing last night). You will be paid back.
4. There’s a wealth of information out there and lots of people who want to help, all you have to do is ask. Over the last little while, I have found Linked In, in particular, to be an invaluable resource when researching mew applications, looking for a better way to do something or just to get some new ideas from others in my field. Most people naturally want to help others, it just feels good! So take advantage of the huge wealth of knowledge that exists and the fact that you can easily connect with peers from around the world, and ask away!

And I’ve learned that it’s ok to start sentences with and. And that its ok to write in incomplete sentences if that makes things flow a bit better.  So I do. A lot. Because I can. And that’s what I’ve learned about social media so far, but the fun is just beginning.

- Nancy -

Recently, I’ve seen a few discussions around the topic of whether or not a Facebook fan page is enough of an online presence that it could potentially replace a website for small businesses. Surprisingly, at least to me, some people feel that this is a good idea. 

So I decided to give it a little thought, and came up with this list of the top five (slightly tongue-in-cheek) reasons why you should consider replacing your company website with a Facebook page.

Ready? Here goes:

1. You feel that the best way to represent your brand online is to plug it into a cookie-cutter mold. After all, it’s cool to look exactly like everyone else, right? And designing a website from scratch is a time-consuming process, so really, what’s the point when Facebook can decide for you how everything will look.  Takes all the guessing out of the process and makes it nice and painless and bland. Just how you want your brand to look.  
2. You prefer that another company displays their logo and search box at the top of your web page. Top billing is highly over-rated anyways. They’ll get to your stuff eventually. And if a visitor goes to the Facebook search box (the one in plain sight right at the top of your company page) to find what they’re looking for and completely skips over your page, another visitor will be along eventually.
3. You would rather not have any control over pesky details like functionality and page layout. Here’s another thing that just takes takes up valuable time. Besides, Facebook is a big company, they must know how every company wants their page to work, so just leave it up to them, they’ll sort it out eventually.
4. You support market competition to the point that you welcome your competitors’  (or better yet, completely unrelated and distracting) advertisements on your primary web page. Your mom taught you to share, right? So naturally that extends to your web presence too.  Make it nice and easy for your customers to find your competitors, karma will take care of your revenue.
5. You aren’t bothered by the prospect that you could wake up one morning and find your web presence has been inexplicably deleted. In fact, the possibility adds a little excitement to your job. Knowing what to expect from day to day is sooo boring.  Why not spice it up a little and relinquish all control to someone else.

OK, so am I saying you shouldn’t put effort into having a really great Facebook presence?  No, absolutely not.  If your customers are on Facebook, you need to be there too.  And it does give you a great opportunity to talk to them on a real level, the way you just can’t do on a website unless you’ve built that ability right into your website. 

What I am saying is take advantage of what Facebook has to offer by way of engagement, and then take the opportunity to direct fans back to your website, which is hopefully also engaging enough to keep them interested and turn them into customers. Because YOU are in control of your website, YOU get to decide what the user experience is like, and YOU are the only person who should be making those decisions.

It’s been 30 minutes since my last tweet.

It started out innocently enough. I was starting to look into social media channels for work, and Twitter was one of them.  I set up a profile, found a few people I knew and followed them and posted a few tweets and that was it.

I checked my feed every couple weeks, but since I wasn’t following many people, not much was going on.  Then I found a few more people to follow, talked to a couple of them, and they responded. It was pretty cool!  But I still had everything under control.

Pretty soon I installed a little Twitter app on my desktop so I could check on what was going on easily. Retweeting was pretty quick and easy.  I found more people to follow, and more people started following me.  And then it wasn’t long before I was checking Twitter first thing in the morning and on the bus ride to work, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything important.  Now I tweet on the weekends, in the evening and even in the car. Even though some people think Twitter is just a random mess of people publishing their every little move, including pics of what they ate for breakfast, I just can’t stay away. I think I have a problem.

But seriously, I have come to rely on Twitter as more than just my daily dose of anonymous gossip.  In addition to giving me an effective way to connect with others who share my interests, it has become my RSS feed. I figure why scour the blogs myself, when there already many others doing just that and posting the good stuff.  So I just follow them, and stay up to date on all the latest news in social media.

At first I had trouble deciding who I wanted to follow, but I have since come up with a bit of a system, and I try to follow 2 or 3 more people every day.  Here’s how I do it:

1. If I know you personally and you’re on Twitter, I’m probably going to follow you, just because.
2. Periodically I go to my list of followers to see who’s new.  I look at their profile and look at their bio.  In some cases, it’s pretty obvious that it is just a spam account (they follow a couple thousand people, several hundred follow them and they have no tweets). In others, it looks like they might have some similar interests, so I look at their last few posts. If their posts look interesting, and it looks like they have conversations with people rather than simply advertising, I’ll likely follow them. If they just broadcast but I’m interested in most of what they broadcast, I might just follow them anyways.
3. I look up hashtags that I’m interested in (such as #socialmedia or #digitalmarketing) and check out people who post using them, using the same process I described above.

Bottom line is, if you’re talking about stuff I’m interested in, and it seems like you engage in actual conversation on Twitter, I’m more likely to follow you.  And if you’ve hit my blog and think I should be following you, feel free to leave a comment with your handle so I can check you out!

- Nancy -

Do you remember those books when you were a kid (I might be showing my age a little here) where you read the first few pages of the story and then had to choose from option A or option B? Once you chose it told you what page to turn to, to continue reading until you got to another choice. I used to love those books, and I would spend hours going through the book choosing different options each time to see how many stories I could actually get.

Well, the Metropolitan Police in London have done a fabulous job of giving this old classic a new twist, delivering a very powerful message about youth violence in the process. Through a series of 33 videos, starting with the one below, you are literally put in the shoes of a youth who is faced with a choice when he goes out with his friends, whether or not to take a knife.

One of the unique things about the video series (other than the entire concept obviously) is that it is shot from the point of view of the main character, so you can look down at “your” hands or look over at someone else but you never see “yourself”.

Anyways, even though I’m obviously not the target market for a campaign like this, I found the videos completely engaging, and found myself going back and making different choices in the storyline, just like I did when I was a kid.

In my opinion, this is a great use of social media to connect with an audience, engage them for a relatively long period of time, and really get the message across. What do you think?

Here I am at my first blog post on a new blog, almost always the most challenging post to write. People usually say ‘welcome to my new blog’ on their first post, so I’m going to be different and not say that. You’re intrigued already, aren’t you? I can tell.

I will take a moment to tell you why I decided to start this blog however.

I am a Marketing Communications professional and have seen parts of the job description change over the years from ‘traditional’ advertising and promotion to website management and e-newsletters to social media and online communities. The focus of the role, however, has not changed; to use the most effective communications vehicle to communicate with the customer in a way that encourages them to believe in what we are sharing with them, and ultimately to purchase our product or service.

Since the advent of blogging and then full fledged social media, customers can talk back in a way they never could before, and this shift fascinates me. Some people use their new found voice to ‘talk’ to their favorite celebrity or politician, some use it to inform the world what they had for breakfast, some use it to advocate or boycott certain brands or organizations, and some use it to start a revolution.

Because at the end of the day, we’re all social critters and we live in a very social world.  We like to connect with those around us, and feel that our opinions and our views matter to others. And we are interested in what others have to say in return.

So I’m going to use my voice to share with you my views on how we use social media at home and at work, even though that line is starting to get pretty blurry, and how it is changing our view of the world around us.

Whether or not you choose to listen is completely up to you.