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January 16, 2012
As with all areas of life there is a set of commonly accepted rules that outline the dos and don’ts of participation in social media, particularly in a professional or business context. Interestingly, these rules vary little from those that govern face to face social contact.
It is notable that these rules of social media etiquette differ between each social media platform. For example how you should act on Facebook isn’t necessarily equally acceptable on Twitter and LinkedIn and so forth.
Confused? There’s no need, here’s a simple guide to minding your social media manners…
- Business not pleasure – Keep your business and personal lives as separate online as you do in real life. That means separate business and personal social media accounts (where possible). As shown with recent high profile legal cases, business and pleasure do not mix well online.
- Politeness pays – The basic tenets of social interaction apply online – be polite, honest and helpful.
- Be accessible – Make it easy for people to find and identify you – it’s important to complete your profiles as fully as you can. Use your own photo too; you need to be as recognisable as possible.
- Build your reputation – Social media platforms are not well suited solely as a direct sales medium. Boost your business by offering information of value, building your reputation and generating interest in what you can do to help others.
- Remember who can see you – It’s easy to forget the extent of the audience that you have online – be careful what you write and never say anything that you wouldn’t want everyone to see.
- ‘I’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ – Make sure your posts are spelt correctly and are grammatically correct, basic errors can really damage how contacts see and rate you.
- Horses for courses – There are some key differences in how you should use different platforms. Twitter and Facebook, even in a business context, are less formal in tone than LinkedIn and so your posts should reflect the differences. Don’t forget that, if you have your social media accounts linked to update each other; your posts should be written with all audiences in mind.
- Privacy – Privacy is important and private matters should be dealt with by email or using the private message function attached to most platforms.
- Respect – while social media is still relatively new the etiquette governing its use remains in flux. Respect how other people choose to use their accounts, whether to ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ you or not and remember that you also have choices in how to represent yourself online.
These pointers are a broad brush summary of today’s social media etiquette – for some more in depth detail you may like to check out the following link or find out more yourself…
http://socialmediatoday.com/michaelblueeyeddigital/338078/how-practice-social-media-etiquette
November 16, 2011
Google Plus is continuing its assault on Twitter and Facebook, this time by allowing brands to set up pages with which they can interact with their customers. This free of charge addition will allow companies to split the people that follow them into different demographics using the ‘Circles’ feature.
While they still have a long way to go in terms of achieving the buy-in that Facebook and Twitter have (Facebook alone has ten times more members, than Google Plus), if anyone stands a chance at knocking them off their perch, it’s Google.
Think about it; you might have a website and ezines that all link to your Google Analytics account. Now, you can integrate your brand page with that analysis too. Got an AdWords campaign running? Why not link that up too. Google is so much a part of our lives that this new functionality, potentially, offers a complete picture of your performance, which is something Twitter and Facebook will unlikely ever manage.
True, Google will still need to rely on people setting up accounts and using the social media platform – as well as all the others they use - but we think that this is an opportunity that companies and brands shouldn’t ignore….
July 5, 2011
I subscribe to email updates (e-zines) from several fashion/lifestyle magazines for research for one of our lovely clients. Two of the titles, Vogue and Marie Claire, send me an e-zine every single day, even at the weekend. As you can imagine, this can be a little over whelming. I don’t have a stack of magazines in my office gathering dust and taking up valuable space. Instead I have a stack of emails in my inbox shouting for my attention with cries of “latest looks”, “celebrity style tips” and “new season must-haves”, every time I open the “fashion e-zine” folder!
Another title, Grazia, only sends an e-zine once a week. Every Tuesday without fail, my Grazia e-zine pops into my inbox only to sit there patiently, unopened, until it’s filed away in the relevant folder. Of course, by the time the Grazia e-zine arrives on a Tuesday, I’ve already seen Cheryl Cole’s new hair-do and I know that Beyoncé was a surprise hit at Glastonbury.
Although I find the daily e-zines from Vogue and Marie Claire a bit too persistent, I know that they’re bang up to date and they’re always there when I need some fashion inspiration. I don’t even bother looking at the Grazia e-zines as I’ve already got the information I need from its more regular competitors.
When planning your email marketing, content and frequency are equally important. Think carefully about the content of your e-zines. They should be up to the minute, relevant and drive traffic to your website.
It’s also absolutely vital that you schedule your e-zines appropriately for your audience and your message. Send them out too frequently and you risk alienating your recipients; send them out too infrequently and you’ll lose momentum and be usurped by a competitor.
Whatever schedule you decide on, make sure you stick to it, consistency is key. Think about whether you can resource the management of your email marketing in-house or whether you need to make plans to outsource it to a marketing agency. Of course, here at Mzuri Design we can help you with this if you find it’s too much of a time commitment.
Email marketing is certainly on the increase so consumers need to be selective about which e-zines they subscribe to. Make sure they choose you!
April 14, 2011
So, we had a little internal training session at Mzuri a week or so ago, and Katherine sidled up to me a few days before saying “Fancy genning up on these and telling us all about them?”. She had in her hand, a flyer that we’d been given at Pizza Express (our farewell dinner for Kate!) – nothing extraordinary about it, except the odd black and white box printed on it which, if I scanned it with my smartphone, would take me to a web page with lots of pizza recipes on it.
You may have seen an example of what I mean as they are getting more prolific in marketing material. Imagine a square made up of black and white pixels arranged in a random manner. This is what is called a QR code – or ‘quick reaction’ code.
The idea is that the user downloads one of the free QR code readers available on their mobile phones, and then uses it to ‘read’ the code. What happens at that point varies hugely; you could be taken to a web page, or an article, or contact details….or a pizza recipe. Pretty much anything.
QR codes are a little like barcodes, but they have the added advantage of being able to store more than just numerical data. There are numerous free generators online; you simply tell it what you want the code to ‘point’ to, an image is then shown which you can save and use on websites, marketing material, business cards, or anything else you use to promote awareness of your brand.
We’ve seen them used in various applications – some more useful than others – and it’s now something that’s definitely on our radar as an additional communication tool. If you want to know more, then do get in touch and we’d be happy to talk you through this technology and how you might be able to use it. Now, I’m off to make that pizza…..!
April 9, 2010
We’ve been excitedly looking through the final photographs from a recent photo shoot by Mark Langridge for Nikki Szabo Fabrics and Interiors. We’re busy rolling the photos out onto the new ecommerce website, a plethora of marketing materials and also starting planning for our PR assault. While huddled around a machine at the Mzuri offices pouring over the images for the first time, we all said in unison (a bit sad really, but at least we’re all on the same wavelength on this important issue!) that this is a perfect example of why it is important to invest in great photography for your marketing, particularly for ecommerce websites. (more…)
January 25, 2010
After a day of final tweaking, snagging and perfecting, our new website www.mzuridesign.co.uk finally went live this evening! Hurrah! A huge sigh of relief was expelled by the whole team who have endured several months of intense development of the site after about 2 years in the ‘planning stages’. Many an evening and weekend have been spent busily preparing case study information, service summaries, loading and tagging images and optimising every page etc; jobs which somehow never seemed to get done during working hours as we were doing ‘our day jobs’ working on client projects.
So, the shoe was very much on the other foot and it has given me really useful insight into the process of website development from the other side!! So here are my three top tips when approaching a major website development or re-development: (more…)
January 18, 2010
Google’s recent announcements will have a big impact on how we all approach SEO and social media in 2010. The first change is that Google will now include real-time data in search, including status updates from Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and blogs. So your ‘tweets’ need to be brand aligned, relevant and timely! A recent article in B2B Marketing magazine describes tweets as needing to be ‘mini-press releases’ – a really good description to follow if you’re new to the social media arena. (more…)
October 27, 2009
Whilst it may be obvious to some, the content on a web page is probably the key factor in determining the relevancy of the page to a particular topic. Google, the number 1 search engine used worldwide, strive to perfect their search engine algorithms to identify as accurately as possible what a web page refers to and to achieve this, aims to see exactly what a visitor to the site would see. (more…)
October 19, 2009
When keywords, also known as key phrases, are mentioned in relation to search engine optimisation, we often get the same feedback from clients who think that keywords are simply a list of words that can be added to a page, the result being that the page then appears in search engine listings for any of the given keywords. (more…)
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