Insights discovered about my professional passions: Branding, Marketing and Communications
Here’s wishing all who celebrate a very blessed Christmas and a happy New Year!
May you experience a hearty measure of joy, peace, hope and love this season and look forward to the renewal that each New Year can bring.
I won’t be posting much over this holiday season… family beckons and it’s way too nice to be staying at the computer!
(This video, by Igniter Media, remains as one of my favorites to date):
Got this from that free e-book on what should the hub of your social media marketing be, which I recently read. Although the person quoted, Mike Sweeney (managing partner, Right Source Marketing) didn’t exactly phrase it as a “web asset strategy”, it’s still a great way to view how best to use your web assets.
Our website tells people what we do.
Our blog tells people how we think.
Our presence n social media properties – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. – serves as a distribution engine for the content produced on both the site and blog.
I think it should go without saying that you need to manage your brand online these days, whether you’re doing it for yourself or your brand. You should realize that, these days, customers, professors, potential employers – all of them turn to Google, Facebook and other online avenues to find out more about you before they even encounter you.
So what can you do to manage your brand online? Here are 5 steps, which I’ve reworded and summarized for my own application from this great article:
Smashing Magazine has released a free Facebook GUI PSD Kit, designed by SurgeWorks. The main idea behind the kit is to speed up the prototyping of Facebook application UIs and Facebook fan pages, thus sparing you from drawing all the comps and letting you customize all the texts, buttons and data as you need. The kit is free to use in all projects, without any restrictions.
The kit brings the Facebook vector icon and logo. Also, since the focus of this resource are the UI elements, it brings a main window with the header, menu and the chat window for you to set up your realistic mock-ups. Plus all the modal components, comment boxes, buttons, message boxes, tabs, etc. All the components are full layered, built using vectors and blending options, so that scaling and editing the objects will not be a problem.
The theme is released under Creative Commons. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the kit as you wish.
If you haven’t discovered Facebook’s Social Plug-ins yet – now’s a good time to start. I don’t think I need to bore you with the details of how massively important Facebook is, if you’re looking to build a social network presence, along with capitalising on all the real (and perceived) benefits therein.
Here’s what you’ll find at Facebook’s Social Plug-ins Page.
Techcrunch has an interesting article on how you can customise your Facebook fan page so that you can reach social media god-hood. Helpful if you’re a brand that wants to “trailblaze” the social media landscape via Facebook (Is social media still considered “new” media and “new” enough to have trailblazers!?).
Key takeaways:
Continue reading ‘How to Build Engaging One-of-Kind Facebook Fan Pages (via TechCrunch)’
Here’s a very interesting piece of news via Mashable – STATS: Facebook and Twitter’s Growth Flattens.
I was thinking about the implications of what this meant and, truth be told, I came up with nothing. To me, it was yet another method, another medium, another tool reaching saturation point. And so, the market will move on to the next new thing – as it always has and always will.
Where does that leave brands and marketers?
Well, with the classics: Product, Price, Placement, Promotion.
Start with a great product – your Purple Cow, Social Object/Blue Monster/Cube Grenade
Give it to your customers/consumers/audiences at a price where they find “value” – whether that means free, cheap or premium
Place it somewhere that’s conveniently accessible – even if that means the good ol’ brick-and-mortar storefront!
And, finally, promote it by having a great way to share its story with others.
That’s marketing – regardless of whatever “next big thing” we’re looking at.
This is a really great resource by Dumb Little Man: 7 Free or Cheap Ways to Effectively Promote Your Business Online. I especially enjoy the fact that it provides brand and business owners tips on “where to start” as well as links to helpful resources. I’ll certainly be coming back to this resource again and again!
I highly recommend checking out all the great insights and tips on how to leverage: Continue reading ’7+1 Free Or Cheap Effective Ways To Promote Your Brand Online’
Here are 6 helpful tips to having a better business blog, “6 Tips for Customizing Your Small Business Blog” via Mashable:
