Lack of Engagement is like Giving a Customer the Cold Shoulder

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I feel that it is very important for businesses that market in the digital arena to be engaging with their audience.  If you use social media, respond and interact with your audience as opposed to just posting.  If you use your blog as a marketing vehicle, respond to comments and shares of your posts.  If you are listed on review sites like Angie’s List, Yelp or Kudzu and you receive a bad review, try to reach out to that consumer to see how you can make things better.

Sometimes people see digital marketing methods or business practices as a bit impersonal and cold, but it does not have to be.  I truly believe that it is possible to show a human side, engage, interact and really connect with people without physical contact.  Maybe I feel this way because I am an introvert and consider myself to be pretty good at forming strong bonds digitally.  Too me, the digital sphere is no different than the physical one.  If someone said “hi, I like your blouse” to me in real life, in the physical world; I would respond kindly with a “thank you” and probably a bunch of gibberish about how I found it at a thrift store, which one, on which sale day…I digress.  The point is that I would engage with them.  They took a moment of their time to reach out and pay me a compliment, to let me know that they noticed something about me and they liked it.  They did not have to do this.

If I had ignored them, I would have been giving them the cold shoulder and probably a negative impression as to who I am as a person.  This is the same for businesses and anyone that markets in the digital spectrum.  Respond, comment, connect and engage.  My (digital) friend Tracy over at Tracyville, wrote a post on responding to blog comments here that I thought was pretty good (check her out!).  She hit the nail on the head when she mentioned how it makes people feel to be responded to or not responded to.  We as marketers, have to be mindful to stay “human” and practice the same principles of physical interactions with our digital ones.

What Perception Does Your Social Media Give About Your Brand?

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It’s a new year and many of us are reviewing our marketing strategies for the new year…or you have already done so.  Social media has become a large part of how brand’s market themselves and/or how they connect and engage with their customer base.  Because social media gives viewers a perceived snapshot of a brand (this applies to individuals/personal accounts too), I think it is important to periodically review your accounts from a viewer’s perspective as well as a marketing perspective.

I  periodically scroll through my timeline on my Facebook, news feed on Twitter, Instagram feed, etc to look at things from a viewer’s perspective.  I look for the different things I look for as a user when I decide to follow a brand.  Sometimes I feel that I would not follow myself based on what I see.  This is primarily because of the speed of change within social media.  The criterion I may have had 6 months ago, may no longer be the criterion I have now.

I ask myself, what perception would I have of me if I was someone else viewing my profile and my posts.  Sometimes I think positive things, sometimes I think negative things.  Here are some of the questions I ask myself:

  1. What is the overall tone of my posts? (too sarcastic, snarky, positive, boastful, etc)
  2. Am I billboarding too much? (post after post of self advertisements)
  3. Am I providing any value? (specifically to my audience or in general)
  4. Are people wanting to connect and engage with me?
  5. How prompt are my responses?
  6. What visual representation of my brand am I giving? (photos)
  7. Am I talking to people? (or speaking at them)
  8. Would I follow me?
  9. Would I unfollow me?
  10. Do I appear spammy?
  11. How am I perceived at a glance?
  12. If I were following me, what would I think about me?

Depending on how I answer some of these questions, I may work to make some changes.  Sometimes I am unsure and I will ask a few peers for their opinion of me based on my social media profiles alone.  I think it is good for brands to not just review the numbers/statistics and strategy, but also review the perception that is being presented from a viewer’s standpoint.

Fixing Jetpack’s Publicize Issues

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I have been using Publicize within WordPress’s Jetpack to post new blog posts to my social media networks for a couple of months now.  At first, it was great!  I was even able to configure things to use my new custom shortlink when it posted on the networks.  Somewhere along the way, things went awry.  First, I noticed that on Google+ it was not posting the featured image, but my header graphic instead.  Next, LinkedIn disconnected from the service and I received an error message every time I tried to reconnect the service.  Last, Facebook disconnected and when I reconnected the service, nothing would post even though it looked connected.

I finally got everything straightened out,  but I thought it might be helpful to post my fixes to these problems in case someone else encountered them.

 

Featured Image Not Posting

I found that some other users were reporting this as a problem on both Google+ and on Facebook.  The problem resided in the meta tags and the use of the open graph format that Facebook pioneered.  I won’t get too technical, because I’m not very good at explaining technical things…I just understand them…sort of.  For some, part of the problem was a conflict in the way their SEO plugin handled those meta tags.

I use All in One SEO pack for SEO on my site and there is a “social meta” add-on available.  Using the add-on, I was able to over ride the Jetpack Publicize settings with those I set within All in One SEO pack.  It also allowed me to set what image I wanted to show when a post is shared from my site.  This solved my image problem.

 

LinkedIn Re-connection

From the Publicize support pages, I figured out that I needed to have revoked the access on the LinkedIn side of things prior to trying to reconnect the service.  Once I revoked the access through LinkedIn, I was able to reconnect from my site.

Here are the steps to find application settings in LinkedIn:

  1. Log into LinkedIn and click on “Privacy & Settings”
  2. Click on the “Groups, Companies & Applications” tab.
  3. Click on “View Your Applications.”
  4. Click the checkbox next to WordPress.com and the “Remove” button.

Facebook Not Posting Anymore

The problem with Facebook not posting was similar to my re-connection problem with LinkedIn.  I needed to have revoked the application’s access prior to reconnecting the service.

Here is what I did:

  1. I disconnected Facebook from Publicize (sharing in settings) in WordPress.
  2. Went to App Settings on Facebook and removed WordPress.com
  3. Returned back to my site’s backend and reconnected Facebook.

If you are having similar issues with this plugin, I can’t guarantee that what I did will work for you, but it might save you a little time, if these are a fix!

 

 

Long Hashtag Gripe: #iOnlyHave140characters

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I have a hashtag gripe.  While I love that brands are embracing social media and making custom hashtags for us to follow and engage with them, why must some of them be so long?  I only have 140 characters!  I was watching TV a few nights ago and saw a KFC commercial that illustrates this point.  I was admiring their use of branding throughout the entire commercial, to include a custom hashtag on the chicken bucket that was in the background.  At the end of the commercial, they used the custom hashtag to ask #HowDoYouKFC?  All I could think about (because I don’t eat KFC) was, why is the hashtag so long?  You can’t even use it in your sentence structure to help cut down on the number of characters.

I felt it would have been better to ask that question in their marketing materials (online, offline, media, etc) and have people respond with #iKFC or something else short and/or that could be used as part of a sentence.  The less characters a hashtag takes away from a tweet, the better.  The responses would allow for more freedom and creativity.  “#iKFC at my super bowl party…” might be a response for the hashtag example.

KFC is not the only example I have seen of a brand using what I consider to be a super long and cumbersome hashtag.  I think sometimes in an effort to be creative and on trend, brands sometimes forget about the actual consumer.  They want us to engage with them, they want to grab our attention, but in the case of these long and cumbersome hashtags, they are making it difficult for us to actually execute this.  For me personally, if it is difficult, I will lose interest and not do it.  Make it easy and I will say, “sure, why not?” #NoMoreSuperLongCustomBrandHashtagsIn2014

Creating A Custom Short Link

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Over the Thanksgiving holiday break when I was supposed to be “not working,” I worked. I did not do anything stressful or work for clients, but I did do some “internal,” as I call it, work. For a while, I have been wanting to create a custom short link. I share a lot of content on social media networks and here on my blog. I primarily use goo.gl (Google Link Shortener) and bit.ly (bitly.com), but I had noticed a couple years ago that other businesses were using custom links. Yes, it took me almost two years to finally do this and I can see you shaking your heads. Please stop. Because HostGator was running Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals that included domain name purchases/registration, I decided to go ahead and get this done. Finally.

If you have wondered how to create a custom short link to share content with, here is what I did to do so:

Bitly offers the capability to use a custom domain name to create short links. Instead of the standard bit.ly/xx12345, you can use cust.om/xx12345. To do this, you must first have a domain name that is not being used for anything else (can be a sub domain). It can also only be 15 characters long, to include the “.” I used Domai.nr, to get suggestions and search for a short domain name to use. Most of the variations of “Colleen Eakins Design” that I was interested in, were already taken, so I decided to just go with my name. In the end, I chose “colleeneakns.me”

The next step, was to go to Bitly and enter the new domain name in as a custom link. You can find this by logging into your Bitly account, clicking on “settings” and then clicking on the “advanced” tab. Once I had it entered, I needed to change my A record for the new domain name to point to Bitly. I can admit that this was a little tricky with HostGator. I must say, that it was easier to make these types of changes with my domain names that I still have under GoDaddy. Minus two points for HostGator. Once that was done and verified with Bitly, I was good to go and geeked to have my “vanity” custom short link. I probably frivolously shared content that day, just so that I could ogle my own link.

Here are a couple [frivolous] links that I found helpful and one irrelevant one:

Bitly Support Page – http://colleeneakns.me/1eJyiOF
Mashable Article – http://colleeneakns.me/1cSxG7i
CED on Facebook – http://colleeneakns.me/1cdQ3W2