As suggested by Elizabeth Arritt, Director of Marketing for the National Board of Teaching Standards (US), although the social media platforms that are appropriate for your business will vary depending on your industry, relying on just one won’t get the results!

Here are a few tips on how to select the appropriate activity for your business’ integrated social media strategy:

* Make sure you are where your target market is, to maximise the impact and effectiveness of your message.

* Try to avoid a baptism of fire. It is best to first observe and understand each social media platform so that you can establish the etiquette or unwritten rules, before you participate.

* Make it easier for yourself – there are now many ‘apps’ out there that can assist you in linking your social media accounts – if you update one, the others are automatically updated. However, it is important to remember not to get caught up in ‘blasting’ out the same updates, across all the mediums, all of the time.

* Make sure that your target markets know where to find you. To achieve this you can link to your business’ social media profiles on a new page on the company’s website or to its existing ‘contact’ page, on email signatures, in your corporate or eNewsletter and on your blog. You could also mention your Facebook account on your Twitter profile and vice versa.

The CME Group has successfully created an online community through its Twitter account, attracting nearly 800,000 followers.

So how did they do it?
According to Andy Sernovitz there are three top tips from CME Group’s Director of Corporate Communications Allan Schoenberg.

* Don’t be so self centred – It is best to limit tweets about your business to 30%, using the other 70% for industry information and interaction.

* One of the keys to the CME group’s success was being where its customers are. It knew that their customers were active users which made it worthwhile investing in.

* As well as sharing links to interesting content, CME group has become actively involved in conversation, engaging with its followers and conducting weekly live interviews with influential leaders in the marketplace.

Previously we have written about protecting the image and reputation of your business. As reported by Bnet, in a world of social media which has led to the blurring of the lines between our personal and professional lives, it has become increasingly important to take steps to protect your personal reputation. It doesn’t take much for a smear campaign against you to quickly spread across the internet which can be seriously damaging to your career.

You can use the following tips for tracking and repairing your online reputation:

Tracking your online reputation

* Make a list of the most likely places your name would appear online to begin monitoring your online reputation. Identify blogs, forums, and social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which anyone within your professional circle may also use. You can even track your company’s corporate site and previous places of employment.

* You can then set up your own individual Google alerts for the sites you want to frequently monitor at www.google.com/alerts. Other monitoring tools include Twinbox, which tracks comments made on Twitter through Microsoft Outlook.

Repairing your online reputation

* Although the above tips are useful, unfortunately they will not prevent online attacks. The first thing to do is examine what has been said about you and whether it is accurate or not. If not, you should correct them immediately. If it is true, you should apologise via the same medium as the message.

* If your professional realm is under attack, consider advising your employer as well as the legal department – especially if the comments made are defamatory.

Other useful information

An important aspect of creating your own personal brand online is to separate your business and personal social networking contacts. For example, you could use Facebook for personal networking and LinkedIn for business networking.

You build and maintain others’ brands every day, why not start doing it for yourself?

Create your own PR that reflects the real you – the professional you. By circulating positivity around your name, the likelihood of negative commentary being regarded is reduced.

We came across this article by Lee Odden, which is a guide to assessing if your PR agency is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and social media ready.

We are pleased to note that we have been implementing the suggested SEO and SMO strategies for our clients for some time now.

So how do you know if your PR agency is SEO and social media ready? Odden proposes a six question quiz. The main points are below.

* You need both social media and SEO strategies.

* As discussed previously on our blog, Social Media Optmisation (SMO) can be integrated with SEO strategies to increase your business’ online visibility, particularly through organic search on search engines such as Google.

* When it comes to SEO keyword optimisation, the keywords you have been optimising for on your web pages and in your blog posts should also be optimised for in social media content, along with links back to your website pages on these particular topics.

* You need to get to know your target audiences so that you can customise online content to their interests. A good way to do this is by conducting a survey including questions such as: what social media sites do you visit and how often? What type of search do they use for story research? etc. This should ideally be the first thing you do, in order to assist with developing a blog content plan.

* Develop a blog content plan that not only includes content on your company but also industry specific topics that will be of interest to your target audiences, including journalists and bloggers. Ideally, you want blog content to reach social media news and bookmarking sites and this is where providing quality content can help.

* Have good quality, keyword optimised blog posts on your website as well as interesting and useful content on your social media profiles.

Odden also speaks about establishing your PR agency’s true core competency: traditional or digital PR. We believe that with a highly qualified team with experience in varying fields, it is possible to have a PR agency that can operate competently within both areas.

Last week’s post explored online reputation management. This week, another issue relevant to the topic has emerged.

In case you haven’t heard, users of the social networking site Facebook are now able to register names for their profile pages. These names also act as a URL address extension so that users can to access their profiles directly.

The ability to register became available last Saturday June 13. Three million users have already registered individual profile names – 500, 000 of whom did so in the first 15 minutes of this feature becoming available.  Source.

Connecting Images recommended to its clients with existing Facebook pages to register their business name/s as their individual profile names, so that their profiles became easier for existing and potential customers to locate.  In addition, getting in early could prevent others from inappropriately registering their business name.

The process of poaching a competitor’s name online is not new – think back to the early adopters who registered well known web addresses long before the legitimate brand owner set up a website!

Poaching business names online is quite common and referred to as ‘cyber squatting’. Businesses must be able to establish their genuine presence on such sites, to avoid reputation management issues.

So what can you do to avoid cyber squatting?

Quick tips

- Regardless of whether you are currently engaged with new communication technology, stake your claim anyway, and register your business name on emerging web services.

- Don’t try to get creative! Register your most commonly used business name (the one that is on your website, in your marketing collateral and in your advertising).

- If you find that someone else has already registered your business name as their individual profile name, check it out and if you suspect it is a case of ‘cyber squatting’ take action. Some services (i.e. Facebook) offer the right of appeal.

Want to know more about how your business can best utilise emerging web services? Give Merilyn or Cal a call on (03) 9819 2566 and arrange to come in for a coffee and a chat.

Google has recently updated its searching function to include features of ‘real time search’, according to Smart Company.

So what does this mean?

A greater emphasis has now been placed on the importance of regular and fresh content being added to websites, which allow users of the search engine to categorise search results into time relevancy (E.g. past 24 hours, past week etc).

Although most Search Engine Marketers (SME’s) are concerned about what ramifications this may have on the SEO of websites, as it has so significantly increased the need for frequently updated, fresh content; this feature also allows your business to effectively monitor your reputation over the internet.

Online reputation management is becoming increasingly important when recent communications crises such as that of the Dominos video are considered.

One of the most conflicting aspects of the internet is the power of the user to contribute to a social forum on a range of topics. In one way this empowers those that may not necessarily have had their voice heard in traditional media. However, it also opens a Pandora’s box in terms of protecting the image of an organisation or business.

Furthermore, traditional media now refers to blogs and social media websites as reliable information sources when reporting on breaking news stories.  Due to the immediacy of the internet, blogs etc. can often be the first sources for breaking new stories as they can publish information before traditional mediums have had a chance to respond.  This has increased the power of the internet, as a reliable source of information, which means online attacks can be particularly damaging to your company’s reputation – particularly if the story is later picked up by traditional media.

Read more on online reputation management here.

Like most things, marketing isn’t an exact science. Research and strategy are certainly required to develop a strong marketing campaign. Furthermore, testing and measuring specific tactics is the way to go.

Continual testing of new tactics or variations of existing marketing strategies is important for any business. It allows the business to remain fresh and current and achieve its marketing and communications objectives.

It is also important to track the effectiveness of these marketing efforts. This will continually reshape your future marketing activities into those that will be most successful for your business.

This can be achieved by tracking the incremental costs and revenue from the promotions, in order to calculate the return on investment (ROI). Knowing the ROI of a marketing activity makes it easy to evaluate each promotion’s success to determine whether to drop, tweak, continue or expand it.

Want to know more on refreshing or expanding your existing marketing activities in order to attract new and better business? Give Merilyn or Cal a call on (03) 9819 2566.

Does it seem as though every 16 year old you know has more knowledge about tweating, writing on walls, updating their statuses, tagging their friends in images and uploading their latest pics to Flickr, than you ever will?

Although there has been much discussion in recent times on how Facebook, You Tube and other more familiar social media outlets can assist and at times hinder your businesses communications and reputation, Twitter is the latest craze to sweep the net and it can also be utilised as a business communication application.

An Australian software-as-a-service company, Cleartext recently utilised Twitter to take advantage of the unreliability of a competitor and attempt to attract new business.

As with anything, the use of Twitter by your employees on behalf of your business requires guidelines and having a policy specifically on conduct during use of social media is a particularly important step in embracing this new technology. Telstra has recently developed such a policy.

Lost amongst the jungle of tech talk? Connecting Images can assist you in understanding and utilising social media as a business application. Give Cal or Merilyn a call (03) 9819 2566.

Creating, re-branding or refreshing a business’ image can be at times, a stressful and complicated process. Read some of our previous posts to find out what makes a brand iconic and how to create an effective corporate identity for your business.

When re-branding, our clients often ask us which colours will best suit their websites. For this very reason, we have added a full colour chart to the website to assist our clients is selecting web safe colours that are consistent with your businesses’ image.

If you are struggling with the complexities of projected and reflected light, RGB, Hexadecimal, CMYK or spot (Pantone® PMS) colours we’re always willing to assist. Whether it be with our expertise or simply by making our colour guides available to clients, we’ll help you make sense of colour.

Don’t be beaten by the recession, gain market share. This is currently the goal of just about every business across the country, not to mention in every other struggling global economy!

In these tough times, Public Relations and Marketing are often viewed as unnecessary ‘luxuries’. However, according to Brian Mahoney Director, Financial and Corporate Relations (FCR) from the PRIA (Public Relations Institute of Australia) and those who survived the last recession in the 1990’s, the best way to not only survive a recession but also come out of it stronger is to continue your PR and marketing activities.

Before you dismiss this as biased opinion, read about the rationale behind the statement…

All of your competitors will no doubt be slashing communications budgets in an attempt to pinch the precious ‘pennies’, that is if they haven’t already. Therefore, by maintaining active communications through this period of recession you are more likely to gain market share, emerging from the recession better placed in the market!

To find out how Connecting Images can help you through the recession blues with innovative and integrated communications strategies, give Mark, Merilyn or Cal a call on (03) 9819 2566 to arrange to come in for a coffee.