The Instagram Effect

I’m always looking for ways to take better photos with my iPhone, and I recently ran across a 24-minute mini-documentary named Instagram Is. The video is basically a series of interviews with users of the app, each defining what Instagram means to them.

I’ve dabbled with Instagram and always considered its main purpose to be applying filters to photos – filters that can make mundane photography more interesting. One message that the video clearly delivers is that the images alone are not the reason that Instagram has grown over 500% in less than a year. The app’s creators said in a recent interview that Instagram is not about photography so much as “communicating a moment (to someone). It just happens to be an image…It’s about more than that. It’s about communicating a message.”

So it is widely agreed: the primary draw of Instagram is sharing image creations with the community of 100 million active users that has grown up around the app. In the aforementioned video the subjects share how their relationships have grown stronger, how they’ve been inspired and how their  lives have changed for the better through Instagram. This app is really inspiring folks to get out in the world, take note of their surroundings and share what they are seeing in creative ways.

A Social Brand

Not only are individuals flocking to the app, so are brands. Instagram has shown the most growth of any social network for brands this quarter, beating out both Pinterest and Google+ by substantial margins. The app hopes to maintain that momentum through enhancements to the community experience. Again the focus is on community, not photography.

As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Instagram is proving that sharing that picture may be worth even more than that.

The post An Explosion Called Instagram appeared first on Parthenon Publishing.

Sometimes facts are easy. If you want to show the success of a program, you go to the numbers: customer satisfaction increased by X percent or no injuries were reported for more than eight months. Those kinds of facts are pretty straightforward and usually easy to find.

And then there are “facts” that maybe aren’t quite so factual. While Google searches give us an incredible amount of information to sift through and use in articles, much of that information is dicey. Include a false bit of information in a blog post or white paper or newsletter article and you cast doubt on everything else in the piece.

How do you tell if your “fact” is too good to be true? There are a few rules.

If they tell you a thousand times…

You will probably find the same fact cited in dozens of websites, but that doesn’t ensure its validity. Fascinating tidbits get picked up and reused over and over by different bloggers and writers just because they sound good. You need to know the source of your fact, and then you need to go right to that source for confirmation. If that’s not possible for some reason, then you need to find an extremely reliable secondary source. If the fact has been published in a mainstream major news organizations or magazine like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CBS or Esquire, even, note that the fact was reported by them.

Know the context

Once I was doing research on employee theft and found the astounding fact that 75 percent of employees steal from their companies. This was attributed to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Pretty reliable organization, right? Plus they are easy to find, so I felt confident that I would be able to either confirm or debunk the statistic. It took some digging, but I finally found the study they did that included that alarming fact. And once I had the full picture, that 75 percent didn’t look so alarming. They were counting time spent goofing off and pilfered pens and Post-its as employee theft. Strictly speaking, you can count that as stealing, I suppose, but it isn’t what I imagined when I first read the statistic and definitely was not what was implied by the many articles and blog posts that used it.

Don’t stop at Wikipedia

I love Wikipedia. It’s often the first place I look when researching a topic. But it is a starting point. Crowdsourcing means that mistakes get corrected, but it doesn’t mean that all mistakes get corrected. People who add to these entries may not be using the original sources and could be passing along questionable information. Fortunately, you can see the sources with the entry and do your own investigation to judge if they are reliable.

It can be disappointing to lose the perfect piece of trivia or the astounding statistic that will give your piece of writing that extra punch. But doing the extra work to track down the truth gives you a better understanding of your subject, and also a better antennae for spotting false information. While shock factor and trivia are exciting, they aren’t nearly as valuable as the truth.

The post Is That a Fact? Check appeared first on Parthenon Publishing.

A well-designed case study has long-term benefits and is a more reasoned method of extolling your virtues. For example, a “We met our deadline!” post on Facebook or Twitter will get a few congratulatory replies, but it also will have some people wondering if this is somehow out of the norm for your outfit — not the message you want to send.

Case Studies Tell The Tale

A far better way to broadcast your accomplishments is via the “we came, we saw, we conquered” approach of the case study. Often overlooked because they can be dry as dust and just about as compelling, case studies done right showcase what you do — and how well you do it — to the audience of your choosing. They are the unsung heroes of a sensible marketing strategy.

Let’s say you’re an architectural firm, and you’ve just finished a major renovation for a local firm. Here’s how to spell out your genius:

• Identify the client, and the problem (why they came to you).
• Write a short, succinct summary of what you knew needed to happen (the end goal).
• Include the unique challenges you found, so you’re seen as a front-line problem solver.
• Detail – in just a few (as in, no more than five) steps – what you did to solve the problem. Include specifics, but don’t go overboard with details.
• Give a snapshot of where the client is now, preferably with a quote or two from them about the overall fabulousness (yes, we know that’s not a word) of their new digs.

Build It — They Will Come

Now decide if you want to include art, video (if creating a digital as well as print version) or other elements to make your case. Remember, this is meant to be a short summary, not a white paper. The goal is to raise awareness of, and interest in, your services.

When you’ve got all this material together, you can produce it in several ways: some people like PowerPoint; others prefer a single-page print or PDF handout for distribution.

Doing good work should never go unnoticed. Having a few case studies on hand can not only highlight your work to existing clients; it can also allow you to strut your stuff for potential new ones in a way that’s clear, factual and compelling.

The post Making the case for case studies appeared first on Parthenon Publishing.

Understanding and managing multiple facets of any project is vital to it flourishing. You have employees, budgets, timelines, vendors, scopes, government regulations, risks and much more to juggle. One area of project management has the power to make or break it’s success, and that’s communications.

We’ve all seen projects run off the rails. The stakeholders wanted A. The project was communicated as B. Too late in the game we find out what would’ve worked the best for them is C. Now the budget is gone, the deadline is today and no one is happy. Luckily, we can avoid these situations with a well thought out communications plan.

You owe it to your team and to your stakeholders to create a communications infrastructure. So, what do you do? Here’s a high-level approach.

Identify Your Stakeholders

A stakeholder is anyone with interest in your project. This is more than just making a list; this is identifying those people, their needs, their perceptions and their influence on a project. Not all stakeholders should be treated equally. Some have more power whereas others might have more impact to your project. You will need to identify the positive and negative impact each can have on your project and later on you will plan how to mitigate the negative and maximize those with positive contributions.

Develop a Plan

Here you identify who should receive project communications, what communications they should receive, how they should receive them, and how often they should receive them. You will outline who will initiate updates and the frequency of updates. Here you can define roles and responsibility so everyone doesn’t have to communicate with everyone else – creating a large number of communication channels and unneeded confusion.

Share Your Plan

The purpose of distributing info is keep everyone informed on the plan and progress of your project. It’s the execution phase of what you just planned above using the channels you cited in your plan.

Manage Expectations

Much like the process above, this is continued execution of your plan with a focus on ensuring the stakeholders are being managed appropriately. This is here to identify issues and resolve them quickly and proactively. If everyone is on the same page throughout the process, you have a greater chance of success.

Report Your Performance

Here, you need to monitor and control the project and produce results that are sharable to the team and stakeholders. This shows your progress and contains the whole story of your project – not just the good stuff. The reports can take your work and highlight areas that need work, identify trends, show small deviations off plan and ultimately can be used as a deliverable to the stakeholders so they are well aware of the project’s status.

Finally, it’s worth noting that communications can fluctuate from informal to formal and are important to manage whether they are water cooler communications, full-on, grandiose presentations or discussions with high level players. You need to tailor your communications to your audience. And always make sure the data you provide is timely, accurate and truthful.

The post Communication Is Key! appeared first on Parthenon Publishing.

Now, before you go reporting us to the Better Business Bureau we’re not talking water boarding or 50 Shades of Gray here; We’re talking about the kind of punishment that is serious enough to produce results but lighthearted enough that your entire workforce isn’t reduced to tears.

The deal with the devil

We have an online project management system called 5PM that we use here at Parthenon. Many of us have been using it — consistently and correctly — for years; Others have failed miserably, using it halfheartedly and sporadically but mostly side-stepping or ignoring it altogether.

This quarter we’ve had enough, and that is where the Wheel of Shame comes in. Throughout the week, everyone is responsible for marking down anyone who uses 5PM incorrectly or fails to use it when they should. During our Friday huddle, the most egregious offender must spin the Wheel of Shame and perform whatever punishment they are dealt. (The punishments are a group of suggestions we submitted before the game began.) Thus, the offending party is subjected to a (very mild as far as I’m concerned) shaming and his or her coworkers are treated to a little bit of hilarity.

The punishments

To date, we’ve witnessed the following:

• Jacky working the corner (no, not like that) while holding up a sign that said “Honk if you love 5PM” until she got a honk. (She managed that in about 10 seconds. Because she is a professional.)
• Ashley White reciting an original poem about 5PM during huddle.
• Joe participating in huddle fully mummified (and quite dizzy from being spun around while wrapping).
• Bobby singing all of his huddle answers. (Mr. Stark has a little vibrato in him, it turns out.)
• Carlton taking a smoked oyster & clam juice shooter.

The takeaway

The first week we implemented this system, our 5PM usage tripled and our mistakes diminished by some equally ridiculous percentage (we weren’t keeping track of mistakes before, but we know we were in failing territory). Making the process accountability-driven, yet fun and communal, made us successful.

So the next time your employees are having trouble making it work, don’t reward them with donuts when they deliver; Let them get creative and dole out the punishments to those who don’t.

Nothing renews a person’s commitment to company protocol like eating a diaper full of oatmeal.

The post It puts the tasks in 5PM or else it gets the hose again appeared first on Parthenon Publishing.

Well, there is no right way to respond, but keeping these four things in mind can help you to be proactive, not reactive:

1. Don’t ignore their concerns. Your customers are key to you generating new business and disregarding what they say about your business will only hurt your bottom line. An article on Entrepreneur.com about reputation management states, “According to a study by Boston-based strategy and communication agency, Cone, 80 percent of consumers said they changed their minds about purchases based on negative information they found online.”
2. Think twice, respond once. From the adage “measuring twice, cut once,” you want to respond quickly — no more than 24-72 hours after the post. But that doesn’t mean you write a formulaic response. Make sure that your comment addresses the poster and their issue individually and personally. This approach will make your customer feel heard and valued.
3. Let’s not play the blame game. We’re familiar with the phrase “the customer is always right,” but  know that there are times when they are not. In those cases, your best bet is to acknowledge that they are not completely satisfied with your company and that you want to find a way that both of you can better the relationship going forward. You always want to reconcile if it’s possible. It shows are you are dedicated to your customer base and ensuring a high level of satisfaction both in person and online.
4. Don’t forget to brief your staff too! They need to know if a customer is unhappy so that they can avoid the same problem in the future. Their commitment, or lack thereof, to providing high quality service is definitely a contributing factor to creating and maintain a good rapport.

So you are basking in the glow of customer praise?  That needs to be addressed too. You want to still follow the steps above and let each customer know you appreciate their time and continued business. Thinking of offering a new service? Ask your customers for suggestions. Test it out on Facebook. This is your focus group; so, why not find out what your customers think when all it costs you is time… to help your bottom line.

The post Online Reputation Management: The Comments appeared first on Parthenon Publishing.

Billed as “the little keyboard for big fingers,” Minuum offers a unique alternative to the traditional keyboard for mobile devices. More than 8000 crowd-fund backers pledged in excess of $85,000 to support  this project, which has been in development for more than two years and is slated to be released in beta for Android devices in June 2013.

As you already know, the keyboard on many mobile devices isn’t perfect, taking up a disproportionate amount of the screen and not well designed for typing accuracy. Will Walmsley, Minuum’s hand-gesturing CEO and lead designer, has addressed both of these issues in creating an alternative keyboard that takes up much less space and uses predictive technology to increase accuracy. It’s still based on the QWERTY keyboard, so typing with it should be intuitive for most users. Other benefits include scalability to the user’s preference and magnification to access punctuation and special characters.

But wait, there’s more. Minuum’s streamlined, one-line design allows for uses in many ways that a traditional keyboard can’t match. For example, wearable technology such as watches, rings and glasses could easily employ this type of technology for data input.

Early user reviews indicate that this type keyboard may prove to be a viable alternative to the traditional keyboard, opening doors to uses for many new technology devices we seeing with more frequency in the press.

The post The Minuum Project appeared first on Parthenon Publishing.

Like politicians, the “campaign” has been the gold standard for marketers since the beginning of time, and rightly so. As a marketer you have priorities, and the campaign is the perfect vehicle to make consumers aware of those priorities. Pick a month, pick a product, develop a strategy, and voila – you have a campaign.

There is just one problem: Campaigns operate on a company-based timeline, which inherently ignores the timeline of the consumer you are trying to reach. In the world we live in now, the consumer’s timeline is right here and right now. It is real time, and as marketers this means meeting our audience in the moment, rather than during a scheduled campaign out there on the horizon.

Luckily, there are plenty of tactics available to marketers to accomplish this. While many companies have used social media and real time engagement to supplement campaign-specific marketing, these tools are powerful enough to stand on their own. The following tactics can help any company meet their audience where they are at any given moment.

Social Media is a Headliner. OK, OK, this one is obvious, but are you using social media to its fullest potential? Are you posting on Facebook every day? Are you posting on Twitter several times a day? Even on social media, our tendency is to create posts when we have something to say. But what we need to be doing is creating posts when our consumers want to listen. Create a content calendar at the beginning of each month that charts daily posts or topics. Consider writing and scheduling posts in advance to ensure a busy day doesn’t turn into a day with no social engagement. Lastly, it’s not called marketing media. Be social on these platforms; Engage, comment, follow and be present when your consumers are looking for you.

Websites Aren’t Static. Design website, check. Write content for website, check. Launch website, check. Now what? If you’re wondering why your customers aren’t coming back to your website every month, it’s likely because you’re not providing new information to engage them. A news feed or blog is a great method for bringing your audience to your website more often, while improving your odds for website conversions. If you pursue one of these tactics, consider what information a consumer would want. Hint: a mention in the news or press release won’t cut it. For example, for one of our hospital clients, we developed a special feed on their site and we write several stories a week related to wellness, general health, and interesting facts. When the ghost in Field of Dreams told Kevin Costner, “If you build it, they will come,” he might have also mentioned that regular stadium maintenance would be necessary to keep them coming back for more.

People Are Talking About You. Talk Back. In the age of real time marketing, managing your reputation is more important than ever. As a marketer, this allows you to participate in the conversation that is being held about your brand. Immediate tactics include claiming your business pages on popular review sites, setting up a monitoring tool to keep track of what’s being said on blogs and social media, and developing and executing a consistent plan to monitor and respond. Remember, the theme for this blog [and for better or worse, this world] is real time – monitor constantly, and respond as quickly as possible. Always be intelligent, thoughtful and respectful in your responses.

Campaigns aren’t dead. They are still incredibly useful marketing tools. But in acknowledging that, we also need to remember that the way our audience wants to receive information is changing. If you’ve already used these real time tactics in the past, you’re ahead of the curve. If you don’t employ these tactics in 2013, you’ll be left behind.

The post Is Your Brand Living In Real Time? appeared first on Parthenon Publishing.

One of the most important aspects of generating interaction is optimizing your feeds to hit your audience when they’re most likely to engage. Because it’s not worth sharing content if nobody is going to see it.

When I first started working on the business side of social in 2008, the art of timing my posts was highly unscientific. I’d watch the number of Facebook friends who were signed in to chat throughout the day, and when I felt there were enough, I’d post. Luckily, my method was fairly successful; even after I tested various times, I found that my friend gauge had given me a pretty good reading. For my audience, the best times to post turned out to be late morning or mid-afternoon. My guess was people were bored and catching up on Facebook at work.

Thankfully, community managers today don’t have to rely on such arcane methods to test the best times to post for their audience. There has been a fair amount of research over the last couple years into the best times to post to Facebook and Twitter. Bitly launched a study last year that actually had findings similar to my own – early afternoons during the week were good times on both networks. Media Bistro released a similar report in the winter. Both were large-scale studies that tested a very broad audience.

But as you know, every audience is unique. It’s not always wise to rely on broad studies to decide your marketing strategies. So I thought I’d share some of the tools available to help businesses (and individuals, if you’re so inclined) learn what times are best to post for their audiences. Here are some of my favorites.

Tweriod

This tool analyzes your followers’ Twitter patterns to determine what times of the day they’re most likely to be reading their feeds and posting. Armed with this knowledge, you can time your tweets to post when they’re most likely to be read and retweeted. A sample graph from my Twitter account is below. As you can see, my followers are most active between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. during the week. It wouldn’t do me a whole lot of good to tweet something in the wee hours of the morning if I’m hoping to for interaction.

PageLever Now

PageLever has been hailed as a savior for marketers looking for robust Facebook analytics. Their focus is specifically on the News Feed, and PageLever Now provides real-time analytics for your page. It allows you to track, within minutes, which posts are most active, how long they are generating engagement and when they fall off users’ feeds. Using this data, it will assist you in choosing the best time to schedule your posts.

Timing+

This is the best tool I’ve found for optimizing Google+ page sharing. It will look at past data to help you decide the best time to write a post on your page. Your posts are given ranks based on +1s, comments and shares, and then broken down both by day of the week and time of day. The tool will also show your most popular posts as part of its report, which can help you tailor post topics to what gets the most interaction.

Once you know what time your followers are most likely to interact with your business, you can begin writing in advance to share at an optimal time. But how do you make sure your posts go out at the times you’ve planned? Certainly you don’t have the free time to log in everyday at the perfect hour to craft a genius post. Good news, there are a ton of tools that will help you schedule Facebook, Google+ and Twitter posts in advance so that you can set things up days out and rest assured your audience will see your content when they’re online.

Next time I’ll share some of my favorite tools for doing just that.

The post Timing Your Social Posts: Make Sure You’re Heard appeared first on Parthenon Publishing.

It’s absolutely true that we measure our Facebook success by the number of “likes” we rack up. Watching that tally rise day by day is a form of instant gratification, and will always be important. But not as important as “shares.” 

Think of it as the difference between an introductory meeting with a potential customer and a recommendation from a happy client. The “like” may reflect nothing more than a passing interest. Shares are a measurable version of  “word-of-mouth,” which has always been the ultimate form of promotion for any brand or company. The “share” will help you build your Facebook community, and requires a thoughtful approach.

First, build your likes organically. Even though it’s an outright “ask,” the singer’s plea is aimed directly at a group of people who are likely to be interested in what’s happening at the club. There are plenty of tricks out there to bump up your numbers, but you want genuine “likes.”  Those are the people you need to build a community. Those are the people who will share your posts — as long as they have interesting information.

Use your easily available content. White papers and blog posts on your company’s website are there for the linking. Summarize the important points in a post and then guide visitors to the full article. Be sure the page has a “share on Facebook” button. If you send out an eNewsletter, do the same. Make any content that you think is shareable easy for a reader to share.

Don’t be afraid that readers won’t scroll. Conventional wisdom says short and pithy is the path to attracting web readers. That is true for straight information delivery, but sparking comments, discussion and connections requires more. Research shows that people value longer content because it has some thought behind it. Time is valuable, and we’ve all started to realize that reading a slew of empty listicles may be fun, but it’s often just  a time-waster. Longer content  gets more shares, too.

Establish yourself as part of the conversation, not a salesman or lecturer. When an interesting article related to your business appears, post a link to it along with your own comment. Found a cartoon or video that hits home in your business? Go ahead and post that. Proud of a new ad campaign? Share it and ask others to pass it along. Even straightforward news about your company should be posted, but be smart about it.

Keep track of what kinds of posts get shared. Those are the ones that are resonating, so continue along those lines with future posts.

The post Share and Share A Like appeared first on Parthenon Publishing.