Who knew a carnival could be online? Where are the rides? Do I have to put on one of those silly looking virtual goggle things? No? Oh. Well... I guess this will do, too :)
I've had a lot of fun and a few giggles reading everyone's blogs. Everyone did an awesome job and I can definitely say I've taken away some valuable information from everyone's contribution. So let's get started!
Matt Schrorder - Seeing the header image in the "Blog Carnival" post was hilarious. If you can laugh or become amused as soon as you visit a website or blog, then you know it's going to be a good visit, and it was! The "I'm feeling social (media)" was probably everyone's favorite post. It was a great way to invite and share with everyone your life and experiences. You brought a serious topic (divorce) and made it a little humorous throughout - that's a good way to ease the seriousness of certain topics. Great job!
Mike Nelson - One thing that makes a good blog is the writing style of the author. Mike's writing style makes the blog posts really easy to read and everything just flows smoothly like it should. Some topics like explaining an app (Vine and AA) or explaining intellectual property can be tough to explain without using big words and long sentences, but Mike did a great job of simplifying it and making it easy to read. Having an entire site/blog pretty consistently easy to read makes it a successful blog!
Kimberly Paulk - Another thing that makes a blog so appealing and good is the blog's visual appeal. Fancy, colorful, graphically mind-blowing sites/blogs are cool and all, but simplicity - to me at least - is equally, if not more, appealing than pages that are literally jumping out of the screen at you. Kimberly is another example of a great writer whose writing is detailed, easy to read and follow, and gets the full message across without any questions at the end.
Jamie Richards - Reading Jamie's blog I almost felt a sense of Zen in the writing. The way she feels and knows the topics she writes about definitely shows in her writing. Being able to explain something that would needs pages to elaborate on, Jamie did it in one simple post like her topic "It's just Facebook, who needs a plan?" and "Good writing is the key to success in social media." The posts are easy to read, detailed, and covers a lot of good points in a good sized post.
Great job, everyone!
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Adobe Connect Experience
Adobe Connect is a web meeting tool that enables users to connect with clients, colleagues, classmates, and friends and allow them to share documents, PowerPoint presentations, or their own desktop screen. It's an extremely useful tool to connect to anyone from anywhere on any device.
I recently used Adobe Connect to connect with my professor and classmates to give a presentation on Klout; a website that measures your influence on social media on a scale from 1 to 100. Using it for the first time was just a bit confusing. Not knowing what to do or what to look for to upload the PowerPoint presentation could make anyone a little anxious when you're on a time schedule. But it didn't take me too long to finally get everything situated and ready for action!
I recently used Adobe Connect to connect with my professor and classmates to give a presentation on Klout; a website that measures your influence on social media on a scale from 1 to 100. Using it for the first time was just a bit confusing. Not knowing what to do or what to look for to upload the PowerPoint presentation could make anyone a little anxious when you're on a time schedule. But it didn't take me too long to finally get everything situated and ready for action!
The "face" of Adobe Connect is pretty simple. You have your presentation and screen nice and big enough in the center, and all the attendees and a small chat box on the right side of the screen. You also have the option to enable your webcam or upload a photo of yourself to be shown on the top right corner.
A really cool and helpful tool that Adobe Connect has is "share your screen." This allowed me to share my own live desktop screen with the group to show them in real-time any examples or demonstrations I may have had. In this case, I showed a live view of what Klout's dashboard and user profile looked like.
Overall, the experience with using Adobe Connect has been a positive and very helpful one. It is definitely a tool that should be used more often professionally and academically for it has the potential to make an online meeting seem like an offline one.
Screenshots: https://connect.du.edu/p65jl28s9h8/
Monday, March 3, 2014
Using Social Media Correctly
Social media isn't just about posting status updates, uploading photos, and sharing funny cat videos. Well, it kinda is, but social media for businesses and organizations is a little more than that. Businesses and organizations have to use social media in a way that's going to do several things: increase awareness, engage with users, ask for feedback, customer service, and properly promote their product or service.
Twitter and Facebook have become the 'Customer Services Center' for many major companies including JetBlue, Southwest Air, L.L. Bean, and Starbucks. 1 in 3 social media users prefer to reach out to a brand for customer service through social media channels than on the phone. Because 90% of upset customers can be retained with great customer service, it's important to be able to act quickly, effectively, and positively to satisfy and give the customer a positive and successful experience, and one way of doing this is via social media.
Southwest's 'Nuts About Southwest' blog and Twitter channels have been very popular avenues for great customer service. Though Southwest is probably the most popular on social media among the airlines, JetBlue comes in as a close second. JetBlue incorporates humor and a little cleverness in their posts that makes reading their updates fun and entertaining.
Besides customers service, using social media is mostly about engagement. If you're not engaging, then what are you doing? Just posting information? Are people even reading it? One way to find out is to open up the discussion, ask for feedback, and invite readers to share their opinions and suggestions. If readers are responding and interacting, then that's probably a good sign of engagement. Readers want to feel connected to the brands they love, and one of the best ways of doing this is inviting them to the conversation. When announcing or updating a new product or service, asking the for the reader's feedback and reviews makes them feel heard and apart of the product and service process.
Resources: 10 Steps to Brilliant Social Customer Service (infograph) http://www.sentimentmetrics.com/blog/2013/07/24/10-steps-to-brilliant-social-customer-service-infographic
Blogging Best Practices
Blogging today has changed so much from the online journal it first began as. Today, almost every major company and organization has a blog. Depending on the company or organization, each blog is used differently, whether it's for product or service information/updates/announcements, customer service, informational (info in the same field or expertise), or simply to connect with the customers.
Regardless of the blog's use, there are a few simple best practices that blogs should follow. Of course this differs slightly from blog to blog and on the type of business, it is for the most part all relevant.
- Engage with the audience from the beginning. Readers most often pay close attention to the title and the first couple of paragraphs of the blog and then decide on whether or not they want to continue reading the rest of the post. This means the title and the first couple of paragraphs is your chance to make sure the reader continues reading the entire entry. Using humorous, whimsical, and playful titles are safe bets and they'll catch the reader's attention.
- Be casual. Many readers don't generally enjoy or respond to a formal or authoritative tone. They want to know and feel as if they're talking to a human being and not a robot reading off a script. So it's important to write in a casual, natural, almost conversational tone to keep the readers interest, attention, and engagement.
- Inviting to the conversation. Not all posts have to answer every single question. Sometimes it's good to have some questions unanswered. If the first few paragraphs of a post is to invite the reader into the door, the ending paragraphs should invite the reader into the discussion and allow them to engage.
- It's okay to promote. Usually a blog isn't the place to promote your business or service, but every once in a while it's okay to throw it out there. It's even more okay to throw other businesses and services out there! Whether you're promoting your own stuff or others' stuff, the basis of promotion is to get you noticed. Guest bloggers and link sharing are great ways to increase some awareness. By going after popular blogs and asking for a guest post, their post will link to their blog and back to your site, getting extra traffic from their readers and visitors.
Resources: Blogging Best Practices http://www.echoditto.com/insights/blogging-best-practices
How to Blog (Even if you can't write) http://socialmediatoday.com/hishaman/1545026/how-to-blog
Image: http://www.stayonsearch.com/httpdocs/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/
Image: http://www.stayonsearch.com/httpdocs/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/
Sunday, March 2, 2014
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Klout
What is Klout?
Klout is basically a tool to build influence. For decades we've relied on radio announcers, TV hosts, and traditional media to shape our opinions about things. Today, we can create and drive the conversation, voice our opinion, and connect with people all over the world using social media. Influence is the ability to drive action.
Oprah is a great example of an influencer; what she says goes! Her influence inspires millions to read titles from her book club and buy products she features on her show. Likewise, as PR and marketing people, one of our primary motives is to create an influential brand, product, or service. Klout helps us do that. Klout doesn't actually make you influential, it simply calculates how influential you are with some fancy algorithms, shows you this data and lets you know on what social networks you're most influential on, which ones need work, and it connects you to other influencers and people specifically influential in your area of interest.
How does it work?
As mentioned, influence is the ability to drive action. The more influential you are, the higher your Klout score. The Klout score measures your influence based on your ability to drive action. So when you sign up with Klout, it allows you to add all of your social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Foursquare, Tumblr, Wordpress, LinkedIn, YouTube - all of those and more! And it takes all of these networks and accumulates them based on your actions, what you talk about, and how people are reacting; are they liking it, commenting, and sharing? And it also takes real-world data from places like Bing and Wikipedia (if you're famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, of course), and it creates a score from 1 to 100 based on your social influence.
Image: http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/recruiters-klout/
The Power of Social Media
If social media isn't part of your Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) plan, then you're doing something wrong. Social media has become so important and crucial to many businesses and organizations' success. It's the easiest, fastest, and most affordable (usually) way to get awareness, exposure, and sales. With the millions of users from multiple social media websites, reaching a general or specific target audience is practically a piece of cake. Unlike with traditional media and paying for ads on the radio that no one might listen to, in a magazine that someone might not flip through for months, or a television commercial that a person might TiVo through - sending your ad through social media is guaranteed exposure.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOqRjNXxXBA
Welcome!
Welcome one and all! I'm going to be using this blog to post relevant information and fun stuff about eCommerce and social media... My specialty! Social media is the way to get anyone to listen these days. With social media you can go from no one to someone literally overnight. It only takes a photo or video to go viral before the whole world knows about you and wants to be your friend... Or enemy.
The increase in social media use and users is increasing every single day. As new social media websites are created, even more people are turning to them as a form of socialization. The infograph below shows just how much some of the most popular social media websites have made such a difference and influence in users' purchasing behavior, following brands on social media, and accessing those social media via mobile.
With this much growth, anything is everyone's business once it's uploaded and shared for the world to see. Using social media correctly, businesses, organizations, and individuals can have great influence on the web!
The increase in social media use and users is increasing every single day. As new social media websites are created, even more people are turning to them as a form of socialization. The infograph below shows just how much some of the most popular social media websites have made such a difference and influence in users' purchasing behavior, following brands on social media, and accessing those social media via mobile.
With this much growth, anything is everyone's business once it's uploaded and shared for the world to see. Using social media correctly, businesses, organizations, and individuals can have great influence on the web!
Image: http://infographicality.com/
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