Personal Brand Archives - Woolf Media & Marketing

September 21, 2011

Promoting Facebook Traffic–Keep ‘Em Coming Back for More

With this week’s changes to Facebook, there has been a rebellion among Facebook users. Facebook fans have turned in their rock concert lighters for torches are marching upon Mark Zuckerberg’s castle. However, despite the hoopla and gnashing of teeth, I don’t think there will be a mass exodus from Facebook any time soon. Facebook fans will continue to complain to their friends about what’s wrong with the new Facebook interface, and they inevitably will use Facebook to lodge their complaints.

Do you see the logic here? Facebook is popular, extremely popular with a current populace of 750 million active users spending over 700 billion minutes per month on the service. People are not going to abandon Facebook, which is why it continues to be one of the most important online locations for your personal brand.

How do you turn traffic into repeat visitors? That’s the big question. The short answer is, “be interesting.” However, that’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s one thing to post baby pictures for your friends or the latest stupid video from YouTube. But it’s something completely different if you are a company trying to build a brand following. You need to keep the content interesting and relevant.

The problem with social media is that it’s voracious and requires a steady diet of interesting material. So how do you keep it fresh?

Here are a few ideas I spotted earlier today in a post from HubSpot on Facebook Page Ideas You Haven’t Tried Yet. I plan to try some of these for my own corporate fan page to see if going to experiment with these and see how they work. Rather than posting all 25, I want to share some of my favorites. I’d love to hear what works for you?

Don’t link to your Twitter feed. As the article notes, Twitter and Facebook are very different, and a Twitter feed will clutter your wall with junk that will cost you followers.
Use comments and “like” buttons to promote interest. Show that you are following others, and they will follow you in turn.
Ask for ideas. What should be your next topic, or product, or book, or whatever. Open the floor to outsiders to share.
Pose an open-ended question. Let followers fill in the blank or answer an open-ended question that has universal appeal.
Post teasers. Post partial entries or interesting insights from your blog or corporate news to promote traffic.\
Tag real people in your photos. It will call attention to those photographed and all their friends.
Post a mystery photo. Ask for identifiers or captions or guess a location or something about the photo – think Where’s Waldo?
Share photos from a local meet up or meeting. People like to see themselves online, and this will tie the photos to your brand.
Post pictures of interviewees and industry experts. If you are talking to industry pundits, use their photos to drive traffic to an interview or insights posted on your blog or web site.
Use infographics. More infographics are being used to explain ideas (like the map above showing Facebook traffic). The right infographic can be eye-catching and compelling and tell an interesting story.

These are just a few of the ways to keep your Facebook content fresh and drive traffic. Be sure to keep your content relevant as well as interesting, and use whatever you post to promote your brand. Your followers or audience should know what to expect from your brand experience, and that extends to their social media interaction with your brand as well.

November 30, 2010

Would Sarah Palin Be Your Dream Public Relations Client?

I love seeing what my fellow professionals are writing about. I turn up lots of interesting tidbits and ideas from my fellow writers and marketeers, and I like to follow a number of bloggers who manage to serve up with fresh content on a regular basis. One of my favorite bloggers is Carol Tice, an accomplished freelance writer who is not only good at her craft, but good at promoting herself.

I now want to take a moment to share my admiration for successful freelance writers. The first freelancer I ever met was my Uncle Ed, who was very prolific and successful. In the age before the Internet, he would hear a new joke and mail it to Playboy or come up with a new story idea to sell to the New Yorker or Field and Stream. Uncle Ed was creative and a good marketer, able to sell a story idea to a wide range of magazines. Early in my career, when I was working as a magazine editor in Idaho, one of my good freelancer friends, Hank Nuwer, taught me about the discipline of freelance writing. Hank would rise early in the morning, around 3:00, and spend the next eight hours writing, whether the words would flow or not (which left the afternoon free for trout fishing). It’s that kind of focus and discipline that makes a successful freelancer.

And as I have been following Carol Tice’s blog, I can see she has the same creativity and commitment to her craft as a freelance writer. Her latest blog post about Sarah Palin inspired me, because the lessons she offers to freelance writers to help them promote themselves can be just as easily applied to any public relations endeavor. Her basic point is that Palin has figured out how to get attention, and keep getting attention. Whether you agree with her views or her politics doesn’t matter, she’s a good self-promoter. I have not seen her new reality television show, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” but it has been getting a lot of attention and a fan following. My wife mentioned the show to me over dinner this evening, and even though she is not a fan of Palin’s politics, she said her views of Palin have changed since she saw a couple of episodes of the show. Palin has the promoter’s gene, like Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum – she knows how to pack ‘em in and remember why they came.

And I wish some of my clients could learn from their example. I have been preaching social media to my clients for some time, and the problem most of them have is they are not interesting in being social. They don’t want to invest the energy in promoting their personal brand as an extension of their corporate brand. They lack that promoter gene.

So here is a quick recap from some of Carol Tice’s tips for freelancers, and why freelance writers or anyone seeking publicity can learn from the Sarah Palin promotional example:

Palin is fearless. She makes a mistake or gets called on some error she makes in a speech and it doesn’t phase her. She just keeps rolling on. I think many PR programs fail largely because of fear of failure. You have to be willing to get out there and take a risk.
Palin loves the limelight. Clearly, she is a believer in the adage that all publicity is good publicity, and she is willing to get other there and mingle to be known.
Palin is not easily embarrassed. She ignores the elephant in the room, like her daughter having a child of out wedlock while she’s running as vice president, and just sticks to her message. None of my clients would be able to show that kind of tenacity in a tough interview.
Palin has a game plan. She is not interested in abandoning the plan just because it didn’t work the first time. She’s refining her strategy and is determined to get elected to higher office.
Palin is clearly different. She is not like most politicians and clearly stands out in a crowd, which makes her easier to promote. And, of course….
Palin is memorable! She makes outrageous comments, challenges her critics head on, and leaves a lasting impression. If I could get more of my clients to use memorable quotes, anecdotes, and sayings that would make them memorable, they would be quoted more often. Too bad we can’t see Russia from Silicon Valley.

Love her or hate her, you have to admire Sarah Palin’s ability to effectively promote her own brand. She knows how to get the attention she wants and how to stay on message. I wonder who is brave enough to do her media training?

September 12, 2009

This Online Property Is Condemned

I was doing some research for a client project the other day and ran across an article in the New York Times talking about the high failure rate of weblogs. According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, only 7.4 million of 133 million blogs were updated in the last three months. That’s only 5 percent, which means 95 percent of blogs have been abandoned:

“…many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world. Getting started is easy, since all it takes to maintain a blog is a little time and inspiration. So why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?”

So why do people blog in the first place? Some see blogging as a path to fame and fortune. Others see it as a way to create an online forum to communicate with customers and prospects. I agree with an emerging breed of bloggers – creating a weblog is a means to extend your personal brand and promote an online presence.

When talking to clients about social media strategies, I tell them they need to think about the three C’s – content, conversation, and community. You need to start with the content in order to provide topics of conversation that ultimately lead to community. The blog is an ideal online icebreaker. It gives you a forum to talk about what interests you, both personally and professionally, and gives you a platform to share ideas with the rest of the world. A blog invites conversation where a web site only offers a sales pitch.

Blogging also makes you more three-dimensional, if not more interesting. It gives you an online soapbox to share ideas and concerns about topics that are of interest and make you stand out from the pack. Of course, there are more ways to build a web presence and engage in conversation these days. Facebook, for example, provides a great weblog platform with ready-made templates and discussions just waiting for you to adopt as your own. And then you have feeds on Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and elsewhere to help the content proliferate.

The objective is to lay a trail of online bread crumbs that lead back to web locations, converting followers into allies. Whether those followers become clients or partners or sources for referrals really doesn’t matter. The first step is to engage them in conversation.

So if you choose to blog, stick with it. The followers and the comments will ultimately find their way to you, in one form or another. It just takes commitment, focus, and a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your online brand. These days, Google is the first stop when people want to learn more about you. Wouldn’t it be better to let web searchers uncover the content that you created and that tells your own story? That’s why you should take charge of your online brand with tools like weblogs.