I recently wrote a guest post for the Design Rangers Camp Blog on how to blog for your small business (and why blogging is still important in the age of Facebook and Twitter).
Here’s the link for blogging tips and tricks.
Happy blogging!
Friends, readers, listeners, viewers… I’ve just joined the team over at At Length, a really lovely venue for ambitious, in-depth (read: long) works of writing, music, photography and art. I’m terrifically excited to be AL’s community manager and help promote the magazine as well as its content. Using social media to promote good words, thought-provoking images and meaningful music? Well, that’s just rad.
The magazine publishes several times a month – and the line-up for 2010 is looking phenomenal. You can find me tweeting for At Length here. Find us on Facebook here. We’ll also be sending a monthly email to keep in touch and make note of recent content – sign up for the emails here.
Hooray!
[I contributed the following post the Design Rangers Camp Blog, the virtual outpost for my favorite field guides to the creative world. I'm cross-posting it here for you to enjoy!]
As you reflect on your marketing efforts in 2009 and prepare for 2010, it’s easy to focus on what you accomplished (or didn’t) and what kinds of strategies will meet your needs going forward. But before you design a plan that’s all about YOU, remember that no marketing will work unless you put your customers first.
Ask yourself the following question: how often do you listen to your customers? ok
One of the reasons I enjoy Twitter (and microblogging on sites like Facebook) so much is that it captures small moments in time, records compelling pieces of insight, and provides an efficient opportunity to share a wide variety of things I consider important (for personal, professional and political reasons). I find it immensely satisfying to read these tweets, posts and updates as meandering narratives of our days.
But it’s also insightful to reflect on the patterns of our microblogging, and to see what (if anything) is illuminated by them. So at the end of this long and mostly unplugged holiday weekend, I generated a Tweetcloud based on language analysis of my Twitter posts for this past year. As a reflection of what I hope I’m contributing to the social universe, it’s both cheerful and motivating.
Hooray!
Here’s the link.
I had the good fortune of catching a number of great sessions at the IABC Social Media Conference in New York last week, many of them by representatives of large companies like Nokia and Virgin USA. Many of those sessions reinforced the importance of a high-level approach that integrates social media with marketing and communications strategies when developing and maintaining a social media program. To echo the smart words of Julie Cottineau from Virgin: You don’t need a social media strategy; you need a brand-building strategy. This is something I find myself emphasizing to companies of all sizes, but especially to smaller organizations.
Because smaller organizations often forego strategy, it’s easy to believe they’re at a disadvantage as social media evolves. Not necessarily true! In fact, being small has a real upside when it comes to social media. ok
