Erika Heald Marketing Consulting

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April 3 Content Chat Recap: Coaching Executives for Social Media Content Readiness

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Deirdre Breakenridge Content Chat

April 3 Content Chat Recap: Coaching Executives for Social Media Content Readiness

This week #ContentChat was joined byDeirdre Breakenridge (@dbreakenridge) to discuss Coaching Executives for Social Media Readiness.

Q1: Why do executives need social media coaching?

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February 13 Content Chat Recap: An Introduction to Social Media Growth Hacking

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Neal Schaffer Content Chat

An Introduction to Social Media Growth Hacking

This week #ContentChat was joined by Neal Schaffer (@nealschaffer) who gave us a preview of the topic he’s exploring in his latest presentation and upcoming e-book, An Introduction to Social Media Growth Hacking.

Q1: What is growth hacking, and how is it different from traditional marketing?

[Read more…] about February 13 Content Chat Recap: An Introduction to Social Media Growth Hacking

Start the New Year Off Right With an Easy and Doable Weekly Social Media Plan

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2017 Social Media Plan

Did you meet your social media marketing goals for 2016? Or do you feel like you spent a lot of time on social media channels but just didn’t make any headway?

For many small business owners and solopreneurs, social media activities are just one more item on an already overflowing to do list—if they make it onto the list at all. Social media engagement then becomes ad hoc and reactive, which rarely leads to driving business results.

Social media has the potential to be a significant business growth lever, but only if you make it a priority, and commit to using it consistently to build relationships with your existing customer base, and your ideal future customers. It’s not enough to create an account on every new social media channel and wait for someone to engage you in conversation. To unlock social media’s potential, you have to set goals for what you want to accomplish and align tactics to those goals and track as you make progress against them over time.

What is your reason for creating and maintaining your social media channels? Are those channels meant to drive direct sales, increase traffic to your website, build relationships, provide customer support, or all of the above? Once you determine the why behind each channel, you can set appropriate goals to track your progress towards that goal. For instance, if your goal is to increase traffic to your website, a measurement to track progress against that goal would be the number of clickthroughs on the URLs you are sharing or the amount of referring traffic from social media as recorded by your website analytics. [Read more…] about Start the New Year Off Right With an Easy and Doable Weekly Social Media Plan

Your Lack of Social Media Guidelines is Killing Your Employee Advocacy Program

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Your Lack of SMM Guidelines is Killing Your Advocacy Program

Why You Need Social Media Guidelines

Over the past two months, between attending Content Marketing World and MarketingProfs B2B forums, I’ve had a number of conversations with marketers who are working on launching or revamping an employee advocacy program. Most of these conversations centered around finding ways to gamify and incentivize employees to share company content, or finding tools to make it easier for employees to automatically share content to their social networks.

Although these are important considerations to take into account in building an effective employee advocacy program, they don’t address one of the primary reasons that employees aren’t sharing about their employers on social media—they’re simply not clear on what’s allowed.

You may think that your intentions are obvious when it comes to encouraging employee social engagement. But recent research from Bambu by Sprout Social found one of the most common obstacles that businesses are facing is hesitation from employees. Specifically, 77.3% of those surveyed don’t feel encouraged to share company news on social media. The survey further found that employees aren’t sharing because they don’t know if their company is OK with them sharing news.

Having well-defined social media guidelines in place, and including social media training in new employee onboarding is a prime way to fix this. [Read more…] about Your Lack of Social Media Guidelines is Killing Your Employee Advocacy Program

Making the Most out of Social Media Marketing World

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Social Media Marketing World

Twitter is already full of pre-Social Media Marketing World shenanigans in San Diego. Since I’m not flying down until tomorrow, in the midst of my FOMO,  I have time to share a few thoughts, as a returning attendee, on how to make the most of this unique event.

  1. Join in on the pre-conference virtual networking. On Slack, there are channels for everything from technology marketers to craft beer lovers—join the ones that will connect you with like-minded folks! There’s also Facebook page and a Linkedin group to explore.
  2. Download the event app. Search the app store of your choice for Bizzabo. This is a great way to build and manage your sessions schedule, and planning meetups with other attendees.
  3. Pack backup device batteries. It’s not too late to get them sent via Amazon Prime to your hotel. You don’t want to run out of phone juice just as you’re snapping that perfect selfie on the U.S.S. Midway tomorrow night, do you?
  4. Bring your walking shoes. The Convention Center is steps away from the Gaslamp Quarter, a neighborhood full of cafes, restaurants, and shops you’ll want to explore. I highly recommend tapas and sangria at Cafe Sevilla.
  5. Eat tacos. Lots of tacos. Especially fish tacos. It’s pretty much mandatory. When I was in college, we’d hit up Casa de Bandini in Old Town (it’s since moved to Carlsbad), but more recently Huapangos  has been a favorite place of mine for margaritas and Mexican food.
  6. Visit the Zoo. San Diego’s Zoo is an amazing park, with some of the best-designed exhibits I’ve seen. It’s well worth the time and entrance fee.
  7. Bring a water bottle. It’s easy to get dehydrated between the socializing, sunny weather, and canned air in the session rooms. So keep that water bottle in hand and filled up. If you forgot to bring one, it’s likely you’ll be able to obtain one from a friendly conference sponsor.
  8. Prep your note-taking setup. I’m a big fan of Evernote and create a new notebook for each conference I attend. Within those notebooks, I create individual notes for each session I’m attending. I try to ID the speaker’s twitter handle in advance and add it to the note to make sure I’m tagging any quotes I share appropriately. I like that it’s easy to share my conference notebook with my team, to share the learnings and resources from the event.
  9. Talk to strangers. This conference has facilitation of networking down pat. I’m an introvert, and really appreciate how easy (and painless) they make it for you to find people you’re interested in connecting with.

I’m going to go get packed now. Hope to see you there!

3 Tips for Making the Most of Your Big Corporate Announcements

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Corproate Announcement Tips

Sure you could just send out a press release about your latest round of funding or your geographic expansion and be done with it, but where’s the fun (and audience engagement) in that? Get your employees amped up and your community excited by harnessing the power of your social channels.

1. Make it Personal

A press release inherently lacks personality — it’s a general mass communication after all. Put a personal spin on your announcement by creating a quick video (using your iPhone is OK) with your executive team sharing the big news. Then upload it to your YouTube channel, and embed it in that blog post you’re writing. But don’t stop there— if you’re announcing a new round of funding that’s earmarked for expansion into a new area, tap employees to share their excitement  about those new ventures via a short video as well.

Check out this great example from Social Bakers for some inspiration:

SocialBakers took the personal touch one step further in the video by inviting customers and fans to a speical Google+ hangout to get more details on how they intended to use the funding, and invited feedback from customers as well.

2. Create a Variety of Easy to Digest Content Blocks

Use a design tool like Canva to illustrate your announcement simply yet elegantly (like I did with this blog post), and include the image with all of your social posts. For extra social currency with a funding announcement, include the logos of your new investors in the image. Or take it another direction entirely, and share your excitement through animated GIFs like TrackMaven did recently.  You can also upload a few short slides to SlideShare summarizing your funding round details, including what the cash inflow will enable the company to work on next. And what about live tweeting the announcement? Many folks who wouldn’t click through to read a press release just might share or respond to your good news via twitter.

3. Pay it Back via Social

If you’ve done a good job in getting the word out about your big news, you’re likely to enjoy some social buzz and media mentions. Why not do a roundup of the coverage via Storify, and embed it a blog post? And if it’s a funding announcement, be sure to thank your investors—previous and current— in your social  coverage.

What are some of the other ways you’ve used social to make the most of great corporate news? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

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