Tag: social media

5 tips for publishing content that matters to your fans

content that resonates with your fans

Don’t let what happened to Formula 1 happen to you. I watch Formula 1 racing since the mid-1990s. I saw its progression from being an entertaining sport where the drivers and team owners spoke their minds to an aseptic corporate communications machine. I lost touch. I stopped reading the news. These days, I watch the races that I pre-recorded the day before. I recalled when I stayed up late to see the start of the race live. Frankly, I missed the time when I couldn’t wait to read the F1 news before, during and after each race.

Sadly, this is what many marketers and business people are doing online. They lack personality. They feared to show their human side. They try to appeal to everyone. They fail to tell stories that resonate with their customers — current and potential customers. I think all this is a mistake.

Social Media: Exercising restraints before hitting the publish button

relevance checklist oreo wonderfilled

A couple months after I started blogging, I developed my brand relevance checklist. I did it to ensure that what I say online would always be consistent with my personal brand and with what readers expect from me. Whenever I get a new post idea, I write a post, a tweet, a status or I tell my opinions in a comment, I validate if I should publish it or not, up to the last moment. When I have doubts, I either press delete, or save it and think it over.

Two weeks ago, I was glad to hear Pam Clarkson (Mondelez Canada), Laurie Dillon-Schalk (Draftfcb) and Helen Androlia (Draftfcb) mentioning during the Oreo Wonderfilled session at Mesh Marketing 2013 that they also use a checklist to validate whether or not they should comment, participate in a conversation or create an original content. In a matter of fact, their checklist is quite similar to my own checklist.

Twitter Cards Fill a Gap in Social Sharing Tools

sharing tools missing source

My biggest pet peeve when it comes to Pulse, Feedly, Share This and similar tools is that these aggregators, readers and sharing tools don’t automatically include the Twitter handle of the author or publisher of the content that you wish to tweet. This self-promotion technique has to stop.

Some will argue that adding the right Twitter handle only takes a few seconds. It is true if you sit by your computer. To them, I will reply that it is another story if are on your iPad or iPhone and you don’t recall the Twitter handle of the author or the publication. Since 30% of Web traffic comes from tablets and smart phones these days, this is not a problem that we cannot ignore anymore.