How to Automatically Post Content to LinkedIn and Google+

Sometimes clients ask for things that you recommend they don't do, and still want it done anyway. One of the big things I come across is auto-posting of blog content.

Posting like this to Facebook, due to EdgeRank, is totally pointless - your content will never get seen as Mr. Zuckerberg and co. will see any third party app. (an external tool or internal Facebook Page add-on) as spammy (like the Poker apps of old) and devalue your posts accordingly. Automation in Facebook means your content is 80% less likely to be seen by your audience. Don't do it.

For some channels (like LinkedIn and Google Plus) it can be done, but the channels themselves don't offer it as a service and (certainly in Googles case) they seem to actively discorage it.

Personally I think all social media posts should be individually crafted for the best results. This should be done 'by the channel', with sympathy to the audience and client goals, and should offer your followers the best experience possible. Yes this is time consuming, but results always are.

Automation for business rarely works well.

Sometimes, however, the client just wants it posted when they publish and to the devil with the consequences. It's not rocket science to fudge this using an RSS feed, but to me this feels almost like grey-hat tactics. In reality, the client pays the mortgage and you can only preach about best practices for so long. This had to be done, so I had to find a simple way to make it happen. If you ever need to do this, here goes.

First set-up a new Hootsuite account for your client. I'm a big fan of Hootsuite. I've written before about creating custom search code for Twitter etc., and once you delve under the hood there's a wealth of good stuff we can turn to our advantage.

Next, on the start screen, click on the option in text at the bottom that says 'Add A Different Social Network'. If you're already logged into an existing account click the button that says '+ Add Social Network', under your list of streams. You'll then get the pop-up, below.

On the left you'll see a list of options - including Google+ and LinkedIn (this process works the same for both, so let's do LinkedIn as an example).

Click on the LinkedIn option, and you'll see the 'Connect to LinkedIn' dialogue.

You'll need to be logged in to your LinkedIn or Google+ accounts already to save any messing about. If you are, Hootsuite will sift through the Pages you belong to and those you Admin. It'll then give you the option to pick one.

Just select the Page you want to post to and click 'Finish Importing' down there on the bottom right.

The next step is to connect an RSS feed. If you have trouble finding the feed there's a good little 'how to', here. If you want to get an RSS feed from your Twitter, I wrote a post about that recently (and that has a whole extra level of potential).

Anyway, just nip back to the main interface (the 'dashboard') in Hootsuite and click on the cog symbol ('settings') over on the left. Then choose 'RSS/Atom'.

Next click on the '+' icon next to the 'My RSS/Atom Feeds' drop down (when you roll over it it says 'Add New Feed').

A box will pop-up with all the fields you need to import your feed and set up protocols. It's pretty self explanatory. Just add the RSS URL at the top, then click in the box that says 'Network to send feed items to' and attach your channel (double check it's the right one, those social channel icons are tiny).

You can leave the scheduling stuff, unless you have specific requirements, but it's good to put something in the 'Prepend text to each message' box to say it's yours and from your blog or whatever. Above I'm just using our agency as an example, I'd NEVER do this for channels I personally manage.

Press 'Save Feed' (bottom right), and Bob's your Uncle.

Remarkably painless, once you figure it out. I still maintain there's no substitute for manually crafting posts, as many of these will be truncated and won't have any call to action or other useful stuff, but if you have to do this I can testify it works.

I feel slightly dirty. I'm going for a shower...

4 Pieces of Advice for Starting out in Digital Marketing

My Dad gave me 4 pieces of advice when I was young. If you know my Dad you'd know he's a bit 'special', all be it in an awesome way. They were as follows:

• Never fall in love from behind.
• Don't set fire to yourself.
• Never play cards with a man who has the same first name as a city.
• Never drop a baby boy on his head...

I rest my case.

I was thinking about this the other day, having just narrowly avoided setting fire to myself, and I thought about applying this to what I do and wondered what 4 pieces of trite advice I'd give to younger folks setting out into the work in on-line marketing. I have no offspring of my own, which is a plus for humanity, so here we go:

“The more difficult something is, the more rewarding it is in the end.”

1) Go Back to Basics
The brand is the core of everything... 90% of the old pillars of marketing still work in the digital realm, though admittedly with a twist or two. Simple branding is the core of all businesses. B2B, B2C, big, small, whatever. Just because we work in digital doesn't mean this is something we can ignore. If you want the edge in what's now a growing and competitive area, you need a proper brand strategy (more than you need air).

Your brand is your promise to your customer, and your internal and external guidelines for communication. It's what sets you apart from the competition, and it's what tells your clients what they can expect from your and why they should trust you to provide the goods and services they need in exchange for their hard earned dollars.

Every damn thing you do comes from your brand strategy. Without it you can't even identify the key messages you'll be communicating about the product or service. Your voice, your distribution channels, what images you use, your motivations, where you concentrate your efforts, how you word your content, the lot. Frankly, you can't do an effective job without having a strong foundation to build on, and that means being comfortable with how we do the basics.

2) Remember you Know Jack, and Shit (and Jack left town).
Marketing is an agile process, or should be. Looking at the figures will give you insight.

Never presume you know how the target demographic will react. Make sure everything is measurable, and keep measuring it to see if it works. If it works, why? If it doesn't work, fiddle with it or scrap it.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes, but learn from them when you do. Get a bit nerdy about numbers, but don't let it stifle your creativity.

3) Be Bloody Amazing
Boring is, well, boring.

The best people I know (at what we do) have a drive to learn all the time. They are a little bit obsessed, at the exclusion of a lot of other things, about using what they know and about leaning more.

They are polymaths. They have a myriad of interests, skills, and obsessions. They suck up information like a Dyson does dust bunnies. They read industry blogs and feeds. They tweet, and listen to industry influencers. They write, and force themselves to learn as they do. They experience life by going to conferences and talking to other like-minded peeps. They travel, or go to the theatre, they go on courses or to conferences, or love cinema, or create in virtual worlds. They produce video, or audio, or write, or mentor. They seek the opinion of others and amalgamate ideas into something greater than the sum of it's parts.

Truly dynamic people, who stimulate debate, and action, and put IN to the Internet (we still spell that with a capital 'I', right?) have the ideas - and for many of us this doesn't come naturally. These are the people who are more than just consumers of other peoples data. They pro-actively contribute, and learn in the process. You have to work at it at first, but once you start the ball carries on rolling.

4) Get Sign-off From the Client
I've worked in agencies, or for organisations with multiple stakeholders, for most of my working life. I've learnt this one from my own folly and from watching the folly of others. I'm serious here.

Get them to sign the initial contract. The design doc. The brand messaging doc. The keyword research. The marketing plan. Every damn thing where a decision is involved that will impact the final result. Most importantly, get them to sign to say the work is finished (based on the original brief they signed to commit to a pre-defined conclusion). No surprises, for all parties.

If it's all signed off it doesn't come back and bite you in the ass, and also avoids feature creep. Remember: If it's signed-off, feature creep turns into up-sell.

Trust me on this last one. In fact, get it as a tattoo.

So there you go. I've been working with a few bright sparks from Agency Life at Manchester Uni. recently, who might find this amusing. Yes, it's all pretty obvious and pretty basic, but so was my dads original advice (which has always stood me in good stead).

Oh, and find a really bloody good accountant...

3 Tools for Creative Social Media Images

A picture paints a thousand words, if you believe Frederick R. Barnard or Telly Savalas, and images certainly help boost EdgeRank in Facebook, stand out in G+ (which has a few built in tools of it's own), and make for something to populate the profile with (over on the left of your main page) in Twitter.

There's a tonne of photo manipulation tools out there that link to your profile, from Instergram to Hipstermatic, and all the tools like them that FourSquare and the others have crow-barred into their mobile interfaces - which are fun to play with though really social media channels (or channel supports) in their own right. This is not what I want to highlight. What I want to share is a few tools for making custom images, because sometimes you need something a bit special and it's these that get the likes and get passed around. Yes, it takes some effort, but effort is invariably rewarded with community support. What we're looking for, to be blunt, is the more 'pinable' kind of stuff without needing the skills to do all this in Photoshop.

ReciteThis

Ok, I love this tool. I use it a lot for more fan based channels where I want to highlight quotes or whatever, but sometimes for clients too. If you need a simple sign or graphic, this is fried gold.

here's one I made earlier

As with all these tools it's not the tool but how you use it that counts. Think about how to get the best out of this and make sure it's of value.

Let's say you're my good lady wife, with a new Steampunk cooking book coming out this year. How about using it for seeding recipe ideas or quoting Victorian literature about food? Say you're an accountancy firm like my buddies over at Sedulo (who rock all over social by the way). How about picking out a 2013 Budget quote that's going to affect business? Posting topical quotes, inspiring messages, home-made haiku, tips, hints, whatever suits the channel or brand and will be fun for the community, will help spread the good word and show you care enough to make something just for them.

PicMonkey

I've got some deep admiration for this as an online app. It's apps like this that really give you an insight into where the web is heading in the future, when tools like this will be in the cloud instead of locally on your machine. PicMonkey, even the free version, does pretty much everything (and does it very stylishly) that you need to edit imagery for your communities. Stickers, textures, adding text (with a decent font bank), some decent touch-up tools, etc. The 'Themes' area has some nice groups of tools to help you make a start. You can see a features list on the site. You can also edit screen grabs and stuff with the Chome add-on. Nice.

The opportunities are fairly obvious, but I find I use it mostly for making easy collages of images and for adding text.

Animated GIFs

When I make a GIF (on the Mac) I use GIF Brewery, which goes for a song at £2.99 in the app store. It's pretty no-frills, but it lets you crop and save presets and that's really all you need.

Animated GIFs are pretty hot right now, and have been getting a resurgence since the advent of Tumblr. I've always had a massive soft spot for them and used to do them the old fashioned way with stills in Fireworks. They work great in G+, and for blogging obviously, but Facebook and Pinterest (while they recognise them) don't animate them. Google Image search also has an animated image search now, so it's a nice little nod for SEO moving forwards. I also like them (if subtle) for Twitter profile images, where appropriate.

Animated images give a special kind of impact, offer a slice of life, attract the eye, get passed around, and often use imagery taken out of context to make a point or (with text) to highlight a message. Choosing what clips you use, and where and how you use them, is the difficult and creative part. Big corps. are now using them for movie trailer previews, the possibilities are a lot of fun.

a special kind of impact

I'm told that GIF Animator is good on the PC, and Gickr and GIFSoup (which also has a big collection of pre-made stuff) are a couple of the better ones on-line - but to be honest I've not tried them. For smartphones there's GifBoom for the iPhone and Android, which let's you do the necessary live and for free - I've tried this but couldn't really find a use for it at the time. If you find anything good let me know, I'd love to add them if you've got recommendations.

So there you go. Something a bit different. Social channels are catering for images and the web is getting more visual. Making something unique, putting into the web (and not regurgitating the same old drok) is where the shares are. Go make something cool.

Leveson Policy Needs to be Reviewed for Bloggers

As Chairman of Enquiry of the ongoing investigation into the practices, culture and ethics of the press, Lord Leveson wants to regulate the print media. He has suggested that judges should have the power to award full costs and ‘exemplary damages’ against any unregulated publishers.

Having worked in publishing in the past, for the DMGT and Associated Press for 7 years, I’ve been keeping a casual eye on this. What he's proposing are fairly strict measures, and the press need them (not Associated I must add, to my knowledge) but this policy is steeped in ambiguity. It's very possible Lord L only ever saw this new legislation applying to the large and unwieldy print publishers and not to websites (unless they belonged to these publishers), but that’s not something that’s made it into the small print.

incredible naivety

What I’m seeing now, in the current proposal before the House of Lords on Monday, is that these regulations apply to any size of publishers and are going to apply to all UK websites. This is totally bonkers. They also appear to apply to anyone who generates content for (and publishes) a blog. This could have extreme repercussions, with ordinary blog publishes and small businesses potentially falling foul of crippling regulation and forcing many to stop the publishing that is an essential part of their SEO, community support, and content marketing. If there's more than one author of the blog, it looks like they'll also be forced to join a 'self regulator'. You can see a list of the current rulings, and their wording, here.

It seems to me that this policy needs to be seriously reviewed. There's serious lack of clarity in the current proposal, and wording and delivery like this is frankly naive in relation to the developing digital landscape of UK business.

As stand alone entities, websites where never a part of the phone hacking scandal. They shouldn't be required to be crow-barred into self-regulation in this way. It’s frankly crazy, and this needs to be reviewed before going before the House of Lords on Monday.

If you feel as I do, please take a look at the facts and consider adding your signature to the Open Rights Group campaign on this matter.

Every signature helps, and even if it doesn't it'll make us feel like we tried.

How to Identify Your Brand Evangelists

In social media, brand evangelists are worth their own weight in gold. These are the fine folks who are behind your product or service enough to pro-actively tell the rest of the world about it with little provocation and with maximum gusto. These are the folks who 'share', 'plus', 'like', 'comment', contribute, and are truly passionate about spreading what you do out there in the world.

identifying those who'll spread your message

As a percentage of your overall community it's difficult to say how many you will have, but you will have them (to varying degrees). Initially they will probably be staff or family members, but if you keep a community active and engaged you'll soon start to see more - from experience I'd say it's probably around 1 in 300. Without going to the trouble of paying for software to identify these people for you (you'll want to be considering this when a social channel goes over around 5000ish, as that seems to be the 'confusion tipping point' (for me anyway)) just create a decentralized (Google Docs) spreadsheet of any individual comments, the name of the person doing the commenting, and the name of the forum, blog, review site (like Yelp or Review Centre), or social media channels (Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) where the comment appears. Comments tend to stand out better then simple button clicks ('likes', yada, yada) or shares, and commentary is a stronger mark of evangelism. If you find an individual (or firm) chatting about you across multiple channels they're definitely what you're looking for, but people can be passionate in just one channel too (especially social) so that's not a dominating indicator. What they are saying, and the frequency they are saying it, are usually the big clue.

NB: Just a quick note, a Brand Evangelist is not necessarily an Influencer. Influencers are the peeps with the big networks and followings, but they may not give a pair of fettered dingos kidneys about you or your brand. If you can get a Brand Evangelist who IS an Influencer then that's great, but for this exercise they're two different things - as a casual observer I like to use the Klout tracker Chrome extension for Twitter to keep an eye on Influencers who might be passing stuff to their followers, and I run down my list of recent engagements in the 'connect tab' to see if anyone stands out. I'm not a massive fan of the likes of Klout, Trackr, or Peer Index as (if the truth be known) I don't honestly trust the accuracy of their figures - but they are a handy first indicator.

Fostering NEW Evangelists

creating people who'll sing your praises

To make new evangelists in social media you need to find new opportunities to make conversations. This means going out there and talking, giving things away, soliciting reviews, all the usual stuff. Reach out and partner up with suppliers, people who share similar ethics (like green recycling policies, or those who are involved in the same charity work as you, etc.). Be the 'real deal' and join conversations about things you or your brand are interesting in - don't just flog your widgets. You need to help people, talk to people, and give them practical solutions. Try using social to run simple competitions, even just for small fun prizes - basically, stimulate people to talk about you.

The obvious method is to just push the boat out a bit and to give good service - for example, my break light went out and I was passing the dealership I bought my car from so I popped in for a bulb. They insisted on fitting it for me, and not charging me for the bulb. I'll be an evangelist for Smart of Derby now forever. It cost them 10 minutes, a bulb, and a smile, and now they have my good will across my entire network of friends, fans, and followers.

Tools You Can Use

If communities get too unwieldy for manual comment collation, or you want to examine trends by individuals in 'likes', 'shares' etc., you're going to have cough up some pennies. Tools can be well worth it as part of a short-term out reach campaign, or for larger communities over longer periods. There's plenty out there for Influencers, but not that many for Brand Evangelists (i.e. filtering out the Kool Aid drinkers in specific communities).

ViralHeat is pretty simple, probably the best for this, and has a 14 day free trial then only $9.99 a month. There's also Twesier, which has has a Pro package that let's you sort your friends and followers by popularity, influence, activity levels, etc. with 7 days free trial and then £9.99 a month.

What To Do With Evangelists

Once you know who these people are it's time to get creative. How about inviting them to events or to come and take a look behind the scenes? How about sending them new products or asking them about new services? How about just sending them a bottle of wine when they've just a special occasion, and saying congratulations? How about giving them some money off codes to spread around amongst their friends. There's lots of options, and they all foster sign-up, inbound links, good will, word-of-mouth, and eventually sales. It's really down to what suits the brand personality and to what suits your wallet.

Hope that's of use, and if you know any more tools for specifically identifying a Brand Evangelist (over influencers) please let me know, I'd love to add them.

The Pros, Cons, and Alternatives to Buying Friends, Fans, and Followers

There are services out there who will sell you YouTube 'views', 'likes' and 'subscribes', Vimeo plays, Tumblr likes, Facebook follows and 'likes', Twitter followers, Instagram followers, even SoundCloud plays, in fact pretty much anything you need to boost the ranks of your social channels if numbers are all you care about.

Whether I think this is right or not - I often have to explain the benefits and the downfalls of this for clients because, put simply, most of them ask. Most people see these services and think "Why shouldn't I throw fifty quid at this to get the ball rolling and get the Pages hopping - can you do this for us Nik?" Let's assume community growth is part of the strategy, here's the impartial answer I give them:

The Pros

Having a healthy number of followers boosts credibility, meaning others are (psychologically) more likely to sign-up and join the community, watch the video, eat the Soylent Green, whatever, because they believe it is of value because of the perception of worth indicated by the 'likes', 'plays', 'friends', 'followers', etc.

It's probably cheaper than social ads.

The Cons

Most of these services are compleatly untargeted and/or fake accounts, even if they claim to be otherwise. As a consequence people don't care about the Page or account they are following, and their interaction stops here. If you could get blood out of a stone Mount Everest would be covered in black pudding factories, it's not, and it's the same thing trying to squeeze interaction out of bought friends, fans, and followers.

Friends might not be as reliable as you think...

There is an ongoing drop off to followers and subscribers that will continue indefinitely. A percentage of these accounts are real people, and eventually these real people will realize you are clogging up their stream with news and stuff they don't care about (probably because your chatting away in a different language or not about Justin Bieber). Eventually they will unsubscribe, and user numbers will start to fall almost immediately - this is especially true with Twitter where many of these are opt-in-bulk-follow-back arrangements.

Channels, notably Facebook, are cracking down on this. Back in August they announced a new automated system to weed out fake accounts and followers, and said they'd penalise numbers accordingly. There's not much point paying for followers if they are going to be removed automatically. If they take this further and penalise EdgeRank, for example, you're in a world of pain. Technically it's against most sites terms and conditions, so you also run the risk for getting your whole profile wiped - which I doubt makes for shits and giggles.

The Alternatives

So I'm going to look at this simply. How would I spend that £50 (or less) to get better results?

• Targeted Facebook social ads (or Promoted Posts if you've got something good to say). At least this 50 quids worth of targeted accounts will care about what you do and you might actually get some shares or sales out of it. How about some LinkedIn ads to target companies that need your services? If you need a bit more money signed of for this, how about creating your own and ploughing anything you make on blogs AdSence back into your social marketing? If you go for tight local targeting that £50 will be much better spent.
• Contests, sweepstakes, giveaways. I've always liked WildFire apps for this, they keep everything under correct terms and conditions and they're cheap as chips.
• Fan-specific (you gotta be a 'liker') coupons and discounts (see WildFire apps again)
• A reveal page. If they don't click 'like', they don't get the good stuff. Here's a simple how to.
• Do some outreach. Here's a trick I use for Hootsuite to find Twitter peeps. The rest is chatting in groups on LinkedIn and being happy to answer some questions on the likes of at Quora, Yahoo Answers, and commenting on blogs and Tumblr etc. It'll cost you nothing but time.
• Posting awesome content - take some time to create some white-paper quality stuff, and to spread it around creatively. With a bit more time build an Editorial Calendar and some user personas, and get your colleagues in sync to produce some serious stuff that people will actually want to read.
• Using viral apps like Questions and Offers. It's all there in Facebook's interface, ready to rock.
• Asking f/f/f's to tell their buddies (which is free, but you gottta give them a reason to do so).
• Embed video everywhere. Videos on YouTube are great for long tail search, but embedding Facebook vids in your blog content is a greater reason for people to click-through to your community.
• Check your literature and website. Are your social channels EVERYWHERE? Have people got the URL and links in front of them so that they can easily find your Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, G+, Flickr, whatever?

I could add a lot more alternatives, but I'm starting to bore myself. Weighing up the pros and cons seems to have obvious results. Personal biased aside, that's a lot you can do with just a tiny bit more effort that will be a lot more effective than paying for numbers. There's no substitute for effort, and that's where you should place your £50. If you don't want the hassle yourself, imagine that money is going towards an hours work and to someones wages within your company, it's often a lot easier to justify to the powers-that-be.