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I love Buffer. It is one of my favourite apps of 2011 … and it now comes with some funky new features. Yes, I loved the addition of Facebook to Buffer, but now you can add content straight from Reeder, Zite & Flipboard.

Rather than me go on and talk you through how to do it, Michelle MacPherson (one of the internet marketing people I follow with interest), has put together a useful video showing exactly what to do and how to do it.

Enjoy the new Buffer features!

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

The only constant about Facebook is their joy of changing things. Many businesses have embraced Facebook Pages as a way to build a community around their business, but the latest round of Facebook changes seem to be having an impact on many business pages with many businesses pages commenting that engagement on their pages had dropped away recently.

Facebook’s latest change surrounded your newsfeed – where it presents to you stories that it thinks are the most important to you. You can change to see all the stories … well sort of.

Over the past few weeks I have been watching what is appearing in my newsfeed and it appears that Facebook only feeds some of the business pages people have liked into the feed – not all. The majority of posts on business pages are not appearing in the newsfeed. This has a significant potential impact on a number of my clients.

So I ran two different experiments to test the issue:

1. The “Like rampage”: I tested to see if I actively liked or commented on a page, whether or not subsequent posts would appear in my newsfeed – testing the idea that perhaps they were only showing information where I had actively engaged with the page.

“Liking” a post on a page had zero result on later page posts appearing in my newsfeed. If I made comments on a page, there was an increased chance that all the subsequent posts would appear in my feed (but no certainty).

2. The “What am I missing” test: In this test I created a List in Facebook of all the pages I had “liked”.  I checked the new List results to see what I had been missing. At least 90% of all updates were not appearing in my regular newsfeed.

All I can hypothesise is that Facebook is actively giving preference in the newsfeed to people and not business pages – which means that there is a high potential that a large proportion of the people who may have “liked” your page are not seeing any of your updates in their newsfeed.

If people can’t see your updates, they can’t engage with your business.

My personal campaign against being told what I am allowed to see …

I am not a big fan of arbitrary censorship, so I have now created a “Mega Newsfeed” List – with all of my friends and all of my pages – it is not elegant, but at least I see everything and can make choices about the information I choose to engage with.

If you want to see everything as well, here’s a quick primer in creating your own Mega Newsfeed.

1. Start by clicking on the word “List” in the left hand column of your Facebook default page
2. Click on + Create a List in the top right hand corner
3. Name it and then click “Create”
4. Click on Manage List and then choose Add/Remove Friends
5. Manually click on all your friends (a blue box and tick will show) – Click Done to Save it
6. Click on Manage List and then choose Add/Remove Friends (again)
7. This time click on the box top left that says “Friends” and then change the drop down box to Pages.
8. Manually click on all the Pages (a blue box and tick will show) – Click Done to Save it
9. Once you have your list created, hover just to the left of it and click on the pencil. Mark your list as a favourite. It will then move to the top section of your FB page.
10. Once again hover to the left of it and click on the pencil to rearrange the order. You can move it right to below the Newsfeed. When I go to Facebook, I now ignore my general Newsfeed and just go to my list. I also go through my list once a week and add in new friends and pages (did I mention the workaround is not elegant!)

I would love to hear what happens when you create your own List – how much have you been missing?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – SEO Copywriter

I was having a debate with a colleague the other day – should women take their husband’s surname when they get married? Yes, I know … it is still culturally expected in Australia for a woman to take her partner’s name, but in my book, you need to look at it from a marketing perspective and not just a social one.

Women are marrying later than in our parent’s generation, and for many women, they have built a solid reputation (brand if you would like to put it another way) around their name. If you go to any search engine and type in a person’s name, you will see LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media links back to that name.

Your name is your personal brand on the net.  So, what happens when you change your name? I many cases, you cease to exist. Potential employers or clients can’t find you, and you no longer have a body of work to back up your credibility.

To get over the cloak of invisibility, you need to build a whole new brand around your new name.

And just like any rebranding exercise, you need to ensure people can link the old brand to the new brand, meaning they need to be able to find your old name and then be referred to the new name.

At its simplest, if you have a website your About Us page should have both your old name and new name in them. If your website is under your personal name and not your company name, so www.marysmith.com for example, then you have a whole new can of worms to unravel. At the lowest level, you need to set up redirects from your old site to your new site.

To be honest, if you have any form of internet presence at all, you need to look at hiring an SEO company to help you sort out links to your new name and to get a net presence again. And just like any SEO strategy, this process takes time and money.

From my personal side of things, I did change my name when I married, and kept my ex-husband’s name when I divorced. Why? I experienced the loss of my history when I changed my name the first time and know what a hard slog it was to rebrand … I didn’t want to go through it all again.

Would I ever change my name again? Only if I wanted to disappear into obscurity on some remote tropical island.

So what about you? What do you think? Should women change their names when they get married?

Ingrid Cliff (nee Moyle)

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Have you noticed that good spelling seems to be going the same way as the dodo? When I was going through school, every blackboard would have the ubiquitous spelling list on it, with words that progressively became harder as you travelled through High School.

Somewhere in recent years, spelling seems to have dropped off the radar. But good spelling does matter!

Poor spelling risks lives

A few weeks ago, there was a major chemical fire in Canberra. The emergency services sent out an alert to local residents via SMS telling them to remain indoors. The problem was that the alert had a number of key spelling errors. Apparently a number of elderly people ignored the warning – after all it just looked like on of those spam emails you often get, complete with poor spelling.  Nerida Gill blogged about the problem. Luckily in this case, no one died from the spelling errors – but it was an unnecessary risk.

Poor spelling costs your business great candidates

Last week my daughter was applying online for casual employment. She is a top student, barely takes any days off, and gets straight A’s for effort & behaviour. In other words – a great candidate for a junior casual. She went to lodge her application on the Hungry Jacks website – and she called me over to look at their site. It was full of spelling mistakes (which could be overlooked at a pinch). These were compounded by simplistic and laughable “screening questions”. Her comment – “well they are obviously not a good place to work for – they don’t really care about their HR if they don’t check their careers site”. Hmnnn.

Poor spelling distracts from your message

Recently, a chain of tile stores took out a very expensive TV campaign based on their slogan “You’re not going to believe it”.  The slogan was repeatedly sung, while the words flashed up regularly on the screen … only problem was the printed words said “Your not going to believe it”.  Ok – what’s a few letters between friends. But all I could see was this typo. And the ad was repeated week after week – with no edits. So all I could think about was how many people it takes to make a TV ad. You have writers, voice over talent, graphic designers and ad agencies.  They never have anything “go live” without approval from the client. How many people in that loop saw the ad – and how many people obviously can’t spell?

When it really does matter, you need a proofreader to check over your work.  No-one can pick up all their own errors (as my blog attests).

OK – getting off my soapbox now.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Brisbane Copywriter

Australians, as a group, love technology. But some things they have been slower to adopt than others.

We have been slow to pick up on the QR Code trend – which is massive in many Asian countries and in the US. QR Codes? Those square bar code thingies that when you click with your smart phone, take you to discount coupons, websites and more information. You can’t go past a restaurant or store in many overseas countries without passing a QR Code as businesses try and entice you in their doors with menus, discounts and information about what is beyond the front door.

We have also been slow to pick up on online grocery shopping.  Which is why I love this creative idea from Tesco in Korea. The campaign took out the top prize at Cannes this year for the best marketing campaign in the world, so it is worth watching!

Why do I love the concept? For starters, people learn how to respond to new ideas by watching others. By having an extremely public display of how to order online groceries using QR codes, Tesco is killing two birds with one stone. They are teaching both online grocery shopping and how to use QR Codes.

They have tapped into the same strategy that the father of the modern shopping cart Sylvan Goldman used when teaching people how to use shopping trolleys. And once people see how fast and easy it is, they are more likely to come back for a second or third go (assuming their experience was a smooth one in the first place).

I also love how they have taken the concept of “impulse buying” to a whole new level. Most people get off their daily commute from work and head to their local store to pick up their groceries as part of a routine. By putting a virtual store in their way, Tesco is breaking their pattern.

And by putting up life size images of products in glorious colour, they are breaking down the other mental barrier to buying online – research a small photo and tiny description are not as effective as when people can see and touch your product. Life sized images bring to mind the possibility of touching the product, which hopefully should reduce the barrier (although neuro-marketing research by Antonia Rangel has raised questions about this approach).

So … what do you think? Would you try buying groceries online from your local train station if you saw loads of other people doing it?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Brisbane Copywriter

Google+ is another major social media site, put out by the Google behemoth. Think of a mash-up of Facebook & Twitter, with a few new bits thrown in and you get the gist of it. It has been out beta testing for a few weeks to a limited audience mainly tech heads, early adopters and marketers at this point. And I’ve been quietly playing in the sandpit with the other Google+ kids and have a few observations.

Psych Comments

Ok. You know I love people watching, so watching people play with new online toys was an opportunity too good to pass up, so I jumped at the first Google+ invite that came my way (thanks Paul!).

Imagine walking into a room where nobody knows the rules. Where there are no boundaries or history of what is acceptable and what isn’t. What happens?

There was a great model developed by Bruce Tuckman, that described the four stages any group goes through in order to develop:

• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing

Forming is when everyone is trying to work out the rules, work out who is boss and who is the leader (not necessarily the same person). People tend to be independent and go their own way.

So what does that look like in the Google+ world? Well, to start with, there’s been an awful lot of “nice venue, have you tried the dip” type of conversations happening. Think back to when mobile phones came in – everyone walked around with their phones, saying very loudly “I’m on my mobile phone”. Then when Twitter came out, pretty much everyone’s first Tweets were “I’m on Twitter“.  In the early days, people talk about the space they are in to start a conversation.

In the absence of rules, some people just take what they know and adopt that same process in the new environment. So in Google+ that means we have seen a lot of people just posting their same stuff that they post on Twitter or Facebook. Other people test the boundaries, testing each new feature and whooping for joy with new discoveries.

Then comes the Storming phase. I used to describe this in groups I worked with as “the everyone hates everyone phase”. We are starting to see early glimmers of storming with people posting about how they have deleted their accounts because they can’t see anything new, others telling others how they “should” be using it and still others just having a rant about everyone and everything.

If Google+ survives the Beta testing, eventually we should get to the Norming phase, where the role, rules and uses become clearer and people get a clear view of what they will use Google+ for. Performing is the mature phase – think Facebook & Twitter.

So what is cool with Google+?

There’s a few great features that are useful for most businesses.

Hangouts – Live webcam chats. You can hang out with up to 10 people and see each one’s webcam (and no, don’t even mention Chat Roulette). This feature is free and would be great for group team meetings for geographically scattered groups.

Huddle – Group chats in the same vein as MSN, Skypechat or Facebook, except you can have an unlimited number of participants. I can see it being used for conferences and team brainstormings, and not just for getting a group of friends organised as to where to go for dinner, as promoted in  Google’s  video.

Circles – If you have ever been on Etsy, you have seen circles. These are where you sort your friends from your acquaintances. People you follow from people you can’t stand. You can then choose who gets particular updates. I’ll be honest, while I love the concept, I suspect this will appeal most to people whose spice racks are in alphabetical order and who find it easy to compartmentalise things.  My brain doesn’t work that way, so having to put a sorting hat over each person I want to talk with or follow, challenges me.

I can also see a lot more Wienergates happening, as people send the wrong update to the wrong circle (it is really easy to click the wrong circle at the moment).

So what do I think? Will it fly? To be honest, to me it’s too early to tell. Just like it took me about 12 months to get the hang of Twitter in the early days, I suspect it will take me a little while to work out it’s role in the bigger scheme of things. At this point it is just an add-on to my existing marketing, and not replacing anything … yet.

And what am I watching for? Privacy, Google indexing (how quickly are things in Google+ indexed in search engines) and the effect of such indexing on search engine rankings. Nothing much really!

If you have a Google+  account, what are your early thoughts?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Brisbane Copywriter

Well, last week’s post about alternate ways to drive traffic to your site created a load of interest – particularly around Squidoo.

So what is Squidoo? Squidoo is a community website, started by Seth Godin and some others. People can create pages (called lenses) about single subjects of interest to them.  As a writer (or lensmaster), you can go as deep or as shallow as you like in terms of information – as long as each lens is a single subject.

I like to think about Squidoo as a sort of more fun version of Wikipedia. If you want to know how to create Star Wars birthday cakes – you will find a Squidoo page on it. If you want to learn more about Woodstock – someone has written a page about it.

There are 35 different category areas in Squidoo, of which business is only one category. In business, there are a range of sub-categories including marketing, small business, internet, real estate, employment amongst other things.

Creating a lens is simple. It is a content managed site, so you don’t even have to know HTML – just choose your modules and fill in the blanks.

My lens on Employee Performance Review Tips hovers consistently in the top 20 pages in the business category, so it seems to have captured the imagination of readers. A few people last week wanted to know how to write great Squidoo pages – so here are some of my tips of what works (and doesn’t work).

1. SEO – SEO – SEO. By this I mean, don’t start writing a lens until you know what people are looking for. I used my internet research skills to find out the most searched for keywords in my niche (and what people were looking for). It then made it easier for me to create my lens.  Of course I made sure my keywords were in my title and throughout my lens.
2. Solid content. Give useful & practical information – this is not the place to push a sale.
3. Pictures. Spice up your text with colourful royalty free images.
4. Link back to my blog. My Squidoo lens pulls in the RSS feed of my performance review blog – so it gives even more targeted information back to reader (while increasing traffic back to my blog).
5. Links to my products - I have links to all of my performance review products.
6. You Tube video – I found some funny You Tube videos about performance reviews. People love humour.
7. Humour. I added in more performance review humour with some performance review jokes that used to be passed around in HR circles.
8. A poll. I added in a poll. This does double duty for me – people love interacting, and it also gives me stats on the most common objections or problems people have with performance reviews (which helps me refine my product and my marketing).
9. Link to my Twitter feed. Another way to get people to interact.
10. Amazon books. These are books that I have read and loved. And a % of each sale comes back to me as an affiliate fee (and I also donate a % to Kiva). Yes, you can make money from Squidoo Lenses (although you will never replace your day job from these fees).
11. Reader thoughts.  People share their comments & thoughts about the lens.
12. Adsense. Another way to earn affiliate income.

The main takeaways from this post is to make sure your lens is optimised for search engines, has killer content as well as a bit of fun and interactivity to to. This is not the place to be stuffy and boring!

So what doesn’t work? If the topic is not a “hot topic” that people are interested in (and you haven’t done your SEO correctly), then you won’t be found and you won’t get the traffic. I have a few other lenses with mixed results. They do get some traffic, but these are not as popular traffic wise as my hot topic.

One of the good bits about Squidoo is the amazing amount of support out there to help you. There is an active forum as well as  Squid U – all designed to help you work out any tricky bits of code you want to insert, or learn the tricks of the trade.

And does Google like Squidoo?  Well in many cases new lenses are picked up by Google within 3 hours (which is another brilliant tip if you want your regular website found – create a lens that links back to your site). And if you look in search engine results – Squidoo is right up there (type in employee performance reviews into Google to see what I mean).

Happy lens creating!

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Web copywriter

There’s some interesting statistics just out. According to comScore’s 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review reported in PC Mag, last year:

• e-mail use declined 59 percent for those aged 12-17
• usage was also down about 1 percent for the 18-24 age bracket,
• down 18 percent for people 25-34 years old,
• down 8 percent for people between 35-44, and
• down 12 percent for the 45-54 age group.

Across the board, e-mail use declined by 8 percent.

But the good news is the grey army. People ages 55-64 used e-mail 22 percent more and those ages 65 and older saw a 28 percent increase in its use.

Yeah … so what? Stop for a moment. Most people are using emails LESS. That means fewer people are reading all those beautifully crafted ezines and emails businesses are sending.

So where are they going? The big winners are Facebook & Twitter. 9 out of 10 internet users visited social networking sites each month, with one out of every 8 minutes on the net spent on Facebook (according to the comScore’s report).

Why are people abandoning email & moving to social media? My theory is the spam & the ads. People are simply sick of the noise – they are tired of spam emails for pills, potions & lotions. They are tired of money scams and viruses. Social media is seen as safer communication amongst friends. They want to hang out and talk – rather than be bombarded with junk.

Now, this is a trend to make businesses sit up and take notice. Social media is no longer a fad, it has gone very much mainstream – and businesses need to quickly learn the game, get up on the rules and create a social media presence.  Your customers are moving. You need to follow them.

And here’s how to find me on Facebook or Twitter. Love to connect with you there!

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriters

It’s back to work time for many of us, and all of the regular networking events and conferences are starting to gear up. This meant it is also the time to brush up on your networking skills before you hit the meet and greet circuit.

The first thing to know is that if you are going to network, you need to network with a purpose and not just fluff around. Networking events are a great way to meet potential clients or alliance partners for your business. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your next event.

1. Take plenty of current business cards. Look over your cards – do they “feel” solid and high quality? Is the design professional & attractive? Can you actually read the text and not need a magnifying glass to do so? This is a great time of year to get your business cards redesigned and reprinted if they are not sending the right impression.
2. To make it easier to manage the event, I usually wear a jacket with two pockets. My business cards are in my right hand pocket and the cards I collect go into my left pocket.  This stops them getting mixed up, and leaves my hands free to hold a drink or coffee. At lunches or breakfasts, I have a lovely business card case that sits next to me at the table, rather than reaching for my handbag all the time.
3. Networking is not a competition to collect cards with the winner the person with the most cards at the end of the event. It is about learning about the other person and their business and thinking about how you or someone you know can help that person succeed.
4. Learn to sell through and not to. If you try and sell to the person at the networking event, you may as well pack up and leave now. Networking is all about the long term alliances, building trust and sharing knowledge, not short term sales.
5. Be generous with your time and advice. Take time to enjoy meeting people and getting to know them in more depth. This is not a speed dating experience – savour getting to know the person you are talking with.
6. After the event, jot on the cards you have collected where you met the person and the date.
7. Follow up every card with a short handwritten note or email. Don’t try and sell anything in this note – that is bad form and generally will “burn” the person.
8. Do not add the person to your email list unless they have given explicit consent to do so.
9. Periodically touch base with the people you have met.
10. Alliances are the some of the most effective business referral strategies. Look for people who provide goods or services to a similar client base to yourself, and work together to build both of your businesses.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Many businesses struggle with marketing their business – but what would your marketing be like if your clients are all dead?  Annette Lourigan is the Community Relations Manager from Metropolitan Funerals and was at a WNA lunch I attended yesterday. At this networking lunch, everyone gets a few minutes to tell people about their business – traditional elevator speech stuff and often people tend to zone out after the first 20 or so speakers. That is until Annette.

So why did Annette stand out?  Well for starters she is marketing the unmarketable. I mean – you don’t normally flog funerals at women’s networking lunches. And she had a darn funny way of making people think about her product. The story she told was directed specifically to the women.

She told them “You know that big bottle of perfume that you keep in the bottom drawer. The one you were given by your husband. The one you keep telling him you will wear on a special occasion. After you are dead, your husband will think that it is now a special occasion and you will be stuck with that darn perfume for eternity. You may want to sort out the details of what you want to have happen to you before then if you don’t really like that perfume (and clear out that bottom drawer).”

She used humour to get her point across in a very effective way, and gently helped people to start thinking of the inevitable. Just goes to show there really is nothing that is unmarketable – you just need to find the right story for your business.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter