1. A quick response can go a long way
2. You may have to respond as you, not your company
3. Give yourself more than 140 characters to respond
4. Let someone else respond for you (your fans for instance)
5. Know when to let it go

Read more

Mashable recently posted the article “HOW TO: Deal with negative feedback in social media” to help marketers identify the different kinds of negative feedback they may get, know if they should respond to that feedback and understand how best to respond. Here’s what you should know:

Think about it …

You have to make your point pretty quickly in a banner ad, but you should get to it even faster if you’re writing a headline for something like a Digg article. Why? You have one line to grab someone’s attention, and we all know people don’t read; they scan.

As conversationally as you may write a homepage, you should use an even more casual tone for a Facebook status update. Why? Because you’re having a personal conversation. Think employee to fans not necessarily company to target audience.

See a pattern? Social media takes the principles of writing for the web to the extreme. Keep that in mind as you read (or more likely scan) these additional guidelines for writing social media content from Social Media Today.

Focus On Your Reader

Establish your intent early on in both the headline and the initial paragraph.  Let your readers know what benefit they will get out of reading your content.

Have a Strong Headline

Your headline is where it’s all at.  Make your statement there and make it big and bold.  Your headline should clearly establish the exact benefit your reader is going to get by reading your article. The best headlines provoke an emotional response in your reader.

Less is More

Keep things brief and make your point quickly.  Many readers simply parse through the content on your blog and don’t actually read it completely.  Establish your point quickly and then move on to the next one.

Shorten Your Sentences

Keeping with the first point above, keep your sentences short.  Make sure that each sentence has a beginning, middle and end.

For example, take  the sentence “Your goal is to learn how to write compelling content.”

Notice how the sentence makes a strong statement while adhering to a structure that presents a beginning, middle and end.  The sentence establishes the point right off that bat with “Your goal” and then moves on to tell you what you are going to be doing in the words “learn how”.  Then it tells you what you will accomplish with the words “write compelling content”.

This has a profound impact on your ability to create compelling content and will drastically improve the response you get from your copywriting.

Shorten Your Paragraphs

Writing short, informative paragraphs allows you to break up your content into smaller blocks that each make their point quickly. Statistics show that readers tend to absorb the point much quicker when faced with shorter paragraphs.  It tricks their mind into thinking your article will be quick and easy to read.  Notice how the majority of paragraphs in this post are no more than 3 to 4 sentences long.

Write With Purpose

Make bold statements about your topic.  Show that you are passionate about the topic you are writing about and have a clear, concise purpose in writing it.  Establishing your purpose in a firm manner that isn’t insulting to the reader.  This tells them you know what you are talking about and you mean to share it with them.

Have a Beginning, Middle and End

Establish the problem or need you intent to solve in the beginning and then provide the substance of your solution in the middle.  Finally, close it out by clearly demonstrating you have solved their problem.

Use Simple Words

Use simple words such as “use” instead of “utilized” and “get” instead of “receive”.  This makes things much easier to read as well as simple to understand.

Read more in the article “How to Write Compelling Content with Purpose”

Yesterday I wrote a quick blog post on my personal blog called, “Keeping Social Media Going.” The basic idea was “we are all set up on Social Media, now what?” It’s a fear of many companies and something that is continually on my mind. How do we as marketers stay relevant on social media while continuing to communicate our brand message on a consistent basis without overwhelming? There is an art to walking this thin line.

The answer… create a content strategy with two components:

A Backbone Message – This is the overall brand message that we want to continually communicate to our consumers. This will become the starting point for all messaging and content throughout our social programs. This could become the “big idea” that draws consumers to engage with our company.

Campaign Specific Messaging – To keep our company relevant and exciting and to create multi-touch engagements throughout a given year, we need to create campaign specific messaging. While creating our social strategies for the year, we will need to identify these different campaigns. These could be product launches, community involvement, marketing campaigns, etc. These campaigns will likely become the big ideas that continually engage consumers. During the engagement, the consumers will then be exposed to the backbone messaging, allowing us to communicate our brand correctly during each engagement.

This combination of backbone and campaign specific messaging is vital for any social success. Too much of one or the other will sway the consumer in the wrong direction. Too much Backbone Messaging, the consumer will feel “marketed too,” which they don’t like. Too much Campaign Specific Messaging, the consumer won’t fully understand the brand message and our marketing objectives won’t be achieved.

Here’s some bullet points that I outlined in the Keeping Social Media Going post from yesterday to help with other strategies to stay relevant and engaging:

• Keep responding and answering fans, followers, friends
• Continue to share content of affinity organizations and information relevant to your brand message
• Cultivate relationships with your most loyal followers and your loudest influencers
• Build mini conversational campaigns around company milestones or important company dates
• Continue to scan the ecosystem for opportunities, discussion topics, etc.

What are your thoughts? How do you stay relevant to your consumers?

Photo courtesy of Flickr – Paul Garland

Last week I had a quick conversation on Twitter that started off with one of my random brain droppings… But the 3 sentence conversation really made me think about what is needed to be successful in social media. The tweets go like this:

Me: What does “social media” mean anymore… Isn’t it just simply using technology to communicate?

@vabike: Bike advocates’ problem isn’t web and social media skills, it’s laziness & lack of inclination to communicate

Me: @vabike I would imagine a lot of communities are like that. Then it comes down to relevant content to spark the interest to communicate.

I wanted to call out the response from @vabike… It’s not the skills but the laziness and lack of inclination to communicate. Simply tweeting or posting a Facebook message doesn’t equal communication or conversation. So the question becomes, what would give consumers, (in this case, bike advocates) the inclination to communicate with what your brand is saying online? The short answer… Relevant and entertaining content.

Insights

Scanning the interwebs for information and conversation is a crucial first step in creating this elusive relevant and entertaining content. Understanding what is being said, where its being said, who’s saying it, and how it’s said will give you context as to what is relevant to your consumer base as well as the channels used. Continually managing and monitoring the ecosystem will give you a real time updates on the sentiment shifts in the market.

Test

Knowing what information is important, relevant, exciting, educating, and entertaining for your consumer base will give you the knowledge to create engaging content and entertaining interactions. To further define the engagement level of content, we need to test messaging and content strategies, monitor the engagement, and track what happens. Getting a global view of the engagement levels of differing content provides concrete information in how to engage online and how to give your consumers inclination to communicate back.

Adapt

As with anything you monitor, test, and track we need to have the ability to adapt. The world in social media is in such an infancy stage, growing at the pace of nothing we’ve ever seen, so we have to adapt to whatever this behemoth turns into. We have to be nimble to market values and sentiments. We have to continually monitor our ecosystem and account for changes as well as our strategies.

In social media, content is king. With the amount of information available to our consumers, we have the task given to us to, not only differentiate in our product/service offerings, but also differentiate in what content we deliver, how we deliver it, and how we interact with consumers once they engage. Following the aforementioned steps will give you the foundation for success in this crazy social world.

Photo courtesy of Flickr – neonihil