Etsy & Pinterest – Procrastination Heaven

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Vanessa • 1 Comment

Most people can find things to occupy themselves with while procrastinating. Some people get creative, some people clean, some people manage to do absolutely nothing whilst looking relatively busy (cleaning up your desktop on your PC is often a good one), me? I like to find either photography sites with avant garde styling, or hand made crafts sites like Etsy.com or Pinterest.com. Apart from the endless searching through handmade crafts and beautiful photography these sites often fuel my creativity fire, rather than just fuel my procrastination…. I can spend hours making piles and piles of ‘favorites’ to come back to later. This is my ‘little’ obsession and I’m not sure that there’s a rehab for creative compulsive behavior.

Apart from the fact that I have access to the internet 24 hours a day, my searching for DIY and handmade crafts is made easier only by the fact that the digital mediums and channels these companies use are so accessible and functional. The easy to use interface, coupled with a simplistic design and navigation makes the experience even more delightful. Etsy, the day I downloaded your app was the day that the Facebook app was jiggled and moved off the important home page on my iPhone to the second page of ‘not so important’ apps. The app had the ability to create piles and piles of images in a scrap-booking fashion allowing me to ‘check up’ on my piles when in need of some inspiration. The sites are easy to use, and the Etsy app has new featured pikes of other peoples favorites as soon as you log in… Winner!

So why am I telling you about my new found procrastination? Well, the fact that handmade crafts have now replaced reading status updates, and I have been frequenting Spotlight more often than Myer means to me that I have finally got my groove back. I’m feeling creative and these hubs of inspiration have allowed me get those creative butterflies in my stomach I thought were in hibernation. This means that soon enough a new brand will emerge in the form of crafts and wearable fashions, and Etsy and Pinterest will be two examples of digital channels to harbor my new passion of handmade goods…Why not stick with the ones who have got the digital arena sorted using digital platforms to their advantage.  Keep your eyes peeled for updates of the new Vk brand.

Filed Under: DIY & Handmade

Social Media Spam

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Vanessa • 1 Comment

Lately I’ve noticed that there is an abomination of tweets, status updates and wall posts of people ‘Spamming’ information in the hope of potential business. Some businesses use social media as an advertising platform for which they can plug their products or services. This rarely works in their favor unless they are advertising the ‘freebies’ involved also, and even then does it really produce repeat customers? It is not necessarily a bad thing that people are advertising their menu of services available, but it is not how social media can be used effectively. Lately I have been noticing that there are even more annoying updates, tweets and posts than 160 character or less advertisements. That is the promise of more friends for following someone, paying a subscription or delivering information in return for this popularity. A Lady Gaga fan page has @mentioned that by following this person you will gain 400+ more followers in days? what is with that. Isn’t having followers about genuine popularity, not rent-a-crowd followers (if the request is even genuine).

My point is (and I do have one) is that you should always do these three things when managing your business profile or page:

  1. Think like a fan: why would I want to like this page, if not for the fact that I am a strong brand follower for life, then perhaps it’s because the content on the page is well worth the updates. This can be a variety of useful (or even irrelevant, but funny) content, who cares as long as it speaks the language of your brand. which brings me to my second point….
  2. Give your brand, or business a personality (a profile): It doesn’t necessarily have to be detailed, or if you wish it can? Give the personality a sense of humour, characteristics, likes, dislikes and other personality traits that will ensure that whoever is managing your page will always be producing consistent content from one person to the next and sound like it’s being delivered directly from your brand.
  3. Don’t overdo it (or forget about it either): if you post twenty updates a day you will fill peoples walls with only your brand (practically shouting at them) and this more often than not reflects badly on the social media users and they will un-friend, un-follow, or un-like you (strangely enough).

So if you feel like the above-mentioned sounds like too much of a hassle, and you just want to throw it in the too-hard-basket then maybe you could consider hiring a social media manager to help you manage your social media presence. It’s more than just gaining friends through online chatter, it’s about predicting trends, analysing markets, adjusting with the technologies and updating what you thought you already knew on a regular basis. Social Media… there’s no turning back now!

Hire a social media manager

Filed Under: Blog

Why Does My Business Need Facebook?

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Vanessa • 0 Comments

So your wondering why you are spending so much time trying to promote your business on Facebook, but your still not seeing any profitable results? It could possibly be because you are simply ‘advertising’ your business to your clients and this is not why people join social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, in fact it might be quite scaring your potentials away. Nobody like to advertised to on social media. They feel like it’s an invasion of their private social time. That is why social media communications require a two-way conversation and is about building strong relationships and networks. It sounds like a lot of work, but is not all that different to a sales assistant in a clothing store building and maintaining a client relationship base. However, without the personal eye contact of a sales assistant it is imperative that the greetings and open-ended questions remain genuine and authentic from your end so as not to deter your potentials clients away from your page.

Asking relative questions is always a good topic starter. For instance, referring to a certain public holiday coming up, or asking what everyone’s favourite day of the week is, and why? These kinds of questions often prompt people to answer, to which you can formulate a response engaging them in conversation.

Or perhaps you are cruising through your fans and wondering how you can get engage them in conversation? Well, way to do that is to comment on interests on their page similar to your own. Perhaps mention how much you like (the topic) also? and refer them to a link that they may find useful. By doing this you are assisting them on a common interest with relevant information. This does not mean that you should backlink on all of your fans pages, but if you have previously engaged with this fan than they will be more appreciative of your information.

Be wise with your forward engagement on fan pages as this strategy can work against you if you over-use it and possibly ‘annoy’ your fans, resulting in ‘unfriending’ (when they unlike your page, or unfollow you on Twitter).

Emotions are important: It is imperative that your social media personality actually has a personality providing humour, emotion and entertainment to your brand. Without this your brand is just a robot reproducing content and links. This will only get you ignored.

If you have a personal Facebook or Twitter page think about the brands that you follow, why you follow them, and why they are interesting to you? More often than not irrelevant content is passed off as SPAM and in the future the brand is often overlooked. Personally the things I find interesting and the links I tend to click on are information sites that produce strong, relevant and easy to understand content. One of the most common phrases with web publishing is ‘Content is King’, and it’s true. If you have strong, valid content for people to read, then they will appreciate your article and hopefully return the favour by linking to your site, or page.

The key thing to remember is that social media is about engaging people in two-way communication with your brand. The effect of this done correctly can result in lifetime preference for your brand or services due to the personal effect of your social media strategy. Think like a fan of any brand and start your strategy from there and you will eventually see results as you build up trusting relationships with people who begin to feel like they already know you and your brand.

If all of this seems like so much hard work for you, you could possibly hire a social media manager to setup and maintain all of the above for you. They can even be your online port of call for customer service with a provided list of FAQ’s from you to respond to customer enquiries. A social media manager will update your status a couple of times daily, reply to comments and inbox messages, engage with your friends/fans, delete your SPAM and provide you with monthly report of activity between your profiles.

 

Vanessa Kellett | vanessa@vkmediamanagement.com | http://vkmediamanagement.com

Filed Under: Blog

Interesting SEO & Social Media Articles

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Vanessa • 0 Comments

If you want to know how it works I have found some interesting articles that have fairly detailed and indepth explanations of what is involved with SEO and Social Media and why it may be important to your business, and reason why it needs to be controlled:

Smarter SEO Campaigns

Managing social media at work

Grow Your Business Through Social Media

Jeffrey Hayzlett, a sought after speaker for business communications had an interesting insight about using the various Internet platforms effectively:

Look at it like this. LinkedIn is the street, Twitter is your front porch and Facebook is your living room” and moderate the content and frequency according to the intimacy level of your environment.

Read full article: Top Brand Secrets: How the Big Brands are doing it (Social Media)

If you would like more information regarding any of these topics, please contact us with your questions and we will get back to you as soon as we can to answer them for you.

 

Vanessa

 

Filed Under: Blog

Social Media: Everyone’s doin’ it

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Vanessa • 0 Comments

Hi,

My name is Vanessa and Welcome to my Blog. When I was younger I wanted to be a rockstar, a singer or someone famous… Now with the internet I can live vicariously through anyone famous that I want to be… I can party with them on Youtube, hang out with them on various blogs, be part of their conversations on Facebook (kinda) and follow them on Twitter (in a non creepy way).

I love the Large weaving inter-networking that is the world wide web… It’s amazing, and I spend a large portion of my time cruising through only a small portion of information available at my fingertips. So it is no suprise that I have put two and two together by expanding my services to ensure maximum use of my time to surf the web….. Social Media management, SEO and website deisgn are vitally important to your business… the idea of ‘just Google(ing) it’ is the new Yellow Pages. So it is no suprise that my Yellow Pages sits in the bottom of my cupboard dormant till the next year comes around and they are replaced by a new, younger model.

There are so many things that even I do not know about this web of wonder, but what I do know is it is important to ensure your online presence is valuable and consistent to your offline presence… otherwise you are no being very truthful to your target market. There’s a difference between having a website and social media accounts just for the sake of having them… If you are not using them to your advantage they may be doing more damage to your image than you think. The internet is fast becoming the leading point of contact for clients, customers and businesses alike to communicate as it is instantaneous, and they don’t have to spend time on the phone waiting for an answer. So perhaps one of your customers has a query over Facebook, but you haven’t checked your page for 7 days. This small neglect may result in an unhappy customer wanting feedback or answers. Another example could be your ‘potential’ clients tweeting about their desire for a service like yours, and you can’t ‘hear’ them because there are no filters out there to connect them with your business.

Social Media Management is about giving your business a strong online presence consistently across a range of Internet media platforms. We can help you ensure that your clients are being heard, that your online ‘friends’ know your there, and that you are engaging in the two-way conversations that is social media.

Perhaps your website is not performing how you would like it to? We can evaluate your site and give you constructive feedback for how you can improve your sites visibility and performance in top search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

If you have any questions regarding our services we would love happy to help. If you want to know how it’s done we can either evaluate your situation and hand it over to you, or we can train/consult/advise you where to start and also show you ways to maintain your social media presence. I
Social Media: It’s all about you, the needs of your business and the needs of your clients.

Filed Under: Blog