Over 187,000 people are on Facebook in the Greater Victoria area. Thousands of people and hundreds of businesses have started interacting on Twitter. Between 2008-2009, time spent on social networking sites jumped by 82%.
Are you connecting with your customers online?
Join us for a free introductory seminar on Social Media Marketing for Business to learn how social media can generate business, increase brand awareness, and position your company as a leader.
Where: Serious Coffee View Royal (across from the Casino) 1701 Island Hwy.
When: Tuesday Feb. 23rd 6:30-8:00pm
Details: Serious Coffee will be closing to the public at 6:30pm for this special event. Food and drink will be available to purchase for seminar attendees. Seating is limited to 30 ppl, pre-registration is required. REGISTER HERE.
This video clip is from sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s and shows us where the internet began. It sure gives me some perspective on how much we’ve progressed since then – but also how many things have remained the same. We’re still using the internet as a social medium to interact with people who have similar interests – and that social component just keeps growing. Take a look:
This is a great video about how consumers have changed in what they want from advertisers. We want authenticity, conversations, relationships – not a sales pitch. Take a look:
At our recent seminar on Twitter for Business in Victoria, BC I mentioned that there are several resources you may find useful in your Twitter endeavours.
URL Shorteners:
URLs can take up a LOT of space in your tweet – sometimes more than 140 characters.
If you want to add a URL to your tweet and the platform you use doesn’t offer auto-URL-shortening, use the following site:
Alright, that should help you to get started, but remember that I warned you – once you “get” Twitter (which takes about 1-2 weeks if you really stick with it) you may become a bit of an addict. It’s happened to the best of us. Have fun!
This video is the perfect demonstration of how to listen to and show that you care about your customers – using the power of online video. It is radical transparency at its best. When I watched this I smiled and thought to myself “right on! A big corporation that realizes their success depends on happy customers!”. Watch and see how sometimes winning back your customers means making big changes.
What do you think of this demonstration of radical transparency? Will you be trying the new crust?
Twitter is innovating – which is a good thing. Recently they have introduced “lists” to their platform and have partnered with Google to bring us live search and with LinkedIn to make it easier to integrate tweets within LinkedIn status updates. One thing we are going to notice, however, (that could be a bit confusing) is that the term “follower” won’t be as clear-cut anymore.
If you want to receive a person’s updates without having them clutter your main Twitter feed, simply add them to one of your lists without following them. They won’t show up as someone you are “following” this way, but the person will be able to see that you have “listed” them (unless you add them to a private list) and you’ll have to click on that list when you want to see what they’re posting. On the side of private lists, they are truly private, so some people will create a list of “competitors”, for example, that they can monitor without anyone knowing about it. There’s nothing sneaky about that either because everyone knows that when you tweet it’s available for the world to view.
I like this new list functionality because it allows me to organize the masses of tweets that come in every day and helps to ensure I won’t miss updates from those I see as valuable content aggregators and producers. I also like that I can visit the pages of those I respect on Twitter and see how they have organized people into lists. If someone has a great list called “ComediansOnTwitter” for example, I can add that list to my account. Right now I am in the middle of conglomerating a list of Eateries in Victoria so that every time I am hungry and want to grab a bite at a local restaurant/cafe/pub, I can see what the specials are at all the local food joints that tweet. Feel free to follow the list if you like.
One issue I have is that in programs like Tweetdeck where I started organizing people into lists long before Twitter came up with their own version, I now have a whole bunch of lists with duplicates that desperately need cleaning up….in my spare time! Yikes.
However – remember that if you don’t follow the person they can’t DM (direct message) you anymore and that might be a barrier to a prospective customer.
This guide (passed along by @ambrosiacentre in Victoria) is a useful tool for those just getting started in Twitter. I would argue that it’s not “complete” anymore as things are constantly changing, but it makes a good start.
What better way to start 2010 than to attend a series of social media seminars geared to help your business thrive? We’ve had a lot of requests for an educational series that goes beyond scratching the surface of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for business. We’ll take the time to explore local case studies, but also to go through an in-depth “how-to” so that you leave with an understanding of how social media can benefit your business, and how to tweet and network online effectively.
Where: The Union Club 805 Gordon Street, Victoria, BC V8W 1Z6
When: January 9, 16, 23, 30.
Schedule of Events:
Saturday, January 9, 2010 8:30am – 1pm. Special Guest, Brent Hammond
Welcome to Marketing 3.0 – First Annual Seminar Series
A New Approach to Goal Setting with Trailblazer’s Brent Hammond.
Social Media is Here to Stay – Now What? with Terri Davies, Sunstar Creative
Saturday, January 16, 2010 8:30am – 1pm. Terri Davies
Inbound Marketing: Your clients are surfing the internet – are they finding you?
Twitter: Why and ‘How-To’ use it for your business.
Saturday, January 23, 2010 8:30am – 1pm. Terri Davies
Facebook for business: How to get results with fan pages & advertising
LinkedIn: Maximize the potential of online connections
Saturday, January 30, 2010 8:30am – 1pm. Terri Davies
Blogging: One of the best marketing tools of 2010
Completing the marketing mix – networking, advertising and print material
How to Make 2010 the best year ever – mastermind sessions
Colour is used in design to attract attention, group elements, indicate meaning and enhance aesthetics.
Colour can make designs more visually interesting and aesthetic, and can reinforce the organization and meaning (often importance) of elements used in design. If applied improperly, colours can seriously harm the form, function and therefore effectiveness of your website. Colour theory is a massive subject, one well worth learning more about, so here is a set of guidelines that address common issues regarding the use of colour in website design:
Number of colours
Use colour conservatively. Limit the pallate to what the eye can process at a glance (generally about 5 colours. Of course, this depends on the complexity of the website design). Don’t use colour as the only means to impart information, as a significant percentage of the population has limited colour vision.
Colour Combinations
At a glance, the possible range of colour combinations may appear limitless. And to a large extent, it is. That being said, aesthetic colour combinations can be achieved by using adjacent colours on the colour wheel (analogous), opposing colours (complimentary), colours at the corner of a symmetrical polygon circumscribed in the colour wheel (triadic & quadratic):
Appealing and engaging colour combinations can also be found in nature.
Use warmer colours for elements you wish to appear ‘more in the foreground’ (read: eyecatching) and cooler colours for elements you might wish to appear ‘background’ elements.
Light grey is a safe colour for grouping elements without competing with other colour.
Saturation
Use saturated colours (pure hues) when attracting attention is a priority.
Use desaturated colours when performance and efficiency are the priority.
Generally, desaturated, bright colours are preceived as more friendly and professional; desaturated, dark coloursare preceived as serious and professional (as with the Whitehouse logo above); and saturated colours are preceived as more exciting and dynamic.
Exercise caution when combining saturated colours; they can interfere with one another, appear to vibrate and cause eye fatigue.
Lastly, and this is more a point of academic interest: There is no substantive evidence supporting the general effect of colour on mood as most of us tend to think. Similarly, there is no universal symbolism for different colour -different cultures attach different meaning to colours. Therefore, verify the meaning of colours and colour combinations for a particular audience prior to use. (see the ‘Color of Power’ by M. Walker, 1991).
A few weeks ago I was reminded of a type of directory website called .tel offered by Telnic Ltd. (and available through several re-sellers worldwide). This is a very basic-looking website that serves as a home-base for all of your contact details online and offline and allows others to find you easily.
Here’s a clever .tel commercial that got me excited about owning my very own little piece of internet real estate:
After I saw this, I went out and bought terridavies.tel, thinking that it could be beneficial in multiple ways:
1) If I get caught in a situation where I don’t have business cards on me (heaven forbid!) I can just say “go to terridavies.tel and you’ll see links to my website, blog and social media”
2) Since even my business card doesn’t have links to everything I do online (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc.) it’s nice to have a central location for people to find this info.
3) Having an additional inbound link from .tel to my website and blog can’t hurt (and could help) in terms of their Google rankings. Plus, .tel might actually ranks all on its own one day for those searching for info about “Terri Davies, Victoria, BC” (since I’m not listed in the Yellow Pages).
However, even after all that I am still unsure that I am actually going to reap the benefits of owning this account. I’ll really need to direct people there if it’s going to be effective (like Ben in the commercial), and that sort of defeats the purpose because why not send them to our Sunstar Creative website? It would be good if I didn’t have my own website….but for a web-savvy business owner I have yet to see the real benefit. I also found that the look was really boring and I am craving the ability to get into the code and modify it!
The cost of securing my dot tel name was about $45 ($44.56 if you want the exact figure) for two years through one of the Canadian resellers called Webnames (other resellers include TuCows, Sibername.com, DomainPeople, Netfirms and more ) and this included the domain registration and hosting. What do you think? I’m happy to hear any ideas you have of how .tel can be beneficial. Here’s what Telnic Ltd. has to say in their Telegraph eNewsletter I received today (it looks like some business are trying to make it work, but it seems like a stretch to me…)
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Are you connecting with your customers online?
