Copy & Coco

Today I was given one of the most important tasks I've had these past few weeks at Frozen Fire: to edit the copy for one of our clients.

But first, it was a festive morning today at Frozen Fire as we grouped in the conference room, Simon holding an American flag and Nikki pulling the familiar red stripes and white stars up on the big screen as we posed for a Facebook post. If you are not a seasoned sports fan and have no idea what I am talking about - We at Frozen Fire, although reasonably patriotic, are not die-hard America fans... I am talking about the U.S. versus Germany World Cup game.  Check it out on our Facebook page!

Anyway, the client I mentioned, whose name I am not sure if I can repeat, told Frozen Fire that they wanted to change their target audience for their services... which meant that almost every page of their sizable website had to be edited to meet their newest needs. 

While at first the small changes to pronouns, etc, that I had to make sounded easy enough, I didn't realize how difficult, yet extremely educational this task would be. As one of my goals that I outlined on the first day, learning to write with professional etiquette had to be checked off at some point. Not only have I been changing words around, but I have been deleting and creating full sentences, and have put deep thought into each one (hopefully it shows). After using several keywords over and over again to make the text appear to be written by a professional, my "professional" vocabulary - if you will - is already improving only after about four hours (has it been that long?!) of editing (only a few more pages to go!).

While it has been an excellent learning experience, I could only sit for so long writing copy, so when Nikki and Pete invited me to go to lunch with them, I was excited (Goal #2:  Learn professional behavior etiquette). Sitting with Pete and Nikki was relaxing and fun, and it was a great experience to sit with two professionals and having intelligent - yet laid back -conversation with adults. I also got to meet the renowned Coco. 

~ If I have not discussed Coco by now, I feel like I have failed Nikki as an intern. Coco is Nikki's baby (well, not actual baby. Coco is a small wiener dog) ~

Eventually, we returned to Frozen Fire after taking the Dart to Nikki's (too meet Coco of course) and I have been sitting in my same spot going back to writing copy.

Writing copy.

I feel so professional just saying it! I was watching Mad Men last night and Don Draper said something about Peggy "writing copy" and I got all excited thinking about how I might get to do that at some point during my internship. 

Anyway, 'twas a lovely day of Copy & Coco. I can't wait to see what next week will bring!

~ Meg

Moz & SEO optimization

June 24, 2014

Zip! Another day has gone by.

Today, Jordan showed me how to use HootSuite, which is SUPER cool. It is definitely a necessary tool when managing multiple accounts.
When I was at Balcom, I only watched Leslie use HootSuite for about ten minutes, which was cool, but not enough to fully comprehend anything. Well, today that changed.
Jordan sent me some Excel spreadsheets, each one for a separate client, and each had the next week's Facebook and Twitter posts planned out - content, links, hashtags, and all! It was so cool.
I never thought about how agencies know when and how to post - much less how they organize it, yet there it was - all I had to do was copy and paste the content/links to HootSuite!
And the coolest part?
HootSuite lets you schedule when something is to be posted - meaning I scheduled a tweet to be sent out a week from today! I didn't remember that from Balcom!

I don't think that I wrote last time about my plans for Valerie's (my friend's mom) interior design company, Harding Designs. I'm planning on taking the things I learn here at Frozen Fire and working for her in order to hone my skills and implement the strategies I am learning here at Frozen Fire. Anyway, I have already drafted several "plans of action", and getting a HootSuite for Harding Designs and making a spreadsheet of social media posts are another thing I am adding to the list!

Last Thursday, I wrote about the SEO meeting I attended with Nikki and Pete, which, as I indicated, was extremely helpful and educational (and which I am also using to help Harding Designs!). Today I wrote up a summary about what changes we made to that client's webpage - describing the point of changing the keyword and key phrase , how we figured these were the best options, and how they affected the rest of the page in improving the page in terms of improving the SEO. Concerning search engines - keywords seriously are the key to all questions... well, they are pretty darn important. 

Finally, I researched Moz, a software as a service (SaaS), which is a location data management tool AS WELL as a marketing analytics software. It is SO cool, and if you buy the more expensive Moz Pro package (of course), there are endless analysis tools, such as Moz Analytics, Open Site Explorer, Followerwonk, etc to track and improve SEO, social, branding, link building, and content marketing efforts. Moz is definitely something worth using if you have problems like the ones I was researching on Yelp (yikes!) and it most certainly is valuable when you are dealing with SEO and follower feedback.

06/19/2014

June 19, 2014

Today was busy as usual, but perhaps the most interesting and important thing I did was sit in on a meeting with Nikki and Pete about expanding one of our client's SEO. I never realized how much work went into SEO - I simply thought that you just inserted a few extra words into your website and BAM! you improve your SEO. Although that is a major component, we used all sorts of tools - such as Google AdWords (my best friend), and typed in countless keyword and phrase combinations to see which were most effective. Google would tell us the level of searches and competition for each keyword/phrase we tried - basically, the better for us if the search for that word/phrase was high and the competition (aka other websites using those keywords) was low. We went through our client's Wordpress (the tool FF uses for their website) and made sure that the article heading, page title, page url, content, and meta description all came out effective. We only focused on the website for today (we will go through YouTube, etc later), on the blog adding “bunion” as a keyword and “What is a Bunion?” as a key phrase and on the home page “bunion surgery” as a key phrase in order to improve their SEO. We also edited their meta description and inserted “bunion” into it (another SEO tactic).

06/17/2014

June 17, 2014

Another very busy day at Frozen Fire-

If I walk out of this internship only learning one thing, its that Yelp has terrible customer support (joking - I already have learned way more than that).

Today my task was to help two of our clients with their Yelp pages - reviewers on Yelp can start pages for businesses without the business’s involvement whatsoever, which, at least for the businesses, can be a hastle. Due to the customers’ vibrant enthusiasm for our client(which, although a good thing, is not so good in this aspect), there are three pages, one for each location, thanks to reviewers (thankfully they are good reviews). This can be a little confusing - it is best to have just one clean, concise page with the three location listed, rather than three separate pages. My task was to see if we could someone delete or merge these pages into one page, which is where my snide remark about Yelp’s customer service comes in. They have NO phone number on their website, and I had to find it on some sketchy ‘top-secret’ website most likely made by a Norman Bates-type, and after several pushings of buttons and listening to voice recordings, another voice recording said “We are sorry - Yelp is unable to provide on-call support due to the amount of questions we receive daily” WHAT?!

I’m turned off from Yelp and I’m not even a user! HAVE GOOD SUPPORT, PEOPLE!!!

Anyway, after hours of looking through conversations on Yelp (I swear, Yelp is Facebook for some people - there were countless conversations about “what dog should I get?” or “5th birthday party ideas?” that had nothing to do with the salt to pepper ratio of a certain restaurant’s certain braised lamb or whatever Yelp is supposed to be for!), I noticed a man who was commenting on several of the conversation feeds with helpful advice. It was by hunting this man down that I FINALLY was able to get the help I needed. Seriously, I had to go through pages and pages of people’s thoughts about life and dogs until I found this guy. Besides providing the ability to discuss publicly on their website, Yelp had almost NOTHING to do with my success whatsoever!!

Anyway, he’s currently helping me with both accounts. Apparently, we can claim more than one Yelp page and we can merge the two duplicates we had. Thank goodness. My only question for him is, if we claim all three, what exactly will that do…? Besides giving us more control over them. When people search for our client will three pages pop up? One girl commented on a conversation I started on Yelp (yes, I did that too, and people have already begun to argue via comments about things that have nothing to do with my question… Who are you people?!), and stated that

“...when you go to a business on Yelp, there is a button on the right hand side of the screen that says "Edit Business Info". Click on that. There is a listing that says "This is a duplicate of another business on Yelp", and there is a box provided where you can copy and paste the URLs for the different listings. “

So hopefully she and Don (the guy I had to hunt down) will be the only sources we need.

Other than that, I finished the SurveyMonkey task. It was WAY easier than the GoogleAds (RateMD) task -- which I feel like I’m extremely close to understanding, but the website just bombards you with information. I think I’ve got the gist though. I have a meeting with Nikki later about everything I did last week and today so hopefully we can clear that up together based on the information I’ve compiled.

06/12/2014

June 12, 2013

After attempting to arrive at Frozen Fire fifteen minutes early and failing due to a homeless woman who stood in front of my car and would not move until I gave her some money, I entered through the glass doors and began my second day at Frozen Fire (with a minute to spare).

In all, it was an extremely productive day for me - after walking into the office, I attended a quick meeting with Nikki, Liz, Jordan, and Greg discussing the company’s new approach toward their Facebook page, putting Jordan in charge of regulating and posting the content. We spoke about making the page more ‘fun’, meaning posting behind the scenes images, etc. of the staff and what goes on at Frozen Fire (while still maintaining a professional and serious face). Just from sitting in this meeting I learned something new: to speak up when I have an idea. Luckily, Greg said what I had been thinking - which was to have some pictures/small bios (VERY small) of the three new interns at Frozen Fire. That was something I was very impressed with at Balcom when I worked there - they posted a picture of me with a small bio so that all of my friends would see it on my Facebook feed, and as a result, some of my Facebook friends began following Balcom on Facebook in case they eventually wanted to intern there as well. It is a fun thing for followers to see and like, but also gave Balcom access to all 1,500 of my Facebook friends (not to brag :) ).

I had a meeting with Nikki and Jordan today on one of our client's new campaigns. We met to discuss a 6-month plan to increase revenue from one of their services while simultaneously reaching new patients. I have to say this was very exciting for me - Nikki handed us each a small packet outlining the plan of action, with goals that we are all working toward. My first task was to become familiar with their website and social media profiles, which was very impressive (also Frozen Fire’s work). The website was very clean and pretty and its social media platforms had interesting posts (I started following them on Facebook - I had no idea that I would ever follow podiatrists on Facebook, but the content was VERY interesting!). After doing this, I had to do a write-up of advertising costs and options on Facebook and RateMD.com, which sounds simple enough, but GoogleAds, which RateMD.com uses, is extremely complicated (which one would not think) and they don’t have helpful videos like Facebook does. At noon I attended a webinar on “Blogging for Local Business”, and did a write-up of it for Nikki - in all it was stuff I had picked up on Tuesday from reading Frozen Fire’s blogs, but I will paste it here in order to keep the information on hand.

I was extremely busy today and learned a lot (yet again!). I’ve gotten to see the inner workings of a project and have had hands on experience!

(Blogging for Local Business)

The 30-minute webinar today emphasized the importance of maintaining a blog as a local business owner, stating that over 60% of consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post they have read and that 70% of consumers learn about a company through their blog rather than through paid advertising. Obviously a good reason to start blogging.

The webinar speaker pointed out some good reasons to keep a blog, one being that having a blog creates a one to one relationship between the consumer and the small business, and that it establishes a long term footprint for people to understand what each local business values. Along with this, having a blog promotes social media sharing and increases a business’s SEO, while also providing a cheaper means for putting their message “out there”, rather than learning HTML or paying for a web design developer.

So, what sort of content should a local business create?

For one, local businesses should be educated, especially of what is going on in the area around them. Reading Twitter feeds, content from customers (reviews, comment cards, surveys, etc), emails, should give good ideas, but when it comes to writing, the webinar speaker had some good suggestions, such as writing how-to articles, company news, upcoming events, staff profiles, fun facts, customer reviews, and he pointed out that these should be should be useful, original, actionable, shareable, timely. One VERY important point that should be stressed is that local businesses should not just talk about themselves in the blog. They can instill a sense of being trustful and a leader by posting things such as interesting articles that they have found. It makes them appear to be reliable, educated, and a leader. ASK yourself, “Would I be interested in reading this blog?”

The speaker also stressed the importance of image use in blogs, stating that they encourage social media interest and sharing, support your point, introduce the message, make the blog more memorable, achieve an emotional connection, more color and vibrancy. An excellent source for images is Flickr Creative Commons, in which photographers have offered their work.

Although it is important to have good content, it is also important to have read-able blogs- meaning don’t write a thirty-page manifesto. Keep it short. Use small snippets from the blog post to introduce the post. Sharing views and statements from the post in the form of short attention grabbing posts works as good on Facebook as it does on Twitter. And finally, although writing a blog is important, taking the next few steps to put the message across is almost as important as the message itself. make your content epic so people NEED to share, link to influential blogs so they link back, reference and quote experts so they share your content, make your content easy to share, optimize your content for SEO to attract interested prospects, add keywords to rank for relative terms, etc.

Finally, blogging is a marathon, not a sprint.

First Day - 06/10/2014

June 10, 2014

My first day at Frozen Fire was the perfect experience to commence my time there, and I learned my first lesson within minutes: professional attire.

Of the three goals Nikki had me set for myself, one was to acquire professional etiquette, both in behavior and attire. For a Pitzer student whose wardrobe consists mainly of high-waisted shorts, clogs, and cut out Ts, this is actually more challenging than one might think. I’m sure that once in the habit, dressing to make a good impression will become more routine though.

Anyway, for most of the day I sat at my shiny, white desk and observed the Frozen Fire website and blog, as well as the company’s various social media profiles. This may sound simple and unvaried, but I learned so much just sitting, reading, and observing. After reading the blog posts written by the Frozen Fire employees, I started to notice a trend - most of the blogs were advice from Frozen Fire to their clients on how to digitally market themselves better - they had a very how-to and DIY feel. I took their ideas and practiced going onto websites such as Dunkin Donuts and their social media platforms and observed how well, if at all, they were implementing Frozen Fire’s tips. (Something else I noticed about the Frozen Fire blogs was that they were taking sips of their own medicine -- they were keeping a “conversation” with the client via the blog, yet maintaining a somewhat authoritative and all-knowing face. They were also telling the clients how they can digitally market themselves better, however, since the clients lack the tools and skill sets, Frozen Fire can plant these ideas and then swoop in when a client decides they want something.)

In summary, I learned a lot just from doing research on my own. I took note of the blog, how the use of bullet points made it quicker and easier to read, how each entry had a small introduction to pull the reader in, the use of their mission statement at the end of each post, etc. I noticed the overall visual scheme, reflected by their website and office space - a clean, minimalistic look that gives the sense of ease and simplicity (which translates into fast, easy results). I also read the blog post called “The White Background” about Apple’s genius idea of using a simple white background in their ads to create the same sense of simplicity that Frozen Fire abides by. I also noticed Frozen Fire’s media platforms all contained the company’s mission statement, however they did not give much else information -- just a link to the site. I thought this was quite a good idea - give people a taste of the company, using a certain aspect (YouTube = videos, Facebook = personal, etc.) yet leave them wanting to know more about the company, drawing them to the actual website.

In all, a great way to begin this internship! More on Thursday! (See goals below)

• Goals
• Acquire professional etiquette: both in behavior and in professional attire (something that I have already pushed a little)
• Learn more about marketing, which I got a taste of at the Balcom Agency, however I would like to see it integrated with film since I have a passion for both. (I also would perhaps like to start a digital marketing company like Frozen Fire one day, but we shall see!)
• Become more proficient in writing for other people, rather than the language and syntax I use while blogging for myself. Basically, I would like to learn how to write more professionally, yet in a way that still allows me to integrate my personality into the writing without making it too personal/sarcastic.