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.