Implementing a social media campaign needs thought and much planning to ensure the end outcome is the desired one:

Initial research: Find out what people are saying about your brand on the most popular social networks for your country as well as general business information. Track and monitor what is said and check out competition, find out what they are doing and record anything interesting (search results, feedback etc), which you may be able to implement at a later stage in the process.

Goals: What goals are already set in your business? What is it you want to achieve? Have you achieved it yet? How can social networking and a social campaign help/assist you to achieve your goals?
Research how you will achieve your goals and how you will track each step you have made in order to achieve a positive outcome or to tailor it to work better. Ensure the goals you set out to achieve are monitored closely so you can make the most impact on your campaign.

Tools: Try out the range of different tools on the web, discover which tools best suit the needs for your reporting and meet the needs of your goals, use several if that suits the needs of helping you to achieve your goal – creating a mix gives the best of every world – always research for new innovative tools on a regular basis as there are APIs being created all the time!

Performance measuring: There are many ways in which you can measure your performance – using tools on the web which will track your social media campaigns or develop your own in-house tools, monitor this on a regular basis so you can adapt your strategy to achieve your goals – remember – the results may not be what you’d hoped they would be.

Reporting: Create your own reports using the data you have gathered along the way, ALWAYS include positive and negative remarks as they provide a basis for development or help choose which direction needs to be tailored, the positive will show where you have got the direction right to help achieve your set goal and strategy.

An important factor is to remember that a social media strategy is not set in stone, it can be changed! Once you start your social campaign it is very difficult to go backwards if you have a sudden change of mind or direction. Make sure your research is thorough and you are confident with all you have set out to do – there is always plenty of help to be found so don’t be afraid to seek it out!

Is a picture worth a thousand tweets? Quite possibly

I loathe seeing pictures of myself appearing in the public domain. Vain enough to do vanity searches, realistic enough to recognise that I’m not particularly photogenic, I’ve chosen in the past to use meaningless alias pictures wherever possible.

When I set up my Twitter account I used one of my favourite pictures of a wind-up robot holding up a pencil (see below) for my profile picture – it expresses how I feel some days!

This remained for over a year of intermittent and non-strategic Twitter usage, during which time I picked up 280 followers who were happy to follow my occasional rants about Google News, blatant RTs of press releases and WebCertain news, along with the odd, daft discussions about celebrities and ancient pop music.

Like many people with a corporate, yet personal, Twitter profile my Tweets are somewhat random, despite the advice I would give anyone – you must define what you are about on Twitter and stick to it!

I could have ruthlessly pursued building up more followers by keywording my Tweets and following the key influencers in my sector, but, really life is too short…

One simple step has made my follower numbers jump up in just a few days.

I’ve deleted the cute robot and replaced it with a real picture of myself. It’s a rather simpering pose, but I still feel  safe in my anonymity as it’s fairly heavily photoshopped – yet it is still a recognisable human (female) face and it is encouraging more people to follow me.

In four days of continuing with my unexciting and infrequent Tweeting, I picked up just over 20 new Twitter followers. In the old days of the robot, I would have maybe found 5 more people following me.

Interestingly, a number of people who I kind-of-know from conferences and the search marketing sector are now following me. I haven’t targeted anyone, I haven’t changed any other details on my profile page and I even Tweeted in French at one point… (I am not French).

Pretty obvious stuff maybe, but the rule seems clear –

If you are a corporate Tweeter – use a company logo
If you are a person (with a name) – use a picture

Whatever you do, don’t choose a robot for your profile picture…

On this blog in August 2009, I wrote about how tweeting can get your own way and how the power of Twitter is unbelievable, which is very true and I think people forget this all too often!

The latest article I found was relating to how people forget about social networks being as powerful as they are – a Vodafone employee wrote an offensive and obscene message on a Vodafone customer complaints Twitter account. The Twitter account in question had over 8,000 followers at the time and Vodafone had to apologise to each and everyone who was following them.

Another instance of lack of awareness of how powerful social networks are was just after New Year, when a so called ‘joke’ on micro blogging site Twitter ended up with a Doncaster man being arrested under the terrorism act!

“Robin Hood airport is closed, You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” (Source: The Independent Online)

Another story appeared around a similar time about a questionable picture (a baby with a cigarette in his mouth) on Facebook by a teenage mother, who was subsequently arrested and had social services checking around to ensure the baby was not subjected to any harm.

I think there are some very important lessons to be learnt here;
Think before you speak/act/type!
What enters the web stays on web, search engines index everything!

A section is devoted to a story about a wild boar ‘rooting through bins’ in the Forest of Dean.

It seems like a pretty dull story to me – wild animals struggling to find food in adverse weather conditions takes to hunting through rubbish discarded by humans, but (and here is the nub) I can’t for the life of me work out why it is in the Entertainment section…..

Anyone????

Here’s the Press Association’s report

Any idea why this is in the Entertainment section?

This highlights how publishing has moved on and answers the question;  “What is the perfect headline?”  Answer:  “You need two of them to cover all bases.

Back in the day, headline writers were mostly bothered about space – and they still are if they are working on print publications.

Punchy, snappy, short – this is the style that most of the memorable newspaper headlines adopted.  Take the  Sun front page headline on the sinking of the Belgrano:  GOTCHA! Its boldness made it famous, but it would have baffled the search engines.

One of my favourite headlines of all time is from a report on an expected victory by Inverness Caledonian over Celtic: Super Cally Go Balistic Celtic Are Atrocious - it’s perfect…as a memorable headline, but less so as an search engine-friendly title.

Title tags are incredibly important to search engines, but they aren’t the only important part of the story as the keywords (and repetitions of) in the main body, category of news, tags, alt tags, links in etc. all play their part in the search engines reaching an understanding of the content.  Or not – see examples of Google News screw-ups.

So, unless you have a content management system that can deal with dual headlines, you’re best to aim for a couple of these options per headline.

Straight-forward, factual – using well-rehearsed keywords.  Thus, the Sun’s Gotcha would be “Falklands War:  Controversy over sinking of Belgrano”.

Be bold and controversial, but keep some keywords in.  “Bloggers revolt over scandalous Belgrano sinking”

Think, to hell with the search engines – and go with puns!

From a search engine perspective, ideally, keep your headline around 60 characters (for web listings)

“The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program.”

Please can someone at Google have a word with the person in charge of the algorithm – almost every day an inappropriate story gets coughed up into the Entertainment section.  Today’s example is pretty extreme -

Nestled in between

‘Strictly Come Dancing is fixed,’ says Joe Calzaghe (the former boxer who has been dubbed by some “the dancing wardrobe” for his wooden performances can’t understand why he didn’t win celebrity dancing show)

and

University Challenge contestants are given more clues, says producer (the only quiz show on TV for viewers with IQs in double figures drums up some much-needed publicity)

there is a very different story…

Yes,  this is a grotesque story about a vicious attack on a young girl by other teenagers. This is not what any rational person would consider “entertainment”.

How did it end up in Google News?  It must be the reference to social networking, or maybe because the attack was filmed by mobile video.  Still not an entertainment story!

Spotted anything else like this?  Please let us know by adding a comment below.

Optimising your article could mean that 1000 people read it rather than 100. Getting your thoughts or article read from across the World Wide Web could be very important for your online status and reputation building.

I’m trying to get at how PR and SEO cross over, how doing some keyword research and optimising your text can get you known in your area of expertise. Here are a few simple rules I generally use:

1. decide on your subject area
2. do some keyword research, general, then narrow down your search topic
3. keep the keywords safe, as they could come in handy another time – always do a quick check to ensure you have picked the most searched for terms
4. write your text keeping your keywords in mind
5. When reading back your text insert your keywords > N.B. make sure the text still makes sense.

Inserting keywords can make all the difference to how many people view your piece.

There’s just one thing that doesn’t add up with this apparent ploy to win passengers over: SMOKING IS BANNED IN PUBLIC PLACES – and that includes workplaces e.g. airports and aeroplanes.

Ryanair want to sell smokeless cigarettes which dispense nicotine without poisoning the air, apparently to calm grumpy smokers down, but smokers surely know when they book flights and holidays that smoking is banned on planes and has been for some years. Therefore they are fully aware how long it is till their next smoke, so why offer something which will surely cause passenger uproar?

Answer: most likely another PR stunt to get Ryanair in the headlines and boost sales – this time appealing to smokers who apparently lack self control.

Researching using Google “ryanair pr stunt” comes up with over 14,000 results – just shows how much publicity they get! This is the first page of results:

I have highlighted the 3 other stunts from this year, the remaining stories are reporting the same stories from different journalists/news publishers…

So why do Ryanair do this? Maybe they are running out of ideas to promote their brand and have to resort to silly media outbursts. What do you think?

Most of these strange results are quite amusing, or just gently misleading. Such as the main headline referring to one football team proclaiming “We wuz robbed” next to a picture of a player from the opposition.

A bit more disturbing is the tendency for stories to end up in the wrong news category, most often with a Weird World / Quirky story appearing in Entertainment.

There’s an example live at the moment:

Woman is savaged in 18st reindeer attack.

By no stretch of the imagination is this an entertainment story, even if the poor woman was once a contestant on a reality TV show.

Was the Google algorithm confused by the tasteless “Sex rampage reindeer Mr Frosty gores woman” in the Metro – Mr Frosty sounding like a cartoon character, or possibly a reference to the Xmas song “Frosty the Snowman”?

It highlights that human editors do a very valuable job!

Have you come across any strange Google News results (in any country)?  Or have you any idea how this story got into the Entertainment category  – please let us know…