Randall Craig, Social Media, Social Networking, Speaker, Associations, Business, Consulting

Social Relevance: Improving Your Signal-to-Noise Ratio

by RandallCraig on May 17, 2013

Filed in: Blog, Blogging, Communication, Make It Happen Tipsheet, Social Media

Tagged as: Engagement, Focus, marketing, messaging, segmentation

No one cares about you – they care about how you can solve their problems. Write for your readers.

These two expressions epitomize the most important marketing (and social media) concept: relevance. How often have you seen a post, picture, tweet, or comment that adds zero value? Or where the signal-to-noise ratio is, well, noisy?

When it comes to using social media as a professional tool, there is a subtle shift that must happen. Instead of a self (or corporate) focus, the post must be designed to be user-relevant, and user-focused. It’s true that celebrities (and politicians) often break this rule, but they would do better if they were more relevant.

Social relevance isn’t rocket science – here are five tips that can help:

Define the primary and secondary audience for your Facebook and Twitter updates, tweets, videos, and blogs.
Define the overall goal and the high level messaging that you need each audience to adopt.
Brainstorm on the key information needs of the target audiences. And if you’re not sure, ask. The intersection of this and your goal/messaging should define your overall theme.
Brainstorm specific post topics within this theme.
Seek to engage, not just broadcast. A great barometer of relevance is the degree of engagement. If there are no shares, likes, or comments, your post may not have hit the mark.

This week’s action plan: What’s your signal-to-noise ratio? This week, review all of your social posts, using this five-point checklist as your criteria. (Are the posts really written for a targeted audience? Does it appear that there is an underlying goal? Are the topic choices important to the audience? And on a similar theme? Is there engagement?) If the posts are too wide-ranging and diffuse, then start writing for your reader: they will care about you once you begin solving their problems.

Competitive insight: Reviewing your competitor’s social posts can often give you insight to their marketing strategy: reverse engineering what they have been saying, provides visibility to their priorities and goals.

Postscript: Read the last 30 (or 300) posts of mine at www.RandallCraig.com: What is my signal-to-noise ratio?

Note: The Make It Happen Tipsheet is also available by email. Go to www.RandallCraig.com to register.

Randall Craig

PS: My firm now publishes a no-spam high-value monthly newsletter, the one-o-eight. It’s filled with more content and news you can use. To subscribe, fill in the form here.

@RandallCraig (follow me)
www.RandallCraig.com
www.108ideaspace.com
www.ProfessionallySpeakingTV.com

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Being Real

by RandallCraig on May 10, 2013

Filed in: Blog, Communication, Make It Happen Tipsheet

Tagged as: Customer Service, Twitter

What’s your reaction when you read a company newsletter, instruction manual, or other corporate communication? You probably think it sounds plastic, anti-septic, and homogenized. If so, you’re like most people – they see corporate-speak as fake, and they can sniff it a mile away.

The best communicators have always known that effective writing connects at an emotional level with the reader – no matter the topic. And what is most effective in social media is precisely this, along with a one-on-one connection between two people. This is true even if one person is a representative of a corporate brand or an organization.

Unfortunately, this point has been missed by many corporate communicators, who have blindly transplanted their impersonal corporate voice onto the social web. Or worse, who have adopted a breezy hipster tone that is so far removed from the corporate brand, that it is laughable.

Here are four ways to get real in your social conversations, especially on Twitter:

1) Avoid the passive – it removes the writer from the equation.

Wrong: Mistakes were made.
Right: We made a mistake.

2) Speak for yourself – “We” shunts responsibility somewhere else.

Wrong: We apologize for disappointing you.
Right: I am sorry that we disappointed you.

3) Avoid jargon and speak plainly – jargon hides and distances

Wrong: We strive to exceed expectations and provide a great service experience
Right: We goofed, and promise to do better.

4) Be engaging – remember that a conversation takes place when two people are engaged, not just one.

Wrong: “… and that is our approach.”
Right: “…and that is our approach – what has worked for you?”

This week’s action item: Review your conversations on the social web to see if you can be more “real”, and less fake. And while you’re at it, do a double-check on your print collateral and website: what would it take to make you be just a little bit more real?

Postscript: How did I do? When you read this post (or any of my posts, for that matter), do you get a sense that there is a real person who wrote it? That the topic – and my style - is more real than plastic? Of course, there is always room to do better: what would you suggest?

Note: The Make It Happen Tipsheet is also available by email. Go to www.RandallCraig.com to register.

Randall Craig

PS: My firm now publishes a no-spam high-value monthly newsletter, the one-o-eight. It’s filled with more content and news you can use. To subscribe, fill in the form here.

@RandallCraig (follow me)
www.RandallCraig.com
www.108ideaspace.com
www.ProfessionallySpeakingTV.com

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Marketing Insight: Improving Web ROI

by RandallCraig April 25, 2013

Does this sound familiar? You have a website (or two), a marketing budget, and a more than likely, a desire to grow. It doesn’t matter if growth is defined as more event registrations, newsletter sign-ups, leads, or transactions – the problem is that too often, a web initiative doesn’t always pull its weight. There are [...]

Social Media Planning Calendar

by RandallCraig April 19, 2013

How do you organize your Social Media activities? Most people have a system – whiteboards, excel documents, Google Calendar, or often, scraps of paper. Unfortunately, none of these are particularly effective, nor are they efficient. And they certainly don’t help you share your activities with your colleagues. Our take on scheduling and planning: Social Media [...]

Are Resumes Dead?

by RandallCraig March 28, 2013

Look at your LinkedIn profile: does it bear any resemblance to your CV? For most people, a LinkedIn profile far surpasses paper: Paper can’t compete with connections, recommendations, endorsements, , groups, status updates and more. With the momentum clearly “social”, will your paper resume die? Or is it already dead? The answer is no, for [...]

Viewpoint: Social Media – Going Out of Business

by RandallCraig March 21, 2013

Before Social Media really took off, the number of tools for engaging stakeholders online was very, very small. You could create a bulletin board on your site. An interactive calculator. A “guestbook” (remember those?) Or get people to sign up to a ListServ and participate in a discussion via email. These all had one thing [...]

Leaving a Market Behind

by RandallCraig March 15, 2013

Have you ever slipped into the assumption that just about everything (and everyone) is fully connected over the social web? That a connection is one click away on the latest iPhone or Android smartphone? Last week I had a stark reminder, in the most unlikely of places, that this is absolutely not the case. For [...]

Prospecting on LinkedIn

by RandallCraig March 1, 2013

Most people have a LinkedIn profile. And most people understand the importance that relationships play in building a business, making a sale, or getting the job. But most people are mystified when it comes to using Social Media (and LinkedIn in particular) pro-actively. Of course, there are active strategies that are a play on content [...]

Low Social Productivity?

by RandallCraig February 22, 2013

Special Note: Join me for a full-day Social Media Master Class on March 13th. We’ll explore Social strategy and risk management, with a focus on practical, implement-immediately ideas. Limited to 10 attendees. Are you one of “those” people who have thoroughly adopted Social Media, but have a nagging feeling that you just aren’t that productive [...]

Content Marketing and Thought Leadership

by RandallCraig February 15, 2013

One of the most important – and one of the newest – elements of a modern marketing strategy is Content Marketing. The idea is that if your “content” is everywhere, then would-be clients would be easily attracted to you. Unfortunately, many marketers miss a crucial aspect of this: that the content must be valuable in [...]

Social Media Dieting

by RandallCraig February 7, 2013

Special Note: Not happy with your Social Media ROI? Join me for a full-day Social Media Master Class on March 13th. Do you have a well-defined morning routine, that includes Social Media? Tweet, Post, Check Status, Share, and Comment. Then see who has looked at your LinkedIn profile. Later, repeat – sometimes several times. There [...]

17 Ways to Great Social Engagement

by RandallCraig January 25, 2013

Have you ever been disappointed with the engagement level of your blog? Have you decided that this year something “better happen”, to make it all worthwhile? If so, you’re not alone. Here are 17 ways drive more users to your blog, and increase their engagement with it: Write great content. If you write poorly, or [...]

Choosing your focus

by RandallCraig January 18, 2013

Do you attribute your success to your focus? Many people do – and in the spirit of “small focus – small success/strong focus – great success” many people are focused on… greater focus. But is there a downside? Consider the following: Ignoring everything except the goal means that many data points along the way are [...]

What’s your 365?

by RandallCraig January 3, 2013

January 11, 2006 holds a special significance. Over a decade before that date I had put the Toronto Star online, as well as completed substantive work with the Globe and Mail and several major book publishers. I was at the vanguard of online publishing (blogging wasn’t invented then), yet I wasn’t publishing myself. On January [...]

Baseline Capability and Campaigns

by RandallCraig December 14, 2012

Have you ever been in a situation where despite your best efforts, you cannot make headway? Or where you feel like a fish swimming upstream? This inertia – resistance to the new – is a key reason why implementing change is so difficult. It’s also why selling new products to clients or new ideas to [...]

Social Infrastructure

by RandallCraig December 7, 2012

Look around, and you are surrounded by advertisements: which ones catch your eye? Likely, the ones that are the loudest. Unfortunately, the race to the loudest is making it hard for anything to get through. One of the key reasons for corporate interest in Social Media is that it is a completely new channel, one [...]

Social Networking Integration

by RandallCraig November 30, 2012

Have you ever considered how some words (and technologies) are so important, yet in the fullness of time completely disappear? Buggy whips, Barrel makers (“coopers”), and Telex machines are but a few examples. Not fifteen years ago, the term “ebusiness” was popular, until people figured out that there was no such thing as ebusiness – [...]

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