In the first installment of Social Media Strategies for Small Businesses, we discussed finding the key objective of your social media strategy. In Part II, we'll stick with Christopher Barger from General Motor's team. This installment deals with designating someone to 'own' the social media engagements your company initiates.

Here is the next installment of strategizing for your small business' social media campaign:

2. Designate an Evangelist for Your Company

This discussion is perpetually discussed on the Internet, but when it comes down to it, someone needs to be accountable for your social media. Every department in the company may be consulted when it comes to finalizing decisions, but ultimately one person (or department) must stand up and take responsibility for the outcome.

Who ultimately gets gets chosen could be vary, depending on how large your organization is and its corporate culture. For instance, Barger (remember him, from GM?) says social media at General Motors is “owned within the communications team, reporting up through the Vice President of Communications, who reports directly to the Chairman/CEO.  Social media leadership has a seat at the communications leadership table and acts as an integral part of the larger corporate communications function.”

Your organization may not be structured in that manner, so accountability may reside within the sales team or marketing.

You may also consider using consultants or other external resources for some portions of the strategy and handle others internally. Barger explains, “We use internal resources whenever possible; given that two of GM’s main goals are to become more responsive to the public and to incorporate insight back into the organization, these are things we can only effectively do if it is our team who are engaged.  We use agency partners for monitoring/measurement, for identifying new opportunities and new influencers for us to reach out to, for video production, and for counsel on tactics/strategy.”

 

I came across this article and thought it was quite interesting. A lot of good questions are brought up about why City and County Governments don't adopt the use of open source technologies such as Content Management Systems, CRM's, etc. More importantly, case studies show how 6 different government entities have adopted Open Source with great success. Even the Department of Defense uses it! Chepri Interactive understands the benefits of Open Source software such as Joomla, Magento, and Liferay - do you?

Click Here to Read the Article and Get the PDF

We all know it's out there - taking the world by storm. Not only is Social Media having more of an impact on our personal lives, but it is also having a greater impact on the marketing strategies of businesses, as well. Inbound Marketing is here to stay, so it is high time your small business takes advantage of these websites, blogs, and feeds.

Over the next several days, I'll share with you five points to mull over when beginning a social media strategy. Here's the first:

1. Find the Objective

Luis Ramos, CEO of The Network, tells us that creating a social media strategy is a laborious, complex process because “it includes not only looking inside the organization to establish appropriate practices, usage policies and content parameters, but it also includes looking outside the organization to determine the proper degree of engagement.”

Decide why you are entering the social media arena, and what it is you you want to accomplish with it. This is absolutely paramount if you plan to measure ROI or develop your own analytics or tracking.

Here's an example from General Motors: when GM put their social media strategy together, they had some very specific goals that they wanted to reach. General Motor's Director of Global Social Media, Christopher Barger, shared the following:

A. Become more responsive to people/consumer audiences
B. Incorporate audience/consumer feedback into your organization more quickly and effectively than has happened traditionally
C. Make your brand a little more “human” to the outside world, and show people the smarts, personality and passion of the people behind your logo
D. Increase awareness of the strength of your current product lineup, and provide perspective/accurate information about your company

Another bonus of creating objectives is that they can help establish the timeline for implementation. It happens all the time - We’ve seen an organization’s list of objectives and just knew there was no possible way that they could get everything going at once, or in the allotted  timeframe they hoped for. It is very important to have pre-defined objectives, as they can assist in establishing priority and help create the best way to actually phase in a social media strategy.

Well, there's your first installment. Look here soon for Part II, Internal Ownership of Your Social Media Strategy.

In the realm of Content Management Systems (CMS's), one would think that one product would be able to beat out the others and claim the spot as "the best" among its peers. Often our clients come into their projects set on using one particular CMS for their implementation, but ultimately choose another based on the feature set. Most are ran on the same technology (php), but have different frameworks with different sets of strengths...

We at Chepri have taken on a rather exciting web development and design project! Although we are always excited about each project that we are involved in, every now and again one pops up that is not only exciting in the same way, but has more 'curb appeal' due to it's potential to be viewed in a widespread fashion right out of the box. We've recently been working on the site for The Racing Chef, which is a new television program debuting March 1st on the Speed Channel. The project is almost done, and will soon be viewable at http://theracingchef.com!

Get ready for your jaw to hit the floor -- many companies don't even know!  You could be seriously underestimating its value to the business. You could be damaging your company's business or brand, or just floating out there with no real presence. It might look slick, but without measuring website performance, you’ll never know what is going in the real world.

Many companies still do not perform any web analytics at all. We’ve seen any number of companies over the years spend tens of thousands of dollars on a costly re-design because of a vague feeling their website doesn’t work – and then repeat the same mistakes because they don’t carry out analytics first to find out what the problems are. Some of the companies that do limited analytics, when looking at their results, don't know where to look or how to measure effectiveness.

Traditional marketers and communicators are obsessed with achieving their objectives. Web marketers and communicators are obsessed with helping customers achieve their objectives.

"Brand advertising, the kind you're used to seeing on TV and in print, isn't nearly as big on the Internet as the search ads dominated by Google," writes Peter Kafka for the Wall Street Journal in January 2010. "But that's got to change, as marketers realize that traditional advertising works on the Web, too."

A company’s web site should embody the company, reflect its values and strengthen its identity. In order to do that effectively, there are questions that need to be answered before design ever begins. This first stage of the Web site development process is the critical Discovery phase.
Discovery involves a complete examination of your company and its objectives, ultimately to a set of goals which the web site should accomplish. Answering important questions about your company and its inner workings will allow you to establish the nature of the Web site and what it should do for your business.
Most questions in the Discovery phase fall into five categories: business goals, budget constraints, brand identity, sales cycle, and competitors.

Initial visual appeal of a website can make or break it's presence on the web. It's been scientifically proven that  a user forms a web site's value before actual cognitive thought takes place. What does that mean? It means that the viewer of a site actually involuntarily makes a decision based on a 'gut feeling.' No matter what a site's content is (whether stimulating or non stimulating to the viewer), the look of a web site can turn on (or off) a viewer before they even know it.

An interesting study, published in Behavior and Technology  delves deeper into this phenomenon:

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/blink/