18 reasons to start twittering

1. It will enable you to experience social networking first-hand.
2. It will make you a better writer – condensing what you want to say to 140 characters is a learned art and a skill worth transferring to other copywriting.
3. Reading others’ tweets will give you ideas for things to blog about.
4. It will help you stay connected to people you care about.
5. It will help you see a new side of your friends, colleagues and network contacts.
6. It will introduce you to new friends.
7. It will help you network – I’ve lost count of the number of people who have come up to me at trade shows and said “I follow you on Twitter”
8. It helps you to engage with customers.
9. It is faster than sending a text.
10. It will make you think about your life and your work.
11. It will help you keep up with what people are talking about.
12. It can help you create buzz for your brand.
13. It will enable you to follow what people are saying about your brand.
14. It will give you a place to reply to what people are saying about your brand.
15. It provides a little light relief in an otherwise stressful day.
16. It humanises you (and your brand) to your customers.
17. It can create traffic for your blog or website.
18. It requires very little time investment and no budget at all.

Marie Page runs an international e-business selling instructional DVDs teaching contemporary musical instruments. She blogs at http://musicademy.com/blog and tweets @mariemusicademy

The Digital Lowdown

Here’s a handy guide to some digital key terms, websites and applications

Bebo

Actually derived from “Blog early, Blog often”, Bebo was launched in 2005 and offers music, quizzes, videos, photo uploading and pop polls/ Built around school networks, Bebo is typically used by younger users.

DandyID

Allows you to store all your online identities in one place.

Delicious

Delicious allows you to bookmark websites – save manage and share webpages tagging as you go to network with others with similar interests.

Facebook

Boasting some 400 million users, Facebook is one of the few web applications that has grown and adapted successfully since its formation in 2004. Used to maintain friendships, its highly targeted demographic profiling makes it a great medium for niche advertisers too.

Flickr

The best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Widely used by bloggers, Flickr hosts more than 4 billion images. Picasa works in a similar way.

Google Alerts

Want to know what’s being said about your brand on the web? Sign up to Google Alerts to be emailed every time someone blogs or writes about your brand (or indeed any other search term you specify). Particularly helpful for crisis management as well as keeping tabs on your competitors.

Google Analytics

Track visits to and usage of your website with another free tool from Google. Understand how people find, navigate and convert on your website.

Google Documents

Superb free Google tool that allows you to create and share documents, spreadsheets and more with others. Hosted by Google, your collaborators can make changes to the documents in real time – much easier than using “track changes” and then emailing a document around.

I’ve even used the software to create rotas without the usual trauma. Click through for a how-to guide.

Google Wave

With email having been created 40 years ago (and messages needing to be passed to and fro, remembering to Reply All to keep everyone in the loop), Google asked the question “What would email look like if it was made today?” The result is an online collaboration tools that enables groups of people to edit and discuss documents simultaneously on the web.

Google Wave is explained in this helpful video.

LinkedIn

A business networking site sharing some similarities with Facebook but focussed on professional relationships. Upload your CV, link to other social networks, blogs and Slideshare.

MySpace

Before Facebook MySpace was the biggest social networking site. Now returning to its original roots, MySpace is a place for musicians to showcase their material and has provided a grassroots launch pad for bands such as the Arctic Monkeys.

Ning

Create your own social network in minutes. Here’s one I created for a class of CIM eMarketing students. Ning is great at hosting info, news and events for people with a common interest.

Skype

Voip application that uses the web to make and receive voice calls, send instant messages, transfer files and video conference. You can even “buy” a telephone number in another country and have calls transferred to your PC or a UK landline. Really useful for online businesses with a virtual international presence but with a UK head office.

SlideShare

Upload and share Powerpoint, Word and PDFs. Great for web conferencing, also a useful source of material for teachers and researchers.

Twitter and Google Buzz

Twitter is the micro blogging site that has exploded in recent years. Limited to 140 characters, twitterers update their thoughts in 140 characters or less. Great for making contacts, also arguably quicker than Facebook and SMS for instant contact with people.

Buzz is Google’s recently launched response. Synchronised with plenty of other micro blogs and social networks, unlike Twitter there is no 140 character limit. Without Twitter’s first mover advantage, the jury is still out on Buzz’s long term appeal.

Wiki

A collaborative website, the most famous of which is Wikipedia which now boasts over 13 million articles (and in one survey proved as statistically reliable as the Encyclopaedia Britannica). Wikis involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation, updating and collaboration.

Wordpress

Since its launch in 2003, WordPress has become one of the most popular hosted blog services and is the first to make the leap to a fully fledged CMS widely used outside the blogosphere.

Easy to use, the magazine style Bloggers Handbook is an excellent users guide to Wordpress and all the major blogging platforms.

YouTube

Now owned by Google, YouTube is a site for uploading and sharing videos. There are also various niche alternatives focussing on special interest fields. Great for hosting videoclips which you can then embed into your own website, YouTube also offers opportunities for viral marketing. Also checkout Vimeo, an alternative offering higher resolution video and without the 10 minute time limit to clips.

Marie Page runs an international e-business selling instructional DVDs teaching contemporary musical instruments. She blogs at http://musicademy.com/blog

Screen clips the easy way

Evernote is a brilliant free software tool that will enable you to make screen clips of anything you want. It works on computers and mobile phones so you capture a shot, save it and then when at some point in the future you want to find it, you simply search using any of the words contained on the clip.

Its also brilliant for students needing to insert screen shots into an assignment. Rather than using the conventional PrtScn key on your keyboard and then having to crop the image once you’ve dropped it into your document, Evernote will crop before you save. This keeps the file size down and is just so much more convenient.

Marie Page runs an international e-business selling instructional DVDs teaching contemporary musical instruments. She blogs at http://musicademy.com/blog

Sign-up forms – good practice

So you want to datacapture the email addresses of as many visitors to your website as possible. How do you achieve this?

The interruption marketing way is to have a nasty pop-up appear as soon as someone clicks through to the site. Not a good idea – will instantly cause people to bounce away and cause immediate suspicion of your brand.

The permission way is to woo the customer with a nice reward. A white paper, a freebie, a competition. You give them something useful and in return they give you their email address. Permission equates to win:win.

So having persuaded the customer to click through for the reward, what hoops do you then demand before they claim their prize? The temptation is to capture all vital statistics possible - full demographics, source of referral plus at least the name of the family cat, their insurance renewal date, child’s middle name and more beside. Research, however, shows that the more complex the sign-up form, the less likely someone is to complete it. What is the real “need to know” data at this stage? Probably just their name and email address. Once you’ve begun to build a relationship later you can begin to learn more about them as they reward your wonderful communications with increased permission.

So keep it simple. Capture the need to know, reward the customer with something worthwhile and then begin the business of building a relationship. Don’t reward with spammy eblasts. Dance with them, woo them and show them you care.

Marie Page runs an international e-business selling instructional DVDs teaching contemporary musical instruments. She blogs at http://musicademy.com/blog

25 e-newsletter content ideas

In my last blog post I asked some questions that hopefully got you thinking about content for your newsletter. Now you’ve done the hard work, here are some easy ideas to give you a bit more inspiration:

1. Guest/celebrity articles
2. Ask the expert (this is always the most popular of the articles I write)
3. How to articles
4. Interviews – an expert, a staff member, a customer
5. Stories about how your products have impacted someone’s life
6. Veteran input
7. Inspirational client stories
8. Lists of Top 10 websites/blogs/resources relevant to your market
9. Top 10s, 5 tips, 10 idea etc
10. Do’s and Don’ts
11. Statistics
12. FAQs
13. Competitions
14. Surveys/survey results
15. Reader feedback
16. Spotlight
17. Day in the life
18. Comment on news stories relevant to your industry
19. Review other people’s products
20. Write articles about your keywords
21. Get ideas from competitor news or newsletters from other industries
22. Browse article directories
23. YouTube clips relevant to your industry
24. Podcasts or vodcasts you have created
25. Look at industry blogs and steal (sorry - source), ideas from

Now think of 10 more!

Marie Page runs an international e-business selling instructional DVDs teaching contemporary musical instruments. She blogs at http://musicademy.com/blog

Five ways to annoy people with your e-newsletter

1. Put everyone’s email address in the “To” field
2. Don’t give your reader a way to unsubscribe, or ignore them when they ask that you stop contacting them.
3. When you meet someone new and chat with them about your business (or the weather), or if they contact you about something unrelated to your business, be sure and immediately add them to your mailing list (don’t get explicit permission or let them know you’ve done it).
4. Be sure not to check your links in your newsletter – that way people will be annoyed AND frustrated when they click and wind up at an error page.
5. Dress up your promotion as a newsletter

Marie Page runs an international e-business selling instructional DVDs teaching contemporary musical instruments. She blogs at http://musicademy.com/blog

E-newsletter content ideas that work

In my previous blog post I discussed some practical ideas for sending out e-newsletters. Here are some ideas for creating compelling content.

Here’s the premise of my suspicion that any marketer who works in a business is perfectly capable of writing an endless stream of interesting and engaging newsletter (or blog) articles:

“I have never come across anybody who new enough about a particular industry or topic to start a business in it, who didn’t also have a nearly endless supply of content to choose from” (Michael Katz – E-Newsletters That Work)

So, you work in a company within an industry that you happen to know quite a lot about – that’s what you do for 35 or more hours every week. Let’s see what you already have inside your head that you could write about.

Now I’m a teacher. I’m not going to give you the answers (at least not this week) but in true active learning methodology, I’m going to facilitate you to find them yourself. So sharpen your pencil and get ready for a one person brainstorming session.

Write a list of all the questions you are asked about your business on a regular basis:

• How do I…?

• Should I…?

• What do you think about…?

• How do I know if…?

• Is it worth spending money on…?

• Do you know where…?

• What would you recommend for…?

• What do you predict will happen to…?

• Can I have an expert opinion on…?

• What’s happening with…?

• How did you manage to achieve….?

You should now have a long list of ideas for your newsletter. These aren’t boring company profiles, new product reviews, interviews with the CEO. They answer the genuine questions that your customers and others in your industry are interested in hearing the answers to.

You may not have all the answers, but I bet you know someone who does.

What are you waiting for?

And if you are still thinking, here are the top 75 entries from my blog from 2009. It’s a niche market but you should find some concepts to inspire you.

Marie Page runs an international e-business selling instructional DVDs teaching contemporary musical instruments. She blogs at http://musicademy.com/blog