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Falling off a blog: Branding social media and why you should write more
The document discusses the importance of branding and content marketing in the context of social media. It emphasizes storytelling, skill development, understanding one's niche, and the convergence of personal and professional identities. Additionally, it highlights the evolving landscape of social media and provides advice on blogging techniques and thinking creatively about content.
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Falling off a blog: Branding social media and why you should write more
- 1. Falling off ablog Branding social media and why you should write more
- 2. Today’s top stories •Your brand o Tips for success • Content marketing o Think like a magazine • Social media o World went and changed
- 3. Your brand o Tipsfor success
- 4. 1. Get your storystraight
- 5. 2. Get anew skill
- 6. 3. Know yourniche
- 7.
- 8.
- 10. Social media o Worldwent and changed
- 11. Social is dead •The big data crunch • Snapchat • Money
- 12.
- 13. Content marketing o Think likea magazine
- 14.
- 15. Blogging basics - Lists -Word counts - Version control
- 16.
- 17.
Editor's Notes
- #2 Frequency and quality of output – you’re doing this already – keep it up! That measure of quality that we have is the brand. Brands aren’t isolated discreet things, they work precisely in as much as they interact successfully with other brands. These brands might be client companies whose brands we use in our promo, but it’s also about Brand You.
- #3 Your brand – we’re gonna talk about why you should have one, and how you can make yours a good one Social media – looking at the dominant paradigm of how we share information Then we’re going to look at Content marketing and what it is and why we do it and how we can turn everyone into this room into a content marketing machine
- #4 What reasons could the cow have for wanting to do that to itself? It’s in Brightwave’s interest that you have a strong personal brand too. We build brands by doing good work, and then telling people we do good work. Brands interact with each other they’re not fixed. Magic reputation dust through association and proximity. Having a brand help you do good work. Good business is return business
- #5 So what do you do? Know what you do. Talk about the last cool thing you did, make it easy to find.
- #6 The guy who wins the TV show isn’t the funniest, nicest, smartest or best looking. It’s the one who changes the most, the one with the best storyline. The journey. The arc. Give yourself a learning journey. Document it.
- #7 Get a hobbyhorse – and ride it. You’ll notice that these first three points all really are the same: it’s about having a clear and defined idea of who you are, This can evolve and change and be about more than one thing, but throughout you have to be aware that you are sending out a signal, and you have to be clear that that signal’s saying what you want it to. That clarity and purpose, having in at the ground floor, is essential for a strong brand. Authenticity, and your originality, your quirkiness. It needs to have a little bit of your soul in there.
- #8 As these fine young captains demonstrate, your social network is your professional network. Business has always been about trust and reputation – and the brand is how that is carried now What this means in practice is remember who you went to college with, or who you worked with in previous jobs, and get in touch with them on LinkedIn. (LinkedIn is the one where you get to talk about business and forget a lot of social niceties, and no-one minds) Remind them that you exist and that you’re good at what you do – lay the groundwork for future opportunities of working with them.
- #9 You have to communicate. You have to produce. You have to make stuff, and get it out there. Content, the stuff you make, is the meat and drink of your brand. It’s the tangible reality of what your brand is. You have to produce something, and it has to be regular. Gotta keep your oar in. Without it, your brand is just a front. The bedrock of what this usually means, is blogging. More on that in a bit. But the point is, you have to be producing something. It might be 140 twitter characters, or some photos, or drawings or your nice Etsy jewellery. But the content you produce is the reality of what your brand is about. Be smart. Work hard. Do good stuff. Get it out there, because someone somewhere is going to look at it, and they might want to give you a job.
- #10 Coming in to land landing page If you’re looking for a HOME for your personal brand, you could do a lot worse that your author page on BW.co.uk
- #11 Not going to say that social media makes revolutions happen because that’s fatuous. But 75% of B2B purchases are influenced by social media. Source: The Evolution of Sales: The Survival Guide LinkedIn ebook If you are in a sales process or client relationship that is longer than a retail money: product setup - people are going to google you, and they’ll find you. And when they do, we want what you brand is saying to be strong and positive, and doing that with social media is the simplest way. Twitter and LinkedIn are prob the most critical here, Quora and Slideshare are also always worth thinking about but you will have your own favourites.
- #12 A logarithm (intelligent personal assistant app) can know what you want or need better than your network will Those elusive and priceless young people are innovating in 1-1 personal spaces rather than 1-many social spaces: using IM apps and Snapchat to redefine previously web-unfriendly concepts like privacy, anonymity and ephemerality. Twitter is maybe half a billion in the red. Growth has slowed. (but it’s still growing)
- #13 What this really means is, we’re into the long tail of social business, and it’s really, really long. Social media platforms as an investment opportunity may be passing (while What’s App and co continue to soar), but their effect on how we communicate is here to stay Difficult to imagine tech, media, advertising, news, politics etc etc without the big global social platforms as their primary pulpits
- #14 Content marketing isn’t new. It’s marketing that people want to read. Marketing that doesn’t suck. It’s not new. Trade papers. There’s little difference between what a magazine can do and what we as a small enterprise can do. We occupy the same online space they do - the only advantages over us that a trade paper has today are all to do with brand and network reach. The right people trust them and read them. But we have our own brand, and our own network of contacts, both of which stand for something by themselves. And we’re in control of growing both of them.
- #15 Content is King here, obvs. So we need to produce it. Quantity and quality This in its most elemental form means text: if you can’t write it, dictate it to yourself and get someone else to type it up! Or if you’re an artist, draw it! Or if you’re comfortable on camera, film yourself talking about it! (Get a good-looking background to shoot against!) Find your ideal format and channel.
- #16 Not hard and fast rules, but things that might help make things easier/get you started Lists. Lists are good, lists account for a huge proportion if shared and shareable blog content. Good reasons for this: Fitting your content to reader preferences and expectations As a focus for producing volumes of content under deadline and resource pressures. Easy to summarise, and therefore to share But the biggest reason for the proliferation of list-style posts on blogs is to do with smartphones. Content in phone-size chunks. The perfect tip or fact or whatever your list is made of, is one that fits completely and perfectly on your phone screen, and one that moves onto the next one in the list with a single flick of the thumb. Lists are easier to read, that’s why they’re popular. Word counts. 500 words. Maybe 750 if you’re feeling inspired and motivated. Or you can be like X and produce something twice that length which wouldn’t look out of place in a broadsheet Sunday supplement, which is fantastic – but you don’t have to. There isn’t a huge amount of work involved. So many of you are used to working with words, you probably produce many times that in a given day.
- #17 Lot of talent here in lots of different directions – might not be writing a snappy 500 word listicle. But it might be designing an amazing infographic. As I said before, content marketing isn’t just about copy. There are platforms that will accommodate any form of creativity. If you’ve got static images, there’s a million photo sharing options out there that I hardly need to name, but from within a business context Slideshare is a great place to get views. If you’ve got animations, film, there’s obviously YouTube and Vimeo – so just because you don’t want to write something, that doesn’t mean you can’t produce and promote something. We’re always going to have to think about issues surrounding your available time and other resources, but if you have an idea or anything we’ll work with you to get it into a form that we can share and work with.