Content Creation and Strategy via Digital Marketing Channels, such as Newsletters, Article Writing, Social Media Education/Support, and Blogging, Facebook Pages | Purple Phone PR & Marketing

What's a Wordle?

I know you've seen these images before - some inspirational, others advertisements, etc.  They are called "word clouds."  What you may not have known is that you can generate your own word clouds using an online program called Wordle.  

I found this out yesterday when reading "4 Great (free) Tools to Measure Social Sentiment and 4 Important Stats" by Nick Bennett.  In the article, he demonstrated the tool by showing the words that he's posted to the Social Media Today site.

How might you use tool to aid and measure your social media efforts?  I bet there are hundreds of ideas, but here are a couple that the article sparked for me:

• Visit a competitor's blog and understand the language that is driving traffic to their site.
• Enter your own site's blog to make sure that you are using your keywords frequently enough.
• Grab the RSS feed from the news paper, an industry journal, or even YouTube's home page.  It'd be the quickest way I know to scan what's happening today.
• Interested in someone on Twitter?  Take a quick look at their blog to get a general idea about the topics that their blog addresses.

What about you.  What other ways could you see yourself using this creative, colorful, and captivating tool?

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(Oh- and my Wordle above?  To try out the tool, I copied the 2010 text from the journal that I keep on my daughter.  The journal contains notes about the clever and funny things she says.  This is ages 6-7.)

Linking the Employer on your Facebook Profile Page to your Actual Business Page

What a pain.  You’ve gone to all this trouble to create a business page on Facebook and have it represent your business.  Suddenly, Facebook updates it’s profile pages so that your key info, such as your employer, are prominent on your page.  The problem is for many business owners who try to choose their current business page as their employer, it’s not an option and a blank, meaningless page is created instead.

The good news is that with a little monkeying around, this can be fixed.

The essence of fixing this is that every single page on Facebook, whether its a personal profile page or business page or photo, has a number that represents it – a unique identifier.  You don’t see this number too often on the site, because words are easier for people to understand, so the site shows those instead.  But, if you can dig up that number for your business page and then add that to your profile page, you can change where Facebook sends someone when they click the employer link on your profile.

Still with me?  Here are the steps that I was able to use to do this:

1. Make sure that you have either the Google Chrome or Firefox browser and the developers add-on for the one you choose. (Add-on for Google and for Firefox.  These are all free to download.)
2. Open your business page in the browser you are using.  I’ll be using Firefox here.
3. Move your cursor to hover over the “Edit Page” button.  Leave it there.  On the bottom, left corner of the page, you’ll see a URL pop up.  At the end of the URL it says “id=” followed by a number.  This is the number of your business page.  Write it down.
4. Open your profile page.  Click “Edit Profile.”  Choose “Education and Work” from the left menu bar.  It’s time to add that number to your profile.
5. Start entering the name of your business page on Facebook. Some pages will come up and if yours does, great.  You’re all done.  Many won’t though.  For those people, just choose any page.  (Don’t finish typing and Add what you’ve typed – actually choose from the dropdown list.)  Literally any page will do because we’re going to replace the page that you add with the number you wrote down above and this random page will no longer show.
6. Now you need to use the Forms option in your web browser.  If you are using Firefox, you’ll see a menu bar up top.  One option says “Forms”.  Click that and choose “Display Form Details.”  If you are using Google Chrome, you’ll find a little gear-like icon in the upper right.  Click that.  Choose “Forms” and “Display Form Details.”
7. When you click this, your page is going to look really messy with lots of weird words all over.  Don’t panic.  All you have to do is find one little piece of information: look for the line that says “employer_id=”.  Next to it, there could be a blank or a number.  This is the spot where you’ll enter the number that you wrote down in Step 3. 
8. And, the most important step of all – SAVE.  Well, click “Add Job.” Don’t forget this or you’ll have to start over again!

Of course, I make no promises that this will actually work next time Facebook makes changes to the profile page, but at least for now, it worked for me!  (Thanks to Tracey Gritz for pushing me to finally figure this out because it’s been driving me crazy for months!)  If you get super stuck or have an easier idea, please let me know! 

Cool Tool: Shoeboxed

You’ve been out networking and have returned home with a pocketful of business cards.  Tired, you peel off your jacket and dump the cards on your desk. 

The next week, you go again and shuffle new cards to your desk pile.  The pile grows.  You brush it to the side, not wanting to waste the time to input all of that information.

Enter Shoeboxed.  This is a great service where you can mail in your contacts, receipts, and documents.  They do the digitizing.  In just a couple of days, you get a spreadsheet back, making all of those business cards and receipts so much more useable!

Now, how cool is that! 

Productivity Fail!

Since I’m on Facebook constantly, I decided the other day to change the launch page for Google Chrome to be Facebook.  Makes sense, right?  Seems the idea has backfired though.

Now, every time I have to do anything at all online, Facebook pops open first.  Once open, it’s a whole lot harder to avoid getting distracted by online interests when they are in front of you immediately upon connection.

So, the lesson here is that how we arrange our technology CAN impact our overall productivity.  Give that some thought next time you feel you’re wasting time online.  (As for me, I’m going to have to rollback that change in the near future so that I can get refocused again ;))

Why Do You Need a Website?

Today, with so many advanced tools out there, a website has boundless potential and should be approached as more than just putting your company's name online and keeping up with the crowd.  To use any of these tools and get some value out of them, your very first step should be to sit down and answer the question "why do I need a website?"  Once you know that, wyou can work backwards to figure out what the site must include.

Working backwards means answering some of the following:

• To reach my goals, who do I need to have visit the site?  (And this may be more than one group.)

• What will they be interested in seeing, hearing, learning?

• While at the site, what do I want them to do?  Buy something now?  Leave their email address for later contact?  Go do thing?

• Are the tools I'm thinking of using easy enough for me to maintain and use?

As you start to answer these questions for yourself, you'll be able to make decisions about what kind of website you need and you'll be able to explain this more clearly to your website devloper.  In the end, you want your website to become a true marketing tool that delivers benefits for both the site visitor and you as the business owner.