7 Things Small Businesses Need to Know About Social Media NOW

This afternoon, I have the opportunity to speak to a group of Lakeland area small business owners. Below are the slides I will be using.

And here’s a link to the social bookmarks for the sites and tools I will discuss in the presentation.

Questions about social media?

A Baker’s Dozen Tips From a Pinterest N00b

The latest bright, shiny object that has grabbed my attention is Pinterest, a visual social bookmarking site. I must admit that when a few of my students gushed about it last semester, I didn’t get what all the hoopla was. I’ve been using Pinterest regularly for about three weeks now, and by jove, I think I get it!

  1. Pinterest is what you make of it. If you like sewing, then focus on the beautiful pictures of people’s sewing projects. If it’s food you love, look at those. If it’s places around the world for an unplugged getaway or even how to survive a zombie apocalypse, there are even boards for that. Really.
  2. Thinking back to taking my SAT, here’s a modern-day analogy: ___ is to bookmark as board is to folder. If you guessed “pin,” you’re right. Give yourself a star.
  3. Use descriptive words to describe the images you pin (or re-pin) to your boards. Saying “Yum!” as a descriptor for every recipe you find or “Simply stunning” for every beach sunset isn’t good enough. This will help you and others when using Pinterest’s search feature. (For my geeky friends, this is all about SEO.)
  4. If you’re not already using the Pin It button, get it now. And I mean immediately. It will save you an enormous amount of time in pinning sites. (From your Pinterest page, click on About, then choose Pin It Button. Follow the directions on that page to install the button on the toolbar of your browser.) NOTE: For now, this button is not yet available for tablets.
  5. Save yourself some time typing. Highlight text on a web page, perhaps the title of the post, then click the Pin It button. Your highlighted text will appear as the description of your pin.
  6. Do you ever find great ideas/images you’d like to add to Pinterest, but you’re using your tablet so there’s no Pin It button? Just bookmark the pages in your usual way (like using Chrome’s bookmarks), and then pin them to Pinterest when you’re back on your desktop or notebook computer.
  7. Another tip for using Pinterest from your tablet or mobile phone: If you want to re-pin something that’s already on Pinterest, it’s tricky to choose the right Board to pin it to (at least when using an Android, it’s tricky). It seems impossible to scroll through to the bottom of your list of boards. What I’ve done is create a board called “+Pinned from My Android Tablet.” Using the plus sign ensures it’s always near the top of my scrolling list of boards. I’ll temporarily pin to that board, then pin it properly when I’m back on my computer.
  8. Sometimes, sites that are linked from the images on Pinterest are in a foreign language. If you use Google Chrome, you’ll get a pop-up menu bar that will ask if you want the site translated for you. The translation isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely better than any translations I could do on my own.
  9. Every now and then, when I click on an image, the link takes me to the home page of a blog, not the specific post where the image came from. That’s frustrating. When I finally find the image, I’ll create a “fresh” pin myself rather than re-pin, so that the link works properly.
  10. I have one board that I called For Friends. If I find something that I think a specific Pinterest member might like, but it doesn’t neatly fit into one of my existing boards, I put it there. Now here’s the fun part. I mention the person’s name in the description using the @ sign followed by the username. (Pinterest will pop up a menu to select the name after you start typing the first few letters.) Now the person will get a notification.
  11. This brings me to privacy. On Pinterest, there is NO privacy. Anything you pin can be seen by anyone on the internet. So if you’re pinning birthday gift ideas for your best friend, remember that he or she might run across them. (For things you want to bookmark privately, just use your usual method of bookmarking, not Pinterest.)
  12. If you want to pin a page that has no images that Pinterest can find, there’s a solution for you. Use Pin a Quote, a bookmarklet that was just released in early March. It will let you highlight text on the page and create an image from that text. It’s quick and easy.
  13. And finally, don’t believe everything you hear or read about Pinterest being a major time suck. Of course, it can be if you let it. But for me, Pinterest has sparked my creativity again. I’ve dragged my dusty sewing machine and paintbrushes out and created dozens of projects for myself and as gifts for friends and family. I probably spend LESS time on my computer now than I did before.
A small sampling of the craft projects I've created since joining Pinterest

What Pinterest tips would YOU add?

NewsU & Inbound Marketing U Courses for Social Media for PR & Journalism

For my COMM 4633 Social Media for PR & Journalism Class 

Below you will find several additional resources to augment your course materials for COMM 4633. Each student will be assigned to read/complete one of the resources. During Week 12, we will have an in-class Speed Learning activity where you will share what you learned with your classmates. (This activity will be discussed in more detail after Spring Break.)

Additionally, after you watch or complete any of these, you may wish to write a blog post about what you learned; these posts could become some of your PR Connections for the semester.

Poynter Institute News University Courses

 

Build and Engage Local Audiences Online

Learn why local content is essential to your survival, and how you can continue being the chief information source to your community, no matter what the platform.

In this course, you’ll hear editors and publishers from across the industry share their stories and their strategies for success. Talk to a virtual colleague to think through some of the questions and concerns you’ll want to address. And test your knowledge of online audiences and the tools you can use to drive them to your site. Along the way, you’ll collect the info you’ll need to create an action plan for your newsroom.

Five Steps to Multimedia Storytelling

Want to spread your wings beyond print reporting, but don’t know where to start? In this course, you’ll learn the basic steps of telling your story with multimedia. You’ll discover ways to map out your story before you head out to do your reporting. And you’ll learn when to use such tools as audio, video and graphics.

Multimedia Reporting: Covering Breaking News

In the days that followed Hurricane Katrina, online news organizations took stock of their skills and resources and turned out some of the best work to date. They sent video reporters out on boats to float through the streets of New Orleans. They fashioned multimedia blogs out of the simplest of technologies. They set up forums for citizen participation. And a few of them saved lives in the process.

The Community Journalism Series: Strategies for Managing Local Contributors

For years, newspapers have worked with user-generated content (UGC) in the form of letters to the editor and similar contributions. Now, news organizations of all shapes and sizes are grappling with a dizzying array of community-written content. Non-staffers are publishing things such as full-length stories, blog posts and multimedia content.

This trend provides new opportunities for your publication to engage with audiences, spotlight new voices and address under-covered topics and communities.

Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University Webinars

 

How to Blog Effectively for Business by Ann Handley and Mac Collier

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Crash Course to Get Found by Lee Odden

Social Media and Building Community by Chris Brogan

Successful Business Uses for Facebook and LinkedIn by Elyse Trager

PR for Inbound Marketing  by Todd Defren

Twitter for Business by Laura Fitton

Social Media for Big Businesses by Paula Berg

 

The Science of Social Media by Dan Zarella

Enchanting Your Prospects by Guy Kawasaki

Social and Mobile Marketing by Jamie Turner

7 Things Churches Need to Know About Social Media Now

The Rev. Mary Beene, my pastor when I was a member of Faith Presbyterian Church in Rincon, Ga., asked me to be a speaker at the Savannah Presbytery’s Leadership Development Conference on one of my favorite topics: social media. You can see the slides below.

All sites and links mentioned in the presentation can be found in my Diigo bookmarks.

Now, a question for you: how does your church use social media?

Live-Tweeting SEU’s Annual Chocolate Decadence Luncheon

Students in my Social Media for PR and Advertising class got to go on #themostawesomefieldtripever — we headed over to the campus restaurant for the annual Chocolate Decadence Luncheon. While there, we took photos and tweeted about our experiences . . . and ate a wee bit of chocolate, too.

The Best of Social Fresh East 2012, Day One

As the Social Fresh East conference proceeds on February 6 & 7, I will be curating the best content below using Storify.

There will be a lag from the time of the sessions that I attend to the time the information shows up here on Public Relations Matters. I want to use my time there to connect face-to-face with many of the participants and speakers that I have “known” via social media over the years, rather than being tied to a computer/tablet screen.

Student Blogs for Social Media for PR & Journalism, Spring 2012

Image Credit: "Why Aren't You Blogging?" by Mike Licht

Students in my Social Media for PR & Journalism class at Southeastern University have started adding content to their blogs for the semester. Please take a look and see what they’re up to. And drop a comment or two! They’d love to hear from you.