NoGoYo on WSN

I had the pleasure of talking with Rich Mabariket, founder of Webseriesnetwork.com, about 3 things content creators should do in their social media & marketing.

Rich is the 6’5” guy and all muscle. I’m the one who looks 65 and no muscle. 

3 Great, Free templates for Social Media Campaign Planning

“If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants”

- Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke

Good social media and marketing campaigns start with planning. The time spent researching the landscape, conceptualizing desired results, defining SMART goals, making decisions, and documenting your roadmap is invaluable. Before every project I take the time to create a marketing plan that everyone involved can use as a guide and reference through-out a campaign.

  But planning is time-consuming. Often repetitive. And occasionally, when you’ve done something many times (or at least feel like you have), planning feels unnecessary. This is one way errors happen - familiarity leads to complacency, complacency leads to laziness, and laziness leads to someone forgetting to regsister a domain name.

To help me with my projects, I have templatized the market and editorial planning process in a series of spreadsheets. These spreadsheets have been Frankensteined from other templates I have found on the web and then molted together to meet my individual needs. These temaplates act as a checklists to make sure I’ve taken care of all the major points of planning, ensuring consistent results. When completed they also become a valueable asset that communicates strategy and tactics in a clear, concise, and actionable manner.

Here are three great templates I have found that I use in my own social media & digital marketing planning.

Smart Insights’s Free digital marketing plan template

One of the best templates I’ve found so far is Smart Insights’s Free digital marketing plan template. The work book / checklist format makes it easy to create a best-practices marketing plan for your project. What’s important is to FILL OUT THE PLAN. Don’t worry if not everything in the document applies to your project - if it doesn’t fit just mark it “N/A” and keep going. Go through the document, thoughtfully consider each aspect of the plan, and FILL IN YOUR ANSWERS! Congratulations - you have a marketing plan!

The Army’s Five day social media strategy template

The Army has a great Five day social media strategy template. The Army sums it up in their typically consice, effective manner: “This document gives you and your social media team the opportunity to plan your social media coverage in advance. It also allows your team to evaluate the success of your social media campaign.” 

Google Doc’s Project Management Spreadsheet

I love 37 Signals’s Basecamp, but Google Doc’s Project Management Spreadsheet is free and covers all the basics of planning out a project, and running a campaign is a project. Again, this template is only useful if you FILL IT OUT and USE IT. 

If you have awesome templates you use, let me know in the comments.

Wait! Before you start that Kickstarter campaign...

You may be considering Kickstarter or one of the many other crowdfunding sites for your next creative/business/socia-good endeavor. The internet has given us many cool things, and crowdfunding has to be one of the coolest of those cool things. If you’re making a Sundance-worthy movie, or starting the next Apple, or preparing to solve the education crisis in America, you only have so much time to get everything done. 

Asking yourself a few preliminary questions before you even start planning a crowdfunding campaign can save you a lot of time and ultimately increase your chance of success.

1. Do you have enough time to plan the campaign, maintain the campaign for a month or so, and then deliver all rewards you have promised donors promptly after a successful campaign is over?
2. Do you know basic online marketing best practices?
3. Is there anything else that you could spend that much time and energy on that would get you better results?
4. Have you ever participated in any crowdfunding campaigns in any way, particularly as a donor?

If answer NO to any of these questions, right now might not be the best time for you to run a crowdfunding campaign. If, for example, you haven’t participated in a campaign as a donor, take some time to look through current campaigns and see if there is one you’d like to support. And don’t stop at just donating - explore the different ways you can participate through sharing, asking questions, and posting comments. If you don’t have a lot of experience with online marketing, take some time to learn about promoting and selling products online.

Once you can say YES to all four questions, CONGRATULATIONS! It’s time to start planning your crowdfunding campaign. Don’t forget to ping me with the link to your campaign site, and let me know your thoughts in the comments section.

Solyndra, Oklahoma, and Dolphins

Excellent article in the NYT on September 24th, 2011, on the ‘panic’ surrounding Solyndra.

The United States, which three years ago led the world in investments in clean energy, has now fallen behind China and Germany, which provide far more generous subsidies. The failure of a single company — and anyone who knows anything about transformative technologies knows there will be failures — is no reason to stop our efforts to catch up.

Agreed. In case you haven’t seen ‘A Dolphin’s Tale,’ Mr. Morgan Freeman has a wise saying (as he always seems to have in any movie he’s in.) He says, “You’re just hurt, you’re not broken.” If the ol’ US gave up at the first sign of failure, we wouldn’t have the lunar landing, that gymnast girl from Oklahoma with the busted ankle, Silicon Valley… nothin’. We’d suck.

How to improve your Facebook Wall post performance by up to 300%: The EDGE? Rules

If you manage a brand’s Facebook presence, you likely ask yourself “How can I improve my Wall posts?” In response to this question, Buddy Media recently conducted a study to determine a set of Wall post best practices. Based on their findings, I created 5 simple to ensure my Brand Pages follow Buddy Media’s Strategies for Effective Facebook Wall Posts:

1. EIGHTY CHARACTERS. Keep your posts under 80 characters in length.

1. DESCRIPTIVE URL. Use your brand’s full-length URLs when possible, use a brand-specific short URL (e.g. http://pep.si/ocLU) when the 80 character limit is an issue.
2. GOOD TIMING. Publish your posts a.) outside of normal business hours and b.) on the days best suited for your brand’s industry.
3. EFFECTIVE KEYWORDS. Request actions with LIKE, TAKE, SUBMIT, POST, COMMENT, and TELL US. Describe promotions with EVENT, WINNER, OFFER, NEW, and WIN.
4. ? Ask questions at the end of your post using the interrogatives WHERE, WHEN, WOULD, or SHOULD.

Notice the first character of each rule spells the phrase “EDGE?”? Makes them easy to put into practice. When you’re writing a post, ask yourself “Does this Wall Post have the EDGE?” 

That’s it — just follow the EDGE? rules and your Wall posts conform with proven best practices that have been shown to yield consistently higher-than-average fan engagement rates.

Want to know more?

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