Tumblr vs Facebook
Today I finally understood Tumblr and why it is significantly different then Facebook and I had to share because I think it just saved my sanity.
Throughout your life experiences (school, sports, jobs, etc) you meet people along the way. These people that you see in person face-to-face is often reflected in your Facebook friend’s list. Most people will Facebook friend people they have met in real life or when these friendship circles combine. Tumblr is a set of people who share their thoughts and personality in an online space. During this process you follow people you often share the same interests or opinions. This creates almost a hybrid cloud-based friendship circle. Many Tumblr users wish that their Tumblr friends were their real life face-to-face friends.
Facebook is like the friends you went to high school with where tumblr is the friends you WISH you went to high school with. Tumblr is where you can surf though someone’s thread of post but never be considered as a creeper.
It is Now Easier to Petition the White House
The right to petition our government is guaranteed in the First Amendment to our U.S. Constitution. There’s usually several ways you can do this: picketing, drafting a letter with signatures, petitioning our House of Representatives, or Senators, but now the White House is going to launch We the People, and easy online tool to create ideas and petition the White House policy makers to actually do something about it. What we at Moxie find exciting about this website is that is has several examples that we all can learn from in how you can use a website to make your organization grow.
Motivate through Interaction
The White House video is under 1:30 minutes, but it packs in so much and asks users to do two things (sign up for alerts and think of ideas). What we can take from this is that the video compliments the call-to-action on the homepage and illustrates how video helps to create a return on investment. Read more here about how you measure the return on investment of a video.
Most of Moxie clients use Google Apps and have access to the feature of creating online spreadsheets. Creating online spreadsheets can make it easy to create wild videos like this one or check out all the features in Google Doc’s Presentations.
Cater to Different Learning Styles
When you thinking of what you need for your website, it is always a challenge to remind yourself that a website is not for you. It is for the people that will visit it. We often remind clients that if you start to inject your personal preference, say flowers or leaves, into the design of the website, you may loose focus of the goals of your website. The White House has done an excellent job identifying that users need illustrations and text to explain the process of how the website works. If you dont read the text, the images make it easy for someone to understand the workflow involved if they were to sign up. Keeping this in mind for your website or areas you can improve can help motivate users to contact you.
Facebook Business Page Updates: Photo Tagging
Having a Facebook business page is a great opportunity to create brand loyalty, engage directly with your customers, and share photos of your events. Now, you can take it a step further.
Facebook just released a feature that lets Business and Individual users tag business pages in photos. A group of friends can tag each other and now the food on the table, too. Photos from a concert can tag the artists on stage to their favorite food/beverage stand. Contests can be created for the best tagged photo of a business’ product. The possibilities are endless. Some things to note:
- You do not have to be a fan of the product or business
- Tag as you normally would in a photo, but search for the business name or product
- I have experienced some issue tagging a couple pages, but as usual with new features, these may take time to fix.
3 Confessions of a PPC Waste-aholic
JP Anderson is a guest blogger for Moxie
Forgive me budget, for I have sinned. I have paid for keywords on some of the best search engines in the world with hardly anything to show for it. I have but three confessions:
First, I have placed too much hope in the contact us button (aka. the savior). I have not allowed easy ways for the paid traffic to make themselves known after spending upwards of $3 per click. If only I could’ve offered a give-away, a simple landing page, or even an e-newsletter they could sign up for. These things would’ve at least given me some idea of who is perusing my site. Maybe, just maybe, not every person goes through the mental process of saying “I have read everything I need to read. I must find the contact us button so I can reveal everything the organization needs to put me in their sales funnel.”
Second, I have not developed any landing pages that would be relevant to the search terms being used to drive traffic. In Halligan and Shah’s book Inbound Marketing, they indicate the likelihood of converting traffic increases by 15% when a landing page is present. They even reference studies which suggest that a well designed page can convert up to 50% of certain audiences. Such data makes me want to put on the breaks before spending any more money on PPC.
Third, I have no easy way to develop and make landing pages. The design of our site is safely under lock-and-key by an overworked IT staff, making it virtually impossible to implement strategic changes. But, don’t worry, atop my Christmas list this year will be a way for me to make mission-critical adjustments to our web pages. Already underway are conversations with low priced landing page designers and a software application that allows me to easily develop my own custom landing pages on a third-party site to minimize my IT staff involvement. These changes couldn’t happen soon enough.
It is these things that I utterly admit for the sake of a better tomorrow.
Signed, a frustrated marketer.
About the Author
JP Anderson serves as Director of Admissions at Northeastern Seminary in Rochester, NY. He is currently completing a Master of Science in Strategic Marketing at Roberts Wesleyan College. You may find him on Twitter and on Linkedin.
Ultimate Guide to Google+ for your Business
If you are thinking, “UGH! Not another social media trend I need to keep track of”, then you might miss the train! This article explores how you can stay ahead of the game and use Google+ towards to help your business grow.
What is Google+?
Google+ lets you post status updates and group them in “Circles” that you name such as “high school friends”, “Clients”, “Inspirational Bloggers”, etc. You control which circle your posts go out to. Anyone can add you to their own circle, but you will never see the name of the circle you’ve been added and vice versa.
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