Comnicate Blog – Online Newsrooms

We all know that technology can make a little less human at times. It is easy enough to ignore a pesky Facebook request, send an off the cuff or rude text and we are probably all guilty of spending too much time checking our emails.

But technology does not have to be the cause of all of these offenses. Instead, current technology should be a reminder for us all to be a little more human online. In a professional, or even personal, sense this does not mean sharing every small detail of your daily life online, being human is not about how much you share. However, a company Twitter or Facebook page is a great way to humanise your organisation. These online platforms give your business the opportunity to create a personal experience for your customers.

One of the best ways to attract customers is to speak to them as individuals. A brand is not human but they can easily achieve a humane approach by leveraging the personality of the individuals that work for them.

It is also important to ensure that your brand uses social platforms to listen and engage with customer queries, and respond to feedback appropriately.

Social platforms can also be a great way to monitor your online presence, check out our past blogs on online reputation management.

Here at Comnicate, we often emphasise the need for comprehensive online business reputation management and analysis. This is especially important with size and impact of social media today.

So when it comes to Twitter, there is a couple of trend and metrics analyser tools already out there including, Twitalyzer and Trendistic and if you are already clued-up to analysing your Twitter presence you might have heard about BackType. Backtype offered a subscription online service which allowed companies to understand and analyse the impact of their social media outputs, by compiling and reporting data on current and past Twitter conversations.

Earlier this month BackType was acquired by Twitter and announced it will be incorporated to provide a free BackTweets service to Twitter users. Despite the press release reporting that no new registrations will be accepted, Comnicate is confident that this will signal a soon to be released easy-to-use and perhaps over regulated Twitter analytics tool.

Regardless, having a comprehensive understanding of your online reputation and ROI through social media is important to every marketing strategy. Twitter is not the only social media platform your business should be managing, but in saying so, it is conveniently easy. Check out Visible Tweets, Twitter Sheep and Tweetstats for more.

While Google+ is still trialling its Google+ Project, otherwise known as the Answer To Facebook, the verdict is still out on its potential success.

Some early adopters are jumping on the Google+ wagon, and despite the all-to-recent Google Buzz failure, the new venture looks promising. However with its functionality strikingly similar to Facebook, as it will allow you to like and recommend websites, products, places etc to your friends, check-in to venues, create a group chat and messaging with friends and instantly share photos. With so much in common, it is unlikely that most users will maintain two accounts, so is it possible that Google+ will sent Facebook down the doomed path that MySpace took?

If this is the case, its unlikely that Facebook will go quietly. Facebook is currently attempting to block a Facebook Friend Exporter tool, which would allow users to export the contact and email details of their Facebook friends and load it into their Google contacts. Just this week, Facebook has begun to removed the email address option to avoid users transporting the data over to Google.

With the numbers of social media users continuing to expand, it makes sense for all companies to have an online marketing strategy. But before you jump head first into the world of social media there are a few question to consider.

What are the needs of your business?

Identifying what your company needs to flourish is really important to implementing your online strategy. Is your marketing budget running low? Do you require more staff? Are you looking to increase the number of return customers?

What am I using the social media site for?

Once you have established your needs, now consider your main objective of using social media sites. Are you looking to network and connect with others within your industry? Do you want to promote a new product? Or grow your client base?

Whose attention am I trying to get?

This comes back to speaking to your target audience.Understanding your buyer personas will help you establish who you should be speaking to and how. Social sites emphasise personal relationships, so use this to your advantage.

Which sites to take on?

Maintaining your online presence takes time and consideration. It is not always in your best interest to be on as many social sites as there are available to you, unless you can dedicate the time that they require. It is always a good idea to start off with one or two, to avoid spreading yourself too thin. If you are already struggling with the upkeep of your online presence, consider offloading some sites or hiring someone to specifically maintain your online presence.

How can I achieve this most efficiently?

It might become apparent that there are several social media channels that are effective for communications. However results take time to acheive, therefore look to create links between social media sites. For instance with Comnicate NewsCentre it is possible from a single posting to distribute the content via multiple channels suc hFacebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and technologies such as RSS andPodcast, to name just a few.

Infographics are the cool kids on the PR block at the moment and if you are planning on creating one for your next press release or blog post, check out these free online tools to get you going.

Before you start, like anything, it is a good idea to have a clear idea of what you want to get across to you audiences. So here are some tips for designing your infographics:

• Decide on a colour scheme and stick to it.
• Keep it sleek and clean, without too much in one picture.
• Research some interesting and relevant facts and statistics to add.
• Remember; it is all about fitting a lot or complex information into a scannable image.
• Reference your facts in the infographic.
• Include your company name and website so people can be sure who made it.

Inkscape

Inkscape is the tool to use to help create your overall infographic. It is a free vector graphic software program which is available for many platforms, and is easy to use and intuitive. It is also simple to import and add other images or visuals to your creation.

Google Public Data

This tool lets you take public data and transform it into an infographic of your choice. The data is presented in colourful and simple graphics, perfect for inforgraphic integration.

Stat Planet

With Stat Planet you have access to tons of great data with which you can create amazing interactive visuals, which can be used as is or saved as static images. It is simple to use and can be downloaded it for free or used within your browser.

Creately

This great tool lets you make professional looking diagrams and flow charts which are also easy to collaborate into your infographic. You simply choose from a number of purpose-designed diagram types and add your data to make your own chart.

Wordle

Wordle will have you occupied for hours. It lets you create word clouds using a slab text you enter. There are a huge range of designs to choose from and you can enter whole books, short passages or see what other people have used.

Infographic press releases are everywhere at the moment, and if you are wondering what exactly is an infographic? Well look no further.

An inforgraphic is an illustration-based press release which focuses on graphs and images to share your message. If you are looking to liven up your media releases, an infographic is the perfect way to avoid publishing a text heavy, dreary post.

Recently at Comnicate we invested time in enabling our clients creating infographics a simple matter. So embedding an Inforgraphic in the Comnicate Newsroom is now vastly simpler.

These days everyone is in a hurry and to appeal to the growing number of texto-phobes out there, an infographic press release is the choice of many blogging businesses. Graphs and pie charts illustrating survey or research results are a great place to start when publishing your first infographic, check out this App Store Stats infographic for example.

Comnicate also loves the idea of showing new processes through flowchart graphics or diagrams. To get the creative juices flowing here are the top 10 best infographics.

All good marketing strategies need to be updated and refreshed on a regular basis and with online marketing channels growing so fast Comnicate has put together a check list for businesses to use and apply to their current online marketing strategy.

Keywords and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Even a basic understanding of SEO and the importance of keywords is enough to ensure marketing success in the world of online marketing.

The idea of SEO basically comes down the fact that customers will not use what they cannot find, so SEO and keyword analysis should part of every marketing strategy. To gain a better understanding of how and what customers are searching for, check out Google Adwords and their keyword search tool.

Website Design

The layout and design of your company website is often more important that you may think. Your website is increasingly becoming the first point of contact or at least the first impression of your business.

While your website should be aesthetically pleasing your website design should focus on ease-of-use and navigation. The keyword analysis you have done, will give you a clear idea of what customers want to know about your business, which should be incorporation into your web page.

Your company website can also be the answer to establishing a meaningful relationship with your customers. By incorporating blog and newsletter subscriptions and options to follow your company on social channels and even chat now functions will give customers a more useful and enduring connection with your business.

Content Strategy

Once you have established what your audience is searching for and your website is customer-friendly you will need to focus on your content. Identify your target markets and establish how they differentiate from one another.. Again, your keyword and traffic analysis will help you determine what topics you should focus on when creating content.

The Importance Of Blogs

Adding a blog to your company website can be an inexpensive and rewarding way to increase traffic and business. A blog which provides consistent, quality updates creates a relationship with your customers and gives them a reason to keep coming back.

Your blog should be representative of your company initiatives and reflect your brand on a personable and approachable level. If you corporate blog needs some spring cleaning, take a look at our 3 Ways to Improve Your Corporate Blog.

Something Comnicate has been thinking a lot about lately is the way that mobile devices are now beginning to out number and even replace PCs and laptops. It is arguably the fastest growing personal medium that has ever existed. So it makes sense that marketing and advertising campaigns are beginning to focus on channelling through mobile devices.

With the introduction of Smartphones and tablets, the opportunity to interact one-on-one with your targeted audiences has increased. Mobile internet goes hand-in-hand new sites, blogs, social network sites, pod and vodcasts as well as video and radio channels. Consumers are becoming more and more accustomed to getting what they want, and getting it fast. We believe that it is important for every business to be thinking about how accessible their brand is online, and how it looks on mobile devices.

It is important that a businesses are aware of their online presence, as well as ensuring that their website is easily navigated and aesthetically pleasing. Recently a lot of traditional print publications have either moved their content online or optimised it for mobile device access, to tap into the now thriving mobile market.

Mobile device marketing can be beneficial for both B2C businesses as well as B2B companies. For example, a customer considering an in-store purchase can now run a product search and receive reviews and blogger opinions on the spot, or possibly even come across the same product cheaper online. B2B companies who understand how instantaneous information gathering now is, and has a good online presence and a well-maintained reputationare definitely more likely to win over others.

If there is one thing to keep in mind for your next marketing campaign it is that consumers want their information as quickly as possible and with minimal effort and how your business can meet this need.

It is not the most recent video but gives some interesting and pertinent reflections on the role of PR, digital and influencers.

For those who missed it…

At Comnicate a key focus is on application usability. That is delivering an application that is intuitive to use, provides control and features as you would expect, delivers the desired outcomes regardless of the frequency of use.

I am happy to say that the feedback we get is one of being pretty much on target. One reason not to develop an in-house solution is we take feedback from dozens of people from around the world. Having a full time development team focussing just on Newsroom Plus delivers better outcomes that an ad-hoc solution.

For inspiration and research one group we use is Useit. Jacob Nielsen is regarded as the usability guru (not design). He made a couple of interesting comments with reference to blogs but equally could apply to Newrooms.

In completing some eye tracking research it was found that article summaries performed best, where there is a summary of a news article and a link to the main page, rather than a complete article.

Certainly that has been our view.

Picture 1: Full story

Picture 2: Full story

Picture 3: Full story

Picture 4:Pictures

Picture 5: Pictures