Let’s start with the number of social media sites that you choose to use. An abandoned social media site isn’t good for your image, so you don’t want to take on more than your team can handle. You want to use at least two different social media sites. Four is probably the maximum for most companies. Faceboook, Twitter, and Instagram are three of the best sites that you can use for branding right now.

Content is one of the most time consuming parts of social media. To build trust in and respect for your brand, content needs to be accurate, unique, and engaging. Avoid posting all the same pictures to Instagram and Facebook and making all your tweets your status updates on Facebook. You also want to maintain the same tone (professional, fun, excited, etc.) on all of your accounts. You can’t be super serious on Facebook, type in all caps on Twitter, and then use teenage abbreviations in your Instagram comments. You don’t want to have brand confusion for people who follow you on all three sites.

Another important use of social media is to market your business in real time. Oreos became the talk of the Internet when they capitalized on the Superbowl power outage with a relevant ad posted to Twitter. You can even try using current news stories to promote conversation. Just be careful to consider the way a breaking story may develop so that you keep your brand out of anything potentially controversial. You can’t post something on the Internet, take it down when things go wrong, and hope that no one took a screenshot.

Finally, you have to respond to comments properly. Some antagonistic comments just need to be ignored. Some are legitimate complaints and require a prompt response. This is an opportunity to show consumers, in general, how your company handles concerns. Deleting negative posts and comments is counterproductive to branding your company in a proper way. Be sure to reward your biggest supporters, and provide incentives for people to like, +1, favorite, or retweet your content.

The right use of social media can be great for the reputation of your business and helpful in building your online platform.

Additional Source: http://www.inta.org/Programs/Pages/branding2013.aspx

The post How to Use Social Media to Build Your Online Brand appeared first on Platform Creator.

“Johnnie, I’ll make you a ham sandwich”, Busia would say.

“Busia, we just ate.”

“Nonsense. Sit down and eat!” she said lovingly but with command.

After all the eating, 15 – 20 of us would go outside to play in the Turkey Bowl. It was a snow covered pavement two-hand touch football game played with current college football athletes, a few brave girls, and ages in between 10 and 35. We were all very competitive and it usually ended with at least one person limping off with a sprained ankle or just the numbness and pain in the fingers coming from the whip of the cold Chicago wind.

Since then, I’ve always enjoyed being around food or working with food-related clients.

The key ingredients in a successful food marketing campaign normally involve an experience or a story, and the interaction of people with food.

I’m a believer in straight-up traditional brand radio or TV spots. But, if you can get customers to have fun with your food, you will have a customer for a long, long, time.

My favorite marketing idea for restaurants is to do in-studio promotions…”Feed the DJ”. It has 3 benefits:

1). It helps the client brand with the station and the DJ’s platform, usually without having to paying an endorsement fee.

2). It shows the food client in a fun light (non-advertising message)…having fun with the DJ.

3). It can incorporate Social Media (DJ tweets, Facebook, Instagram, pictures and / or coupons, etc.) with a bounce-back to the restaurant.

Best yet, it’s low cost. It’s great if you can get live mentions. But, if not, a creative DJ will pre-record :15 second promos to air while you are delivering the food. Most radio stations will charge 35% – 50% for a :15 second promo compared to a :60 with twice the impact as a :60.

When you are first establishing your online platform and beginning to engage the marketplace with a blog and using various social media tools, don’t forget that the goal is to have people experience your brand in a fun and unique way. DJ’s are creative and are experts at having fun.

Want to set up a “Feed the DJ” promotion hitting your target market?

Or, want to set up an event to get potential customers to really experience what you have to offer?

The post Tasty Marketing Ideas for Restaurants appeared first on Platform Creator.

When you are establishing your online platform and beginning to engage the marketplace with a blog and using various social media tools, what are the first steps you should take?

Remember that you do not need to be an expert to give useful advice.

When you think back to the big breakthoughs you had in your life, did you learn more from your successes or your failures? Could that failure help someone else? That’s a blog post!

And, who invented the light bulb? You might suggest, ‘Thomas Edison’. Edison, while holding over 1,000 patents and learning hundreds of ways to use failure successfully, did not invent the incandescent light. He learned how to make it commercially viable.

Social Media, blogging, and SEO are still relatively new tools used to reach the marketplace and engage potential customers.

Have a willingness to take chances and take action. Your brand will withstand the minor mistakes along the way as long as you have three principles in place:

Learn from the Experts

• Success leaves clues – use the tools and suggestions from the experts
• Even the experts make mistakes and many of them will freely admit them
• Even if you become one of the experts, there is always someone from whom you can learn

Serve Others with Compassion (give more than you take)

• Re-tweet, post, and share others’ messages
• Promote others’ ideas
• Give without asking in return

Use Your Failure and Failure of Others as a Guide

• I made a mistake with an e-commerce client recently by trying to spread their ad budget too thin. I can use the lesson learned to take a more firm approach to ad budget planning.
• Many years ago I had a manager who said, ‘if it’s not broken, it’s time to break some glass’. While I respect his enthusiasm for trying to improve an already good product, I learned more from seeing the destruction that followed…I will avoid that.

Like Edison, take Others’ Successes and Improve Them

1). Listen to what the marketplace is wanting.

2). Engage your target market by interacting with them in meaningful conversation.

3). Then brand your message with a targeted approach. Where is your target market hanging out? Serve them and keep learning how to do that better.

4). Who does what you are doing? How can you improve upon their approach?

5). Be persistent and NEVER GIVE UP!

The post My Friend “Failure” appeared first on Platform Creator.

There’s an awful lot we don’t know. The maze of Social Media; the plethora of information about it that bombards you when you enter the realm can be overwhelming. It comes at you in the form of “here’s what you’re missing and need to learn right away. This is stuff you don’t now know, that you need to know to make your platform successful!” It makes sense to want to know more, but it can also become an endless chase – and a Marketer’s dream! The only apparent antidote in this scenario is to know what you don’t know, but how can you know that for sure? It can become a bird chase.

In his book, “Happiness is a Serious Problem”, Dennis Prager refers to “The Missing Tile Syndrome.” It describes our obsession with what’s missing, and the fact that we don’t notice the ceiling tiles that are there – just the holes where there are none. We assume that what’s missing from our lives is what would make us happy, if only we had it. Don’t get caught up in this mindset with your online marketing and the creation of your platform.

You must go with what you now know. Don’t be like the baseball pitcher who only practices his windup. 

There are often just a few basics you need to know to make the best of your situation, or your online platform. These are the ‘old saws’ like:

Hard work – there is no replacement! Of course we have to work on the right things, but nothing happens until the work begins.

Have a system – you won’t know what’s working if you are not systematic about your approach.

Diligence – sometimes it just takes time. Be like the ant – keep at it!

Interaction – your prospects and followers are not just a crowd. Get to know them.

Think for yourself! (This applies only if you want to create something original.)

Adjust your approach based on the results you get. 

There are always a half dozen things that make 90% of the difference. Don’t overlook the basics. We suggest you focus on the half-dozen that YOU think might work for you and then watch for a while and see what happens.

Never underestimate the power of the immediately obvious. While it’s important to have a plan, you can never account for all the variables. You can make educated guesses about the future, but right now there is  a best next thing for you to do to nudge your platform forward, and it’s likely to be that task you keep putting off. You know, that unpleasant one that requires you to dig deeper and create something? Your success is based on doing what you do know now – not on searching out what you don’t know. 

What you don’t know can hurt you, but not acting on what you do know will hurt you even worse.

The post What You Don’t Know appeared first on Platform Creator.

The post Social Media Tools appeared first on Platform Creator.