By Nicole Fletcher

Clients often ask me why they should blog.”I’m an accountant/lawyer/clothing store/Insert brand here,” they say, “What could I possibly blog about and why would I waste my time?” Well friends/clients/future bloggers I’m here to give you the low down, the 411, the how to and the why.

Blogs offer brands from startups to corporate giants the opportunity to flex their creative muscles, to ruffle their feathers, if you will. The voice behind the business gives your brand a personality and human-like qualities, which clients, customers and future business people love. Consumers want to support brands they can relate to, brands that they feel comfortable with, brands they might consider friends. After all, who better to do business with or help you when you’re in need than a real live living and breathing human?

Back to the point: Why you should blog and how you should do it.

Step 1. Have a plan. Know how your voice is going to sound in both the blogger and the social sphere. These voices must be consistent as they are both integral parts of your social media marketing strategy.

Step 2. What are you going to post? Know what ‘vibe’ you want to give off. Will you post videos, pictures, quotes, articles or all of the above? Make sure you’re having fun while you’re posting and that you would want to read your posts yourself! If you don’t find what you’re posting interesting and you ARE your brand, how can you expect anyone else to? Feel free to post brand/industry related information like event recaps, invites, updates, innovations, pics etc, but make sure not to be purely self promotional – customers don’t want to hear you talk about how awesome you are. Sorry.

Step 3. Make Time. Blogging is fun. Post fun things, write what you think, look for unanswered questions, inspire conversation.

Step 4. Don’t be afraid to link back to yourself. Pick keyword phrases in your content that are industry related (ie: what you think people would be searching for to find your company website – Places to Stay in San Diego for a San Diego Hotel for example) and link those back to your website. This will do wonders for your SEO (search engine optimization)- driving traffic to your website and increasing your brand visibility.

Step 5. Push your blog posts our to your social networks. If you don’t already have social networks in place, well that’s another conversation entirely (email me Nicole@jacobtyler.com) but if you do, link to them, tweet about them, ask people what they think and perhaps consider implementing an internal social media policy – thereby inspiring your employees to really invest in the brand and get the word out there. Remember: It’s easy to bring already established communities into your own community than it is to create them from scratch.

In a nut shell, blogging is fun! If you need help setting one up, I’d be happy to help- but if you feel confident, check out wordpress or tumblr- two awesome blogging platforms created for you blogging pleasure.

Here’s to blogging, blogs and being a blogger.

By Nicole Fletcher

It was recently brought to my attention that perhaps not everyone cares as deeply as I do about the Death of FBML or How The 2011 Super Bowl #failed in Social Media but that’s no reason to tell me I’m not, and I quote, “covering real trends in Social Media”. Ouch. In response to this rather hurtful comment, I’ve decided to see what exactly this outsider thinks is “important” and we’ll just see if I agree.

The post accompanying this opinion was one entitled, “A Year in the life of a Geo Based Social Network Giant Foursquare- 2010 by the numbers“. A good title and a good report no doubt but as I read the 134 words in this “earth shattering” article, I’m not gona lie, my mind was not blown. I’ve been jocking foursquare since it’s start, so much so that @dens (Dennis Crowley, Co Founder and CEO of Foursquare) is a twitter follower, consistent chatter, facebook friend and oh yes, foursquare friend of mine. That being said, I know better than anyone how insane foursquare is, with its 3400% growth in one year,  over 6 million users and 381 million + checkins. Here nor there, I would assume that in my abundant list of blog posts, I would have conveyed my respect for this wondrous geo-location trend- but perhaps I need to more often. Whether or not I did in posts like 4 Things you MUST be doing in Social Media – the complaint has been duly noted so be expecting a super awesome geo location and how to work it into your marketing plan blog post in the near future. In the mean time, please visit our facebook fan page with any blog topic suggests social media, SEO, design or otherwise – I always appreciate feedback, positive or negative. : )

For the Foursquare Story, Click Here.

By Nicole Fletcher

In accordance with Facebook’s constantly changing interface, usability and features, they have rolled out yet another update: the pending death of FBML (facebook markup language or the code that creates the pretty pictures you see on facebook pages- for you non techies out there) and tabs.

This announcement freaked me out almost as much as when, a few weeks ago, my fan pages updated moving my beautiful tabs from the prime real estate of the top of the fan page, to just below the profile picture. Now it makes more sense, Facebook is doing away with FBML and tabs – my freak out was part of their plan all along.

Here is what Facebook said:

“With our recent launch of Requests and the support for iframe on Pages Tabs, we are now ready to move forward with our previously announced plans to deprecate FBML and FBJS as a primary technology for building apps on Facebook. On March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to create new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app. While all existing apps on Pages using FBML or the Static FBML app will continue to work, we strongly recommend that these apps transition to iframes as soon as possible.”

To translate: If you have FBML on your page now, it WILL continue to work so don’t fret. That being said, they strongly recommend transitioning to iframes ASAP. That’s a pretty vague statement if you ask me Facebook. So you’re saying my apps will work…but that I should change them soon, thereby subtly insinuating that they may not work in the future? Hm. Not so wild about that statement. Apparently though, we’ve been assured that they will give us plenty of warning before officially killing our beloved facebook markup language.

Anywho, we’re all safe for the time being and it’s pretty easy to switch your FBML to iFrame: Just go to the application’s profile page and under Page Tab Type click iFrame instead of FBML.

The bottom line (so far as this preliminary knowledge goes) is this: All Facebookers were not created equal; most are not developers. As a result, not everyone will be able to customize a page without using a third party application. To be honest though, that’s nothing new. Average users don’t know how to work facebook applications so for them, nothing will change. What’s GREAT about this though is that now, we’ll be able to more effectively track clicks and conversion (who doesn’t love the idea of Google analytics in your facebook application). Woo hoo! So in sum, this is a good thing from a business/developer point of view but not so great from a  regular person pov. If you’re proficient in html – awesome. If not, well, time will tell. As more info comes, I’ll be sure to update!

by Nicole Fletcher

People always ask me what they should do regarding social media and their business. In my professional opinion, this loaded question cannot be answered on the fly, let alone without doing a solid amount of research. That being said, asking is the first step and so I will answer it. Here is a quick list of what your business MUST be doing to avoid being left in the antisocial dust of yesteryear. Mind you, this list is the BARE MINIMUM so please act accordingly.

1. Create a Facebook fan page and Twitter account and use them. Keep them updated with fresh, relevant content and bring in your personal network for growth. Ask your community what they want to hear about and then provide them with that information. Talk to them, respond to them and do it in a timely manner…not just today, but tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. Make time for these tools -  you’ll be glad you did.

2. Install social network links on your website. Your business website should ABSOLUTELY have social links (preferably in the top right corner). Include Facebook and Twitter to be sure, then comes YouTube, Yelp. LinkedIn and Flickr to name a few. Make sure the links work – broken links don’t do anyone any good.

3. Write blog posts. Blog posts don’t have to be perfect or long or serious. They can be fun and short and funny and informative. Post often (but make sure you’re creating good, original, fresh content) and link key phrases (that pertain to your business) back to relevant pages on your website. This does wonders for your search engine optimization and counts as a link back to your website (even though it’s from your own blog). Also post these articles to your social networks. Feel free to tweet your blog post a number of times but be careful with excessive posting on Facebook – people tend to get annoyed with anyone takes over their newsfeed.

4. If you’re a restaurant or other service business, claim your business pages on review sites like Metromix, Citigrid and Google places. Also claim your venues on geo-location sites like Yelp, Foursqare, Facebook Places, SCVNGR, Gowalla, the list goes on. Run specials (start with foursquare – it’s the easiest in my opinion) and track your conversion. It’s easy and it’s free. People are talking about you whether you’re watching or not- why turn a blind eye to such a valuable tool?

These in short, are the BARE ESSENTIALS to social media. To clarify, once you have these set up, you are far from striking social media gold – so don’t celebrate just yet. That being said, if what I’m talking about sounds like jibberish, shoot me an email (nicole@jacobtyler.com) and I’d be happy to get you going. If you have a solid grasp on the aforementioned points and you thought you were sitting pretty, shoot me an email as well. We’ll take the next step together as the sky is the limit when it comes to being social.