Call us 0800 088 7486
There are some very striking social media icons out there, and they can only add to a website, as well as showing you are aware of social media and its importance in everyone’s online life.
Smashing Apps have put together a full range of social media icons for you to plagiarise, enjoy, to inspire or just to oooh and ahhh over.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=6fecaccd-7a36-423c-9880-83e2c224f645)
The rise of Facebook is difficult to ignore and the latest trend appears to be joining Just For Fun groups that are utterly pointless. For instance, I hate the little triangle that is never wiped by the windscreen wiper, Trying to turn on the lightswitch with your head whilst your hands are full, Sometimes I mentally narrate my life as though I am in a novel, When I realised the word “bed” looks like a bed, my mind was blown and so on, pretty much ad infinitum.
If you are a fun loving company looking to raise brand awareness, all you need do is sit down, come up with 20, 50 or 100 equally pointless but fun groups, create a Facebook group page for each one with your branding on it, and start joining and promoting your own groups.
Make sure that the link to each group goes on the news and live feeds, and sit back and watch your branding reach an audience of potentially millions.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=aba80eff-287e-444b-a001-e9ed1a3660ed)
Seth Godin makes a relevant point in his Gotcha! blog post today.
As consumers we hate to be lied to, yet as marketers we are trained to hide the truth behind marketing spiel in order to gain a clickthrough, a conversion or a sale.
When marketing your products and services in this day and age, honesty helps. In fact, it is essential.
If you fail to mention a particular aspect of your product eg it won’t work in certain situations, or its size is cleverly concealed by “trick photography”, or any other issue that might affect the consumer’s purchase decision or use of your product, then you can guarantee that some dissatisfied customer somewhere will mention it.
Review sites, Twitter and forums are full of negative comments about products, companies, brands and so on. When trying to find the right product, consumers are becoming prosumers and increasingly looking to such sites to find reviews, customer comments, and complaints before making a decision on which product they will buy.
Many of these type of complaints can be handled by:
a) telling the truth about the product in the first place
b) dealing with the complaints as and when they occur and
c) rectifying the misapprehension of future customers by changing the description or photo of said product to be honest and accurate
A sale is not a good sale when that consumer ends up feeling misled. It is more likely to be the cause of many non-sales in the future if the customer then complains, whether online or offline, through word of mouse or word of mouth.
In a world full of lies, from politics to the corporate world, the media through to marketing, your every day punter needs to be told the truth. And you will win, long term, by telling it how it is.
Let your consumers be content with your content, and then they will be loyal, evangelical and return customers.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=7f5f9159-1f15-4477-8b71-dd594ea26c5c)
It started off as a quick explore for blog promotion tactics, travelled through a blog critique and moved into a story about the importance of networking with your peers at events, which led to “What is just like breathing for you?”
Which made me stop and think.
Internet marketing, after 14 years, is pretty much like breathing. You look at a website and can usually see almost instantly what is wrong with it and why the search engines and potential customers don’t want to play on it. You can see strategies that would bring almost immediate benefits, often for an affordable budget. You can put together ideas for marketing online that will help achieve the aims of the company behind the website.
Yet, when it comes to Photoshop, I am an absolute muppet. I can’t even select part of the image. So, when I run up against an image problem, what do I do?
Find an expert to help.
Robert Stackhouse, in one of the comments on starbucker’s blog post says, “In “Outliers”, Malcolm Gladwell shares with us the idea of this ten thousand hour rule. Gladwell says researchers find on average ten thousand hours is about the amount of time it requires to become expert at something.”
Do you have 10,000 hours spare to become an expert on something which is peripheral to your business? Or to your daily life? Not usually! So, we bring in experts to do the job for us. We seek help.
Assessing what we are good at, or weak in, is a valuable exercise to undertake that will help you to recognise the strengths that you need in the experts you find. Working out what comes as easily to you as breathing will help to establish, both in your personal life and in business, where you struggle.
Finding those who have the missing pieces of the jigsaw to make your business buzz is half the fun, and then learning from their expertise and taking your business where it needs to be can lead to far greater things.
And the Thought for Friday is:
“Accept random invitations – magic insight comes from unknown folk”
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=e3d96754-5a44-46eb-bcd5-870c4c5c6b52)
