marketing monday

Marketing Monday: Schedule Facebook Posts

October 27, 2014 by Moran Media

Did you know you could schedule facebook posts?

If I have set up a website for you with a blog you know already that you can write your posts ahead of time and schedule them to post for you. That’s what I’m doing with this post. I’m writing it on a friday and scheduling it for a monday. I find using this tactic lets me work on a post and get it done ahead of time, but conform to a post schedule I have made for myself. Also, I find sometimes I have more time to write posts, and sometimes more inspiration, if I schedule the posts then I have a nice backlog of posts. So when a week rolls around when I just don’t know what to blog about or I am swamped with work for a client, or I’m on vacation, my posts can continue to come out without me having to log into the website to hit post.

I love this feature, and have grown used to it. I have at times wanted to do this with social media. With tools like HootSuite you can schedule tweets, facebook updates, you name it. Hootsuit has a very limited free version now, and two levels of paid. It’s a great programs and I have helped a few organizations learn to use it to maximize their social media presence.

Today (friday) I learned that facebook pages has added this feature to their interface and you can post to facebook ahead of time! Not just what you post on your blog and automatically share (if you aren’t doing this, let me know and I can walk you through it) to your facebook page, but regular statuses, images, and videos!

This is fantastic, I have scheduled a few posts from my archives to my brand new facebook page (like it if you haven’t already) so things I wrote in the past can be found there. To schedule a post is simple, just write your status as normal, and then click on the little clock icon in the bottom left side (as seen in the image to the left), you can pick a time and a date. Then, when you visit your page you can also see what is set to post in the future, in case you have any second thoughts.

Marketing Monday: Facebook ads and why they can hurt your brand.

October 20, 2014 by Moran Media

I have had a lot of clients and other organizations I work with suggest we pay to boost posts on facebook or use facebook ads to gain likes on. I always tell them it’s a bad idea, but I haven’t used the scientific method to prove my theories. I didn’t want to risk the reputation of these people or the brand to prove my theories either. Below is a video from Veritasium who demonstrates how these ads work, and how they work against you. The video is about 9 minutes, but it is completely worth the watch. Being involved in social media is a great way to grow your brand, but the best way to get ahead is word of mouth, being engaged with your audience, not paying to boost your posts.

This also is good advice for how you promote your page. When pages first started you needed 50 likes to get a custom URL, so when you started a page you would ask everyone you knew to like it. Now you don’t want to do that, you want to suggest people like your page only if you think they will interact with it. If I had a page that was for a Vegan restaurant for example, I wouldn’t ask my husband, a staunch Meatatarian (meatatarian; one who doesn’t like vegetables and eats mostly meat and starches) to like the page. His like wouldn’t help me, because when the page shared it’s latest Tofu dish he wouldn’t like the post or comment on it, nor would he share it. His lack of interaction would tell facebook that the post is un interesting and unwanted, so they wouldn’t put it on other people’s news feeds. Now if I were to invite my Yoga Instructor, or Chef friend, while they may not be strictly vegan, they may be more open to the latest Tofu dish and would comment or like it, telling facebook the post is interesting, and let it spread to others.

Facebook is insidious in trying to get you to buy these ads and pay to boost these posts. In this screen capture you can see that they tell me that 27 of my friends have paid for post boosts. I have to wonder how accurate that is. I know a few people who have admitted to paying to boost posts, they all told me how their engagement went down after too, but 27? That seems like a high number. I have to wonder how true this number is. Even when you open a page they build a payment method into the creation of the page, skip that, always.

How about you? Have you ever paid to boost a post on facebook? Does this video change your mind, or confirm it, on how advertising works on facebook? Let me know in the comments.

Don’t Stop Blogging

October 21, 2013 by Moran Media

I always tell my clients that they should be updating their website’s blog at least once a week. That an active blog means their page isn’t static and it gives customers, clients, their community, a reason to come back to their site, and it gives google a reason to crawl it. I also tell them that if they have something new they need to post it! Yes I am terrible at taking my own advice. When I start working for a client I am only thinking about their needs, so my page often goes without updates.

Like most advice in life, it’s often not followed by the one that gives it.

Truth of the matter is that you get busy, and sure, I know the best tricks to handle that. Write a bunch of blog posts ahead of time and let the auto schedule publish them at the right time. Again, not followed. Heck, I have designed and redesigned a bunch of sites over the summer and haven’t even put them in the portfolio let alone made a post about them.

It’s hard to remember to promote yourself when you’re running around busy actually working, and when it’s a one woman shop you can’t delegate these small tasks on someone else. Most of your life you have been raised not to brag, and when you post about yourself or your product it can feel like bragging.

Still, these tasks need to be done. When a new customer comes to your site and sees you haven’t posted anything new in a year they get the impression that you’re not an active business. They have no way of knowing you’ve been busily attending to your customers because they only see your inactive site.

What’s the solution? Well it isn’t going back to business as usual. It’s time to try something new, create a new routine for yourself to get you back into blogging and updating your site. Perhaps give yourself a reward each time you complete a post? It sounds simply and possibly silly, but we as humans respond well to positive rewards. Find something small that you value and reward yourself with it, something as small as a relaxing bath, or playing your favorite game on facebook, an extra hour of TV, a muffin, you name it! Find something to reward yourself for good work.

Besides, if you blog/brag about the good work you’re doing, you will likely start feeling even better about what you do.

Marketing Monday: Copyright, respect it, or pay the price.

October 22, 2012 by Moran Media

Back in July many of us heard about “The Nicest Cease and Desist Letter Ever.” When a book cover looked far too similar to the well known Jack Daniels label. Sure the book cover was changed, but not enough to protect Jack Daniels from having to step in. Copyright holders have a duty to send these letters, to stop people from using their trademarks or they could end up having their brand seen as generic, (Further reading on Metonymy) but Jack Daniels did it with class and style, and they helped out a local. Because of this diplomatic move they gained themselves a lot of attention, free publicity, and I bet customers.

When you are working on a project, no matter what it is, book cover, flier, business card, store sign, website, anything, you want to make sure your work is original. Searching goole images isn’t your key to free images, most of those images are copyright by someone. Fonts are copyright, you can’t use the Disney font on your fundraising flier, if you do, Mr. Mouse won’t be as nice as Mr. JD.

What can you do?

Have you art created for you, by an artist who understands copyright (like me perhaps?) and has your best interest in mind.
Use an image with a creative commons license that allows you to adapt and use for commercial work, just make sure you give credit.
Use an image from the Public Domain.
Buy Stock Images, where you are paying for the use of the image. (Sites like clipart.com & istockphoto are prime examples)
Use clip art from your paid programs like Microsoft Word, the clip art in your program is there for you to use, so long as you comply to their guidelines and don’t claim the work to be your own.

Is it really that important? After all I just have a local business, no one is going to check up on me.

Not true. Let’s not forget when Disney Sued a Daycare center for having their copyright work on their walls. It wasn’t even in the ads. Granted, Disney is the most notorious when it comes to suing over copyright but it’s important to remember. Let’s not forget when Hello Kitty sued a local child beauty pageant either. It would be really sad if your great project was the cause of bankruptcy thanks to a law suit.

Wait, but I see people using copyright work all the time.

Sure you do, and they may be getting away with it, for now. That could catch up with them any day. Do you really want to gamble with your business, your charity, your work? People jay walk all the time when it’s against the law, it doesn’t mean they should and it doesn’t mean they never will get ticketed. More importantly, do you want to be the kind of person that would take something that isn’t yours and use it as your own?

Marketing Monday: Spec Work

October 15, 2012 by Moran Media

Spec Work Example, the Sample — image by TopicSimple, www.topicsimple.com

I mentor a few artists just starting out and I’m often asked about this. Spec work, or the contest model, is never a good idea. I’ll explain why, on both counts.

Spec work is asking a designer, many designers to work for free with no guarantee of compensation for their hard work. More so, it doesn’t show a designer’s best work either. In the end both the designer and the customer feel short changed. The above video explains it so well, but it also brings up another important point.

Don’t work for free. It sounds nice, a friend of yours needs a logo or a website and you want to help them out so you offer to work free. Just like Spec Work, working free of charge takes the design relationship out of the equation. You feel like a burden is put upon you because you’re doing this work free, not to mention that your customer doesn’t provide enough feedback for you to design appropriately. The customer doesn’t feel comfortable treating you like they would a paid designer. The customer doesn’t tell you what they didn’t like about the project or they are afraid to press their ideas too much, after all you’re doing this as a favor. In the end both the designer and the customer feel like they were taken advantage of and neither are truly happy with the end product, in the worst case scenario the customer ends up not using the work and everyone’s time is wasted.

They often say money in a friendship can ruin a relationship, in this case lack of money ruins it. If you charge your friend, even at a discounted rate, for the work then they have ownership of their end of the project and you can build a professional relationship that’s key to the design.

Contests are another area to avoid. I have a rule, I don’t do contests. Much like spec work, a contest eliminates the ability to have the customer/designer relationship we’ve discussed is needed for any project. Worse yet, in a contest you don’t get to negotiate your terms and often even if you don’t win the contest, they contest holder owns the right to your work. Contests pay you once for something you’ve made (yes, there are rare cases when a contest winner went on to being the go to designer for the customer, but that’s not the norm) and they can then use it indefinitely any way they like. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, it’s not that far from normal contract work, except normal contract work your best is being sold and there is often more work after that. When a customer asks me to design a logo they often come back to me to create their stationary, business cards, website work, you name it. I can make sure my logo is being used properly and not being distorted, the logo always looks good, the customer always looks good, and I can be proud of my logo.

I’ve worked for agencies that have run design contests, most of the time the intention was good, to give exposure to young artists in school. The problem is that even though we liked the logos produced, we couldn’t change them, because it was a contest winner, and the logo suffered. We ended up with a logo that we were 80% happy with. I have no idea who designed it, and there wasn’t a way to get in touch with the designer, because it was a contest, we the customer had our hands tied. In the end, it was bad for both of us.

The key ingredient to success is the design relationship, getting feedback from your customer, being told what works and what doesn’t work. If you can’t handle some one saying they don’t like your design or even “it’s ugly”, you are in the wrong business. Designers need a thick skin, and often we need to push our customers to tell us what they don’t like. Only then will we have a stunning design.

Marketing Monday: Oreo’s ad campaign

October 1, 2012 by Moran Media

Welcome to the first installment of Marketing Monday, my weekly column on all things graphics, design, marketing, and anything else related. Each week I will focus on something I think is clever or just something I think designers and customers need to keep in mind.

This week I want to talk about Oreo’s social media campaign and their new Ad ascetics. I’m sure you’ve seen a picture of an Oreo similatr to the one posted here. It’s clean, simple, a white background with the cookie transformed into a symbol for an idea, in this case it’s the earth (north america centric) to celebrate the first flight around the world on September 28th. The look of the ad is eye-catching, since an Oreo cookie is iconic they are using their product as the main focus. It’s clever seeing the orea as different symbols.

The company hit a bit of controversy with their Pride ad on June 25th, an Oreo cookie with seven layers of creme, all layers a different color of the rainbow to celebrate Pride Day. Thanks to that controversy Oreo’s facebook page has earned 27 million likes and those 27 million people get a daily image of an Oreo in a different symbol.

People are entertained by the concept, this supports the concept of the Advertising Contract often mentioned on the Age of Persuasion, a CBC radio show dedicated to advertising history. The Advertising Contract is an implied agreement between the consumer and the marketer that in exchange for being exposed to ads, you the consumer must be entertained. It’s an implied contract that began in the 20’s (listen to the linked episode for the full story) and is often forgotten today. Thanks to TiVo, DVR, PVR, Video on Demand, Music on Demand, Netflix, and many other sources of media that limit advertising, the consumer can skip all the ads they want. To get people to pay attention to your ads, you need to entertain them, you need to show them something special. Oreo is doing this, oreo is in 27 million people’s daily lives thanks to their daily ad campaign that is hitting every area of interest.

I recommend you take a look at Oreo’s facebook page, check out their website The Daily Twist, see them on Twitter, They hit up tumblr, they are even on Pintrest, they are everywhere, entertaining people and encouraging them to share their ads. We as consumers are doing this, because we have a bit of nostalgia for the cookie, but more because the cookie is pushing our favorite areas of interest.

How can you use the example of Oreo’s campaign in your social media campaign? How can this be used by smaller companies and organizations? Keep them entertained. Leave your suggestions in the comments section.

marketing monday

Did you know you could schedule facebook posts?

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