Let’s build our social media presence!

For people who use social media sites on a regular basis (I can think of at least five social media sites that I visit every single day), learning how to use social media to market ones products or services isn’t very hard. However, there are many people who don’t visit social media sites but are then told to create a social media presence for their company or organization. To make it easier for all readers, I will break out the process into four steps.

Become familiar with your options

With so many social media sites on the web today, it can be exhausting trying to determine which one to use. Sites like Wikipedia (hey, that’s a social media site!) have a lot of general information relating to social media. It’s also very helpful to have first-hand experience with the social media site you are interested in, so set up your own personal account and begin learning about the site.

Develop your strategy

This is the most overlooked part of the process. Many companies simply use their traditional marketing tactics when creating a social media presence. Don’t do this! Other companies will completely change their marketing message when using social media marketing. Don’t do this either! Your message must stay consistent through ALL of your marketing outlets. However, you must also recognize that you’re marketing a different audience. Therefore, your tactics, promotions, and audience interaction will likely be much different than your traditional marketing efforts. Make sure you’re also building in ways to track your successes and failures. You’ll want to do this during this upfront, instead of trying to incorporate it once you’ve already built your social media presence.

Implement (and keep implementing!)

Once you have a strategy, put it in place and begin building your social media presence. However, don’t forget to keep updating your social media pages. Just because you have 5 posts and 20 friends/followers doesn’t mean your presence will keep growing without your help. There are many helpful tools out there (like Tweetdeck) that help you organize all your social media sites and keep on top of updates.

Monitor and Assess

How are your social media pages performing? What are you followers saying about you? Have you seen positive benefits from this endeavor? Is your social media marketing still conveying the same message as your traditional marketing? Monitoring your performance will tell you what you need to change, and what tactics are really worth your time. Hopefully you will see positive results and find that the time you’ve put into the process has been worth your while.

We understand that for some people this process is extremely overwhelming and intimidating. If you would like help developing your social media marketing strategy (or any marketing strategy), implementing your social media presence, or assessing your current presence, we would love to help!

Contact us to learn more about how we can work together to build a strong marketing strategy for your business or organization!

(website) wireframe

- a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages – Wikipedia

Wireframes are a great way to get ideas out into the open quickly for discussion.  You obviously don’t need anything fancy to create a basic wireframe or idea sketch (heck, a stick and patch of dirt work fine!), but we’ve found that adding a little browser chrome really helps to facilitate the process and communicate the rough ideas more clearly to a broader audience.

You can download our tool for creating wireframes for free here:

FHD Wireframe Tool – PDF

And here are a few basic principles for creating successful wireframes:

• Take a layered approach. Start by thinking about the general flow of your website or application, outlining the main actions and user experience first. Then move to more detailed sketches, creating basic layouts for each of the individual pages.
• Don’t be too literal. Your wireframes will provide the most value if they are quick sketches done in succession–broad strokes to capture main ideas, not detail oriented designs. Your pixel-perfect designs will come later.
• Embrace the power of iteration. Paper is cheap, and although you don’t want to be wasteful, going through a few sheets at this stage of the process will save boatloads later on in the process. Don’t be afraid to sketch out a half-baked idea to see where it leads.  Ask for feedback, then incorporate that feedback into your sketches. Read about usability, and follow best practices for those techniques which are commonplace and need to be recognizable and easy for users. Build upon early sketches.
• Remove all unnecessary elements. Once you’re happy with the direction things are headed, look back over the designs to see if you really need every part of the design. Chances are you have an unnecessary feature or two that doesn’t add enough value to justify keeping.  If this is the case, remove it early on (trust me, it will be much easier to start development, and, surprisingly, your users will thank you later when you give them a simple interface!).

So start sketching! You don’t have to be an illustrator, or even in the design business to gain from sketching out your ideas. If you’ve got a website and sense that some aspect should be made simpler or easier to use, use this basic wireframe tool to communicate your idea to your web developer!  They’ll thank you for the clear communication.

1. Copy and paste all of your content into a Word document
2. Export as PDF
3. Upload to your website
4. Modify page to include link to PDF

It seems simple enough, but one can quickly see the drawbacks of using this manual method (ex. possible errors at all stages, can’t upgrade look of documents without recreating each individually, far too many steps to be doing on a regular basis…).

FPDF

However, if you’re using a content management system you can very easily automate the entire process.  The key is to use a PDF creation library such as FPDF.  This free library (the F in FPDF stands for “free”) is easy to use and allows you to create standard PDF documents using nothing more than a few lines of PHP.

Article2pdf

If you’re using WordPress the process is even simpler.  Article2pdf is a free plugin from Marc Schieferdecker that utilizes the FPDF library.  The installation process is like all other WordPress plugins, and it comes with several configuration options and good documentation.

To use Article2pdf, you simply create a template PDF that serves as the basis for all of your PDFs to be generated.  The plugin does the rest of the work in adding the content to your template design.  With the ability to create template files, I’ve found that I can control nearly everything about the look of the PDFs that I need to.  Of the few things I’ve changed within the plugin code itselft, all were cosmetic details that bugged me as a designer–I could have lived without making any changes if I was willing to accept a slightly less refined look in the end.

So quit manually generating PDFs for everything on your website–with FPDF and Article2pdf you can completely automate the process and use the hours saved to generate more great content for your users!

Metrics – The basic WordPress RSS feed doesn’t give you much of an idea about your readers.  Burning your feeds allows you access to important metrics such as how many people are subscribed to your feed, where they are located, how many unsubscribed readers are accessing your content, etc.

Social Media -Under the optimize tab in your Feedburner account exists an option for FeedFlare–a super easy way to add interactivity to your RSS and email subscriptions.  While the options are somewhat limited, the big names such as Digg, Facebook, del.icio.us and a few others are there and easy to use.

Email – Feedburner makes it easy to deliver your content through email.  Under the publicize tab in your account settings, simply enable email subscriptions and copy and paste the snippet of code into your template.  Your emails will be delivered at a specified time every day that you post something on your blog.  While you don’t have the same degree of control as might be provided by an HTML email service such as MailChimp, your content gets distributed without any work on your part.

Future Modifications – Feedburner routes your feeds through their own servers to provide the benefits described above.  While this may be a drawback to some because your feed address is now of the form feeds.feedburner.com/FlintHillsDesignSnippets instead of something associated with your domain like flinthillsdesign.com/blog/feed, the upshot is that now if your blog moves or your feed address changes, your subscribed readers will not be lost!

You can find WP-Database-Backup here. Thanks to Austin Matzko for such a great modification to WordPress!

• Easy to use for computer experts and novices alike
• Cross-platform (Flint Hills Design is Mac based, most clients use PCs)
• Easy to backups
• Minimal resource requirements (individual computers and network)
• 24/7 access

Basically, we needed a reliable file sharing application that we could control as we see fit. Dropbox met all these requirements.  Some other options didn’t:

• Web App
  We thought about creating our own web app, but hundreds already exist and we didn’t have time.  Plus, most of the existing apps such as Basecamp provided many more features than we really needed (simplicity is one of our most basic guiding principles).
• MobileMe
  We’ve found MobileMe to be flaky, especially for some of our PC using clients.  We really needed this to be bulletproof.
• File Sharing
  The Apple based file sharing was a possibility, but if a computer is turned off you’re out of luck. And it didn’t seem right to be tying up others’ computers and their internet connections every time another user requests a file.
• Dedicated Linux Server
  Probably a good option, but we didn’t want to hassle with the configuration or security issues…

So in the end Dropbox won out.  It’s easy to use and install on all operating systems.  Because it looks and acts like a regular folder on our hard drive, everything is backed up automatically (and dropbox provides a time-machine style online backup as yet another measure of safety).  It’s always on and doesn’t consume precious computing resources due to our files being hosted on Dropbox servers.  And best of all it’s free for accounts under 2GB!  From our experience so far we’d recommend it to anyone.

Say you define a custom field key called Image-Slice, with a value that creates a link to the blog post using an image tag:

Wordpress Custom Field

You can then access that field from within the loop by using a simple php snippet:

<?php $key="Image-Slice"; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>

I’ve found this technique very useful to create websites that use a custom field as a design element.