brand thinking blog

Digital Cookbook

  • How To Tweet With Substance

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    Posted on March 23, 2011 at 2:00 pm

    Let’s say you’ve started with Twitter. Now what? Your business can hardly be broken down in 140-character posts. Twitter can be incredibly relevant to your business–here’s how to use it well:

    1. Link to relevant breaking news. A tweet does not have to contain all the details–just the headline and then a link (using a URL shortener, to make it fit).
    2. Re-tweet relevant news. You don’t always need to be the one to break the story, but sharing it with your network is still valuable–it demonstrates that you’re engaged.
    3. Tweet during events. Tweets can serve as a sort of running transcript of the key takeaways from a seminar, a conference session, a webinar, etc. Think of it as serving up information in snack-size amounts.
    4. Use hashtags when at an event or when you’re following an event virtually. These are a useful way to flag yourself as a participant and make your tweets searchable.
    5. Comment on other’s tweets. If someone has shared an interesting point or posted a question, you can easily reply with a brief point and link to a longer post on your blog.
    6. Share your thought-leadership by tweeting your latest blog posts. Twitter is the perfect venue to promote your blog, and you can automate this process to make it seamless.

    Engaging via Twitter demonstrates your willingness to share yours and others’ thought-leadership, and that only serves to further dialogue with your audience.

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  • Keep Up With Your Firm’s Alumni-The First Course

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    Posted on March 18, 2011 at 9:00 am

    Let’s face it, breaking up is hard to do. But when your firm loses a valuable employee, it doesn’t have to mean goodbye forever. In fact, some of your best future referrals–or even clients–will come from your alumni. Here’s how to build a platform to stay in touch:

    1. Don’t leave the connection in the hands of individuals alone. Social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook were built to make and keep connections amongst people. Make sure your firm has a robust profile and page on both.
    2. Make sure all current and new employees know about the firm’s profile and page so they can link to it themselves. More connections make everyone look better online, so it’s win-win.
    3. Link to your professionals’ LinkedIn profiles now, while they are still with your firm. And encourage them to include links to their LinkedIn profile on their biography pages.
    4. Do respect individual’s rights to keep their Facebook profile private. Give staff the option to link to the firm’s Facebook page but don’t require it.
    5. Chances are high that incoming professionals to your firm are very active of social networks–ask them which networks they recommend the firm interacts with.
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  • Why Blog–The Third Course

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    Posted on March 3, 2011 at 10:14 am

    Building upon the operational elements of blogging and some tips on what to blog about, here’s the rationale for why to blog, to help this tactic gain traction in your organization:

    1. Blogs are a core element of your SEO strategy. Because blogs are updated more frequently than your website, every time you update your blog, you invite Google to crawl your site.
    2. Blogs are an easy way to generate more interlinks, another important element in SEO.
    3. Blogs are likely the ONLY part of your site that enable client interaction–readers can post comments and questions and use social media sharing tools to forward an interesting post to others. If you don’t have a blog, you’re effectively shutting down this avenue of communication.
    4. Blogs are viral by nature–with one click, a readers can share your ideas with others while you still get the credit. Think of it like as digital word-of-mouth.
    5. You’d be hard pressed to find an easier, more cost-effective channel to get your thought-leadership out into the market than a blog. Blogs function as a form of digital PR because they are broadly distributed and easy to share.
    6. Blogs are fast overcoming your homepage as the main point of entry to your website–this blog does exactly that for our own site.
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  • Getting Started With Twitter

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    Posted on February 18, 2011 at 11:15 am

    I’ve written about how to use social networks to generate leads, how to blog, and how to use LinkedIn for your firm. Here are some brass tacks when it comes to getting started with Twitter:

    1. First things first: create a Twitter name, called a “handle”. It’s first-come-first-served even when it comes to brand names, so be sure you grab your firm’s handle ASAP.
    2. You have 140 characters to craft your “About me” description. Be pithy, be smart, and speak with your brand voice. Think of it as the opening line at a cocktail party.
    3. You can customize both the background of your Twitter page as well as your Twitter thumbnail image. Take the time to do this in a branded manner as it’s what people will first see when deciding to engage with you. You can see ours at www.twitter.com/gbltd.
    4. Decide who will tweet on behalf of the firm. You can choose a single person or group or rotate who owns the platform every week. In either case, be sure your team is familiar with the social media guidelines of your firm.
    5. Set up an easy to use social media aggregation platform (we use HootSuite) to make it easy to view at-a-glance your status, mentions and timeline and to help you to schedule tweets in advance.
    6. Install a plug-in that links your blog, Facebook and RSS feeds to automatically update your Twitter account.
    7. Let your staff know that they can link the firm’s Twitter account to their individual profiles on LinkedIn–it’s a win-win tactic to share information, broaden the reach of the firm, and regularly update individual’s profiles with relevant industry information.
    8. Don’t stop there–social networks are not a platform for a one-way conversation; you need to engage with others in the community in order to have any impact. On Twitter, engagement takes the form of Re-tweets, Follows, Direct Messages, Mentions, and Convos (short for “conversations”).
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  • How to Blog-The Second Course

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    Posted on February 9, 2011 at 12:19 pm

    Earlier we wrote about the basics of blogging – consider that a first course. Here’s the second:

    1. Write about what you know AND have opinions on; news comes from a newspaper; blogs offer a mix of news and opinion. This is where you demonstrate thought-leadership.
    2. Tap into the company intellect–write posts that combine two practice groups’ perspectives.
    3. Have a brand voice. We maintain a consistent style and voice throughout all our posts. This helps ensure a cohesive experience–no matter which topic we are covering or who is writing about it.
    4. Keep it concise–2 to 3 paragraphs, max.
    5. Be conversational–write the way we talk.
    6. Always link to the original source of the content–period.
    7. Use images and video whenever possible–it captures more readers’ attention.
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  • Assess the SEO Health of Your Website

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    Posted on February 4, 2011 at 11:22 am

    SEO, or “search engine optimization“, is a combination of optimizing both on-page elements (such as meta tags) and off-page elements (such as links to your website). Here are the on-page elements to look at:

    1. Ensure each page of your site has unique, keyword-rich URLs.
    2. Enrich your website copy with terms you know people search for. While keyword tags seem to matter less and less these days, keyword dense copy is still crucial.
    3. Ask your IT team what your firm’s domain/URL strategy is. Most firms should be focusing their web presence around a single domain/URL, so make sure that your blogs, microsites, etc. are structured off of your firm’s main URL.
    4. Examine your title tags to make sure they are descriptive and keyword rich. Title tags matter not only for SEO but also because your audience will see your title tag on Google as the first line of their search result.
    5. Evaluate your content management system – it should make it easy for you to manipulate key meta tags and URLs on your site.
    6. Keep on your toes – SEO best practices change constantly.
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