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Looking to Upgrade Your Skills?

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VAclassroom has launched signup for their 2011 Summer Skill Camp. This Skill Camp consists of eight 90-minute clinics over 4 weeks. Topics covered include mobile marketing, Google Tools, creating compelling service packages, measuring social media ROI, strategies for launching an ecommerce product campaign, Facebook contests, monitoring clients’ social media activity & improving Google ranking with proven link building & SEO strategies.

The 8 clinics will be held on Tuesdays & Thursdays at 3 PM Eastern starting July 5th. Sessions will be recorded & will be available to watch later if you miss one or need to review the material again.

Oh yeah, did I mention there’s “early bird” discount pricing ($100 off) through June 28th? You can get more information by watching the video below or at this link.

[iframe_loader src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/nWPO1IpCAxE?rel=0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen width=”560″ height=”349″]

How Many Times Are You Going To Follow Me?

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There is something rather comical going on in my Twitter account. I began following a particular last year because they were a client of a friend of mine. I never really paid a whole lot of attention to their status updates because after a while the updates started to not be relevant to what she’s doing (or claims to be doing) in her business venture – absolutely NOTHING personal being tweeted, nothing about what’s going on with the business, a few re-tweets here and there and very little interaction. The Facebook pages for this person aren’t any better.

Anyway, I must admit I haven’t given my Twitter follower list a whole lot of attention this past year, so I’m still “technically” following this person’s Twitter account. Several months ago I started getting notifications that this person was following me – a couple of times a month. It was kind of funny at first and became somewhat of a private joke between me and a couple of other VAs who knew what was going on (the same thing was happening to them – from the same Twitter account). Then the notices started coming closer together. This past week I’ve gotten a notice that this person is following me on Twitter EVERY DAY.

So, what’s the moral of this story? Auto-follows bite. I’ll admit that I did do the “auto-follow” thing for a few weeks but I quickly discovered I was following a lot of people who did a whole lot of tweeting about a whole lot of crap. So I promptly turned off my auto-following.

Do you have any funny Twitter follow stories?

Podcast Marketing Success Strategies

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While podcasting has been around for about seven years, there has been a stigma that podcasts are only viewed by Internet Marketers and technology people. Well, that might have been true initially, but times have changed! One of the greatest catalysts for the rapid growth of business podcasting in 2010 has been the iPhone. Waves of people have purchased new smartphones over the last 12 months and are readily downloading podcasts more than ever before! In fact, 70% of all podcast downloads comes from the iPhone, if you can believe that.

Podcasting is a highly portable and easy-to-implement communication tool for businesses to effectively build brand, connect with a target audience and increase their customer and client base.

Of course, business owners often lack the time and skills to effectively set up, produce and promote their podcasts. It is for this reason that VAClassroom has created this innovative and timely mini-course.

Registration is now officially open for the PODCAST MARKETING SUCCESS STRATEGIES Mini-Course.

The two-week mini-course officially gets underway on Monday, April 5, 2010, and is priced at a very reasonable rate ($147) for the first run of the program.

Please visit this direct link to the VAclassroom Podcast Marketing Success Strategies Mini-Course (click the name) to learn more about the course.

And, as always, if starting a podcast is something you’re interested in, but don’t want to mess with the “behind the scenes” part of podcasting, schedule a consultation with me so we can discuss how I can help take that off your plate!

Facebook Tagging for Business

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Social Media Explorer recently wrote an excellent article about the new Facebook tagging feature and using it for business. Here’s a quick excerpt:

“For a business, this can allow you to stay more top of mind with your friends or fans. When you tag someone, they receive a notification you’ve done so and, thus, come see what you tagged them in. This is potentially very powerful for businesses. As the administrator of a fan page, when you tag someone in a wall post or note, it appears to them as if the business or organization tagged them, not the individual logged in to administer the account.”

Here’s a link to the original article. What are your thoughts?

My Request for Creating Custom Twitter Backgrounds

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I’ve been using Twitter for a while now, and also use it for my clients and I started doing custom backgrounds in Photoshop several months ago. I tend to think of custom backgrounds in 3 categories: good, boring, and frustrating.

The good backgrounds are the ones that are creative or have good contact information AND are optimized for smaller screens. Let’s face it, how many of us use laptops and are using 15″ (or smaller) screens?

The boring backgrounds are the plain standard backgrounds that you choose from in Twitter.

The frustrating backgrounds are the ones where the Tweeple are TRYING to have a good background, but because they have little or no concept of how the viewer’s screen size affects how their background looks to the viewer, half their information gets cut off by the bottom of the screen, the Twitter box or the right side of the screen. What if I DO want to connect with you on Facebook, LinkedIn or call you? I can’t because your information is chopped off and you potentially lost a valuable connection.

Here are MY suggestions for optimizing the viewability of your Twitter background:

  • Don’t put anything important on the right side. Keep that for the “pretty” stuff because unless I’m viewing it on a 21″ monitor I probably won’t see it anyway.
  • Keep the information on the left side no farther than about 130-150 pixels from the left edge (even less if you can swing it). Up to 150 pixels from the left is still visible on my husband’s 15″ laptop.
  • Keep the information on the left side no farther down than about 550 pixels from the top edge (again, even less if you can swing it).

I can not even begin to tell you how frustrating it is for me (even on my 17″ widescreen laptop) when I can’t see the contact information.  You are much more likely to have someone visit a web site, send you an email, connect with you on other social networks, etc. if they can see the information right on their screen.  We are pretty lazy as a society (yes, I’m part of that society), and we don’t want to have to click on your web site link in your bio area (You DO have a web site or other information link on your Twitter profile don’t you?  That’s a whole other can of worms.) and search around your web site to find how to contact you.

So, bottom line, if you are creating your own Twitter background (or having someone do it for you), please check to see what it looks like on at least as small a monitor as a 15″

Here is a resource I found very helpful when I don’t remember the dimensions (which is more often than I care to admit). Croncast

Happy Tweeting!

Social Media Marketing Efforts Should Not Equal Advertising

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I am not an “auto follower” on Twitter – I check out the profiles and web sites of people/businesses who follow me before deciding whether or not to follow them back. I recently was checking the profiles of the Twitter users who recently followed me to see if I wanted to reciprocate the follow. One of the first things I noticed about one of my new followers was their two word bio – not very enticing. The second thing I noticed is that every single one of their Tweets had the link to their web site in it…EVERY ONE. Obviously this business did not get the memo about rule number one of social media marketing – It’s not about advertising, it’s about building relationships with your target audience. Needless to say, they did not earn my follow.