I want to post something on this other brand’s Page, but I want it to look like it’s coming from my brand, not from me. How do I do that?

You can do this using a feature called “tagging.” Tagging other brand Pages is a great way to give credit to the other brand, and it also can get your brand some extra exposure, because your post will appear on your Page and theirs (assuming they allow others to post to their Wall). It’s perfect to use when you’re sharing a link or announcing some kind of partnership marketing effort. And it’s actually really easy to do.

Here’s how:

1) Navigate to the other brand’s Facebook page and make sure that you have “liked” the Page from your personal account. (If you want to “tag” a person, you need to be personally connected to that person.) As an example, I had lunch last week with Christian Adams, a great guy and fellow online marketer, and now I want to “tag” his business to give him credit whenever I share one of his posts on Facebook. Here’s a look at the Facebook Page for Christian’s business, Sigma Creative:

2) Now that you’re connected to the Page, head over to your own brand’s Page. Do not go to your feed or your personal profile. (Note: This assumes that you’re already set up as an admin on your brand’s Page.) Go to the top of the “Wall” tab just like you were going to share any other update, photo, link, whatever. It will look like this:

Start typing what you would want to post on the other brand’s site. Make sure the text of your update has the name of the other name of the other brand in it. In this case, I’m going to share a link from Christian’s blog.

3) When you get to the point where you want to mention the brand by name, you want to “tag” their page. Start by typing the @ symbol, then immediately start typing the name of the business or person you want to link to. Don’t leave any spaces between the @ and the characters of the Page’s title. You’ll see that a list of names will start to appear where you’re typing. Once you see the Page you want to tag, scroll down and highlight it. It should look something like this:

Finish the rest of your update and hit “Share.” The update will post to your Wall, complete with a link to the Page you’re referencing:

Looks good, right? You bet. But wait … there’s more!

Depending on the other Page’s privacy settings, your post will also appear on their Wall. Here’s what I mean:

Now, when readers are viewing that Page’s Wall, they’ll see the post from your brand’s Page. It’s a great, simple way to share the spotlight with another brand on your Page, while getting some extra exposure on their Page, too.

(Note: Don’t abuse this. Overusing this feature can easily be seen as spam, so use the tagging feature sparingly and wisely, especially if you don’t have direct relationships with the brands you’re tagging in your posts.)

How else are you using Facebook to connect with and promote other brands of interest to your audience?

UPDATE: As of August 18th, it looks like Facebook has made it even easier to tag other users and business pages in your posts. Now, Facebook will automatically suggest links to Facebook pages, groups, interests and other users, offering a drop-down list of suggestions as you type, even if you don’t include the @ symbol first. More on this from ReadWriteWeb and InsideFacebook.

The Pitch

First, let’s take a look at the billboard. It’s an ad for American Family Insurance, as part of their “Do you have the {insert everyday catastrophe here} policy?” campaign (Other ads in the campaign ask questions like “Do you have the what’s that dripping noise policy?”). This particular sign asks the question, “Do you have the hail sure gets big around here policy?” What’s interesting about it — what caught my eye initially — is that they don’t just use the side of the building as their canvas … they’ve taken it a step further and used cars in the parking lot to help get their message across. Take a look at these photos to see for yourself what I mean:

(Viewing this in a reader? Check out the photos on Flickr.)

If the 3D hail attached to the side of the building doesn’t catch your attention, then the smashed cars in the parking lot surely will. It certainly made me do a double-take the first time I saw it. There’s no doubt it’s fun and creative.

But does this work? Does it resonate? Is it the best way to move the needle? Does it even help to build brand awareness (especially considering that the parking lot is positioned almost directly across the street from Nationwide’s world headquarters)?

Breaking It Down

There’s a lot going on in this ad, and I think that prevents the piece from working as well as it could. After seeing the billboard the first time, I had a hard remembering who it was promoting. Great ad … no idea what they’re selling. It’s very creative, and it ties in well to their overall campaign (which is focused on out-of-home, as far as I can tell), but I’ve seen very little to reinforce the campaign through other channels. Even the AmFam website doesn’t reinforce the overall theme of the campaign.

This is a huge miss in my opinion. Others in their industry (most notably Nationwide and State Farm) have taken the extra steps to reinforce their latest campaigns with microsites. (Here’s what Nationwide is doing … and State Farm is currently promoting at least two landing pages to reinforce their TV spots.)

Measuring Success

There’s very little to speak of in terms of a call to action on this piece. The consumer can either take action by visiting the company’s website (AmFam.com) or by calling their main toll free line (800.MY.AMFAM). Which means they can probably measure an overall increase in calls or traffic to their site, but they have no way of knowing whether it’s related to this or not. To make matters worse, the message isn’t reinforced on the homepage of the site; instead, the visitor sees AmFam’s regular messaging … my guess is that this is causing confusion that’s probably leading to an increase in their bounce rate. (Data from Compete shows American Family’s overall website traffic trending down significantly over the past year.)

If the objective is brand/image building, there’s a good chance this campaign might be helping, but I don’t see any way they can measure a direct correlation here.

A Good Start

In general, I think this billboard is extremely interesting and eye-catching, and I like the idea of the overall campaign. However, I think there’s a lot more that AmFam could be doing to give the campaign more ‘legs.’ Here are just a few things they might want to try:

• Create a specific call to action. You’ve caught my eye … now what do you want me to do? I get that I might want to make sure my car insurance is up to date, but besides that, is there any incentive to pick up the phone and call AmFam (again, especially considering that this particular sign is located across the street from Nationwide headquarters)? The offer probably doesn’t even need to be terribly compelling — something like a free consultation or a review of my current insurance might be just enough to do the trick.
• Give the consumer a specific place to go. Directing someone to the main number (hello, automated receptionist) or the homepage of their website doesn’t make a lot of sense here, especially considering that the website doesn’t reflect the message the consumer just saw on the billboard. Instead, provide a custom phone number, a landing page/Facebook page/microsite (GetMeThatPolicy.com, perhaps?) that reflects the campaign messaging or even better, a unique shortcode so I could text to receive a special offer while I’m standing there in the parking lot. Keep the next step consistent with what the consumer just saw. (This will help AmFam track the success of the campaign, too.)
• Throw in a social element. “Do you have the {insert everyday catastrophe here} policy?” is a great question and potentially, a great conversation starter. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who have really interesting stories that would tie into this campaign really well. To complement the outdoor ads, why not ask people to share their stories about crazy, “can-you-believe-what-happened-to-me” stories, and how their AmFam policy and/or local agent saved the day for them? A Facebook page, a hashtag on Twitter, YouTube Direct incorporated into a blog — any or all of these options could be an effective way to let their customers tell the story for them in testimonials, photos and videos that reinforce the idea behind the tagline.

In this case, a good tagline and creative “out-of-the-box” execution provide the foundation for a great ad, but it still might not be enough to help AmFam achieve the reach they want. Thinking through the complete strategy, looking for ways to integrate their efforts across multiple channels (ideally getting their customers involved along the way) and understanding how to measure the success of their campaign will likely produce much greater results in the long run.

Your Turn

I’ve said my peace … now it’s time for you to weigh in.

What do you think of AmFam’s billboard? What do you think of the overall campaign? How would you improve on what they’re already doing?

Foursquare allows users to earn points by “checking in” at various locations around town. Users can connect with their friends from Facebook and Twitter, and the user who checks in at a location the most over a 60-day period can become the “Mayor” of that location. (Here’s how Foursquare describes some of their opportunities for businesses.)

But what if you’re not a restaurant or coffee shop or bar or other venue ideally suited for a service like this? Are there still ways you can use a location app like Foursquare for your business? Absolutely. Let’s take a look at how an apartment company could use Foursquare:

• List your business location so it shows up in results when users are nearby.
• Add unique tips and to-dos for local restaurants, retailers and other venues.
• Track Mayor deals and check-in coupons for other businesses in the area, and post them on your website.
• Get out in the neighborhood and help more businesses create their own Foursquare deals.
• Create a referral special for Foursquare users, or offer a freebie for stopping by your leasing office.
• Link your Foursquare account to Twitter, then check in around town to share local hidden gems with your network.
• Encourage as many people in your community as possible to join Foursquare, then share their best tips and to-dos on your blog.
• Offer a reserved parking spot to the “Mayor” of your community.
• Use the “Shout” feature to let locals know about upcoming parties or other open events at your community.
• Partner with a local coffee shop or bar to offer a special discount to their customers “brought to you by XYZ Apartments.”

What else would you add to the list? Are you using Foursquare? Have you tried it for your business?

Connect with Mike on Foursquare.

I’m going to cheat a bit on this first one, because I’ve selected an app that I had a small hand in creating, called TurnSocial. TurnSocial is a social layer that you can add to any website — in fact, you can see it in action at the bottom of this page.

To understand the tool, I think it’s important to know what problem we’re trying to solve. We saw that lots of people and businesses were creating profiles and connecting with people on multiple social networks. These sites make great ‘outposts’ where brands can connect with their audiences. But once you get a lot of these outposts going, it can be a major task just to let people know where and how they can connect with you. So we saw sites like Friendfeed, Chi.mp and a number of others, that helped us aggregate this content on their sites. One more site, one more profile to manage. Ugh, right?

But let’s say you’re doing a nice job of driving traffic to your website. Maybe it’s your blog, maybe it’s PPC ads, maybe it was that great deal in your last e-newsletter. How do you let people know about all that time you’ve spent making connections and building relationships across all of those social media sites? You could use an online profile widget like Retaggr, or you could add rows and rows of social media icons in the sidebar. How many times have you seen this before?

Except every one of those icons takes the visitor away from your site. It takes a lot to keep someone engaged on your website … you shouldn’t lose them just because they want to click on some icon they’ve never seen before! Twitter badges and a Facebook fan box provide more information, but each only pulls content from one site, and it’s not long before you have a sidebar full of widgets that may or may not be relevant to your audience.

THIS is why we created TurnSocial — it’s intended to keep your socially engaged visitors on your site. You’re already creating content on your website, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Flickr, on YouTube, in lots of places across the web. You don’t need another site to manage. You need a better way to show a more complete snapshot of your online presence to your reader. Provide context. Show some personality.

TurnSocial brings all that social content back to your site. And if you’re in real estate or if you’re interested in highlighting local content on your site, we threw in some bonus features for you. Add your location, and TurnSocial can pull local content from Yelp, WalkScore and RentWiki, as well as posts from local bloggers on Outside.in. There’s are a bunch of other cool features for brand marketers that we hope to announce soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, play around with the bar on this page and let me know what you think.

You can sign up for your free TurnSocial bar here. Would you use this on your site? What other apps would you want to see included in the bar? What are some other ways you are featuring your social content on your website? What other social media tools would you like to learn more about?

What does this have to do with me?

Social media has made it much easier for us to spread the word through blog posts, status updates, photos and videos. Unfortunately, it has also increased the amount of noise that you need to cut through to ensure that your message is heard. You need to work harder than ever to get your message in front of the right people … there are just too many other options that are pulling at them for their attention.

The best email marketers have known this for a long time. It’s a basic formula, really — segment your database by interest, deliver relevant content to each of those niche audiences, watch open rates go up and unsubscribes drop.

So how can this translate to social media tools? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Blogs: Some blogging systems like WordPress allow you to create separate RSS feeds for each category that you write about. You may want to publish these feeds (maybe using a tool like Feedburner) to give readers the option to only hear about topics that interest them most.
• Facebook: You’re only allowed a single account, but you can broadcast your message to a specific list of people, or you target your message by age, location or several other categories. Set up well-defined groups or fan pages to make it easier for your audience to find the information and the like-minded folks they’re looking for.
• Twitter: You can’t send tweets to specific lists (yet), but there are many companies that are successfully using multiple accounts to target specific customers or communicate from different parts of the organization. A great example of this is Dell, which has over 35 different accounts — as well as the employees who manage those accounts — on their corporate Twitter page. These accounts range from the Dell Outlet to small business offers to investor insights. It’s a good bet that your current customers might not be interested in the same deals or updates as prospects who have never done business with you. Why not have separate accounts to cater to both groups equally?
• Tools like Ping.fm and Posterous allow you to choose the individual sites where you want to send a post, or you can post a single message to all of your affiliated accounts at once.
• Targeting current customers or employees exclusively? Try a private group on LinkedIn or Facebook, or start a private networking site using a tool like Ning. Put up the velvet rope and cater only to their needs. (I think I first came across the velvet rope concept here.)

The bottom line is that it’s harder than even to grab someone’s attention. Even the smallest of organizations may have many different audiences, each with different needs and objectives. A shotgun approach almost guarantees that you’re missing the target for at least two-thirds of your audience. You don’t need to reach everyone with each update. Instead, try focusing on one group … give them something that’s incredibly relevant to them, then do it again. Practice targeting.

What else can you do to better target your message and engage your audience? Have an example of a company that has effectively segmented their marketing efforts? Let’s hear it.

There is one message that works for all audiences — THANK YOU. Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for all you do. Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone!

Photo by viZZZual.com

Visibility matters. It’s critical that readers can find your site through search engines, but it’s just as important that you know which terms those readers are using to find you. So it’s good not only to keep an eye on the keywords that you think are important, but also other terms that are similar to the ones you think of first.

Google has a TON of great resources to help you learn more about keywords, including Google Trends, Google Insights, Google Analytics, related searches and Conversion University. One of my favorite new(er) tools is something Google calls the Wonder Wheel … it’s sort of like a mind map for related keywords.

Here’s how it works:
First, try your original search. In Jonathan’s case, here’s what his initial search would look like:

(Kudos to my #AptChat co-host Lisa Trosien for owning the #1 result! Also note that Training Factor’s YouTube videos show up in the top results, even above their own website — a great example why you should be using multimedia to increase your visibility online.)

Now, let’s see what Google thinks are some related terms. Just click “Show Options,” then click “Wonder Wheel” in the sidebar that appears on the left. Here’s what you get:

You can see that some related terms include “conservation programs,” “nwp services corporation,” “utility management” and “operational efficiencies.” If you’re writing about multifamily training, these might be a few good terms to include on your website or in blog posts (assuming that they’re relevant to your topic).

Don’t forget to try synonyms for your original search, too. Instead of “multifamily training,” Jonathan might want to try “apartment training.” A quick spin on the Wonder Wheel shows that related terms include “apartment leasing training,” “apartment maintenance training,” “apartment classes” and more. (Litter box training? Who knew?) Keep digging, and watch the Wonder Wheel expand quickly to discover new subjects. Here’s an example:

As you can see, you can use Wonder Wheel to easily find terms that are related to your original search. If you’re blogging or maintaining a website, this can be an excellent way to discover popular terms and brainstorm new topics for future blog posts. So take the Wonder Wheel for a spin. You might be surprised at what you find.

Have you tried Wonder Wheel? Has it helped you? What other tools are you using for keyword analysis?

There is an ongoing attack on sites running older versions of the software, so it’s important to upgrade to avoid the issue. (Blogs hosted on WordPress.com are not affected.)

The following warning comes from Lorelle on WordPress:

There are two clues that your WordPress site has been attacked.

• There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as: example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))… Look for keywords like “eval” and “base64_decode.”
• A “hidden” Administrator has been created (which you probably won’t be able to access). Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

Any sites not running the current edition are STRONGLY encouraged to upgrade to the latest version WordPress. From what we’ve seen, this attack goes deep into your site and its associated database. WordPress remains an outstanding content management system that we use for many blogs and websites, and it has a strong community that is available to help. Lorelle’s post offers a number of resources to help you get the answers you need.

If you have questions about upgrading your site, please contact us … we’ll be happy to review your setup, no charge.

(All 30 Lines clients running WordPress should already be running 2.8.4. As always, please contact us anytime if you have any questions about your site.)

During his press conference yesterday, Favre talked about his legacy, specifically stating that his legacy wouldn’t be defined by this year: [Bold added for emphasis.]

First of all, when people start talking about my legacy, it’s mine. It’s what I think of it. I know the way I played the game, the way I’ve handled myself as a teammate, a leader, within the public. Yeah, I’ve made mistakes along the way — we all have — but if I had it to do over again I’d do it the same way … I don’t think anybody has played the game with as much passion, or loved their teammates as much as me.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Brett doesn’t get to decide his legacy … everybody else does.

Let’s try a couple more. What comes to mind when I mention Bill Buckner? Pete Rose? Michael Vick? George W. Bush? You instantly get a picture in your head of your version of each person’s legacy — I’m guessing it goes something like this: flubbed a ground ball, gambled on baseball, led a dogfighting ring and, well … I won’t take a guess at how view that last name.

You don’t get the final say

The point is, none of these people got to tell us what their legacy would be; we’ve collectively made that decision for them.

The same goes for Brett Favre, and the same goes for your brand. You don’t get to tell people what to think. Instead, your customers and their friends formulate their view of you based on how they perceive you, your product and your service through their personal interactions. No one press conference or press release will change that, either.

So give your customers something to talk about. Give them ways to remember you. Create a remarkable experience. Find ways for them to share your products or stories about your fanatical customer service. And remember, this isn’t a one-time deal — in today’s world, it’s all about “What have you done for me lately?”

Put your brand in your customers’ hands, let them create that legacy for you, then keep innovating based on that feedback. It probably won’t get you in the Hall of Fame, but you’ll be well on your way to becoming legendary in your town or industry.

As for me, Favre can play for as long as he wants … I’m a college football guy. Bring on Fowler, Herbie, Desmond and Corso!

Think about some of this data:

• By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers — 96% of them have joined a social network.
• 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences!
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
• 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
• 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.
• Only 14% trust advertisements.

Of course, this doesn’t mean stop everything else. If your offline efforts are working, keep at it!

What do you think … is social media permanently changing how we communicate? What do these numbers mean for business owners?

That’s a lot of different things to know and manage, and I haven’t even started to scratch the surface … and new sites continue to be introduced almost daily that are changing the way we communicate.

Whether you’re looking to get more out of these tools or you’re just trying to figure out how/where to get started, it shouldn’t have to be an overwhelming endeavor … that’s why we’ve started offering the Quick Fix.

Here’s how it works:

• Use our online tool to schedule an appointment. You can prepay when you book, or you can pay at the time of your consultation. It’s a flat rate of $50.
• Give us a few details about your questions, as well as a link to the site/page you want to discuss.
• When it comes time for your appointment, we’ll call you and provide you with a link to login to the online meeting.
• We’ll spend the next 30 minutes answering your questions, helping you understand the features of the tool and working with you to make sure you understand how it fits into your communication strategy.
• If for some reason we can’t help get your questions answered, we’ll help you find someone who can or we’ll give you your money back, no questions asked.

The way we look at it, we spend a lot of time learning these tools, determining which ones are most effective for business and exploring ways to dig in and get the most out of every site. You spend more time connecting with your customers, not trying to figure out the latest Facebook feature. Consider it your online marketing help desk.

Want to schedule a Quick Fix? Go ahead – give it a shot. We’re giving away the first three for free.