We are pleased to announce our video partners Feature Media.

Feature Media are a well-respected, digital film production company that make sure they understand your business, your audience and your objectives, before giving advice on the best video solution for you.

Why should you use video?

• Video is currently one of the fastest growing on line marketing tools
• It engages targeted audiences and is more likely to be shared than any text document
• Using video online increases the speed at which your website is ranked
• Video can be multi-platform – you can use it anywhere!
• On line video marketing can be tracked so you know what your Return on investment is.

For more information on how Cat Creative and Feature Media can help your business contact Cat or Julie using CCM as a reference.

Connect with Feature Media

No one wants to be sold to

What you are aiming to do is build trust, credibility and mark yourself out as an expert. Ever heard of the saying from the film Field of Dreams “Build it and they shall come”? Write good quality content and they will read. But you must do this consistently and regularly without compromising on the content.

Ask for a commitment

Building a community, or in other words a regular audience and readership is no easy task. It takes time and persistence to get readers returning to your page. To combat this use the carrot and stick approach, ask them to subscribe to your blog, use tools to create an email ‘opt-in’ option, offering freebies is always a good thing! Don’t underestimate this aspect, particularly if you’re blogger. Building a solid community can take months.

Listen, listen, listen

This is so important, and can be the making of your successful content. What does your prospect want to read about? Have you asked them? Installing a simple a poll plugin on a blog utilising social media platforms to ask questions can be a real driver to increasing readership. Remember you are equipping your audience with tools that they can take away and apply in their business and daily lives so give them what they want.

Leave your ego at the door

Whilst you’re laying the foundations of building successful content always remember to be a little humble, don’t forget that you are also a participant in the content conversation, not the owner. If a reader goes to the trouble of commenting on a blog post or replying to a status update then go back and thank them – it will go a long way.

Measuring ROI

If your ultimate goal is to increase sales then you need to sign post this for the reader, without blatantly selling. Use it as a platform to overcome common objections. For example, we frequently hear that social media doesn’t work, it doesn’t attract new clients or sales so to combat that we tie it to reality. We compare the price of traditional print advertising with the use of free social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, and actively demonstrate that the ROI of these forms of marketing are far greater. Invariably social media wins every time!

Of course there are also SEO benefits of content marketing. Write copy that’s keyword rich and post your content on site such as Technorati, a blog directory that distributes your content. Monitor this traffic by taking baseline metrics before you begin, then compare month on month which content proved popular and focus your efforts on reproducing that content.

Article Marketing

Online article sites such as Ezine are increasingly popular amongst content authors. The same rules apply i.e. no selling, share your knowledge etc but the real difference is the SEO opportunities. All the articles are carefully managed, moderated and vetted before being published to ensure they stay within the guidelines. By submitting an article you are giving your permission for the content to be re-used on the web, complete the links back to your platforms, blog or website.

The results are in – and they make fascinating reading! Follow the link above to access the results.

Let’s take a look at the  McDonald’s Profile Page.

Straight away you can clearly see that this is a Brand Page. Businesses will now be able to customise the header with logo’s etc, but the short biog remains at 140 characters. Just the imagine the way this can be used for special offers, promotions, seasonal variations etc. And is it me or does it slightly reflect the new Facebook Timeline?

The next major change is the Connect and Discover buttons in the header bar. Connect now separates into two categories, interactions and mentions. This let’s you see who followed who, what conversations are going on and who’s re-tweeted you. By clicking the ‘open’ icon in the top right corner of any tweet you can see the full conversation without having to go anywhere else!

The Discover button is awesome! In one glance you can see all the stories that are hot news on the web, and jump into the conversation by clicking ‘View Tweets about this’.

Over on the left hand side there’s a ‘Who to follow’ button which is actually much more intuitive than previous versions. Rather than suggesting Britney Spears or Barak Obama Twitter looks at who you are already following and makes suggestions based around that – nice touch!

Over in settings, there’s a funky new Keyboard Shortcut list, which is quite easy to learn and saves time with less clicks needed to get to where you want to go – in case you felt that clicking a few characters on a keyboard was an arduous task!

The old favorites remain – following, followers, favorites and lists, but one of the biggest changes, which we can’t wait to access here at CCM Towers is embeddable tweets.

Say someone bigs you up on Twitter and raves about great customer service, you can now capture this tweet, play around with the formatting and then embed the code straight onto a blog post, an article, your Facebook business page etc. They can also be ‘live’ as opposed to just a screen shot, meaning you can add a follow button and links – how powerful will that be on blog post? We’ll write a separate blog on this as soon as we get access.

Here’s a very brief overview of the major features, it will be interesting to see peoples reactions as it is most defnitely a ‘marmite’ moment – you either love it or hate it!

Think of it as a giant scrap book of your life.
 You now have the option to add a ‘cover image’ to your timeline. Choose wisely and with care, potential employers, colleagues, your mum / dad won’t appreciate seeing your table dancing antics from Friday night!

It’s all about the timeline.

From the day you were ‘born’ on Facebook right up to the most recent update your entire Facebook life is now laid wide open for all to see (if you choose the right privacy settings). Using the tool on the left you can go back through historic and memorable moments in the scrap book of your Facebook life. And of course, so can your friends.

No longer are you limited to ‘Having a great day’ you can now categorise your life experiences with the ‘Life Event’ button and announce to the world that you have a a broken bone, became engaged or even had a baby!

Got a Spotify account? Great, now you can link it to your Facebook account and the whole world can see what you’re listening to. No more sneaky listening to Barry Manilow!

Watch a TV programme and share it with your friends.

You may never need to leave Facebook again!

Facebook is and will always be about on page engagement, whether you’re an individual, an SME or a major brand. It really is a case of “What happens on Facebook, stays on Facebook”

What do you think? Love it? Hate it? Leave your thoughts below.

So take a look at your page, what does it say about you, your business, your hobbies, interests?

 Here’s a screen shot of my current home page. This is the new Facebook Timeline page which is slowly being rolled out. At an immediate glance you can see that I’m family orientated, a Cas Tigers fan, that I’m attending a networking event and I recently read the Washington Post!

This is a completely unplanned screen grab, but imagine how many businesses could appeal to me here, and target their Facebook ads to match my interests. For example;

A photographer could focus his advertising on family portrait shots, a super league rugby club could engage me with an advert displaying their latest kit, Facebook game or even a season ticket give away. Waterstones ads that have an international focus could appeal to my sense of travel and I haven’t even started on the children’s Christmas gifts possibility!

But of course the advertisers wouldn’t just be appealing to me, they want to reach a wider audience, but do you see how by studying your target audiences on page activity you can increase engagement and reach a wider audience? By encouraging post likes and shares you can appear in friends of friends time lines without really trying.

Use the tools at hand to understand what your audience. Facebook Insights is now much more ad focused than ever, and gives some great statistics to help you understand what posts appeal to readers of your page – use it to your advantage!

Don’t forget to let us know how you get on. If you’re interested in finding out more about Facebook Ads for your business just drop us a line.

I’ve been using Twitter since 2008 and I’ve seen so many variations of how people choose to promote this. It varies so much depending on who is in your Twitter stream that I thought it might be an idea to point out a few of the classic mistakes and highlight what some would consider a better way of promoting your followers.

Do’s

• Make it a habit and commit to taking part every week
• Thank the people who #ff you
• Include some of the followers you have interacted with that week
• Tell people why they’re worth following
• Take your time and promote people who could do with a few more friends

Don’t

• Reel off a long list of users for no reason
• Use it as an excuse to spam people
• Over promote yourself / your partners
• #ff the same people every week
• Promote ‘celebs’ just because you like them

November / December 2011

Ideal for those who are brand new to Social Media (or who may have dabbled a little!)

Half day training session (approx. 2.5 hours) £150 + VAT

You will learn;

Twitter

• How to create a Twitter account (if applicable) or review of existing.
• What to Tweet, when and how to start conversations.
• How to find followers and create a following.
• The do’s and don’ts etiquette
• Re-tweets, mentions and replies.

Linkedin

• Profile review
• Connecting etiquette
• Joining & taking part in groups
• Lead generation

Upgrade to a full day session at £195.00 +VAT by adding any of the following;

Facebook for Business

• How to create a Facebook page for Business (or review if existing)
• What to post, when to post and why.
• Creating engagement and interaction with your audience.
• Tips to build fan base.

Blogging for Business

Social Media Marketing strategy

These are totally interactive sessions, you actually create profiles as we go through the workshop. Each of the modules can be exchanged, so if your business would benefit from Facebook rather than Linkedin it’s OK to change at no extra cost.

We supply work books for follow up, and on-going encouragement to keep tweeting when we’ve gone and provide lots of tips on how to get the best return on your activity.

What are you waiting for? We have limited places so book now by emailing cat@catcreativemedia.com

‘Should’ is the key word there! When we launched it at the beginning of November we had no way of knowing just how well it would take off.  We have all the Yorkshire data isolated and held in a vault, but it occurred to us that perhaps we could look at the bigger social media landscape and take a chance on rolling it out nationally / internationally.

Then we realised that we would be re-launching on Children In Need day.

Then we had a light bulb moment and made a huge decision – for every survey entry that is completed and submitted TODAY only Cat Creative Media will donate £1 to Children In Need *gulp*

So, post the link to Facebook, re-tweet it on Twitter, share it on Linkedin and let’s see how much money we can raise in the next 8 hours.

Here it is: http://bit.ly/vGaPaz

Simply copy & paste onto all your platforms. We’ll keep a running total going throughout today and announce the total raised by 5pm this evening.

The two things may seem totally incongruous but there was a moment on the way home (the 5 minutes before this was penned) when I had one of those OMG lightbulb moments.

when you’re charging nearly £6 for a sandwich I’d like to think you had a higher social goal than pure profit in mind

I’m not sure why I never thought of this whilst there but it hit me like a jack hammer on the journey home on the train, what was completely missing for the Great British Business Show (the 26th by all accounts) was any evidence of social enterprise as a new way of doing business and much more importantly any sign of a company like Create providing catering that fed both its clients but also its staff.

Exhibition centres like Earls Court have a right to make profit as a privately held company but when you’re charging nearly £6 for a sandwich I’d like to think you had a higher social goal than pure profit in mind and something more socially substantial than a bit of lettuce.

So whilst yesterday was Social Enterprise Day, let’s make the genuine benefits of a better way of doing business an all year round thing rather than something that is celebrated on only one day a year. When we get socially responsible all of Society benefits. In the coming year we’ll be doing our bit with opportunities for those that need it most. What can and will you do in your business to ensure Society profits?