Understanding SEO, SMM and PPC – a gardener’s analogy

June 8, 2010 By Kelli Brown View Comments

What’s SEO and what does it do? Do I need it? What’s PPC?

Those are some of the most common questions I’m asked when I begin working with clients small and large. Let’s start by defining them:

SEO means Search Engine Optimization In short, this is getting a site to rank better in search engines using techniques that are both technical and marketing oriented. Some SEO is performed onsite, other aspects are performed offsite.
SMM means Social Media Marketing Though this is a broad category including everything from blogging to YouTube to Foursquare and all of the social networks, we can understand it as using social tools on the web to foster interest, engage our target market and ultimately achieve goals – whether those goals are brand awareness, fundraising, sales, thought leadership, etc.
PPC means Pay Per Click Advertising! The most common PPC campaigns are through Google AdWords, and this group is also commonly known as SEM or Search Engine Marketing, as many of the ads appear among search engine results.

Did that solve all your problems and answer all of your questions? All ready to go and handle your web marketing? No?

Let’s work with an analogy to understand how these various marketing tools can fit your needs.

Imagine you’ve just moved into a new home, built from the ground up just for you. Now, it’s time to plan your garden. Your budget is tight, what with the new mortgage and all, but you know what you can afford and what results you’d like to see. You want to invest in things that will grow over several years, but you’d also like things to be pretty this summer. And you want to bring a bit of the garden back inside with you, so some herbs are in order. Grab your trowel and gloves and let’s get working.

SEO & Apple Trees

Your first purchase is an apple tree. This tree might cost more than all of the other plants and flowers in your garden, but it’s worth it to you because you’re in this for the long haul. The small sapling doesn’t look like much now, but you understand it’s an investment. That said, it’s not as simple as dropping this glorified twig into the ground and letting it fend for itself. You have to maintain it and meet its basic needs, with water and a bit of fertilizer if you want to go the extra mile, but you know it will in time bear fruit. It takes a few years to mature. Unless it contracts a disease, your fruit tree will continue to provide you with tasty treats. If you really want fruit now, you’re going to have to buy a mature tree.

Search Engine Optimization is like an apple tree. The time and money invested in optimizing your website will continue to bring you results for as long as you have the site. Barring major changes in the way that search engines rank sites (and these changes do occur), SEO doesn’t expire and often costs less to maintain – as long as it gets a healthy start. Unfortunately, like our apple tree sapling, SEO doesn’t bring results overnight. Although technical and marketing changes can make vast improvements in site ranking relatively quickly, SEO is a cumulative – it may take months to see clickthroughs from targeted traffic while the site’s rank continues to rise for relevant search terms. If you want the ranking associated with a powerful domain name, your best bet might be to buy that domain name – but it can get costly quickly.

Social Media & Basil

While you love your garden, you really enjoy bringing a bit of the outdoors back inside with you. You want a close relationship with Mother Nature – and for you, that means fresh herbs for the dinner table. To that end, you’re growing basil.

Though you’ve started from seeds, cultivating each plant, it doesn’t take too long before you’ve got some leaves to harvest. But, if you really like basil and want to enjoy it more often, you’re going to need quite a few basil plants. If you took all of the leaves off of one plant as soon as they were large enough, you’d kill the plant. But if you have five plants and harvest them in rotation, you’re going to have vibrant plants and a steady supply of basil. That means having to buy more seeds and growing more plants at the start, even though by the end of the season you might have more basil that you bargained for.

To further complicate matters, there are several types of basil available and you’ll need to know which plants will give you what you’re looking for – depending on if your goal is pesto or spicy Thai food.

Social media tools are like basil plants. Each network has a niche that it’s best suited for and some media types work better than others for different markets. To get the most out of it, you need to know which tools will help you achieve your goals.

While social networks don’t take as long to develop as search engine optimization ranking, they do take time and commitment – if you pester the first people to join your Twitter feed or Facebook page by constantly begging them to invite their friends or retweet your posts, you’re going to kill your following. Grow your network slowly – and, dare I say it, organically – instead of paying for leads or spamming your potential clients.

If you want to cast a wide net and see results more quickly, you will have to invest more resources initially. This might mean employing a wider array of social networks and media sites to create more entry points for potential followers. The downside here is that you might eventually have more interaction than you could anticipate – which means more to manage.

PPC & Snapdragons

The basil and the fruit trees are all lovely, but your basil doesn’t have any flowers and your sapling is healthy but doesn’t have the immediate eye candy you were looking forward to this summer. In short, you need cheap flowers and you need them now.

You might want snapdragons. Very colorful, with a relatively low cost and short life span. They’re annuals, meaning that they won’t be around to flower next year, but that’s okay by you. You just need something nice to show your mother-in-law this weekend.

While you’re going to put some money into pretty snapdragons, you’re not going to blanket every speck of open soil with them. Their value and beauty are fleeting, so covering the backyard with them would be a huge waste of your budget.

Keyword-based advertising (pay-per-click campaigns) are like the annual flowers in your garden. They provide results right now and have a relatively low investment cost as compared to maintaining social media projects or site-wide search engine optimization. Unfortunately, advertising only works while the ads are in place – once an AdWords campaign ends, your premium slot on content networks or search results pages evaporates.

Finally, to dispel a myth, purchasing advertising through Google does not increase your ranking in search engine results. Those results are organic and cannot be bought.

What do you need in your web marketing garden? It depends on what results you need and when you need them.

Filed Under: search engine marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, tips and tricks

Ask P3: Using WordPress to build a website with a static home page

March 18, 2010 By Kelli Brown View Comments

I’ve had the pleasure of teaching a month-long course for small business owners and marketing executives that demonstrates, hands-on, how to use WordPress to build and manage a complete website. My students have some amazing projects and continue to amaze me with creative uses of WP’s content management tools and excellent questions about usability and SEO. I’d like to share a common question about WordPress.

I installed WordPress on my domain and added a template that gives my site the look and feel of a business, but my home page is still my most recent blog posts. How do I create a real home page?

It’s a common question when you start using WordPress as a full-out CMS instead of blogging software (or in conjunction with a blog). Although it’s been answered elsewhere, I’ll also cover it here.

Note: Some themes automatically shift your most recent blog posts to another page without taking the steps below, so you might want to check if your theme supports this option before you start working.

If your theme is a standard theme that defaults to recent posts, here’s how to create a static page for your home page. We’re using Mystique for this example.

Log into your WordPress dashboard. Under your Pages menu, click to add a new page. The WordPress editor opens.

We’ll create the home page first. Add a title and any content that you’d like to appear on the new, static home page.

When you’re finished, click publish. Of course, you can always make changes later.

Next up, let’s create a page to hold all of our blog posts.

Under your Pages menu, click to add a new page. The WordPress editor opens.

Add a title for your blog page – “blog” is a good choice, but you might also consider “recent news” or “latest updates” depending on how your target market feels about the credibility of the dreaded B-word.

Unless you want content to appear at the top of the blog page above the posts, you’ll want to leave this section of the site empty.When you’re finished, click publish.

Now let’s tell WordPress which page goes where.

Under Settings, click Reading to display the Reading Settings for your WordPress site. The default setting is that the front page displays your latest posts. Instead, let’s click the radio button for a static page. We’ll set our front page to Home and our posts page to Blog (or whatever name we chose).

You can also change the number of posts the posts page will display (the default is 10) and the number of posts that will appear when folks subscribe to your RSS feed (again, the default is 10). You can show your RSS readers the full text of each blog post or a summary – there are pros and cons to both options, but we’ll save that for another blog post.

You can also change the encoding of your blog pages and feeds. Unless you know that you need to change it, you’re best leaving it set to UTF 8.

After saving our settings, let’s go to our site and see what we have.

And now, let’s see what we get when we click on the Blog page.

Looks like we’re all set!

But, what if your theme has a link to Home hard-coded into the header? When you add a Home page, you might end up with two home links in the header. If we apply the Jarrah theme, we end up with two home page links.

Although there are a number of different ways to fix this, learning how to exclude pages from your navigation is a handy trick, and we’ll use it here.

In your Dashboard, click under Appearance > Editor. Click on the right-hand side to edit the header.php file.

Although every template is a little different, we’re looking for the part of the code where our theme creates our top navigation. Where our code says

wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&depth=2&sort_column=menu_order’);

we want to change it to

wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&exclude=’);

where we’ll add the page numbers that we want to exclude from our navigation. In this case, our home page is 2, so our code will read

<?php wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&exclude=2′); ?>

We’ll save our changes and refresh our home page to see the change.

To determine what the page number of any given WordPress page (or post), you can mouse over the page link in the page editor. From the Dashboard, select Pages > Edit. When your list of pages loads, mouse over the page title link and the page number will appear in the bottom left of the browser window.

Of course, if you’re not using SEO-friendly permalinks, you can just navigate to the offending page on your WordPress site, but you really should be using SEO-friendly links! That’s another post for another time.

Filed Under: ask P3, tips and tricks, web development Tagged With: blog posts page, cms, remove home link, static home page, theme options, wordpress

Social Media 1-2-3: Three steps to create a social media strategy

October 27, 2009 By Kelli Brown View Comments

Our first post in a series to help beginners (and maybe some more experienced hands as well) understand social media begins with strategy.

Often skipped entirely or dismissed as unnecessary, drafting a social media strategy should be the cornerstone of every social media campaign – regardless of the company size. Whether you’re an individual looking to rebrand yourself before a job search or an international company trying to target a new market, you need to have a plan. Let’s take a look at what goes into a social media strategy in three steps.

One caveat: This three-step guide assumes that you’ve already spent some time online listening to your market and you’re able to make an educated guess at how to target them. Before you can build a strategy, you’ll need to have set reasonable goals for your social media campaign.

Step One: Resources: Social media isn’t free. Before jumping on the Facebook bandwagon, take a hard look at what resources you can allocate.

Will a new social media campaign replace existing aspects of your current marketing? If so, will it free up budget? What content are you going to contribute? Do you have a regularly updated blog that provides more than simple self promotion? Is your company in support of promoting themselves as thought leaders in their industry? How often can you add new content?

Who will search for relevant articles to post? Who will answer comments on your blog and moderate posts to your Facebook fan page? How many staffers can be dedicated to the initial setup and learning curve of various tools? Will each staffer specialize in a specific area or will you need to cross train your staff to function with multiple tools? What skills do your staff already have and what will need to be taught/learned? Will your outreach be limited to business hours only or is it possible to allocate manpower over a larger part of the 24-hour cycle?

How much budget can you allocate to purchasing support tools for your strategy? Can you foot the bill for Involver’s toolset to make your Facebook presence more powerful and easier to manage? Will you and your staff have smartphones capable of sharing content from anywhere with a 3G connection?

To build a successful strategy using social media, you’ll need to take a hard look at three resources:

Time: How much time can you or your company dedicate to these efforts on an ongoing basis?
Talent: What skills can you leverage that allow you to reach out online in a new format?
Technology: Both hardware and know-how – can your current hardware get the job done and are your tech skills up to the task (or do you have a geek in waiting that could help you out)?

Step Two: Content: Before you create that corporate account at Digg.com, take a step back and consider what content you’ve got to share with the world.

The first part of content brainstorming should be a raid of your archives. Have you got good informational articles that can be repurposed as blog posts with a facelift? Do you have some PowerPoint presentations explaining your product or service that can be shared at SlideShare.net? Videos teaching someone some tips and tricks that you can add to YouTube? Audio files that teach – can they be made into a regular podcast? Content is king in any social media campaign, so consider first what you’ve got to use. In many cases, generating new content is also the most time consuming (and therefore resource consuming) aspect of your strategy, so make sure you use what you’ve already got.

But your own content is less than half of the equation. In order for your outreach effort to be a success, you need to become a valuable resource to your target market. And that means sharing a wealth of top-notch content that extends well beyond your own self-promotion efforts. If you’ve done a good job of building a successful listening system and know what content is relevant to your target market and where they can find those resources, you’re well on your way to sharing great links.

Instead of trying to steer your market to your content only, serve as an aggregator of relevant information on the Web in a variety of platforms. Become the go-to site for news and information, tips and tricks.

Instead of the staid model of solely diseminating information to your target market, become part of the discussion and encourage a focus group atmosphere.

Step Three: Tools: Finally, we reach the aspect of social media with which folks are most familiar. Once you’ve got the content, how are you going to reach your target market?

If you’re lucky, the most powerful tool in your social media toolbox might be your own Web site. If you’re unlucky, and your Web site doesn’t meet the needs of your target market, you’re going to have a hard time with any Web-based marketing campaign – despite your best efforts. Your own site is home base for your presence on the Web. If your ultimate goal is to sell a product, be contacted by a prospective client or be hired to perform a service, your own site is the most likely gateway for new business. Make sure you have your ducks in a row at home before spending resources trying to promote a weak site.

Whenever possible, your use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter should be a means of getting people back to your own Web site. Don’t let your networks serve as an end point. While it’s useful when someone shares your Facebook fan page, you’ll have a lot more leverage if the link they share is to your blog or Web site. Train your target market to come back to you as a destination for useful content. Any links to your site that are shared will improve your search engine optimization – this technique is known as inbound marketing.

Which networks are the best fit for your target market? Will you reach the same market on two different networks, such as Twitter and Facebook? What sites for rich media fit your content the best? Does your Web site have tracking software in place to determine from which sites people click through to you? Which networks are best suited to your specific goals?

In summary: Evaluate your resources, raid your archives for content and target your market on the networks that are most conducive to achieving your goals.

We’d love your feedback on our new series – Social Media 1-2-3 – here on the blog at Pixel/Point Press. To read more articles in this series, please bookmark this category.

Filed Under: social media 1-2-3, tips and tricks Tagged With: blog, create, facebook, fan page, linkedin, rss, social media, strategy, twitter

Introducing Social Media 1-2-3 – a new series of blog posts for social media beginners

October 22, 2009 By Kelli Brown View Comments

Earlier this week, a friend challenged me to explain the premise behind social media marketing in three steps. After a short spiel, I realized it is possible to explain the basics in simple, easy-to-understand terms – and doing so might just help someone to take their first steps using a new tool or strategy.

While I strive in our classes to provide a wealth of knowledge in a very short time span, hoping to keep our students busy for several months after the classes end, I’m beginning to realize something: There’s a market for brevity.

To meet that growing need, I’m hoping to create a series of blog posts explaining how to get started in the wide worlds of social media networking and marketing. Topics will include:

Blogging
WordPress
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
Third-Party Twitter apps: Seesmic, TweetDeck, Bit.ly and others
Making the most of RSS feeds

And more. I’m also hoping my regular readers will help me generate some more topics. My goal is to provide a new post every Tuesday until I’m stumped for topics.

In another new addition to the blog, I’m asking readers for questions about how to use social media, drafting a strategy, etc. With your permission, I’ll reply to these questions and more every Wednesday on the blog so that others can learn from your questions. To send me a question, please email at kelli@pixelpointpress.com.

As always, thanks for reading, commenting, subscribing and sharing our content with others!

Filed Under: online learning, social media 1-2-3, tips and tricks Tagged With: beginner, blog, facebook, linkedin, rss, social media, tips, twitter, wordpress

Tips for successful Facebook fan page after Involver

July 6, 2009 By Kelli Brown View Comments

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on tips to create a successful Facebook fan page (also known as a public profile). One of the toolkits mentioned in the blog post was applications made by Involver.com. Hands down, Involver.com makes the best applications for Facebook pages. Their tools allow page administrators to easily integrate YouTube, Twitter, RSS, slideshows and much more into Facebook fan pages with ease.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one aware of how great these tools were. Involver.com also had a clue – and decided to monetize their tools by introducing a premium membership. Even at $29 a month (introductory pricing with one month free), the tools are a great deal. For a major company that’s trying to make the most of their Facebook fan page, $29 a month is nothing. I would strongly suggest anyone who can afford it keeps using their tools. If you need further convincing, check out some of the case studies available on their site.

Involver.com's array of tools for Facebook fan pages

But what about the rest of us? What if you’re just starting a fan page and you’re not sure how much of an investment to make? What if the only budget you’ve been allocated is your own time? What if the whole reason you got into social media marketing in the first place is because it’s free*?
Nothing out there right now can mimic the ease and simplicity of the toolset created by Involver. But let’s look for the next best solution to the most popular tools and how to get the same results.

RSS

To import your RSS feed – whether it’s a blog site or regular news site or press releases or Twitter – you need Social RSS. This very handy app allows you to import up to five RSS feeds into a page. You can choose how many items post from each feed and have a little flexibility in the placement. What’s better, you can still add the feeds to a page tab so fans will see “RSS/Blog” when they visit your site. Don’t forget to add a box to the main page so your feeds are prominent.

Twitter

Though there are countless Twitter apps out there that allow you add your Twitter feed to your page and update Twitter from Facebook (and vice versa if you’re using TweetDeck or Seesmic, among others), sometimes the simplest solution is the most effective. Instead of adding another app (and another tab) to the top of your page, add your Twitter feed via RSS as one of your five RSS feeds using Social RSS. To find the feed for your Twitter page, just visit your own page in Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/pixelpointpress, for example – and click the RSS link on the right-hand side. You’ll have similar control and fewer apps to manage with Social RSS installed.

SlideShare

Well, this is a no brainer. Instead of using Involver’s Slides for Pages app, just use SlideShare’s own app to share your presentations on your page. Link your Facebook account with your SlideShare account and fans will see your latest presentations as well as those you’ve marked as a favorite. Don’t forget to add both a tab and a box to the page to make it easier for fans to find your presentations.

Video

As it stands, I haven’t found a good substitute for YouTube for Pages. That said, Facebook’s own application allows you to upload video – several fan pages have made an impact using this simple but useful tool. A few to view are Pringles and Victoria’s Secret. The main benefit to using Facebook’s video function is that users can share their own videos with the same interface – no more separate tabs for user-generated content.

All the rest

When it comes to coupons and polls – as well as other custom branding – and your Facebook fan page, it’s time to learn some Facebook Markup Language (FBML). In short, it’s time to dive into the deep end and become a developer. Give it a shot and let us know what you learn by posting in the comments!
* For the record, social media is anything but free. The tools are free to use, but your time commitment is a very valuable resource. Please understand that social media isn’t for everyone – and that any serious marketing campaign takes resources. You get out of it what you put into it – and if you’re lucky, you get a bit more.

Filed Under: social media marketing, tips and tricks Tagged With: blog, facebook, fan page, involver, public profile, rss, slideshare, twitter

How to learn the latest Web tricks? Turn to TV

June 22, 2009 By Kelli Brown View Comments

It’s amazing how much the Web had changed learning. Those of us who would have needed a degree in computer programming a decade ago can now learn just about all we need to build a killer web site online.

We all know how video works online, but some companies have taken things a step further to make it easier for prospective and current clients to learn the ins and outs of their software. Let’s take a look at just a few of the resources out there to improve your skills – for SEO, WordPress and graphic design.

Google Webmaster Help channel on YouTube

Pick from more than a hundred great videos by the guys on the search engine team at Google. My personal favorites are those made by Google SEO leader Matt Cutts – they’re short, they’re witty and they give us insight on how to design our site to make the most of search engines.

WordPress TV

When it comes to blogging, nothing beats WordPress. But most people don’t even begin to realize the power of WordPress as a content management system. With the ability to create excellent custom templates, track traffic through Google Analytics and perform your own SEO with any number of plugins, there’s a whole lot of information to learn about WordPress.
WordPress TV provides short snippets of information – whether it’s an update from a WordCamp conference around the world or a challenge to create a specific site in a short period of time.

Adobe TV

If you’re involved in graphic design or web development, at some point in time, you’re probably going to use some Adobe software. Yes, you can jump through any number of hoops to build a site without Dreamweaver and open-source alternatives have many rivals for Photoshop. That said, for many of us, there comes a time when the maneuvering to save money on software ends up costing more money in lost time and productivity.
And let’s face it – there’s a certain amount of geeky pride involved in saying that you have CS4 Master Collection – even if you know you’ll never touch half of the applications in the suite.
When you buckle down and make the big purchase, it’s up to you to ensure that you’re using Adobe’s exceptionally powerful software to its best effect. Local user groups can help you with short seminars and tips and tricks, but when it comes to learning a program from scratch (the way the creators intended you to use it), nothing beats Adobe TV. The wide variety of videos available cover every ability level and every program. In addition, there are videos to inspire you – showing the works of others that came out of the software.

Filed Under: graphic design, online learning, tips and tricks, web development Tagged With: adobe, google, learn, online, seminar, tutorial, tv, wordpress

Five Facebook fan pages that get it done

June 3, 2009 By Kelli Brown View Comments

In last week’s blog post about crafting a successful Facebook fan page (or public profile, as they’re now officially called), I promised a post on five pages that get it done. They aren’t the top five pages on Facebook (Coke comes in at #1, followed by Pringles at #2), but they use a variety of approaches, content and tools to perfectly target their markets.

From smallest number of fans to largest:

Zappos

Zappos Facebook fan page

16,000 fans

Zappos has an impressive social media campaign spearheaded by their CEO (who is on Twitter @zappos) and their Facebook page is no exception. The page has amateur video shot around the Zappos office and interactive photo galleries where fans are encouraged to submit captions. From blog posts to musical videos sung by staff, the page has everything – except shoes. You see, Zappos is in the shoe-selling business. They also sell clothes. And that information is conspicuously absent from their page.

So why is this page a success? Zappos can’t compete on shoes alone. They sell the same brands as every other online shoeseller. They compete on service – and their videos and other quirks are a testament to their interaction with their customer base. Fans at Zappos already know what they can buy at the main Web site – their fan page is a broadcast of customer loyalty. And in that way, a huge success.

Us Weekly Magazine

Us Weekly magazine Facebook fan page cover gallery

32,000 fans

Us Weekly magazine’s fan page highlights the same content that made them famous – celebrity gossip. The page has many of the same features seen in other Facebook fan pages, from videos to polls to the magazine’s Twitter feed – all powered by Involver. What sets this page apart from others? Two main points.

First, the magazine has done an excellent job of cornering their target market – online. That’s no small feat for a print product. If you don’t believe me, take a peek at the number of newspapers closing in the U.S. because they failed to conquer the Web. The print magazine’s major drawback is just that – it’s a print magazine. Pretty tough to stay ahead on the gossip front when you publish once a week. Their Facebook page is the venue for new gossip and it allows users to share in the rumor mill with wall posts.

Second, they know their product, know their target market and know what works. What sells the magazine? The cover. What features prominently on their page? A gallery of magazine covers. Playing on the same idea, fans are invited to “guess the cover” each week.

Sometimes the simplest strategies are the ones that work best for a Facebook campaign.

Red Bull

Red Bull Facebook fan page

1.1 million fans

If your approach to social media (and marketing in general) is to spread the message far and wide with whatever tools you’ve got at hand, you want your Facebook page to reflect it.

For this reason alone, Red Bull is a success story. The beverage manufacturer that “gives you wings” might be best known for the Flugtag (German for flight day or air show) where fans compete in homemade, human-powered flying machines – with a variety of success. Red Bull also sponsors a litany of professional athletes in many sports. And hosts a wealth of sports-related Web sites. Recently, they added a magazine to the marketing effort.

The Facebook page serves a clearinghouse online for all of the company’s other marketing efforts – sponsorships, print publications, events, partnerships, and the Red Bull blog. You can find it all in one place – indeed, it’s the only place on the Web (aside from Google’s search results) where you can find all of Red Bull in one place (even other Red Bull fan pages).

Victoria’s Secret PINK

Victoria's Secret PINK Facebook fan page

1.2 million fans

A funny thing happens when a company posts its commercials on the Web. Those commercials, abominable things that we skipped over when watching television, become videos. Instead of skipping them, we’re transfixed, spending more time on the site than usual and clicking the button to share them with our friends afterward. In short, it’s a marketing dream come true.

Victoria’s Secret does an excellent job of balancing upfront advertising with content. Using Facebook Markup Language (FBML – Facebook does not allow HTML in fan pages), the company has populated the page with traditional ads – you’re hit with “5 panties for $25″ as soon as you open the page. In this case, the videos are also advertising, but it seems more palatable on the Web. Finally, the page allows users to upload their own videos – and users have answered the call. It’s social media marketing at it’s finest – allow your fans to do the marketing (even the content generation) for you.

Starbucks

Starbucks' Facebook fan page

1.7 million fans

In case you haven’t heard, Starbucks is having a bit of an identity crisis.

After expanding at a ridiculously rapid pace, the coffee giant lost touch with what made it great. Corners were cut to save time making drinks. Pair that with a worldwide economic recession the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades and those $5 Frappucinos just aren’t selling as well. At it’s heart, Starbucks isn’t a coffee company – Starbucks is an image company that also peddles caffeine. When that image gets tarnished, you have a major problem brewing.

Starbucks attacked the problem head on. Massive changes were made in store structure, with a renewed emphasis on what made the coffee chain great. Instead of dismissing the populace while growth exploded, the company has opened its collective ears – begging for feedback from customers, critics and fans alike. A social media campaign – complete with crowdsourcing – is at the heart of this and their Facebook page is no exception.

A robust discussion board elicits fan feedback on everything from how to deal with recycling their paper cups to discontinued syrup flavors – in short, Starbucks is listening.

A final touch: Instead of just uploading blog RSS feeds (a timesaver, but not always a good fit for every company), Starbucks uploads each link individually (tracking the results via bit.ly – very smart) referencing the blog writer on a first-name basis. Those of us who enjoyed the coffee back in the hey day probably had a similar relationship with our barista. It’s a small touch that goes a long way toward recalling the nostalgia that made the company great – and that’s what marketing is all about.

Those are my five – did your favorites make it in? Other amazing ideas I’ve missed online? Please post in the comments so that we can all get a glimpse of what successful companies are doing with their Facebook fan pages.

Next week: Come back for five tips to help you get the most out of Twitter.

Filed Under: social media marketing, tips and tricks Tagged With: crowdsourcing, facebook, fan pages, involver, PINK, public profiles, red bull, social media marketing, starbucks, us weekly, victoria's secret, zappos

Ask P3: Using WordPress to build a website with a static home page

How to learn the latest Web tricks? Turn to TV

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