Newhouse Social Media // Curated by colleagues from the 2012 MAYmester PRL530 Social Media for Public Relations class in the Public Relations Master's Program at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University.
Content creation and keeping your fans interested until they buy is a core strategy of social media. It creates a bind between customers and the brand. It creates a feeling of reciprocity. These are powerful marketing techniques.
The catch, of course, is that content is hard to create.
Most brands create blogs, but then are unable to maintain them. Or if they do, they are not really maintaining them well enough to keep fans interested enough to create any real business results.
If you are blogging on behalf of your business and trying to create a connection to your brand, here are a few templates to help you create blog posts that will provide value for your readers and keep your fans close.
Posterous is not a microblog. It's your place to post everything. Now we've added a simple but powerful new post editor that lets you post any combination of photos, music, video and docs, and intersperse them with text in any order you want. There are no limitations that force you to choose whether a post is for photos, video, embeds or anything else. It's simple and powerful at the same time.Here's what you can do now with every Posterous blog as of today, both for posting new posts and editing old ones.
Upload any kind of photos, music, videos and documents
Select and push multiple files up in one batch, all with no additional software install.Image rotation, reordering and deletion
Reordering image galleries is as easy as dragging and dropping them into the order you want. Rotating images to the correct orientation is super easy, and deleting is just a click too.
Combine and ungroup image galleries easily
Finally, sometimes you want to break some images out of a gallery or rearrange which photos are where. That's easy with our ability to expand and combine galleries.Click to view largeDownload full size (93 KB)Rich text and media the way you want it
Whatever you upload is automatically and intelligently mixed with the text of your blogpost in any order that you desire. Just cut and paste or drag the media to where you want in the document.Try it now, enabled for all Posterous sites and users today.
Now you can create and edit posts without all the hassle. What are you waiting for? Next time you edit a post, you'll get dropped in automatically.You can also post at any time via the web by clicking Post by Web on your Manage page.
You asked for it, and we delivered. Posterous is about creating simple software that does what you need without complicating your life. We've got your back. As always, feedback, questions and bug reports are welcome at help@posterous.com.
Loving this update so far...
Some more great blogging tips!
Why you must blog, what you should blog about, the right and wrong way to blog, and how to find your blog's voice. Great advice that will help your blog promote YOU more effectively.
HOW TO: Create a Successful Company Blog via mashable.com
Mark Suster is a Partner at GRP Partners, a Venture Capital firm in Los Angeles. He blogs at Both Sides of the Table and can be found on Twitter at @msuster.
I’m often asked by entrepreneurs and business owners whether it is worth blogging, and if so, what they should blog about. On the first question, the answer is obvious to me — you must blog as an entrepreneur.
In this post I’ll cover why you need to blog, how to determine what to blog about, and finding your blog’s voice.
Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.
I've received a bunch of emails asking about how to get images into Posterous. You would think the simplicity of Posterous would allow you to upload photos easily, but that isn't the case if you are using the "Post by Web" interface, which I am using now.
If you have a single photo, one of the easiest ways is to write your post as an new email and then email it to your personal blog at post@posterous.com or to the class blog at post@newhousesocialmedia.posterous.com, draft your email and just click send. The image will automatically attach.
One cool thing about posting via email is that if you have multiple images, they will all appear together in a fun Posterous-style slideshow. However, this isn't always ideal as we bloggers may want to put an image at the beginning, write a few paragraphs, then have one or two images later on.
And yeah, it's great to use the bookmarklet to post links and comment on other sites, but hey, we're hardcore bloggers now and often have our own opinion...so we need to use the regular web interface to create a post.
So how do you upload images to your post and get them to appear correctly?
Well, Posterous makes it easy—and difficult. There is no upload image button within the web interface. But wherever you want an image to appear, you simply copy/paste a link to the image directly into your post. The only thing is you have to have an image already uploaded somewhere on the web—Flickr, Picasa, or other sites. Flickr tends to be the easiest, but creating an account and all the hassle that goes with that makes Posterous seem like a lot of extra work.
Use Image Sharing Sites
One of the easiest ways to do this is by using one of the image sharing sites that have become popular mostly due to Twitter, such as Twitpic and Imgur. Those like Twitpic are geared for Twitter users, but others like Imgur are for anyone to quickly upload a photo and get a link to that photo as fast and easily as possible.
Just visit the Imgur site, click the Browse button, and click Continue to upload your photo.
The copy the URL address on the next page:
And come back to your Posterous post and just paste the link directly into your post on its own separate line—don't paste the image link within a paragraph or a sentence because it won't always work. Just hit that return button, paste the link, hit return again, and continue typing.
Easy.
The same thing goes for any image on the web with the usual .jpg, .gif, or .png extension. As well as links to YouTube videos. Posterous is pretty smart at recognizing links to different types of content.
For more on this, check out a related post on the Official Posterous Blog.
Takeaway From Today's Lecture: I am really amazed by the limitations that I wasn't aware even existed in the blogging/social media world. I always see celebrities and company's using Twitter and blogs to promote their products but never really considered the legal implications behind "endorsements" and product reviews, etc. The thing that stuck out the most to me was regarding the question I asked about Twittering as an employee, but not during work hours and not specifically asked to do so by the employer. I am amazed that (technically, according to the guidelines) an employee working at a Burger King drive-thru cannot tweet about how much he or she loves Whoppers without stating that they are an employee of the company! That just blows my mind because it is something I would never expect.
Questions Remain: If the above information about employees being technically regarded as "spokespersons" for their company in the blogging world is true, then if a CEO of a company (as I have seen before) tweets about a great new product from the company, are they held to the same guidelines? Since they are technically also employees of the company, do they need to indicate on each of these tweets that they are an employee, or is the public knowledge of them as a CEO enough? Does it matter if their profile says 'CEO of ...' or do they need to indicate that directly on the post?
Mentioned in class yesterday. Gives a great overview of the service.
