Communication methods have changed faster than anyone could have imagined.  A website is no longer enough.

People want interaction and responsiveness from organizations large and small, for-profit and non-profit.

Organizations are struggling to decide which channels to use, what to publish, how to engage and manage conversations and who in the organization is responsible.

Equipping people is critical to the success of any online organizational presence whether it is for an association, a for-profit company or a non-profit organization.

Michelle Cullison, President of Daystar New Media, has partnered with meeting planners, association executives and speaker bureaus to create highly successful events. Explore the website and contact us to ask questions, check date availability or book an event.

I’m talking about the newest feature on Twitter, the follow button.  It’s a button you can place on your website to invite site visitors to follow you on twitter WITHOUT leaving your website.

Check it out on sidebar of this blog, SocialMediaExplained.com.

This is a great new way to grow your twitter following with people who are familiar with your  company. In the past, as in yesterday, it was a risk to promote twitter on your home page because, if visitors left to go over and follow you on twitter, they may get distracted and forget to explore your website.  With this new button, web site visitors can click to follow and continue browsing. The follow happens on your website.

But, the next time your web site visitor logs in to twitter, your tweets will be in their stream. Hooray! Think visibility.

To get a follow button for your blog or website, login to your twitter profile and then go to twitter.com/followbutton.  Grab your very own Follow Button.  WordPress users can copy the code into a text widget and SAVE! – Your done!  Traditional HTML site owners will likely need to send the snippet of code to their web designers.  Either way, its quick and easy to build that following on twitter with people already visiting your web site.

Have a great week!

Michelle Cullison
DaystarNewMedia.com

About the Author:
Michelle Cullison, consultant and professional speaker, equips businesses and organizations to expand from web site to web presence to achieve REAL business objectives. Learn more about her company at DaystarNewMedia.com. Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn.com/in/michellecullison or send an email to michelle@daystarnewmedia.com.

https://twitter.com/about/resources/followbutton

Believe it or not, the quote above is from a managing attorney of a successful law firm about his experience trying to reach recent law school graduates for recruitment. The potential candidates weren’t spurning him or the firm. The problem was simple. The candidates weren’t checking their email. They were oblivious to the opportunity. The hiring attorney assumed email was a primary communication tool for the new graduates because it is a primary hub in his firm and for business in general. In the end, the hiring attorney took the high road, adapted to his audience, established a facebook account and proceeded to successfully connect with the candidates.

Have you thought about your audience?

What communication channels do your prospects and clients use most? How about your colleagues? Do they regularly use text messaging, blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn Groups or Facebook Walls? Do they call or email regularly? What communication channels work best for them? Give it some thought. You may want to ask them in a variety of ways across multiple channels. You want to be sure they get the survey.

Since business success is dependent on successful communications, take time to identify who needs to receive your communications and which channel is best suited to them. As the number of options for reaching our audience continues to increase, this is no small task to assess. But, considering the cost of lost or incomplete communication to your business, it is worth the effort.

Invest time to identify which channel of communication will best serve each of your target audiences. They will appreciate getting information in a way that is convenient for them. And, you will be assured that information is reaching its intended audience positioning you to receive timely feedback and stay engaged throughout the sales cycle and into the on-going business relationship.

About the Author:
Michelle Cullison, consultant and professional speaker, equips businesses and organizations to expand from web site to web presence to achieve REAL business objectives. Learn more about her company at DaystarNewMedia.com. Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn.com/in/michellecullison or send an email to michelle@daystarnewmedia.com.

Peace, Love & LinkedIn - Be a LinkedIn Groupie

The 70’s are gone but being a groupie is definitely in-especially on LinkedIn.  So, today I’m asking you to be a groupie.

Here’s why: LinkedIn, unlike Facebook, requires that you clarify your relationship with a person before you can invite them to connect.  In other words, you have to have an existing relationship and prove it by indicating where you worked or attended school with the person.  If you simply claim to be a friend,  you will need to provide the person’s email address. You won’t be allowed to connect if you say you don’t know the person.   Growing your network with new contacts-people you don’t know-can be complicated on LinkedIn.

There is a solution become a LinkedIn Groupie!

Search LinkedIn Groups and identify which ones would position you with people you can build business with (prospects, existing clients, referral partners, colleagues, etc.)  In these groups, you can get to know people by joining and participating in Discussion, a feature of LinkedIn groups. In addition, once you are in a group, LinkedIn allows you to invite your fellow group members to connect. This opens up a brand new avenue for network growth.  I highly recommend that you engage in the group and offer value to its members. The more you do that, the more likely it is that group members will accept your connection requests when you make them and become valuable business connections.

Growing your network to 500 strategic connections (connections within your target market or industry) is one of the first steps to seeing ROI from your LinkedIn time investments. Using groups can help you get the job done!

If you want to learn more about how to develop business on LinkedIn, contact me on LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com/in/michellecullison or at  michelle@daystarnewmedia.

I’m a proud LinkedIn groupie. I want you to be. Peace.

Let me tell you how.  You’ve probably heard of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Perhaps, you’ve subscribed to a couple of blogs using this technology. But, you probably don’t know that this techie tool can save you loads of time.  Many of today’s web-based tools and social media sites support RSS technology, so you can simply post content once and stream it across the social web to multiple sites. Storing content once saves time on updates and reduces storage costs and expands the influence of each communication without expanding the workload.

So, how can businesses benefit from RSS technology? Here’s how: Businesses must keep the communication lines open with both clients and customers. Creating a communication piece (text, audio, video, print, web, etc.) takes a lot of time. Using a communication piece once (email news, single blog post, print letter) is beneficial but using it across multiple networks greatly increase the influence of that one article.   This system can be set up EASILY with a blog and the built in feature, RSS.

Getting started requires that you first have a blog such as the free blogs offered at WordPress.com. This will be the communication hub for your social web presence. The goal is that all content posted on the blog will automatically stream to the social web onto sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

To set up your own automated system, a system that feeds Facebook pages, LinkedIn Personal Profiles, LinkedIn Company profiles and Twitter profiles, do the following:

1.      Identify your blog sites RSS Feed address. If you are using wordpress, it is typically the URL of the website. (Example, my blog is http://socialmediaexplained.com .  Many of the RSS feed apps can use the plain URL, some may require the feed URL that looks something like this: http://www.socialmediaexplained.com/feed/rss/ (In your browser, find the subscribe to feed link or icon and you will find your feed URL.)

2.      To stream your blog posts automatically into your LinkedIn profile, set up the LinkedIn app, BlogLink on your personal profile. (This is found in the apps section of LinkedIn.)

3.      To stream your blog posts into your LinkedIn Company profile, edit the RSS Feed field in your company profile. (You must be the admin of the Company profile.)

4.      To add the feed to your Facebook page, use one of the RSS Facebook apps such as Social RSS, http://apps.facebook.com/social-rss/tabsettings.php.

5.      To add the feed to your Twitter profile, use one of the Twitter apps such as Twitterfeed.com.

6.      RSS feed management also be done with an account on Hootsuite.com. To use this tool, create a hootsuite account and then configure the RSS Feeds settings for each profile: LinkedIn Personal, Facebook Pages and Twitter Profiles. LinkedIn Companies must be configured on LinkedIn.

Please note that the above procedure doesn’t mention every single app available to feed RSS around the web. I’ve just shared with you some of the tools I’ve used on different projects in recent months to get the job done.

The set up I recommended should take approximately 15-30 minutes for 3 profiles. Once the set up is done, your business blog will extend across the web EVERY time you post a new article on it! If you have a staff, you can set up the feed to go into every staff member profile. RSS Feeds can extend your communications and save you time and money. Stay tuned for other ways to save time with social media! And, if you don’t want to do the set up yourself, hire Daystar New Media, Inc. to do it for you.

Michelle Cullison, consultant and professional speaker, equips businesses and organizations to expand from website to web presence to achieve REAL business objectives. Learn more about her company at DaystarNewMedia.com. Connect with Michelle on LinkedIn.com/in/michellecullison or send an email to michelle@daystarnewmedia.com.

This quote comes from my 18-year old daughter, a high school senior this year.   SHE’s feeling OLD due to the changes in technology—the move from Google to Bing!  Maybe your business is in the same situation.   Are you stuck using old techniques that don’t work like they used to? 

Here are 5 ways to renew your business website traffic by leveraging search and social media:

1. Fully develop a content rich Bing.com/local Business Listing.  Show up locally.
2. Fully develop a content rich Google.com/Places Profile. Show up locally.
3. In your status updates on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, regularly link to the internal pages on your website. Take people and search engines deeper into your world.
4. Regularly add new content to your website or blog.  Be the resource of valuable information of interest to the audience you want to reach. Search engines-and people- LOVE new content.
5. Optimize your social profiles by providing links from each profile to your other websites/profiles, using keywords in your profiles that clients/prospect use to find you and keeping your profiles active with a steady flow of new content.

Search engine optimization is still critically important to business. People still google and bing for businesses they want to find.  But, people are also asking their friends and colleagues on social networks who they recommend.  Google and Bing now serve up those social conversations in the search results. Social media and search engine technologies are merging. To keep your business young and traffic flowing to your website, keep your business appearing on both search and social sites.  And, if you are still feeling old? Tell someone to Bing it!  

Michelle Cullison, a leading expert on helping companies expand from web site to web presence, offers fresh, ideas on using social media and web communications to reach business objectives. Michelle@daystarnewmedia.com, (504) 780-2113end_of_the_skype_highlighting, http:// www.daystarnewmedia.com

1. Keep moving and yell.
2. Slow down and share the path.
3. Veer off and go around him.

In order to keep from yelling and losing my momentum, I chose to veer off the path. What I landed on was a LOT of soft, loose sand underneath a thin layer of grass.  While swerving wildly, I proceeded to yell and lose my momentum.  In hind sight, the obvious best choice was:  Slow down and adapt.  

It is also the best choice for social media and business.

There are those who choose to: Keep moving and yell. They say things like: We don’t have time for social media. The phone accomplishes the same thing.  My target market isn’t there.  These folks will realize too late that while the tools (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) may change, social networking will be part of the business communication tool box for years to come.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are businesses veering off into the social spaces with little thought and no objectives defined. They say things like: This could be the golden ticket. Let’s give it a try. Everybody’s doing it. We’ve got to have a Facebook page. Like my bike in the sand, these folks will get stuck very quickly. In the end, they will yell and abandon social media as useless (no business objectives were reached) or they’ll see they need to slow down and adapt it.

The businesses that start with the slow down and adapt approach are careful to consider how social media fits into their overall business strategy. They say things like this: One of our goals is to increase leads on our website.  We also want to build our email list with targeted prospects. How can we use social media to accomplish these objectives? Or, they might say, we need X number of new sales per month. What methods could we use in the social media space to accomplish this? These folks are the ones that have social media success stories to share.

The point is, strategy is essential to anything and everything in business and it doesn’t come without a time investment.  Slow down. Stop to consider social media’s role in achieving your business objectives.  Make sure that everything you do for your business, including social media, has a clear, measurable objective.  When you do, you won’t get stuck in the sand.

We help our clients avoid the sand and get results.

To learn more about our consulting services, visit DaystarNewMedia.com or connect with us in the social spaces.

In Gmail, you will find the Signature settings in the General tab of the Settings Page.
Settings is at the top right and the default tab is General. Scroll down to find Signature.  

If you click the Image icon in the signature box, you will find a request for a web URL, the address of the image on the web instead of the normal opportunity to insert an image.  So, if you want to add social media icons to your gmail signature, you must first upload them to your website hosting server. Do not link to social media icons that are stored on someone else’s web server.  

For example,  on my website Contact page, you see this information:  

Michelle Cullison, President
Daystar New Media, Inc.
info@daystarnewmedia.com
504-324-1058   

 Michelle’s Blog:  SocialMediaExplained.com  

 Michelle’s Facebook Page:  Social Media Explained   

Michelle on YouTube   

Michelle on Twitter   

Michelle on LinkedIn   

If you right click on any of the icons and examine the properties, you will find the direct URL to each. For example, the rss feed icon is stored here: http://www.daystarnewmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/feed.png.  Now, you can copy each URL and insert it in the web URL code and then association each icon with your profile by inserting the link for each icon.  

I took a different approach.  To create my fancy gmail signature I did this:  

1. I copied the code from my contact us page into the Gmail Signature form.  

2. Then, I deleted the text to the right of each icon to create a horizontal row of icons you see here:  

3. Because I already configured each icon to link to my profile, I didn’t have to insert web URL or profile links on the icons over in gmail.   

Beware that the settings box may not display/load the icons–mine didn’t, but don’t worry and think it isn’t working.  

Gmail signature settings

 Here’s proof that it is.  When I send a message from Gmail to Outlook, the images load just fine.    

So, now Gmail users, you too can have a fancy, schmancy email signature!

Since I recently updated my outlook signature file to include 5 social media icons (see image below), people keep saying,  ”I want one of those!” and asking, ”How did you do that?”

Today, I’ll show you how to make your email signature look like this:
 

Before heading over to Outlook to edit your signature, perform a search for social media icons. There are literally thousands of styles to choose from grunge to glowing neon to everything in-between.  Search for “Free social media icons” on a search site like google.com or bing.com.  

Or, you may want to check out this simple set of vector icons called buddycons located here: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/08/buddycons-vector-social-media-icons/.  Click the Download File button at the bottom of the page and unzip the images to a folder on your computer.

Next, make a list of the social profile or page URLs (web addresses) that you want to link to from the new icons.

Like this:
http://facebook.com/socialmediaexplained.com
http://LinkedIn.com/in/michellecullison
http://www.SocialMediaExplained.com
http://twitter.com/mcullison
http://youtube.com/mcullison
   and    

Now it is time to head over to Outlook and customize your signature.  Here’s how:

1. Open a New Mail Message.
2. Click the Signature icon and then select Signatures, the last menu option on drop-down menu.
3. Type in the signature text.
4. Then, click the Picture icon (the left icon highlighted in yellow below) and insert the icons.
5. Next, while the image file is selected, click the Hyperlink icon (the right icon highlighted in yellow below) and enter the URL/address of your social profile or page. You can copy and paste the URL/address from the list you made earlier.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you have added all desired images (in this case social media icons) and links.
7. Once the signature is complete, click OK to save it.

Enjoy your own FANCY, SCHMANCY email signature!  Now you have it!

 
If your social media profiles/pages aren’t helping you accomplish business objectives, contact Michelle Cullison for a phone consult today at 504-324-1058 or michelle@daystarnewmedia.com. 

Visit DaystarNewMedia.com to learn more about our programs and services.