But what about that ever-fraught topic when it comes to the digital space: copyright? First of all, Pinterest clearly states in its Terms Of Use that it is not responsible for the consequences you might face if you wrongfully share copyrighted material on Pinterest. This seems harsh considering that Pinterest users are not making money off their boards and it can be argued that being pinned actually serves as publicity. But, be that as it may, the applicable laws are on the side of anyone who chooses to take a dim view of their content being freely pinned.

So what can you do avoid committing copyright sins on Pinterest?

1. Share your own content only; use your own photos and art. This way, you won’t have to face copyright violation notices. But you might also find that you have tacitly agreed to Pinterest owning the rights to your work, so consider that option and look into a Creative Commons license for your work.
2. Look for open-source or free-to-use images. Creative Commons and Corbis Images have extensive collections of these, and you can use the search tool Compfight, selecting the Creative Commons option, to find such images.
3. When in doubt, don’t. No matter how obscure and harmless you might think your use of someone else’s copyrighted image is, should they find out and choose to make an issue of it, you won’t have a lot of legal protection.

This seems to take half the fun out of Pinterest, but in fact with a little creativity and lateral thinking it can make using the site even more fun and rewarding. Speaking of creativity and lateral thinking, these are qualities that are virtually mandatory for members of the i-Vista Digital Marketing team. If that sounds like a good fit for driving your social media strategy – whether that includes Pinterest or not – get in touch!

• It’s a question of identity: Your brand is your business identity. It isn’t just a logo, a tagline and a company name: it’s the sum total of perceptions around your business. Without a clear brand story, you’re just another faceless me-too business.
• It’s the starting point for business relationships: Customers form relationships with brands. Consistency around a brand builds trust and feeling of loyalty.
• People remember a good brand: It’s important to be memorable. Recall enables repeat business and a strong, distinctive brand that people remember goes a long way.
• It’s your social media passport: Social media engagement is emerging as a given for businesses. And without strong branding, it’s impossible to achieve traction in the digital realm.
• It helps tie together your presence across platforms: With strong branding, your activities on different platforms have a clear tie-in with each other. Instead of being standalone units, they develop synergy.
• People love stories: A good brand always has a brand story, an origin tale that your customers can connect with.
• Branding can help David slay Goliath: Intimidated by a long-running brand’s staying power? Don’t be. With powerful branding, a newcomer can challenge the stalwarts on an even playing field.
• Customers expect branding: Customers today are pretty branding-savvy. It takes a nuanced, distinctive brand to cut through the clutter and warrant their mind share.
• Without effective branding, everything else is wasted: the truth is, business success is deeply brand driven today. You may have the best service, killer technology or jaw-dropping design; unless you weave a great brand message around it, you’re still going to lose out.
• Great branding makes for great business: Top decision makers and influencers have many demands on their time and attention. If your branding is truly smart, you can catch their attention and multiply the reach of your branding.

So there you go. Ten simple, yet crucial reasons why you need to get your brand story in place before you launch your outreach and promos. At i-Vista, we know that great business results are driven by great branding. Talk to our Digital Marketing team to find out what this means for your business!

1. Sponsor themes and submit to CSS galleries: There are loads of free themes for WordPress, Tumblr and Joomla being made. The people who make these themes are constantly looking for sponsors for their themes. By sponsoring a great theme or CSS that relates to your market, you can be assured of a large number of links through mandatory mentions of you link, perhaps in the footer of these themes. Visit sites like websmasterforums.com to find theme builders. Similarly, submit your site to free CSS galleries for more eyeballs – but be sure you have a top-notch CSS first (it’s something you should do anyway)!
2. Release an eBook: Lots of companies are using this strategy these days, notably consultancies like Hubspot. Compile a selection of your content into an ebook and submit it to eBook directories and promote it on your networking platforms. Link to your site in a restrained way, but most of all make sure the content is useful enough that your eBook spreads far and wide – spreading those links to your site at the same time!
3. Be a curator: With a little practice, it’s easy to create regular posts that point readers to great content related to your key topics around the web. By doing this, you encourage people to link to you because of the useful affiliations that you create, and you also increase the likelihood of being noticed and linked to by influencers if you send them a lot of traffic.
4. Be a link magnet: When you share content from a service like YouTube, you wind up giving them multiple links back. You can use this strategy for yourself too. Create great content and then build multiple link-backs into the procedure for sharing this content. You’re earning these links honestly by producing content that is worth the effort in the first place.
5. Create a widget: Creating or sponsoring a widget that relates to your offering can get you great link mileage. Do you specialize in assisting people with tax filing and tax consultancy? If you can conceptualise and launch a widget that helps people calculate their potential taxes and savings, it’s the kind of thing people will share across the web. Be creative and think of a great widget you can make for your audience.
6. Build relationships: Everything you do to build links doesn’t have to be built around your site. Instead, make sure you’re cultivating good contacts in your industry in person, at seminars, or via telephone, post and email. The better they know you the more likely they are to link to you or to enter into a collaborative content strategy that will give you mileage.
7. Praise others: You use a lot of products and services. Make sure you find places online where you can review them or contribute testimonials. Write to the companies that offer these products or services and request to send them a testimonial. These are great ways to build goodwill and get links back to yourself.
8. Be a guest/be a host: Your key influencers are looking for great content. If you believe you have the material for a great piece of content on a relevant topic, offer to contribute. This helps you reach out to a new audience and spread you links further.  Similarly, offer experts the chance to contribute guest spots to your blog or site; they will in turn link to you.
9. Target influencers on social networks: Mentions on social networks like Facebook or Google+ are becoming increasingly important in gaining a good Search Engine ranking. Make reaching out on these networks with share-worthy content a big part of your activities.
10. Trackbacks: Do not underestimate the power of trackbacks. Look up relevant sites and blogs that provide trackbacks to external links and be sure to add links to them when you put up any new piece of content. Over time, this will increase your link network to a great degree.

So there you go – ten practical, proven ways you can get more links back to your site. Want more? Then how about getting in touch with the i-Vista Digital Marketing team for a customized web strategy?!

A common answer is that you have to keep abreast of trends, you have to be edgy and cool to make it in the digital communication space.

That isn’t necessarily the right answer. In fact it’s kind of a non-answer. Really, because, what do those words mean? What is edgy, cool and trendy? Who decides? And is that what your audience, your specific, unique, all-important audience, wants?

Is it who you are?

Over the years, I’ve become increasingly aware that it’s silly to act like one of the cool kids beyond a certain age. To be honest, I am what I am – no longer a quirky teen, having years of experience and learning to back up my ideas. It would sound silly if I tried to write this blog like a kid – but writing it from where I’m really at- can connect better with my audience.

Because it’s real.

Keeping it real is the single most important aspect of creating effective online content. It starts with knowledge.

1. Know your product and your domain: I used to collect stamps for a few years as a schoolkid. I could probably write half a dozen posts on the basics of stamp collecting, then run out of steam. A lifelong philatelist could keep such a blog going forever. That’s the kind of engagement you need with your subject matter. It’s also important to understand the domain as a whole, who the players are, what the larger concerns are and in what terms people discuss things.
2. Know your audience: Your audience is not the same as everyone else’s. Maybe they really are the type who demand something edgy and different, maybe they’re more into useful tips and tricks, maybe they’re technically inclined, maybe they’re artistic. Find out who they are and how they tick and write to that mindset, not to someone’s hastily conceived idea of what it means to be hip today.
3. Know yourself: This has two implications. Know your brand: know its attributes and image, the kinds of contexts it fits into, what it can be adapted to and what doesn’t work. But also know yourself. When you’re tweeting, updating or blogging for your company, remember that people are more willing to take what you have to say if it’s coming from you, as someone speaking for the brand, rather than as an anonymous spokes-bot. There’s a reason why Twitter fields curated by real people work better than the automated kind: people respond to an honest sense of personality. So instead of losing your voice in your brand, try and understand your voice, how it connects with your brand and how you can use that connection to create better, more engaging and honest content.

And that will get you much further than hasty, knee-jerk attempts to be cool, trendy or edgy.

Over time, we’ve noticed that good customer service isn’t just a function of how many touch points you make available to your customers or how many platforms you use to interact with them. Those are important gateways, but the real deal is how customers fare when they actually get in touch. And that experience is directly linked to customer service.

Caring for customers is crucial to our business, as it is to those customers in turn. Over time, we’ve learned that you can shape your internal ethos to create better customer service. We’ve touched on this in a past blog post, but it’s worth looking at those learnings again in an increasingly competitive environment with stiff competition for each customer:

1. Get the right people in: When you’re hiring, add customer orientation to your list of parameters. That lets you shape a team that is focused on the right priorities from the get-go.
2. Give them the right training: Providing great customer service doesn’t happen by chance; make training in customer orientation a part of your intake procedures.
3. Give them a motto: Try to summarise your customer service in a concise, pithy motto or slogan that gets everyone on the same page.
4. Give them the power: Outstanding customer service isn’t just call centre sweet-talk and sympathetic hand-holding; it’s about results. Give your employees the authority they need to take concrete steps and deliver those results.
5. Keep learning: Create an environment in which people analyse what worked and what didn’t to keep refining the way you do things.

Good communication channels and the right creative outreach can help drive your customer service success. And that’s where a partner like the i-Vista Digital Communication team comes in. Get in touch to find out more!

Last April, this blog offered what was described as the new mantra of online networking: Look for friends, not links. It’s been a year, so it isn’t exactly new anymore, but I think it has stood the test of time. To quote from that post:

‘To understand this, you need to consider the nature of online influence. While large corporations and well-known experts can transfer their influence online, the new breed of online influencers earn their clout in the social arena. They do this by consistently sharing great content and by participating enthusiastically and meaningfully in the larger online conversation, on blogs, discussion forums and social networking sites. They have earned the attention of the online public by proving themselves to be useful, informative, entertaining, reliable members of the online ecosystem. When they share a link, their audience clicks – but only as long as they retain their credibility.’

But how do you catch the attention of such an influencer; how do you make friends?

To draw on another of our earlier posts, there are 4 ways to become a part of an influencer’s circle of trust and influence. They take hard work, but this is the honest, organic way to make online patterns of influence and link-sharing work for you. Needless to say, the success of these tactics is predicated on the relevance and reach of the influencers you select. Choose well because this strategy is all about depth, not breadth! So here are some ideas we have about what would work best :-

1. Join their community: Most influencers thrive on having a robust community around them. So don’t hold back – join their community. Subscribe to their RSS feeds, follow their tweets, join their facebook pages and so on.
2. Be a part of the dialogue: Don’t just passively follow them. Comment. Respond to polls. Help keep discussions active and fruitful. Pitch in with your own views. Get noticed for being engaged and enthusiastic, don’t spam your offerings.
3. Give them your help: Look out for cues to weigh in with useful information – travel tips, gadget reviews, anything that you have some expertise in. Whether you’re offering a great tip or linking to a suitable online resource, this kind of helpful behaviour helps.
4. Give them a free sample: You want your chosen influences to ultimately recommend your offering. When you have their attention, give them a free sample. If you’re selling luxury tours, offer a tour on the house, to check out how you do things. If you’re a consultant, offer a free consultation. Give your influencer a first-person experience of what sets your offering apart.

The bottomline is, it’s not about going out there and promoting yourself in the hope that you will impress people. Great content, community participation and meaningful inputs will get you the kind of online attention you want. For more ideas on building your online reach, get in touch with the i-Vista Digital Marketing team.

To succeed, any individual social media campaign has to be part of a well thought out strategy that sets the pace for what you do, how you do it, when you do it and how you can ensure good results. Let’s take a look at the building blocks of this strategy.

1. Find your audience: You’ve done a lot of research; now don’t get lost in the data. Boil it down to simple, important factors: who do you need to reach, where can they be reached and what topics do they discuss?
2. Craft your message: Your message has to relate to your audience. Find out what their problems are and how your USP can answer these issues. Craft an underlying message that communicates this linkage.
3. Set the goalposts: Figure out why you are on social media. Is it to build awareness, to rally an audience around a specific campaign, to reach out to your existing customer community, to create a new sales funnel? What will count as a success? How can you measure it? How does this goal tie back to your profits?
4. Figure out your content strategy: You can’t just translate an ad campaign into social media terms. The way to get an audience and keep it is to provide them with great content. Figure out what kind of content will attract your target, how you will provide and how you will make it tie back in to your goals.
5. Allot a budget and resources: Keeping your social media activities going will need money and resources. Figure out what kind of a budget makes sense, who should be in charge, what functions you can assign in-house and what you should outsource.
6. Define metrics and parameters: It may not be possible to use every social media platform around. Set the limits for what you can and can’t do, how often you will use the platforms you choose and for what. Also define how you plan to measure the success of the content you share on these platforms.
7. Publish, measure, revise: Once you go live with your content, take the time to let it take effect. Measure all your responses and then refine your strategy for the next round.

It takes time, but it’s worth getting the basics of your strategy right before embarking on individual social media campaigns. Always keep the business context and your overall strategy in mind when you roll out a communication program. Or, work with a partner who understands the big picture – someone like the i-Vista Digital Communication team.

That’s the nightmarish possibility looming over any marketer launching a new content-based campaign online. The best content won’t go far if you can’t get anyone to look at it. It helps if your brand already has a massive online following. But if it doesn’t, and even if it does, you can still earn added traction in social media by networking strategically with online influencers. These are people whose blogs, twitter feeds or videos are relevant to your keywords and have a massive online following.

A single retweet, share or +1 from a relevant online influencer can dramatically multiply your campaign’s visibility and reach. But influencers are aware of their power and their responsibility to use it responsibly and retain their reputation. You can’t just draw up a list of the top 10 bloggers you want to reach out to and mail them with a request to plug your content. You need to work on networking with them, building a relationship over time. Here are some ways to get there:

1. Start following them: Choose less than 10 influencers to follow. Subscribe to their blog, connect to them on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and so on. Attend a live event featuring them if you can.
2. Support them and their community: Start sharing their updates and posts, buy some of their offerings. Better still, write a detailed review about their offerings and ideas. Get active in their community, if they have a discussion forum or a group on a social networking site. Help keep the discussions alive – they will appreciate the effort!
3. Help out: As you follow your chosen influencers, look out for chances to help them out. Let’s say they’re travelling to a place they’ve never visited before and want some context on what to expect. If you can offer personal insights, or at least link to a great resource, they’re likely to remember you positively.
4. Offer your expertise for free: Ultimately, you’re trying to get your influencers to promote an offering that is relevant to them. Let’s say you’re a bespoke furniture maker reaching out to a leading interior design expert. Write to him or her and offer a free consult on one of their projects. Seeing your expertise in action will help make them into advocates.

There are several other possibilities, most of which are variations on these four key concepts. Remember, the social web is about two-way conversations and passing it along. If you give attention and value, you’re more likely to make it worthwhile for others to do the same for you. On that note: did you like this blog post? Found it useful? Let us know! And do contact our Digital Marketing department if you’re on the look-out for a digital marketing campaign driven by insights like these.

That isn’t to say it’s just old wine in a new bottle. The digital landscape has changed immensely in the past decade. Social media is in the forefront, content is still king, but people expect content with engagement and the online dialogue has become resolutely many-to-many. So a composite methodology to tap into the online audience’s demand for engaging storytelling has emerged. It’s a variety of tested ideas and new techniques crafted to adapt to the new scenario.

The two main components of content marketing are:

• Telling a compelling story around your brand
• Using it to create engagement with existing or potential customers

Now, we come to the second theme of my post; the one contained in the headline. Storytelling is already a well-understood craft. But how do you show the link between your brand stories and your business goals? Let’s look at each kind of content, how it drives engagement and how that engagement ties back to your business.

• PR: Public relations stories generate awareness, which leads to website visits, referrals to your communities and traffic on your social profiles. This traffic can be measured and connected to revenues using a standard set of conversion metrics of the kind web analysts already use.
• Blogging: There’s a clear connection between a regularly updated, informative blog and an increase in site traffic as well as search visibility. Again, this traffic can be tracked and connected to revenue generating points like product pages or calls for demos/consultations.
• Social media: Your posts on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and so on will earn you likes, +s, shares, retweets and so on. This increases the total size of the online community you can reach out to. This increases opportunities to connect with your audience and to create brand advocates.
• Online ads: The eyeballs and clicks that you get contribute respectively to awareness and to revenue, helping drive brand engagement – albeit at a cost.

So, there you have it. The key to content marketing is the ability to tell a great brand story, drive engagement and tie that engagement in with business outcomes. Looking for a digital marketing partner who is committed to driving desirable business outcomes? Drop us a line!

These are questions that are becoming increasingly important as businesses venture into the digital domain, seeking to join the online conversation. How do you emerge as an authority in a crowded public sphere? Three simple qualities are common to all successful authorizes. Let’s look at them one by one:-

1. Expertise: You can’t fake this. People have become accepted authorities do their homework. They study their chosen subject areas, burning the midnight oil getting the relevant skills and qualifications. You don’t need to be a PhD with decades of experience to become an authority. But, you need to focus your time and effort wisely so that you can reach a meaningful level of expertise in your chosen time frame. Once you’ve done that, make sure you keep updating your skills and knowledge. This is non-negotiable; authority has to be driven by substance.
2. Persistence: You want to become an authority so that the members of the vast online audience give you time and attention. Your goal is to convert this attention into business gains. However, to get there; you have to focus on the process and not the goal. The process of becoming an authority involves endless networking, creating a constant stream of valuable content and promoting your activities on an ongoing basis. This is also something that doesn’t have an end date attached; you have to keep at it. No one becomes an authority from a position of splendid isolation, at least not in the chatty, crowded social media world.
3. Consistency: An authority isn’t a flash in the pan. An authority isn’t a dabbler or a dilettante. Anyone can have a few good insights; create a few pieces of good content. If you aren’t still at it the next day, your audience – and your reputation – will dwindle away. Authority has to be driven by passion. The kind of passion that keeps you at it non-stop for years to come; staying on top of your game, networking like there’s no tomorrow and putting out great content for your audience to consume.

These qualities can help you move from being just another player in your space to a respected authority in the space of a year. A thorough content and online marketing strategy will provide you with the framework for that success. Looking for a partner to help create and power that strategy? The i-Vista Digital Marketing team is just a call away!