Newsletter comments

Here are the blogs I commented on regarding newsletter ideas and outlines:

Socal Relocation Services

Brian's Villa Capri Pizza

Goalsphere

Newsletter Ideas: A (short) list

At VDS Solutions, most of our business is geared towards putting together a suite of hardware, software and software licenses to fit a specific business requirement.  This is most often geared towards data storage and backup suites and the management of server operations and network infrastructure and data flow management.  A few ideas for newsletter content, in no particular order:

• Highlight a recent data storage and backup solution provided to a local business
• Summarize the initial requirement submitted by the business
• Provide overview of internal reasoning behind hardware/software choices
• Emphasize benefits of delivered solution (% increase in performance/reliability)
• Ideally, close with customer testimonial
• Give an overview of two or three popular network management suites
• Hit major points in newsletter, linking back to larger article/blog post
• Quickly compare/contrast solutions, and evaluate benefits of each
• Again, quick blurbs from actual businesses using each product would be ideal
• Quick write-up on our internal HW/SW management suite (Microsoft's System Center)
• Methodologies behind patch management and software deployment
• Overview of Operations Manager, discussion of SNMP (features & security issues)
• 'Virtual app' feature of Configuration Manager - uses and pitfalls

Visual Platforms

Discuss!

Instagram appears to be oriented entirely around sharing photos, allowing for a short caption and user comments on each photo, and plug-ins to other popular social media platforms.  Tumblr looks to be super customizable and seems a lot less restrictive on the format and type of content posted, whether it be blog entries, photos, video… even literature and music.  Pinterest’s focus (at least for non-commercial entities) is pinning visual content, mostly from external websites, to virtual pinboards, which can be browsed and followed by other users.  Youtube… has videos.  Lots… of videos. 

What all these platforms have in common is a focus on the all-mighty Follow button: driving content to build an audience.

Tumblr definitely seem like it has the potential to be a good fit for creating and sharing bite-sized content of varying format for a service-oriented company.  While video content certainly has very high value, the business I’m using for the class is largely made-up, so I think attempting to produce believable Youtube videos that would be of any real value would be overly difficult.

Here are page post insights terms as defined by Facebook:

• Reach is simply the number of people who have seen a post on your page.
• Engaged Users are the number of people who clicked anywhere on your post.
• [People] Talking About This is defined as the number of people who have created a story from your Page post (Sharing, liking or commenting, answering a question, responding to an event, etc).
• Virality is the number of people who have created a story from your post as a percentage of the number of people who have seen it.

Businesses can use Facebook insights to identify content that effectively engages their customers, expending more effort on topics that their fans have interest in and reallocating resources away from content that isn’t as effective.  They will also benefit from analyzing how well their page posts are reaching their target market and how they can improve their content to reach the demographics they’re targeting.

Social media in business - a query...

Barnes & Noble

www.barnesandnoble.com

https://www.facebook.com/barnesandnoble

https://twitter.com/bnbuzz

Starbucks Corporation

http://www.starbucks.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Starbucks

https://twitter.com/starbucks

BevMo!

http://www.bevmo.com/

http://facebook.com/bevmo (Page may no longer exist)

https://twitter.com/bevmo

https://plus.google.com/+bevmo/posts

Rubio’s Restaurants, Inc.

http://www.rubios.com/

http://www.facebook.com/Rubios

http://twitter.com/RubiosTweets

CNET, CBS Interactive Inc.

http://www.cnet.com/

http://www.facebook.com/cnet

http://twitter.com/cnet

http://cnet.tumblr.com/

http://pinterest.com/cnet

A few years ago, several co-workers and I were tasked with putting together some quotes for a replacement backup hardware for one of our secondary networks.  Initially, we contacted reps from a few of the major vendors (HP, Dell, IBM) directly to put together the proposals, and things seemed to move along fairly well.  Shortly after we started the process however, Contracting caught wind of our efforts, and immediately jumped in to request the process be routed through them as an intermediary.  This generated a lot of extra work for us, since we had to rewrite our requirements so that Contracting could understand them, so that they could then write them into requests to send to their own vendor contacts.

Inevitably, our requirements were either misunderstood or misrepresented to the vendors, as several email chains made their way back to us requesting clarification.  This all had to be eventually cleared up with a telecom involving engineers from the various vendors speaking with us directly.

While I’m not sure traditional social media would have made things easier (short of knowing Facebook/Twitter IDs of Dell and HP employees), it seems to me the ease of communication and information exchange of social media would lend itself well to a more direct line of communication with customers.

While my knowledge of the social media landscape is limited, it seems to me like many businesses have really latched onto Twitter as a mainstay in communicating with their customers.  In some cases, technology-centric companies have shifted an enormous amount of their communication onto the service, often at the expense of other, traditional means ('ancient' formats like email newsletters and user forums).

I don't have first-hand experience with how well businesses fare on Facebook, but that always seemed like an odd fit to me.  I guess it depends on how open users are to broadcasting their purchasing habits and product-preferences to their friends and acquaintances.  On the other hand, I've had very positive conversations with co-workers and (especially) bosses in regards to LinkedIn, and the benefits of getting into circles of "who you know".   I wonder if this works better due to the focus on separating professional life, rather than attempting to blend users' personal and professional lives on the same platform.