Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Supercharging social media with storytelling techniques: #10 Romance!

Romance, how the hell am I going to involve romance in a technique for social media?

Can you guess?

Romance can be used in a social media context. Romance is often either the main plot or a subplot in most popular movies, TV shows and books. Isn't it time social media postings included a little romance too?

We can use a little romance, a little bit of emotional openness, to engage blog readers and post readers. Here's a few examples:

1. Offer a 2 for 1 price on dinners at your restaurant, on the day you met your wife.

2. Similarly, you can offer romantic weekends, 2 for 1 gym memberships, his and hers perfume deals/jewelry deals or chocolates with books and flowers or whatever fits in with what you are involved in, on a special day for you, or a member of staff or whenever suits you.

3. Respect the power of love with links to romantic poetry, books or movies, at special times for you or others.

4. Celebrate family and/or couples with images pages on Pinterest or Flickr for anniversaries, special occasions etc. You can make these open only to people you know, if you are worried about privacy.

5. If you are a big stuffy corporate you can post images from any family day or barbecue event or wedding event you are involved with. Start by posting these on an internal private blog or Twitter account, as part of your internal social media program, and occasionally you might let the public see what is going on, if participants agree to the images going out.

Use a little of the magic of romance to spice up your posts occasionally and watch people come back for more.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Auto posting - chocolate cake on special today!

Your cake is here:

Chocolate cake and auto posting

Facebook has, at last, introduced a feature called scheduled posts, for Pages only. This will allow people to decide when their posts will appear on their Page timeline. Watch for the clock symbol on the post and click year, then month, then day and time. You will be able to post up to six months ahead.

This has a number of practical benefits. For people like me who get up at 5AM and create posts early it will mean a post can be delayed until a more suitable time, or even for when I'm away trying to make some real money.

Such practical benefits will lead to fundamental changes on Facebook and also, eventually, on Twitter, blogs and every other social site. The idea that you have to hit the "post" button yourself will go out of fashion. The era of the auto post has arrived.

Sure, third party auto posting services have been available for years. I use Buffer to schedule Tweets during the day. But when Facebook and Twitter finally get around to allowing posts to be scheduled tens of millions will use their service. Setting up a stream of auto posts will allow people to Tweet and post more often too. And it will force people to think about what they're posting.

And it will lead to auto posts from devices, such as fridges.

And soon the parking meter will Tweet that it's free, if you've signed up for the coffee shop's posts.

And then your Ford will auto-post where you've parked to your friends on Google+, while you're on your way to the coffee shop.

And all that because the coffee shop fridge auto-Tweeted a special 70% off deal on chocolate cake an hour before closing. 70% off!

The temptation will be hard to resist, won't it? Would you like a bite? It's soft and crunchy all at the same time.


Chocolate cake and auto posting


Your imagination is the only thing that will stop you enjoying it.

Who said they don't like auto posting?