Today’s Category: Curation

What I Wish Clients Knew About Social Media

I oversee the Content and Social Media departments here at Overit. It’s a great gig and I’m lucky to have gotten it. I spend my days evangelizing the importance of integrating content and social into your marketing, breaking down how both can lead to better relationships and sales, and then, at the end of […]

Why It’s A Mistake for Brands to Ignore Tumblr

Pretend I’m someone who understands the basics of the Internet but has never used a social platform. Now let me ask you: What’s Facebook? What’s Twitter? What’s Instagram? Most answers, at least from the readers of this blog, would be similar. But I’ve got another question. What’s Tumblr? I would bet that at this […]

If Google+ Is Good, Why Does Google Force It On Us?

Google really, really wants us to like Google+. Google is embedding Google+ into each of its products, making it increasingly difficult to use its services without embracing the Google+ borg, whether you want to or not. Judging by Google+’s still stagnant market share, you generally do not want to use the social service, or […]

Coming to a Pinterest Near You

Pinterest is upgrading – and it could mean big things to come for social media sites. All the features haven’t rolled out yet, but they’re on their way. Here are some forthcoming changes to watch out for: Brand partnerships are coming to Pinterest. No more confusing paths or broken links to get more information. If […]

Tomorrow’s Fresh Pressed: Conversion

Many in-house marketers have told me how their company does not understand the importance of content marketing. They struggle,  argue and often get no support to complete tasks. So here are some suggestions that might help.

Educated Everyone, Not Just Decision Makers

For effective content marketing you will need a lot of data and a good amount of this data will come from other staff members. If you start educating everyone, not just your “bosses”, on “why” what you are doing is needed you will have people to back you up. You need a team behind you for decision making and team behind you to help you complete your future tasks.

This is also an opportunity to make others feel important (which moves me to my next point).

Everyone Has Something to Contribute

Everyone is important and has information you need to make your content marketing work.

Every member of a staff has data and information to contribute. It isn’t just sales people, marketers and managers that matter. Secretaries and assistants deal with clients more than anyone and often they get asked the most questions. These people can fill you in on what people are looking for, what questions they have, what irritates clients and they can provide you data on your target audiences. You need data from everyone.

Next, sit down with those that have always dealt with traditional forms of advertising and find out what works, what doesn’t and which audiences responded to which forms of marketing. Your next move…

Show The Advertising Team How to Integrate Online and Offline Marketing

Once you let the traditional advertising folks know that you know you have something to learn from them you can start bonding with them. Let them know you respect what they have done and you’re all are on the same side. Then you will have an opportunity to show them how to integrate online and offline marketing. You can show them how to integrate your website, social and Internet marketing strategies into commercials, magazines, advertisements, etc. These are staff members you need on your side.

Get Opinions, From Everyone

When you go up to a team/staff member and say, “What do you think about this?” you accomplish multiple things:

• You make them feel like their opinion matters – confidence booster (they like you for that).
• You get good feedback you might not have thought of – info is good!
• You have a new opportunity to educate a team member on why you are doing what you are doing – backup!
• You get ideas for additional marketing strategies – blog posts, infographics, tutorials, videos etc.

The truth is most of us are smart, but we can always learn from other views and opinions. We don’t know everything so we need to get the advice of others. If you want people to listen to you then you have to be open to listening to others and show appreciation for the advice you have received.

The Goal: To Create a Unified Team with Unified Goals

The bottom line is you need a supportive team that will work hard with you to meet your goals. The only way to grab as much support as possible is to be kind and educate. Don’t make people feel stupid, just find a way to get in there and help them understand what it is you do and what you plan on doing.

When you have the back up of several team members you have a better shot at convincing your manager or boss. When a team believes in something and has unified goals good work gets done. Everyone is going to have to work together to make things work. You can unify your team by educating everyone and the team can then work together on unified goals.

Have you ever stopped to think just how crazy the whole social era is? Today, seeing one of your friend’s or family member’s faces splashed all over the Internet is as commonplace as eating or drinking. Photos are a great way to showcase the here and now, but there’s one type of picture in particular that has me intrigued (to say the least) every time I see it: the oh-so-familiar “selfie.” It hasn’t lost momentum from its infantile MySpace days and shows no signs of slowing down. I’ve often thought about the social psychology of the “selfie” and found the behavior an interesting topic to ponder. After all, we’ve all at some point had a conversation questioning someone else’s motives for posting certain images.

Make Note of the Difference

What is a Selfie? I want to make sure were talking about the same “selfie.” There are a couple different types. The first are those avatar and profile images used for an online profile, then there are the photos that aren’t needed, but we take them anyway. I think it’s important to differentiate the two because I’m mainly referring to the latter. The latter is the one that people make fun of, the latter is the one that graces Instagram feeds, dating profiles and Tumblr dashboards.

This is a selfie:

Why All the Selfies?

Reasons vary as to why certain women pucker their best duck face or why men feel it’s a must to flex for the camera. Circumstances dictate the composition of each selfie, but those who take one with intent to share do it for one simple reason: the ego. We all, to some degree, care about our self-image, and we tend to rely on others’ perceptions and judgments to formulate our own online self.

My Take on Selfies

Social sites today give us the option to decide how we would like to mold our online selves. We choose who to follow, what to share, how often and on which platforms. There is no sure thing, no sure guide as to how to operate your online profile. It’s individuality. It’s expression. Some love to share themselves more than others. Just like our day-to-day decisions, we have the ability to choose our online personalities.

I think we often forget just how much control we actually have over the content we see and the content we put out there. (Of course, societal pressures and competition to impress others is a fundamental human element to the social media space. It’s probably why I find the topic so interesting to begin with. But I digress.) It’s on us to decide what parameters we set for ourselves. Which is why I say: selfie away. If you want to post a daily photo of yourself, go for it. If you want to post an hourly photo of yourself, it’s your call. Your online presence is your brand, are you happy with what you’re putting out into the world?

For the Selfie-haters

Not everyone has the patience to sift through selfies as they scroll through social media. Fortunately, in the age of the Internet, you control both what you put into the world and what you see from it.

Unbaby.me replaces baby pictures on Facebook and replaces them with photos of cats, bacon, beaches, or images from any RSS feed. I know that the babies aren’t taking selfies, but you can customize what words trigger the app. Try adding commonly used tags and words associated with selfies and soon you’ll see less headshots on your news feed.

Now that you’ve cleaned up Facebook, it’s time to hit up Tumblr. Thank you Tumblr Savior. Choose whatever tags you don’t want to see  on your dashboard and this app will hide them: #GPOY, #selfie, #tbt, #throwbackthursday, whatever you want. Instant selfie-blocker.

Final Thoughts

I’m torn, you know? I find some selfies incredibly annoying and seek out ways to block them, but on the same token, I understand why people want to show their friends what they’re up to. I accept that this is the era we live in. I guess I’m more interested in what others feel about the topic. Are selfies annoying to you? Do you unfollow people who post them at a machine gun pace? Do you ignore them? Or do you just accept that’s who she/he wants to portray?

The lesson used to be “don’t talk to strangers,” then the Internet happened and the lesson became “don’t talk to strangers online.” But as social networks evolve, teens are talking strangers and becoming more comfortable with sharing personal information.

A new study released by the Pew Research Center looked into teen social network use, particularly the amount of information they’re sharing and why they’re on various websites. In short: teens are sharing more online, but are becoming more careful with whom they share information with.

From 2006 to 2012, teens became more comfortable sharing five main pieces of information: photos of themselves, the schools they attend, the cities or towns of residence, their email addresses and their cell phone numbers. In the past six years, the percentage of teens who feel comfortable sharing their cell phone numbers online went from 2% to 20%. Gender doesn’t matter with revealing different types of content, but age does: older teens feel more comfortable sharing personal information online than younger ones.

One of the hot-button topics of Facebook is the privacy settings. Users want to know what Facebook is doing with information and how they can prevent others from viewing content. Facebook has created anti-bullying pages to teach about privacy settings and has tried to make them easier to understand. Well, teens don’t have a problem with that, they get privacy settings. 60% keep their content private or feel that they know how to manage privacy. Furthermore, another 60% of teens say they’re not too concerned about websites having third-party access or using their information for advertisements. That’s good news for Instagram.

Teens don’t like Facebook. They’re on it, but they’re not happy with it. Other than parents signing up and lowering the “cool factor,” teens don’t like inane status updates, drama, and the constant need to manage their reputation. They feel chained to Facebook because everyone is on it and they don’t want to miss out. Teens use Facebook because they feel pressured to stay in the loop, but they use Twitter and Instagram because they want to.

This is all well and good if you’re a high school guidance counselor, but what can marketers glean from this study?

Marketers should listen to teens. They are the pulse of our society, what they think is cool now eventually catches the attention of the rest of us. The tech bloggers of the world aren’t early adopters, the high schoolers are. They may not be able to afford a Google Glass prototype, but they know that an app that deletes pictures 10 seconds after opening is awesome.

Also, social media strategy – geared towards teens or otherwise – shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. A picture on Instagram shouldn’t automatically be shared with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest. People are on multiple social media accounts and will either get burned out by seeing brands over and over again or know that they’re getting second string content when they see hashtags on Facebook.

The survey disproves several misconceptions about teens on the Internet: they’re not Facebook obsessed and they know privacy settings. Maybe, they’re not as dumb as we think.

Today’s Category: Connections

Blogger Outreach: A Tactic to Keep Your Strategy Fresh

As outbound marketing tactics become obsolete, establishing relationships with bloggers who can promote your brand via word of mouth is becoming more important than ever. Now that modern consumers are wired to tune out traditional ads and have the self-empowerment to research brands on their own, marketers and PR professionals are scrambling to fill […]

How Should Publishers Respond to Link Removal Requests?

Thanks again to Panda, Penguin etc, it seems many webmasters are panicking about links they have obtained in the past, or have been pulled up by Google as a result of over-zealous link building. As a result, we are receiving many more link removal requests than we ever used to, ten or so in […]

Are People Stealing Your Content? How (and When) to Fight Back [SlideShare]

If you’re drinking the inbound marketing Kool-Aid and regularly publishing content online, there’s a good chance you may have experienced content theft at one point or another. Many of us are all too familiar with the feelings that follow the discovery of content thievery: your stomach drops, quickly followed by thoughts of “Why me?” […]

Guest Blogging is not Content Marketing

Like many of the digital folk reading this, I read a lot of blogs, books and pretty much anything that piques my interest. Hell, I’ve even been known to drop into the occasional Google+ Hangout. Doing the rounds, there is a common theme on approaches to content marketing. Though the wording changes from article […]

Tomorrow’s Fresh Pressed: Curation

Poor Yahoo, any move it makes is either harshly criticized or wildly unpopular. While certain corners of the Internet were still simmering over this weekend’s purchase of Tumblr, Yahoo went out and gave Flickr a makeover. The new and improved photo sharing site now has – you guessed it – tiles.

There’s no doubt that the interface is definitely an update. They’ve done away with most of the white space that made their site feel like a warehouse for stock photos. Flickr has also brought the user to the forefront, and every user can brand him or herself as a professional photographer.

Flickr is the quintessential example of a company playing catch-up. They recently updated their app into an Instagram copycat, where users could take pictures, add a filter and share them with friends. Flickr, the site that originally targeted photographers as a platform to display their art, has lowered its standards to appeal to the everyman.

Compare and contrast Flickr’s updated look (above) with Instagram’s look (below).

After Flickr modernized its app, it turned to its online presence. 2013 is the year of the tile, we’ve seen it in website updates on Pinterest, Instagram, and most recently Google+. Tiles have been used in curation sites like Feedly, Pulse, and Scoop.it and have become a popular layout on smartphones. It only made sense that Flickr would try to keep up with the cool kids and adopt a similar design.

So who is Flickr targeting? It seems to be stuck in the crossroads between appealing to the niche market of photographers versus the millions of smartphone users who love taking pictures of food almost as much as eating it. Does it want to become a home for photos so users can share their work on social networks like Pinterest, or does it want to be the social network people visit to comment on and favorite images?

On the one hand, the website is trying to court photographers again by giving each user a terabyte of space. This appeals to photographers who take large high resolution photos and need unlimited space to store them. On the other hand, Flickr is trying to promote the shareability and user interface with an Activity Feed that regularly updates friends’ photos. Pair that with the emphasis of their iPhone and android apps and it seems like Flickr really wants to come back and be the next Instagram.

Check out the side-by-side screenshots of Flickr’s iPhone app (left) and Instagram’s iPhone app (right).

Last week we poked fun at Myspace and their constant struggle to draw users –any users – to their revamped layout. Recently, the once popular Draw Something desperately tried to pull from Instagram’s fan base.  Now, Yahoo and Flickr are trying to catch up and become one of the top networks again. In the modern world, do fallen companies stand a chance at reclaiming their former glory at the top? Or are they doomed to fall into the shadows and disappear, unable to innovate with both the current giants and start-ups with the next big thing?

Here’s my next installment of the Let’s Talk About Type Series. Are you ready to have your mind blown? Excited to walk away with an arsenal of fancy type lingo to whip out at your next party to impress all your fancy pants art friends? Ok, maybe that scenario is only exciting to a type nerd like me, but hey it could happen.

To recap, last time we discussed Blackletter, today we’re going to talk about the umbrella term known as Serif.

Within the serif family are five categories: humanist, old style, transitional, modern, and slab. In this article, we will talk about the first two.

Lingo to Know

1. Crossbar — The horizontal stroke in letters.
2. X-height — The height of lowercase letters, based on height of lowercase x; does not include ascenders or descenders (will explain those further on)
3. Stroke (you remember this one!)

About Humanist

The grandparent of almost all popular serif faces today, humanist typefaces succeeded our Blackletter friends between 1460-1470 and were modeled after early Italian humanist writers. Most want to say that humanist and old face are one and the same, but they are more like siblings or first cousins. Most of the humanist typefaces are not seen widely today as they have fallen slightly out of favor, but their influence is far reaching and they deserve a lot of respect as they are the backbone for today’s more popular types.

Defining Characteristics

Centaur, Humanist Typeface

1. Sloping crossbar on the lowercase “e”
2. Small x-height
3. Low contrast between strokes
4. Dark “color” meaning you can see an overall value to the page. A good way to understand this concept is by squinting at a printed block of text. The value of gray is therefore its color. (Can you see the color of each typeface above in the example?)

Check out these other humanist typefaces, can you find the characteristics we talked about that make up this category?

Jenson, Kennerley, Centaur, Stempel Schneidler, Verona, Lutetia, Jersey, Lynton.

Moving On

Let’s dive into old face, which should get you a little more pumped as you may recognize more of these typefaces. Yes, they are older than your great grandpa, but they have stood the test of time and are well alive in world of typography.

Lingo to Know

Adobe Caslon Pro, Old Face

1. Serif — A stroke added as a stop to the beginning and end of the main strokes of a character. (You remember this from when we discussed blackletter, right? You got this!)
2. Ascender — An upward vertical stroke found on the part of lowercase letters that extends above the typeface’s x-height (remind yourself what this is above when we discussed humanist).
3. Stress/Axis — An imaginary line drawn from top to bottom of a letter bisecting the upper and lower strokes. The inclination of the axis of the lowercase o is usually used to measure the angle of stress, especially for typefaces that exhibit changes in the thickness of curved strokes.

About Old Face

As we mentioned, Humanist faces began from mimicking the handwriting of Italian scholars. Old style, though springing from the same well, marked a distinct departure from this more calligraphic style. This was an exciting time in the history of type! Typesetting (like that on a printing press) began making a stronger influence on the typefaces produced and widely used and seen by the public. This was also the time in history we saw the first Italic type (1501) which was not created to accompany the roman face as it is today, but conceived as a singular text face for smaller format books where space was limited and a more condensed type was needed.

Can you imagine reading a whole book set in Italic?

Defining Characteristics

Adobe Garamond, Old Face

1. Greater contrast between thick and thin strokes
2. The serifs on the ascenders are more wedge shaped
3. The stress of the letterforms are more perpendicular (upright) position
4. The adoption of a horizontal crossbar in the letter “e”
5. Greater refinement than humanist faces as the skills of type cutters was steadily improving. (Above, the left “c” is Adobe Caslon, Old face. Right “c” is Centaur, Humanist. The difference is substantial.)

Old Face Typefaces

Some of the oldest Old Face typefaces are Monotype Bembo (Italian ~1495 Francesco Griffo), Stempel Garamond (French ~1540 Claude Garamond), Monotype Ehrhdardt (Dutch ~1600), and Adobe Caslon (English ~1725 William Caslon).

Others include: Berling, Calisto, Goudy Old Style,Granjon, Janson, Palatino, Perpetua, Plantin, Sabon and Weiss, to name a few.

Next time we’ll continue our discussion of Serif by discussing Transistional, Modern, and Slab. Stay tuned!

The views & opinions expressed in any guest post featured on our site are those of the guest author and do not necessarily reflect the views & opinions of CopyPress.

Guest blogging is all the rage right now, and rightfully so. Offering content to another website is a great way to improve your SEO and your reputation while also helping out the site by offering quality content for nothing but a mere backlink. In a roundabout way, guest posting means that you are asking a website for a backlink to your website in exchange for something else. It isn’t easy, but it certainly sounds in reach, right? Small businesses have caught on quickly making guest blogging one of the most popular ways to earn backlinks.

However, small businesses can’t forget that there are other ways to earn backlinks. Aside from just guest blog links, you have what are called “editorial links.” Editorial links are links that you earn naturally, without asking, that generally come from very authoritative sites. These links aren’t easy to get, but usually provide the best reward.

Top 5 Tips to Earning Editorial Links

An important thing to remember is that an editorial link is not going to appear in an author bio box, but within the actual content. Google likes to see editorial links because they are harder to earn, and therefore hold more weight. A few ways to earn these types of links include:

1. Get the PR Department Involved.

The PR department’s job is to talk with editors of big publications and help a company gain that kind of visibility. Although they might not ask for backlinks, ask them what kind of content is newsworthy and what your best chances are of making a link happen on a given website. In some cases if the PR pro has an existing relationship, he/she can ask the editor directly.

2. Use Your Competition for Leads.

This works the same way when you’re looking for places to guest post. You want to look at your competition and see where they are earning guest posts, and then try and go after those same sites. With editorial links, try to use Bing or Google Webmaster Tools to see where your competition is earning these links, and then go to that site and become as active as you can (consider submitting a few guest posts first to get to the editor).

3. Reference Another Company.

Anytime you mention another company in one of your articles (so you’re giving them an advertorial link), make sure they know it. Mention them in all of your social shares and ask them to share your article—they will be more inclined to do so since they are mentioned. Once you’re on their radar, they will be more likely to not only read your stuff, but also return the favor.

4. Interview and Be Interviewed.

Make yourself available for interviews and you’re sure to gain some editorial links (not to mention interviews are some of the most shared content on the web). Interview others to help bring new eyes to your blog and get the content shared on that person’s blog. After all, the blog is going to want to highlight an interview with one of their own.

5. Get to Know Curators.

Content curation is when a site puts together a post of some of the best content for that week or that month, usually on a specific topic. If you can get one of your articles onto the curated post, it counts as an editorial link. Get to know the curators and always send him/her great posts that you think might work well. If nothing else, you’re on their radar.

Once you break into the world of editorial links and start to earn more and more, you will find that it will be easier than at the start. It’s also important to remember that editorial links need to be completely relevant and helpful to readers. Do not expect your PR professionals to ask for a link when it doesn’t make sense, and don’t add in editorial links to your own content for the benefit of anyone but your readers.

Do you have any tips when it comes to earning editorial links? Any experiences making it happen? Let us know your story and tell us what you think in the comments below!

Amanda DiSilvestro is a graduate of Illinois State University. Although she graduated with an English Education degree, she found herself working as a full-time blogger in the SEO/social media department at HigherVisibility, a leading SEO company.

Today’s Category: Content Creation

Does Your Infographic Tell a Story?

Make sure you do more than throw numbers at readers. I love infographics. And I love storytelling. But rarely do the two meet in any meaningful way. So I couldn’t resist the chance to share a new infographic from one of Socialmedia.biz’s clients, Charles Schwab. When Schwab hired us to create a series of […]

5 Tips for Using Hashtags to Promote Your Business

As more and more businesses establish their presence on social media, it becomes harder and harder to stand out from the crowd and make your message heard. One way to connect with users in your target audience is to use hashtags so that your posts and updates show up when users search for content […]

7 Secrets of Storytelling Success (from a Recovering Corporate Writer)

Stories are the currency of human relationships.” ~ Robert Mckee Storytelling is embedded in our DNA. Before human beings were putting their stories on cave walls, they were passing along survival strategies through stories. Fast forward to today and consider how much we are willing to pay and go out of our way just […]

Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar Revision Checklist

Grammar Denial. When you’re part of a writing community, such as EzineArticles.com, there comes a time when you’re asked to copy edit a friend or family member’s work. This recently was the case for me when I accepted a request to review a friend’s magazine. After an hour of review, I was surprised by […]

Tomorrow’s Fresh Pressed: Connections

Hi, my name is Amanda Dodge, and I am addicted to Tumblr. It’s my social network of choice whenever I have downtime and I’ve spent several hours – possibly days – of my life scrolling through endless memes, .gifs, and cat pictures. When I found out Yahoo had purchased the site for $1.1 billion this weekend, I responded like middle school girl rather than the objective content marketing blogger writing this today.

To all those who are unfamiliar with Tumblr, let me offer three things you need to know about its users if you’re trying to predict how they’re going to handle the change or if you’re thinking about marketing to them.

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Tumblr users are incredibly loyal.

One of the main rules of Tumblr is to always reblog the creator when he’s on your dash. Let me translate: whenever a picture of David Karp shows up in the newsfeed, users must share the photo to show their appreciation of him. This isn’t a mandated rule by Karp himself, it’s something that has grown organically over the years.

Tumblr users aren’t just loyal to the founder, they’re loyal to their followers and the website itself. Users who close their accounts usually create posts giving advance notice and explaining why the relationship isn’t working out. Tumblr is more than a social network, it’s a community, which means Yahoo would have to drastically change it to make people leave.

Tumblr users do not like change.

A few months ago, the designers changed the Tumblr background color from blue to… a slightly lighter blue. The entire community noticed and had to weigh in. Tumblr users make Facebook users look flexible. The community took the news about Yahoo’s acquisition with the same grace and poise expected when watching one’s house burn down. Creative minds immediately opened up Photoshop and started predicting the future of the dashboard in Yahoo’s merciless claws.

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It was this “sky is falling” mentality that led Karp to choose his words carefully in the blog post announcing the acquisition. Instead of predicting any great changes or benefits with the partnership, he explained how everything will stay the same:

Let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing.

Tumblr users do not like being marketed to.

The Tumblr community can tolerate marketing more than Reddit users, but only if the content is interesting and unique. The website has slowly been introducing ads with sponsors like The Great Gatsby and GE by creating awesome content and integrating it into the dashboard. More often than not, the only clue users have that there’s a company behind the post is the handle or description at the bottom.

Tumblr has one box on the side for a sponsored post, and even that is meant to show off cool pictures and .gifs. If Yahoo follows the suit of Facebook and starts increasing the sponsored-to-organic ratio or keeps adding more boxes to increase revenue then users will leave and find another outlet.

How can Yahoo appease Tumblr users with this acquisition? Keep their paws off. The less changes implemented the better. Historically with other social networks it didn’t matter if the users were happy, it only mattered if the investors and shareholders were. We can only watch to see if Tumblr will go down that path.