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Change Your Profile to Highlight Your Facebook Page

25/05/2011 By Leave a Comment

Change Your Facebook Profile to Link to Your Business Page

As a small business owner you want to take advantage of every social media marketing opportunity that Facebook provides.   You can make a simple change in the opening information on your profile that will build a strong link between you and your business.

Follow the instructions set out in this Facebook for Business video). My apologies for the sound quality… My good mic wasn’t working properly.

Kudos to Facebook savant Mari Smith for pointing this out and posting instructions.

Filed Under: blog, small business, social media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Sketchnotes: Social Media Breakfast – Waterloo Region

02/05/2011 By Leave a Comment

I attended my second Social Media Breakfast a couple of weeks ago.  Our speaker was Josh Muirhead explored the power of story (something I have been talking a lot about in my recent presentations) in social media.

Here are my sketchnotes from the Breakfast.

Presentation Sketchnotes I

Presentation Sketchnotes II

By the way, I am going to do a longer piece on taking visual notes.   I have been working on doing more and more of that in the last 6 months and I am really impressed by how easy it is to recall the information and to find the most relevant points many months later.   I hope to post more of my sketch notes here on our site.

Filed Under: blog, small business, social media Tagged With: , , , ,

How Social Media Changed Small Business Marketing

03/02/2011 By Leave a Comment

I talked to a number of small businesses just last week who said that they just couldn’t be bothered to market using social media. One manager said that “Facebook just wasn’t important”. How do you feel after watching the statistics in this video?

What is your business going to do to market itself in 2011?

Filed Under: blog, community marketing, non-profit, private school marketing, small business, social media, summer camp Tagged With: , , ,

The Press Release – 5 Quick Tips

09/11/2010 By Leave a Comment

Letterset-type_stock_sm.jpgNo matter what your business, you can make great use of a media release (press release to the ink stained wretches). Although it’s a little old school in our social media age, media releases can be an effective tool to spread your message.

5 Tips about Media Releases for Your Small Business/Private School/Summer Camp/Non-Profit Organization

  1. Send to people you know. It always comes back to the primary Walking Maverick lesson – Build the Community. In this case: build relationships with important bloggers in your industry, get to know the media people that like to cover stories like yours, have a good email newsletter. People enjoy helping people they know.
  2. Be prepared. Don’t wait until the day before you launch your next big event/product/season to have your media release outline prepared in your computer. Take a look at How to Write a Press Release from WikiHow or sign up for a service ($) like PRWeb.
  3. Make it a habit. If you are prepared (see above) then it should only take you a few minutes to a half an hour to prepare a media release. Knowing that, you can send out a release fairly frequently (is every 2 weeks too much? Depends on your community). Building some traditional brand recognition involves getting your message in front of folks a few times before they start to pay attention. Be careful not to be a spammer.
  4. Blog/Tweet/Facebook it. You’ve already done the work… now get that message out far and wide.
  5. Include A LINK! IMHO, the most important of #4 is Blog it. Create a blog post that gives the details and some photos of the event/product/season. Make sure you have a link available (preferably a custom landing page created just for this event/product/season) in your media release. When I was receiving regular releases as part of my previous social media job it would drive me C_R_A_Z_Y when people would send me text but no links. I would write about their event/product/season and would try to send my readers to their website but they wouldn’t have taken the time to post the original information.

When are you using media releases in your organization?

Filed Under: blog, community marketing, non-profit, private school marketing, social media, summer camp Tagged With: , , , ,

5 Pro Tips for Social Media Marketing for Your Small Business

26/08/2010 By Leave a Comment
5 Pro Tips for Social Media Marketing Your Business

View more webinars from Travis Jon Allison.
My slides (with audio) from the first Summer of Social meeting in Woodstock, Ontario.
Facebook for Small Businesses
Tonight is the second of our free Summer of Social presentations at At The OFFICE (please bring a non-perishable food item – or three). My presentation will be on Facebook Marketing for Small Businesses.   
I’ll post it here when I’m done.
Please let us know if you will be attending – email me: travis [at] walkingmaverick.com
What are you doing in your small business to use inexpensive social media tools for marketing?
Filed Under: private school marketing, social media Tagged With: , , , ,

21st Century Students – New Brunswick

26/08/2010 By Leave a Comment

Private schools need to own one simple idea: Your biggest competition is not the private school that is most like you… it’s the free public school in the same neighbourhood as your potential clients.

The province of New Brunswick is stating publicly what they intend to do for their students in the next 10 years and what changes they need to make.

What are you saying to your families?

Filed Under: private school marketing, social media Tagged With: , , , , ,