10 commandments for moving social media mountains

Charlton Heston in the 1956 movie, The 10 Commandments.

Think you know how to conceive and create social media that gets attention? Creating two-way conversations is a given, but you're going nowhere if you don’t know these 10 social media commandments: 

1.      Thou shalt not neglect photos/graphics. On social channels be brief with your words. If you need to say a lot then use a space that is not on social media channels to say it. The only people who are willing to read more than 80-100 of what you say are your friends, not most customers.

2.      Thou shalt not unleash plagues of ideas. Ideally you should be making one point. If you must, make two points. More ideas confuse the reader.

3.      Thou shalt cast lines that reel in all who are curious. These headlines are designed to get people to click a link to go beyond the social page. Can it be annoying? Yes. Does it work? Undoubtedly.

4.      Thou shalt not be predictable. People get tired. Don’t make them tired more quickly. Curious copy interspersed with different kinds of writing for maximum impact goes the furthest.

5.      Thou shalt avoid disclaimers and disclosures. These are ugly and scorned by all of humanity. Find a way around presenting such copy on your social pages at all cost.

6.      Use photos whenever possible, except on Tumblr when you might choose to go with .gifs first. You don’t generally want to push people invest time in a movie.

7.      Thou shalt not cheat with thy neighbor’s information to create boring photos. Infographics are so 2012. The only place they still really work is on LinkedIn. Want me to prove it? Just see how often the biggest and best companies using social media (Oreo, Samsung, Red Bull, etc.) use infographics.   

8.      Thou shalt remember to execute as you wish, not as social companies want. For example, Facebook wants you to upload your videos directly through FB. Instead, you can use a bitly link pointing to a video on YouTube. You get people's attention using a flashy pic for lower investment buy-ins. There are other things you can do too. (Ask me in the comments below or in any of the LinkedIn groups this is published under. I’m happy to bounce ideas.)

9.      Thou shalt know your age. Trendy sites mainly aimed towards younger folks, like Reddit and Tumblr, see plentiful use of memes. This is where memes should remain for the most part. Occasional use of memes on other sites to remind users of our their youthful days is fine. Likewise, when on social channels for younger folks, trying to advertise or use approaches blatantly vetted by a legal team or PR group is going to explode in your face. Try advertising elsewhere and your paid posts will have a much easier time, although even many people are tired of sponsored posts (advertisements) that they see as SPAM.

10.   Thou shalt be a hep cat modern. Look for trending events and try to quickly create posts that play off of sentiment. You’ll be seen as more with the times, not creating posts that you feed into some sort of machine to be spit out at regular intervals.

BONUS COMMANDMENT! Look at what your competitors are doing with your target audience. Figure out why it works, not just how it works. Now use the why to find your own approach and do it better. 

How to shop for a social media marketing & PR agency

If you asked a store owner who has the best store, what do you think they’re going to say?

That’s right. “My store!” Even if their store has no goods, no customers and no working plumbing.

But while most people would understand that it would be absurd to rely on such a testimonial, this is exactly what many businesses looking for a digital marketing and PR service do. Confronted by many choices, they look up agencies or professionals and try to be a client. It's also what job seekers tend to do. They fall for the claims without thinking them over.

I know this because as soon as some businesses find out that I know about marketing communications and social media work they ask me if I can run a campaign for the them. All. The. Time. I actually have to turn away business that I'm not looking for because of the demand.

Businesses like this have remarkably a lot in common with beginning social media job seekers also, the subject of last week’s article (Reasons for NOT Starting a Social Media Career). This is good and bad. Mostly good for the agencies and mostly bad for clients and beginning job seekers.

Aside from how to negotiate with a social media agency or pro on a job, which requires it's own article, here’s what to keep in mind.

Look up companies on Glassdoor, Google Reviews, Facebook and LinkedIn

Do you really want to be served by or work for a company that has a lot of issues? Of course not.

One of the most powerful ways to find out if an agency is worth working with is running through a number of sites and seeing how it presents itself. Does the company have good Google reviews (search)? What kind of building is the agency housed in (Google street view)? How much does the agency update its own Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and do updates have substance (pride in presentation)?

But by far the most potentially useful thing you can do is to look up the agency on Glassdoor.

Glassdoor lets employees submit anonymous information about their employers. You can see reviews, salaries and interview experiences. Although the information can be skewed since it is self-reported, it can be very accurate and worth taking a look.

The data can give information about reliability of the company, treatment of clients, company morale, retention and much more. Next time you walk into an agency and see a sign that says it is one of the best places to work, but meanwhile you know morale is low, you’ll have a better idea of what kind of environment you’re dealing with.

Turmoil = trouble

With the proliferation of agencies and individuals saying that they are good to go into business with, you might well wonder if they are knowledgeable enough and can prove that they will take care of you, either as a client or as a job seeker.

The first thing to do is see who the agency’s clients are. Are they big clients commanding respect, or at least clients that carry weight in their industries? Or are the past clients not great? Did at any time the agency have a big client that left? What happened to the number of employees and morale? Does the agency focus on serving one client or many, so that your business as a client would be welcome?

Basically, how stable and consistent is this place in its policies, internally and externally? Hearing that a place has a start-up mentality five years after it launched is not a good sign. Look up the employees on LinkedIn and see what their past histories entails, especially if they have the position you're gunning for. Do the same on Facebook. It's not creepy, you're doing research about stuff which is right out in the open.

Do the math

When looking for information on what the agency did in the past, always steer towards hard numbers that show how the agency’s ideas had an impact on engagement rates. The amount spent on a campaign or how many industry awards were won has nothing to do with the bottom line: attracting consumers and getting them to stay.

There are plenty of Super Bowl ads that people remember fondly, yet how many actually got you to buy the product? If the goal was to get people to buy and they didn’t then engagement didn’t succeed. Always find out if your idea of success matches up with what the agency says it can do for you. Of course you’ll need to have enough data so that the agency can tell you if what you want is doable.

Of course, if you’re a job seeker and you see that the company has a lot of money to spend on campaigns, that might be a good thing – it will mean that you probably going to get a decent salary if you get in, and get to work with smart people and cool technology as well. But you have to ask yourself if all the money but lack of social engagement is worth the approach.

Always act in good faith

If you are willing to reach out to an agency or individual for help, the assumption is that you need help. The people who work at the agency can only help you so much as you are honest in admitting your company’s weaknesses. Although you might feel reluctant to do so in a casual meeting or first-time get together, not telling the truth in the beginning is absolutely guaranteed to get you labeled as a bad client and one who can’t be helped. 

The number of people who actually know how to do digital marketing and PR is surprisingly small, and you don’t want to get a reputation for being an unnecessarily demanding or otherwise delusional client. Marketing and PR professionals gossip just as much as many clients and take things personally, so keep in mind that your manners have just as much of an impact on how you might be treated as the issues that the people you're dealing with him. For example, seeing a client zoom into a handicapped parking spot whenever showing up at the office instead of a normal spot is obviously not going to win them friends. But even doubling back on promises and demanding changes in deadlines with zero input from the agency is likely to damage the relationship. We don't spit in your food, but we will take it personally.

Job seekers, when you want to work at an agency always make sure to do your side and tell the truth about what you can and can’t do. Even if you’re working for the hottest agency in the world, not being up front about your capabilities is going to cause problems. This is doubly so in a sweat shop type agency. You can always move on from an agency, but your reputation will follow you, especially in the online world.

Good luck!

How to use Prezi to blow away audiences

Are PowerPoint presentations not working for your audiences? There’s a solution in sight, and it’s called Prezi.

Prezi uses a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface to create beautiful zooming and rotating presentations. Here is a demo:

Prezi is special because it is cloud based. It can facilitate potentially dynamic and exciting offerings that leave positive vibes with audiences long after. Prezis can be shared via email, Facebook and Twitter. I can’t say enough about how cool Prezi is. Prezi is amazing!

Except when it’s not done right.

Prezi can definitely be done the wrong way, which is when things get ugly. Fast.

Today, I’m going to explain some simple pointers for using Prezi. Use these tips and you’ll find your presentations pop more. I assume from the outset that you have some design skill, and that you can do the following. If this is difficult, you’ll want to enlist a designer to help you out. You can definitely do even more with Prezi if you know Flash, but I want to keep this straight forward.

Let’s do this.

Find photos and video

The most important thing you can do to make your Prezi’s interesting is by introducing elements of surprise. This is accomplished by zooming in and out.

Look at your presentation topic. Is there a common theme? Are there visual elements? What ties the speech all together?

After you’ve brainstormed your speech elements, go to Google images. Make sure to only use photos that you have permission to use, or can use under fair use. If you are a student, almost any images you use for a class project will be considered fair use. If in doubt, use search.creativecommons.org to find content (you’ll still want to check that the content is indeed usable).

Use the most high-resolution .jpg files for your art. Change your search terms to “large” photos for these purposes. Once you find the photos you want, save them to a folder. Once you have all your photos gathered, “save as” them as .pdfs. Making the .jpgs into .pdfs ensures that they will not get pixelated when zooming in and out of them.


You can also use videos from YouTube in your Prezi. Be careful that you don't use clips that are so long or powerful that they take away attention from you and the rest of the Prezi.

Here are some photos I'll be using:

Make captions

You can use Prezi itself to insert text into your presentation, but for a custom look you will want to create your own captions offline.

Here’s how to do it. Open a graphic design program (I prefer InDesign) and set up a new document. Make sure to switch it from “print” to “web”. You can really set up whatever pixel dimensions you want. 1024x768 usually works well for me.

Create a text box that is centered and fill it with words for your presentation. Just use a standard font at this point. After you’ve made sure that everything is spelled correctly and makes sense, select all and use new font that looks good – Comic Sans and Papyrus are two fonts you should avoid like the plague.

Generally san-serif fonts are sleeker, look better for headlines and have a more modern vibe, while serif fonts are easier to read in larger chunks. Here’s what I mean:

When you have created your text, “save as” your work as a .pdf and put it in a folder where you can easily find it.

Here is another example:

Choose a master photo or graphic for your backdrop

Remember all those photos we set aside? Choose the one that best summarizes your topic or will be easiest to remember, and which has plenty of white spaces that you could potentially zoom in on.

Log in to Prezi and select “your Prezis”. Choose “new Prezi”. With few exceptions you will want to use the white/blank background. Delete all the default starter elements by zooming or out until your elements change from light grey to vibrant grey. Now you can click on the elements and delete them. Do so.

Use the “insert” selection on the top left side of your screen and choose “image”. Select the photo that you want to use from the folder on your computer. It will be uploaded to Prezi after a few moments. Move it into position and resize it so that it fills the screen appropriately. Right click on it and choose “send to back”. 

Here's the photo I'm using for this tutorial:

Don’t make your audience members nauseous, but do
surprise them

Besides using pixelated images, the single worst error I see often on Prezi is overdoing the rotating and zooming function. Yes, Prezi supports rotation and zooming, but that doesn’t mean you should do it!

That said, use the master photo you have placed as your point of entry. Zoom into different places on your master photo for places where you can add other pictures and captions. 

Here is another place where Prezi’s can confuse audiences. Choose logical patterns to place your materials. You’ve already piqued your audience’s interest with the introduction, now you need to inject some stability. There is a fine balance between a presentation that is staid and a presentation that is confusing to follow. You might want to choose some sort of grid pattern or use simple shapes to establish coherence.

This is what I mean:

Use your path and invisible frames wisely

Now that all your elements have been placed on your Prezi canvas, you need to chain them carefully.

Select “path” on the Prezi menu on the upper left hand corner of her screen. Click on your photos and text in the order that you want. As you do this, your elements will pop up on the left hand side of your screen in order from top to bottom. These are your “slides”.

Once you’ve ordered your slides and text, you might want to have points that you zoom in on. Choose “frame” and then choose a frame style. 

Personally I prefer invisible frames, because the other type of frames look very cookie-cutter.

Click where you want to set your frame and drag until it covers what you want. Go back to your “path” button on the Prezi menu. You’ll see all the path points jump up, with little “+” signs next to points. The pluses let you add path points. Click on a “+” and drag it to the frame you set up. Let go and it should turn into a new point.

If at any point you want to change your slides around, just click on them while the “path” menu is selected and move the slides up or down to reorder them. If you want to delete path points, hover over the slide with your arrow. A little red “x” should pop up. Just click on that if you want to get rid of it.