Archives for November 2010

Travel With Kidz gets the DMA treatment

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We are very proud to be working with the Travel With Kidz travel company.

Headquartered in Mosman Sydney, the group have branches all around Australia and focus family holidays.

As well as working with TWK to setup and execute a social media program we have also done a great blog customisation. It’s common when we speak to new clients that they have a web site but lack blogging capability, so it’s often one of the first things we do for a client, get a blog up and running along side their current web site.

This is very important as a blog is commonly the root of a social media strategy ensuring that tools like Twitter and Facebook have some where to link back to and that content is easily managed and regularly updated. {Read: the static web site is a dead web site}

There’s a knack to this as you ultimately want the end users to move between the blog and the main web site without really noticing, so we customise a wordpress install and make it look almost identical to the main web site.

Have a look at what we’ve done for TravelWithKidz.com.au.

[click on each image for full display]

Building the Social Media Buzz

Building off the content in the Blog, we customised a YouTube channel, and similarly branded their Twitter account. We took over an existing Facebook page that the Townsville office of TWK had built to 490 fans. We then ran a photo competition where people up-load a family holiday photo, and others vote on it by “liking” the photo. In just over a month, we have generated some significant activity and buzz, including:

  • Fans of the Facebook page jumped from 490 to 1,350 in three weeks
  • Average Page views have been over 3,50o per week !
  • General discussion about holidays, and direct bookings with Agents

The Social Media Strategy for TWK has been designed specifically for their target market, and is using a variety of channels to talk to their customers.

Contact The DMA to see how implementing a digital marketing strategy can grow your business.

How to Tag Your Friends on Facebook

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I remember a few years back when I was still getting my first hand lessons on speed typing how I fumbled at sending my first email because I couldn’t find the @ sign (and sometimes I still do). Now here we are in the 21st century where a new world of social media reigns and the @ sign (snail as some calls it) has become more popular and important than ever before. This may probably be the favorite character of heavy users of email and yes, not to forget, the twitter users. Well, birds and snails don’t come in good pairs but it was a perfect combination when 170 million Twitter users started using this symbol when referencing a certain username in their message, commonly known in the tweetsphere as a “mention”.

But you know what, love stories always come in triangles. And I guess Facebook is coming into the scene by starting to use the snail symbol in its own Facebook tagging feature.  The roll out of the @ feature (which has been available for a while) may not be as popular on status updates we see, but I believe it’s because the announcement of this feature was like a lost love letter that never reached the mass of Facebook users.

I’m sure there still remain a good number of the 500 million Facebook members who doesn’t use this feature. Not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t know about it. So I thought this would be a good idea to help people become aware of this option. And if you are into marketing, you can’t afford to forget using this feature to save you time. Instead of actually going to your friends walls and writing there one by one you can achieve it all through the @ tags. Through tagging, you can post those messages and updates all from your own message box. Does that sound so trivial? Well, actually it does, but if you’re chasing time, you’ll be glad you knew about it.  Also, for your business, it puts your brand on other people’s wall!

Some good things to remember when tagging:

For Twitter it’s a default that someone is connected to everyone as you can send out mentions to any twitter profile as long as you attach the @ sign, but for Facebook, it’s a different story. You can only tag your friends and the pages you “liked”. That is also under the premise that they have the wall posting by friends enabled. Obviously, it doesn’t appear on someone’s wall if they have disabled wall posting. It will, however, still appear on your friends’ feed.

Here’s a quick, 2-step guide to get you started on how to tag your friends, pages, events and groups on your Facebook updates.

1. Type the “@” sign on your message box. You will then see a message just below the box that prompts you to continue with the name of a friend, a page, group or event.

2.       Once you start typing, a dropdown list of your connections with the letters you typed will appear. Chose the profile to tag on your update by clicking on it.

And voila! You just successfully tagged that person, or page. To see the result, check on the wall of that person, group or page you just tagged!

If you want someone to take care of your online and offline marketing needs, contact us! We’d love to hear how we can offer our expertise in helping you maximize the different social media channels for your business.

Google Places: Have you claimed your business listing?

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There’s one thing about marketing your business on the Internet which is indisputable: The job is never done!

So you’ve got a website, you’ve added a blog to it, facebook – tick, twitter yup doing it in your spare time – all the bases covered right?

Here at The DMA we do all of this for a living and I can tell you, even when you live and breath it on a daily basis it’s hard to keep up.

New technology, new opportunities, older things that you didn’t really pay attention to but now they’re getting popular, there are just so many varied ways to market online it really is a full time job – and then some.

Just when you thought you had all of your bases covered here’s something else for you to be looking at.

Enter Google Places.

You’ve probably seen this relatively new tool. It’s the business listings that sometimes shows up as a result of a google search. Have a look at the screen shot below, this is the Google Page for Garfish Restaurant in Manly.

What you will find is that Google get basic information from a number of sources, but in this example the address is not entirely correct (granted you’d find it) but more disturbing is the opening hours are way off. Garfish doesn’t open until midday!

When you click on “Place page” you’re then taken to a full page of information about the particular business listing, it can include much more detail:-

  • accepted methods of payments
  • price point (in the case of a restaurant average price for mains)
  • opening times
  • coupons and special offers for visitors

Upon viewing the full page of information there was more work to be done.

There was a selection of photos but none of them very representative. Pulled from other web sites like truelocal.com.au, urbanspoon.com.au etc.. it certainly does not show the restaurant at it’s best.

The Menu link, clicks through to a 2 year old link on another restaurant web site – again not the best thing to be floating around on such a widely used tool as Google.

If you own a business that operates from a specific location, it’s very much worth your while updating and maintaining your page on Google Places. The process is a little detailed, you have to have a google account, then move through the Google verification process to demonstrate ownership of the business. Once all of this is in place you can start curating your own little space in Google.

Alternatively, talk to us here at The DMA, we’d love to hear from you and will certainly assist in getting your Google information update.

(As of writing this we are well on the way to updating the Garfish Page – one of our clients at The DMA)