The Wax Blog

When you are using both social media and a blog for your business, many wonder how much overlap there should be between the two.

Your blog and your social media accounts both need to reflect your brand values.  But should it go further than that?

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I think most people that know me will tell you that my brain might not work the same way as yours. (Four concussions, anyone?) But I am really good at find content for client social media accounts in very little time.  So I thought I would share my non-scientific process for finding and selecting articles, blogs and other little bits for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, among others.

Keep in mind a lot of what I do is B2B so it’s sometimes not that easy to find good, current content. Here are a few ways to make the process faster and much less painful.  (more…)

It is always a bit of dilemma when a client asks that we promote all new blog articles via social media on a daily basis. It’s not that I’m against promoting in this manner, but I am always concerned about balance. I don’t want to get too far into social media strategy, but I would like to discuss how the use of social media affects your blog when you choose these different strategies. (more…)

You’re probably wondering what the heck poetry has to do with public relations and marketing . Aside from all the frustrated poets working in the advertising industry, and the occasional verse thrown into a print ad there really is no relevance here. But today, March 21 2011, is  World Poetry Day and it’s an opportunity to remember what we all seem to have forgotten:

SOCIAL MEDIA IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN

Mark Zuckerberg didn’t start Facebook so we could figure out how many impressions our posts were getting and how to use the latest application to make the best contest that would give us the greatest number of click throughs. I believe Facebook was started because it was supposed to be fun to connect with your friends online and to see what they’re up to on a daily basis. Twitter wasn’t developed so that you “build a platform for your book and get a book deal” Twitter, I again believe, was a way to connect very quickly with people all over the world.

Somehow, social media has become a chore, something we have to do if we want to stay connected, to find our customers where they’re hanging out online. Forget about that. I’ve been having a blast live tweeting American Idol with folks like @jenchicktastic and @pharmd84 for a couple years now. And I’ve tweeted with @janefonda and @mrskutcher a couple times too.  AND I’ve learned some pretty good lessons from using Twitter…that have also helped me connect with journalists, clients, bloggers and others that have helped move forward my business. But once I got too focused on how many followers I had, my twitter “influence” and all that…it became a bummer.

Let’s use World Poetry Day as a way to bring fun back into our social media lives. I dare you to write a twaiku (in case you’re wondering, that’s a haiku in 140 characters or less) and tweet it to me @waxgirl333. I’ll post those in my Friday blog post and give you a link back to your site. Just cuz. And the next time you get on your company Facebook page, or Twitter remember that you’re supposed to enjoy doing this…it’s a way to connect not just another time-draining activity.

Ok…are you ready for my Twaiku? Here it is.

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/waxgirl333/status/49867913150201856"]

By Alisa Gilbert

In today’s digital world, truth and rumors travel at lightning speed. People around the globe can potentially learn of some breaking news via social media networks much quicker than the traditional media outlets meant to deliver that same breaking news. This can be a great boon for business owners and entrepreneurs, especially if their product or services go viral; however, it can also lead to a ‘flash-in-the-pan’ effect that can spell disaster for certain companies that fail to manage their brand online, especially if the cause of that flash is not an exciting product-launch, but instead is a much-maligned advertisement or appalling man-made disaster.

Perhaps the greatest recent example of poor brand management during a flash-in-the-pan crisis is how BP reacted immediately following the Gulf of Mexico disaster. And by immediately, I mean sluggishly. As Jeff Rutherford and others in the blogosphere have pointed out, it took BP seven days to respond to the crisis on Twitter. In that time, an anonymous joker established a fake Twitter account in BP’s name. You simply have to compare the two Twitter pages to understand how greatly this affected BP’s brand. The fake account had double the followers as the legitimate BP account. Yikes!

What can you do to avoid losing the branding battle over social networks? Surely you’re not playing in such a high-stakes game as BP, but at the very least you can still put in place some strategies that BP should have done. Learn from their mistakes; don’t repeat them. Here’s how: (more…)