social media - Think Like A Bride-Wedding Marketing Done Brilliantly

How Often Should You Blog?

April 2, 2012 By ndulj 1 Comment

I get asked this question all the time. Unfortunately there is no magic mathematical formula that I can give you.

The answer is different for everyone. It depends on who your audience is and what you are trying to accomplish.

Conventional wisdom and some of the most influential blogger will tell you that posting EVERY.SINGLE.DAY is a must. That isn’t true for everyone. If you are just posting mindless crap to keep to that kind of schedule, or worse, stealing others ideas and regurgitating them then daily posting may be causing you more harm than good.

Oh sure, if you are a news oriented site or a pro-blogger then yes, daily is what you have to do.

For most wedding professionals that are just blogging for branding and SEO, quality is better than quantity.

Suppose you have been posting random tips to try to keep up a daily schedule. Twitter or Facebook might be a better option. Cut back the words in the post to no more than a quick hit, add an image and schedule it for your social media.

I am not saying to forget your blog. Your blog posts have a different purpose.

On your blog you should be posting well thought out pieces that are better developed. These are the pieces that will be more evergreen. For example, I have some blog posts that are 4 years old that are still getting comments. These are the kind of articles that really help build your reputation.

When I started blogging it was about SEO and getting readers. Today it is also about ‘social proof’.

Wikipedia defines Social Proof this way:

Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others reflect correct behavior for a given situation. This effect is prominent in ambiguous social situations where people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior, and is driven by the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation.

On a blog, social proof is the number of likes, tweets, +1 and comments your post gets. Think about it this way, if you see a post has a bunch of re-tweets and comments, you are far more likely to read it. If other people are sharing it, it must be of value, right? If no one thought enough to share it, it must not be that great. Put another way, are you more likely to pick the restaurant with the line or the one across the street full of empty tables? These people must know something,right? We trust and value the opinion of others in our peer group.

If you are posting everyday with throw away tidbits, your posts don’t have time to accrue any real social proof.

Cut back your posting schedule and make your posts more relevant and content rich. Let’s take the idea a recent wedding done by a caterer. Instead of just throwing up a few pictures and some content along the lines of “We had great fun catering the Rick & Rachel’s wedding this weekend at {Venue}. Enjoy these pictures.”

Try something like this:

Describe the food and how it fit their vision.
What made these food choices unique
Showcase a special ingredient or preparation.
Why did you style the food displays the way you did and how can a bride DIY that decor

What about a planner? Instead of just showcasing the images from the wedding talk about a special challenge or use it to teach brides something.

As search continues to refine itself, you have to pay more attention to the quality and relevance of your content. Quite frankly, first-rate posts that are going to rank highly need more time and thought than a bunch of pictures and a few sentences.

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing, Social Media, wedding marketing Tagged With: blogging, bridal marketing, SEO, social media

What’s Up with Think’s Website?

February 27, 2012 By ndulj Leave a Comment

The short answer is that I’ve been playing!

The long answer is a bit more complicated. Have you ever heard the old saying “The cobbler’s children have no shoes?” What that means is that way too often, people are very good at what they do but they stay too busy to get around to doing whatever ‘it’ is for themselves. The classic example is that in all those year that I owned one of the top bakeries in the city, my kiddos usually got a cake from Baskin & Robbins for their birthday! I know, it’s pretty sad!

It’s the same thing now that I do marketing and design website. I can’t remember the last time I updated Think, a year and a half maybe. Sure, I did a tweak here and a tweak there, but nothing major or thought out. Besides, I really like the way my site looked.

Two things caused me to get in there over the weekend and start rooting around.

Call to action. I preach it all the time that all of your marketing material needs really clear calls to action. No,duh! You would think I would have had mine front and center. I imagine it was a bit of not seeing the forest for the trees. I had a session with one of my consulting clients last week and in the course of conversation it came up that they didn’t even know I designed web sites. Well Shit! How are going to sell something people don’t even know you do?

Mobile Responsive. The second thing that made me do it was the recent launch of some really sweet mobile responsive child themes for the Genesis framework. What is mobile responsive you ask? I am not just talking about having images that show up on iPhones and Androids. My new site will resize itself depending on what device you are viewing it on. No more scrolling from side to side. Really, try it out.

That is a really cool thing, but there is a learning curve and I wanted it on my site, not a clients. There are still things to tweak, like I have to find a new way to display my portfolio. That will come.

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on. I’ll continue to play, especially with the graphics. I’m not in love with those, but you see one of the things I love about the web is that it’s “liquid ink.” Don’t like something, you can change it on the fly. Keep watching as the new site and framework evolves.

Filed Under: Announcement, Marketing, Personal Coaching, Website marketing Tagged With: internet marketing, Marketing, mobile responsive websites, social media

Can You Stop Copyright Infringement

February 23, 2012 By ndulj 2 Comments

I am sure you know that I am part of an interesting discussion group, The Wedding Water Cooler. We have some pretty serious back and forths. interestingly enough, the same day I published my post on Pinterest, the group got into a fairly heavy discussion of copyright infringement.

Pinterest and copyright infringement is an issue that is all over the internet right now. This article on theverge.com explains it pretty well. Recently Pinterest has created a snippet of code to place on your site that will disable pinning. That won’t prevent people from downloading the image and uploading it anyway. In light of this from The Wall Street Journal, why would you want to?

It has also been a boon for some small businesses. “Our traffic converts to sales,” said Amy Squires, co-founder of The Wedding Chicks LLC, which posted about $540,000 in revenue last year, up from $340,000 in 2010. The four-year-old online retailer of wedding-party gifts, which joined Pinterest last summer, said

Pinterest now brings in more than double as many monthly visitors to its website than Facebook and Twitter.

Here is what I told the Water Cooler.

see disclaimer

I am speaking only of images here.

The more ways people spread images of your work the better it is for you in terms of marketing, branding and SEO. That is why I believe so strongly in Pinterest. I think you should have the Pin It button on your site and encourage your visitors to use it.

I can set a site to lock down images but a semi-savvy geek can still lift them fairly easily. Trust me, I do it all the time for bridal salons to show images of gowns they stock.

My advice, share your images and encourage people to share them for you BUT watermark anything that goes on the web. The way stock photography sites do it is great. (see above) They use a semi transparent all over mark that is unobtrusive to viewing the image but damn near impossible to Photoshop out.

One more thing to think about is how are your images being used. Is a bride grabbing your image for her pin board with a link back to your site to say she loves this bouquet or is another florist putting it on their site and saying they created it? Big difference. Either way, having that watermark will mean a lot.

The written word is another story.

You can embed it in a watermarked image but that does nothing for your SEO, maybe even hurts it. So you may try using it for your packages, but not for content you are writing for SEO like your blog post. My only answer is to write in your own distinctive voice and be vigilant in checking with utilities like Copyscape. Computerhope.com has some more great tools.

This is a conundrum that is going to continue for a long time to come.

Let’s add to the conversation the very nature of the internet and the effect it has on the generation that are our current brides and grooms (and most likely all the ones to come after them) The internet is inherently about sharing and connecting. Today’s generation of brides grew up with torrents and Pirate Bay. They view any content on the internet as fair game. Convincing them otherwise is going to be a bitch, to put it lightly.

disclaimer: The image above is a fully licensed image. I spoke with iStockPhoto to get permission to use one of their watermarked images in this article on the condition that I also purchased a licensed copy of the image. As you can see by the unwatermarked version in the thumbnail on the homepage, I did just that.

Filed Under: Ask Christine, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: bridal marketing, copyrights, Pinterest, social media, wedding marketing

Mastering a World in Flux

January 21, 2012 By ndulj 4 Comments

I caught this great quote in the editors column in the February issue of Fast Company magazine

“In our hyper-networked world, the rules and plans of yesterday are increasingly under pressure; the enterprises and individuals that will thrive will be those willing to adapt and iterate, in a disciplined, unsentimental way.”

This is more or less what I have been saying since 2008, much more eloquently stated. You have to keep your eyes open and be agile and unafraid; but that isn’t what this post is about.

This post is about this philosophy in action; a case study if you will. This is a post about my dear friend, Paul Pannone and how he is single-handedly and unflinchingly transforming a very stuffy, nearly dead industry.

The men’s formal wear industry had all but written its own obituary. Stuck firmly in the past; saddled with outdated looks and hopelessly chained to traditional marketing channels, it was sinking fast. They were living in a bubble. Paul, however saw the bigger picture:create product that followed fashion and market it in a way that would appeal to a younger demographic. To survive, the industry had to get with the program…This ain’t your Grandpa’s tux!

To accomplish anything he had to break down the walls of the stuffy, ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ men’s club that ran the industry. To do that he had to get noticed and show his chops. Chops in formal wear he had in spades having been in the industry for 28 years and publishing a successful industry newsletter, E-formal News. What he needed was to show his mastery of the new marketing. Enter eWedNews. Well, that worked for a while, but it still wasn’t quite it. It did open his eyes to what it was going to take to get this done. Throwing off the bonds of a traditional milquetoast editor he struck out on his own with eWedNewz. Look out world!

Paul understood that in today’s fast paced, information heavy, 24 hour news cycle world you needed a little sensationalism and controversy to shine through the haze. Love him or hate him, he got your attention. More importantly, he proved to the powers that be that he knew what the hell he was doing in the new social media world.

Enter the Weintraubs and FLOW Formal Wear. One of the largest manufacturers of men’s formal wear in the US, they had a lot to lose if the industry failed. Seeing that it was time to adapt to a changing market, they brought in Paul.

Finally in a position to influence change in an industry he had been in since 1984, he stepped up to the plate. Styles were updated, marketing changed and you started to see formal wear that didn’t look antiquated. That was the first step.

Time to raise the roof.

A big part of marketing today is celebrity endorsements. What you want is a celebrity that understands social media and eyeballs. Oddly, it’s less about how closely the celebrity personifies your brand as it is whether or not they are getting the eyeballs of your target market. So who does Paul pick? Not a dapper James Bond type, but the Situation from Jersey Shores, Mike Sorrentino. Again, love him or hate him, he loves clothes and gets a ton of media attention.

The traditionalists in the formal wear industry blew a gasket! To say they were appalled is an understatement.

This is what MyTuxedoCatelogBlog.com had to say:

When FLOW Formal Wear announced that Mike Sorrentino (aka “The Situation”) from reality TV series ‘The Jersey Shore’ was going to be the celebrity face for their new line of tuxedos, we were admittedly… concerned? Confused? We didn’t really get why anyone would choose for a tuxedo line spokesperson a guy best know for losing his shirt

Get over it, you wanted new, you got it. The Situation got his own branded line to stand alongside the lines of Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. You want to appeal to a younger demographic? Here you go.

Was it a risk? You bet it was. The top style in the line, the Avalon is just beginning to arrive in stores and according to Mr. Pannone, “Without going into numbers, let’s just say if this was a book, we blew away our first printing and are already on our third.” Here is how the industry reviewed the Avalon once they actually got their hands on it.

From the original quote,”adapt, iterate in a disciplined and unsentimental way”; I would say that pretty much sums it up. How one man, unafraid to take risks but with a vision of what can be is on his way to saving an industry.

So what are you doing to shake up your world?

Filed Under: Inspiration, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: advertising, Marketing, social media, Target Marketing, Trends

Groupon for Wedding Vendors? Not!

I am willing to wager that it wasn’t wedding vendors looking for a boost that sent that traffic through the roof. Now as far as I know, there are still more brides than wedding vendors. (Although some days I question that!) I will bet you money that it was brides looking for a deal. You should see the list of search terms used to find Think this year! Of the top 50, 10 were Groupon related.

wedding groupon
groupon wedding
groupon for weddings
groupon weddings
groupon wedding deal
wedding groupons
groupon wedding deals
wedding deals on groupon
groupon for wedding
wedding planner groupon

Right about now you may be thinking , “Hey, I could get a lot of traffic if I did a Groupon”. Well, yes, yes you could most likely use that to get a ton of traffic, but is it the traffic you want? You may want to read this first…

A photographer works for free for a year through Groupon

Sounds like fun to me.

Here is what brides have to say on Wedding Bee. You might want to notice the comment by the bride than got a deal on here engagement photos…not a word about her booking them for the wedding. Hmmmmm Also the one that bought cake pops, didn’t see her commit to a cake from that baker.

What does this mean to you? Front and center it means brides are looking for deals, but you already knew that. I think that you would be smart to find a way to offer some deals, just not through Groupon-type sites. Come up with your own deals and publicize it yourself with your social media. Put it out on Facebook and Twitter. Publicize it on the local wedding platforms you advertise on.

You might even consider doing it in a Groupon-type manner. Limit the number and require a tipping point. Have a deal on a regular basis, say weekly or monthly posted on your website to keep brides coming back to check.

I can’t even begin to tell you what kind of deal to offer. You will have to think long and hard about that one. Make sure that it gets them into your store or your website. Make sure you will at least make something off of it. Make sure that you don’t do something that will overwhelm you.

Just don’t do what the photographer above did. I want you around next year!

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing, Outrageous Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: advertising, bridal marketing, Groupon, internet marketing, social media

How to Handle a Bad Review

December 23, 2011 By ndulj 1 Comment

I don’t know if you have been following the recent string of articles over on eWedNewz concerning reviews on wedding websites. If not you can catch them here, here and here.

What started as a story regarding the sale by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia selling their interest in Wedding Wire grew to be an indictment of Wedding Wire and it’s review program. Whether you like Wedding Wire and it’s review program or not isn’t really important to my point. They are only one of many review programs out there and I happen to think Wedding Wire does a pretty reasonable job.

Here is the thing, you are not going to please everyone.

Yes that is what we all strive for, but it isn’t going to happen. So on that rare occasion when someone is upset enough to take finger to keyboard and put it out there, how you react is of vital importance.

The first thing you want to do is step away from the keyboard. DO NOT post a response in the heat of the moment. Your feelings are hurt and you are probably angry. Give it a day or two to filter.

Then post one or two reasonable sentences. Something along the line of

“I am sorry that we did not meet your expectations. We are actively reaching out to you via private channels to help resolve these differences.”

Of course you will need to reach out to them, but the point of the post was to let anyone reading the bad review know that you stand behind your work.

What you don’t want to do is post some long, rambling explanation or string of excuses. That is just going to start a very public pissing contest and that is the last thing you want.

Be sure to contact the hosting website to have the review verified or moderated. Sometimes this works. Sometimes.

What if you have no idea who this bride is?

Yep it happens. What if a competitor that is sneaky, malevolent and underhanded lies and posts a bad review on your page?

First you will contact the hosting website to have it verified. That can take forever and they may not even take your side. In the meantime, you need to respond to the review.

“I am not finding any reference to such an incident in my records. Would the poster please poivide her wedding date and location so that I may attempt to resolve this issue.”

Now you have publicly called them out and the ball is in their court. If they continue without providing the information they look like fools. You have also done a lot to CYA.

The main thing you want to keep in mind is that today’s bride is savvy enough not to base her opinion on just one bad review in a long list of stellar ones. In fact in some ways, it makes the other ones look more real. If every single review is Amazing!! Stellar!!! Way beyond expectations!!!!! they start to look a little fake. You know, like those late night infomercials.

Come on now, you do that yourself when you read reviews.

If worse comes to worse and you just can’t take it or find a way to resolve it; contact the website and have yourself removed entirely from the site.

Since this whole bruhaha started with a Celebrity planner’s bad review on Wedding Wire, I reached out to Sonny Ganguly, CMO at WW to be sure you could have your business removed. Here is his response:

In regards to your question, a wedding professional can inactivate their WeddingWire account by sending a request to our Support team at support@weddingwire.com. Our team will then inactivate the wedding pro’s account and remove personal information that they entered from the Storefront.

Ok, so that was kind of vague and didn’t really answer my question; so I followed up with this:

I need just one point of clarification please.

Our team will then inactivate the wedding pro’s account and remove personal information that they entered from the Storefront.

Would you remove ALL information regarding said wedding pro? All traces of them, including reviews or would you leave a basic listing?

I still haven’t received an answer to that one yet, but I will post it to the comments when/if I do.

If nothing else comes out of this dust up and the press from it, I do believe that WW will be more closely watched with regard to the review process. To quote one of their, umm, associates “That’s a good thing!”

As I was writing this I saw this come through my Twitter stream

@idillionaire: If you’re not making enemies, you’re not doing well enough.

Filed Under: Announcement, Social Media Tagged With: advertising, internet marketing, social media, website design

Twitter. How the Big Boys Roll

May 4, 2011 By ndulj Leave a Comment

…and I bet you are doing it better than some.

I ran across this article that shows the results of an experiment digital agency IQ ran to see just how Fortune 500 companies were doing at social media. With the exception of a few, most of them sucked. Check this quote:

The results? HP, UPS, Wells Fargo and GM stood out as top-performing brands, according to five best practices that IQ gleaned from the study: clearly labeling the purpose of a Twitter account; clearly identifying who is replying to a question; keeping the tone light and friendly; making sure you respond; and responding quickly.

Of the 50 companies, IQ did not send tweets to 16 because the agency couldn’t find a Twitter account, couldn’t find an account that seemed credible, or the Twitter accounts it did find were too specific in their topics.

Of the remaining 34 companies, 23 responded to McFather’s tweets. Among the 11 that didn’t: Boeing, Exxon Mobile, Home Depot, Walgreens and Wal-Mart. The fastest to reply were GM, UPS and Best Buy — getting back in 2,3 and 4 minutes, respectively. (Best Buy has previously gained recognition for its Twelpforce customer service page on Twitter.) These companies also quickly redirected messages sent to the incorrect accounts for customer service.

For companies that spend more on marketing than you or I could ever fathom, that says something. What that something is I’m not quite sure.

Are they afraid to take risks?
Do they just not get it?
Are they still trying to turn the battleship of their giant company?
Like so many, are they deluded into thinking that things will go back to the way they were 10 years ago?

I follow the Twitter feeds of many of you and I see how in touch you are. I also see far too many client come to me with no plan or in some cases even a glimmer of understanding of the what, why and how of Twitter.

Everyday, social media like Twitter becomes standard operating practice as a way for people to find the information that they need. The simple fact that Twitter is searchable is reson enough that you can not ignore it.

You can read the full article here at Media Post Publications or download the white paper with the full results from IQ’s website. It’s a short paper; be sure to check out page 2 for some great examples.

Filed Under: Social Media, wedding marketing, What's Hot Tagged With: bridal marketing, search optimization, social media