Tuesday, June 16, 2015

The Perfect Post

When your audience reads and listens to the content you produce, they’re not only hearing your message, they’re hearing the voice of your company—your tone, language and delivery (i.e., formal vs. conversational).

So each time they hear your brand voice, they subconsciously size you up, deciding whether you’re a company they can rely on, and more importantly, do business with. In this post, I provide the four things that make up a brand's voice and how you can achieve this within a post. Enjoy! 

UF/IFAS Voice - Friendly, relevant and educational

Character/Persona (Objective, Trustworthy, Caring)
·         Like This: Although the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred five years ago, the effects are still present. A community event will focus on utilizing our experience to better prepare Gulf coast communities for future disasters. Visit http://healthygulfcoast.org/ for more information.

·         Not This: Don’t miss the Gulf coast community event, unless, of course, you don’t love your community!

Tone (Personal, Honest, Humble)
·         Like This:  More than 750 UF College of Agricultural and Life Sciences bachelor’s degrees will be awarded this weekend! Are you going to receive one of them?

·         Not This: CALS students are graduating this weekend! Share this or miss out.

Language (Simple, Fun, Savvy)
·         Like This: Whoa! Several statewide meetings have been scheduled for Florida growers interested in planting new, promising citrus varieties.

·         Not This: There are lots of fab stuff scheduled for Florida citrus growers.

Purpose (Engage, Delight, Educate)
·         Like This: #‎DYK Fireweed is notorious for causing a burning sensation when it makes contact with bare skin? The good news: this weed can be controlled rather easily with the right herbicide.

·         Not This: Fire weed is bad. Send us a pic.


The most important takeaway is to establish an online company voice that reflects your business values and matches your customers’ expectations. This will help your business build overall trust. 

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

#UFBugs Campaign Re-Cap

We had an unbe-weevil-able (#punny) time celebrating all things that creep, crawl and fly! Now that we've finally wrapped up with Bug Week 2015, I put together a comprehensive report of our campaign results. To share some of the highlights, here's an executive summary and analysis: 

From 2014 –
·         194.43% increase in Impressions
·         85.45% increase in Unique Users
·         70% increase in Interactions
Twitter -
·         We shared more content and engaged in less conversation (follow up questions, etc.)
o   We garnered less link clicks. Reasons for this include: In 2014, we posted the Better Bed Bug Trap, which was retweeted by Science Friday with 580K followers; People will Retweet without clicking on links; UF/IFAS sent out content with less link variation (i.e., Bug of the Day and #BugWOTD linked to bugs.ufl.edu)

Facebook -
·         We sent 8 posts per day and gained MORE fans! This is significant because we see an increase in Page Unlikes when UF/IFAS sends 4+ posts a day. I'm most proud of the fact that we nearly doubled the number of individuals sharing/talking about our content!

Overall, the campaign ran very smoothly. We finally have a uniformed voice shining through - one that is friendly, relevant and educational. We created and shared lots of great photos - some of the best were of our UF/IFAS leadership with bugs and educational bug posters from the IFAS Extension Bookstore. We received more than 30 photo submissions on Facebook which we were then able to spotlight on Instagram. The best part was hearing feedback from our audience members (from California and Germany) who wanted to participate and learn because bugs were their passions!
To see our best posts, overall performance of #UFBugs campaign and reasons for bumps/spikes along the way, you can see the whole presentation here.


Thursday, May 28, 2015

My First Webinar!

Hi everyone,

It's been a while since I've posted! But I wanted to share my webinar on "Establishing a Consistent Social Media Presence."

It was for a UF/IFAS audience, so you'll hear me talk about our guidelines, policies and branding standards for a part of it. Once you get into the steps to creating a strategy, I promise there are some gems that you can walk away with (and examples)!

Feel free to email me or leave a comment below with any questions, comments or concerns after watching.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The Ethical Dilemmas of the Boston Bombings

Gone are the days of traditional mediums like radio, television, and newspapers relaying news of world events. At least, such is the case for Millennials who use Twitter and Facebook as their news outlets.

They use these platforms to make sense of their world -- getting quick, uncensored, up-to-the-minute updates as emergencies, such as the Boston Bombings, unfold. Social media is a great way to find out information from news organizations and citizen journalists alike, but at what point are uncensored images too graphic for public consumption?

I remember sitting in my office one afternoon when I saw my Twitter timeline go from generally happy conversations of daily activities and Taylor Swift dancing vines to "My prayers go out to Boston." Within an hour, my timeline had become inundated with information about the bombings, the suspects, and graphic photos with few warnings of explicit content.

I clicked through post after post to see if there was someone I recognized, and simultaneously prayed that I didn't. One photo in particular is ingrained to memory. One of a man being pushed in a wheelchair with one leg missing, and the other blown away with the remaining bone exposed. One that I won't post because it can't be unseen.

It's sad. It's gruesome. And it could have gone without posting.

It was one thing to read of screaming, crying, running footsteps, and first responders' vehicles arriving to the scene. Boston was in a state of emergency and the attack created utter chaos. But this photo in particular was not needed to illustrate the realities of the event. It takes storytelling to another level - it haunts me.

I had ethical issues with viewing this photo because traumatic imagery can cause viewers to experience distress, anxiety, and helplessness as I did. Especially for minors, or anyone with a personal connection to the victim or event - posting this photo involves injury by exposure. A photo like this is simply too grisly and too graphic for public consumption.

More importantly, I had ethical issues for the man in the image. His consent for the photo was not given, his face was not blacked out, and his privacy was blatantly obstructed. The image was shared beyond measure and any time that he searches his name thereafter, he will be reminded back to this horrific time and place. For him, this will never go away.

I understand images are essential to storytelling, but I refuse to believe that we have become numb to graphic, traumatic images such as these. I think emergencies such as the Boston Bombings could use more sensitivity. And I believe that news organizations and people should aim to be humane and decent when using social media, not always for shock value.

Leave me with your thoughts below!