Even the best campaigns in social media fail to please everyone. And when dealing with a site like Facebook, some people take being a little dissatisfied extremely personally. It’s just the type of “me-me-me” culture we inhabit, and that’s usually a good thing when you’re harnessing this to promote your brand. When it comes back to bite you, though, you better be ready to handle it.

 Tips for Handling the Social Media Negativity

1. Build a Plan Preemptively

Now, understand here that there’s a difference between building a plan preemptively and a preemptive plan. Nothing is really going to preempt disaster outright. Just as a stronger home might stand up to an earthquake, a tornado is still going to rip the roof off. Disaster strikes, and you can’t safeguard against them all. However, you can take your cue from a prepper and be fully prepared to handle it when it does happen. So put a plan of action into place that you’re ready to use at the drop of a hat.

2. Act Quickly

This is where that planning really pays off. The goal here is to act as quickly as possible once you begin to receive negative comments, feedback, reviews, etc. you want to be able to get out in front of the issue(s) before things go viral and beat your brand name down into the dirt. By acting quickly, you can even help prevent some potential disasters; i.e. if a customer has a big complaint, responding quickly may help prevent future issues.

3. Scripts are for Actors

While some of the best support staffs out there do stick to a script when it comes to what the response will be for any listed issue, there is still a time where going off-script is important. You may encounter someone with a unique problem, or someone who doesn’t understand or appreciate the scripted responses. So try to keep things natural with your responses. Having scripted answers for the most common issues is okay, but be prepared to do some improvisation.

4. Be Patient with People

Regardless of what the issue is, you need to exercise some patience on your end. Negative criticism is often the result of people who tried to speak with you but couldn’t get their issue resolved. If you’re willing to put in the extra effort, you may be able to avoid some issues going forward.

5: Set Up Alerts

You need to know what people are saying about you, but you also need to know when they’re saying it. Facebook has a Hyper Alerts tool that will alert you every time someone makes a comment on your brand page. This will allow you view the negative situations immediately before deciding to take action.

6. Only Delete the Worst

Part of being a brand on a site like Facebook is actually taking things in stride. If you can’t handle some light criticism with a smile on your face, then you’re probably going to show off a totalitarian side, attempting to delete, block and ban everyone to say something you don’t agree with. Totalitarianism is a snowball-effect kind of thing. So unless it’s outright spam or obscene, leave the comments standing and respond politely.

7. Set Up a Specific Account

To handle negativity properly, you have to do your part to show that you’re really serious about taking care of the situation. This doesn’t apply to spammers and trolls and the otherwise disgruntled individuals out there who just wish to wreak havoc. But for everyone else, making up the majority of negative comments, you can show that you really care about their issue by having a separate, support-specific email for your brand. People will be more inclined to contact you with negative criticism rather than putting it out in public.

Negativity has a way of finding us all, and it’s really not something that you’re going to be able to avoid. The idea here is to put a plan in place, act quickly when it happens, and to attempt to limit the damage while satisfying the complainants. If you can do those things, then you can handle negativity in social media.

This article is written by Craig Robinson, an online writer for Qwaya, a Facebook ad campaign tool. He loves to write different topics about social media tips and strategies. Besides writing, he also enjoys engaging with different communities and social forums.

Now, this isn’t an article bagging out the fine, founding virtues of the company. On the contrary, it’s about the commercial reality all businesses face. The ability to remain in the game, at the top or anywhere above the profit line is tied to the free market policy – you can only do so much good, and that good has to be good for the business.

Google’s expansive Labs project, which launched Gmail, Goggles, Maps, Reader, Docs and hundreds of other free and loved tools was closed more than a year ago. Disappointingly, Reader joins the official RIP list of more than 100 tools, following recent spring and winter cleaning press releases from Google. They are clearly starting to focus on platforms that lead to revenue and profit.

(Above – live example of Audi advertising on BMW keyword – 15th April 2013 )
Their biggest earner, AdWords, recently announced a massive and somewhat surprising change to their best practice. They are allowing advertisers to buy keywords associated with trademarks of other businesses. This means, starting April 23, Sony could start AdWords campaigns on search terms like “Panasonic” or “LG”.  Sure it can be argued it protects the open market for small and medium businesses. But if you are ACME accounting (ACME being your registered trademark), I’m sure you won’t be happy when I search for your company name and one of your competitor’s lands on top of you in the search results. But that’s exactly what Google are advocating with this announcement:

“Our trademark policy is designed to provide greater choice to users via Google ads. This is similar to the way a shopper benefits when they see a variety of brands’ products on a store shelf.

Even if they are looking for a particular brand of running shoe, for example, seeing many different options enables them to compare features, prices, and more to buy the best running shoe for them.

The same idea applies on the web – people searching for one brand of product should be able to easily find information about products from similar brands to make informed decisions.”

While I can see this balances the playing field for companies and simplifies the worldwide trademark policy for Google, it means a massive rise in offensive and defensive advertising requirements for companies, at the same time probably not hurting AdWords’ profits.

Add to this Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which has changed so considerably in the past 18 months, the funding required for best practice and certainty in results, based on our clients’ spends, is tipping over to be more expensive than advertising. While Google have, in some ways, done the right thing with SEO, tailoring their algorithms to move away from low-cost offshore providers ramping up their search results with fake links and content, they have also aligned search to favour larger organisations, pushing power back towards advertisers including, of course, AdWords itself.

With organic and paid search being a priority for many companies and one of the largest companies on the planet now as focused as you on the bottom line, it is a real wake-up call for online marketing. My advice, after providing expert testimony in a recent online trademark dispute, is unless you’ve got deep pockets and enjoy litigation, start ramping up your digital sales channels to give your business a good spread across advertising platforms. This will not only serve as a great defensive strategy, if calibrated properly to ROI, you should also considerably grow your business.

What are people doing on Pinterest?

Users or “pinners” pin image-based content to their “pinboards”, with short descriptions. Each pinner can follow other like-minded people and groups based on the category of their interests. While sharing images, which carry hyperlinks to the originating site, pinners let other pinners know their choices or recommendations. Due to its image-sharing specialty, a pinner within minutes can critique hundreds of context stories and decide which they will repin on their pinboard or click through to visit the referring website, to tell or sell the initial inspiration.

What makes it a hot sell for social media marketers?

Launched only two years ago, Pinterest recently surpassed LinkedIn to become the third favourite social media channel, specialising in image sharing or “image-pinning”. It stands second, next to YouTube, when the average time spent ( nearly 16 minutes per day) by a user on the platform is taken into consideration. However, if the the amount of Pinterest images viewed vs YouTube videos watched is compared, an online marketer can comprehend the overwhelming content marketing potential of this channel.

Another inspiring fact about Pinterest is its users. Almost 70 per cent are women and nearly half of them have children, with nearly a quarter having a household income above $100K. Though Facebook is still the heavyweight in terms of users and traffic, Pinterest refers more traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. And shoppers referred to retail sites by interest spend more money than Facebook and Twitter combined.

Due to these interesting and promising facts, online marketing companies have also stepped up discussions about how pinteresting their clients or products are. And yet there are others who are deciding if it is just another round of pin the tail on the new social donkey. To help, here are some tips for a successful Pinterest marketing strategy:

Vie for top-pinned categories: Popular categories are the most pinned on the platform, therefore pinning your products here is the best route to success. Home, arts, crafts, style, fashion, food, inspiration, education, holidays, humour, products, travel and kids are the most popular categories, with food remaining one of the fastest-growing categories.

Genuine and interesting content:  Genuine content specifically tailored to the interest of your current or intended followers is most likely to bring you more loyal followers and potential customers. Contrary to what you might think, you don’t have to be original to the entire world; online platforms are showing us more and more, you only need to be interesting to your current followers to engage them.

Aspirational content: Pinners on Pinterest pin any image for its visual appeal and if it appeals to their interests. Pinning images that are interesting with sharp, shop-the-look or aspirational scenes will evoke pinners to click on the buy button and bring them to your site.

Track the conversions: Blindly investing resources in online marketing does not make sense. This is the golden rule of digital marketing and Pinterest cannot be an exception to it.  If you are investing resources in pinning images to Pinterest, then you should also have the outcome of the campaign tracked. You must monitor and review the conversions of your investment by tracking referrers, traffic and sales.

Have influencers work for you: Some years ago bloggers with a massive reader base were massive wins for digital marketing. Their word of mouth would do wonders for websites. Now their reign is being taken over by influential pinners on Pinterest. Sponsoring influential pinners for your product will help leapfrog your brand into converting Pinterest success. Where possible, run this in parallel with your own pinboards and content.

Last but not the least, like in any other social media strategy, make sure all the content you pin or have your sponsored leaders pin for you, is relevant to your business or the destination site. Pinning or sponsoring loads of glossy photos of earthquakes or politics will earn a negative reputation for your brand, if you sell gadgets.

Pinterest is presently the fastest-growing social media platform, promising huge ROI for the right product with the right marketing strategy. Every month its 27 million unique visitors scan through loads of images, coming up with tons of ideas for their wall. On a recent weekend outing to the local park with my recently-born twins I found out why. One of the mothers summed up Pinterest’s potential perfectly: “It’s like your own glossy magazine, made just for me, without all the articles.” Instantly, in my head, I saw the apple falling. What could be a greater source of inspiration for an advertiser than that?

References:

http://mashable.com/2012/02/01/pinterest-traffic-study/

In the last decade, I’m sure many of us have gone from quite pleasant downtime on weekends or long weekends, where we recharged the batteries from our business life, to a rapidly increasing reliance on staying connected and being on. I do this to stay on top of emails, research or flesh out ideas, pitches and props for the week ahead. We now have a pope that tweets, Bieber bashing on our social networks plus alerts, meetings, emails and calendar requests buzzing away in our pockets. Not to mention taking work home on our smart phones.

With the twins soon turning 2 (wow time flies), juggling work and thinking a lot about exercising, I’ve been well behind in my parenting and husbanding which is something I absolutely love and feel like I’m missing a bit.

So I’m going completely off grid for 2 days. And for someone who saw around 50,000 emails last year plus religiously checked social and RSS feeds, it’s a big deal… I’m having withdrawals thinking how I’m going to miss the result of my ebay sale not to mention the few hundred emails I’ll be behind on. But I figure God, or more likely the government, has given me a grace period, Easter Monday to catch up. So join me in connecting the old fashioned way (minus the round dial wall phone but possibly plus vinyl); plan the weekend in advance, call relatives, family and friends beforehand and kiss your smart phone, laptop, tablet, desktop, TV and any other data driven device #OFF.

Timing? I’m kicking off “last supper style” Thursday night and coming back online Sunday morning, when the Easter bunny shows up – which will be me soon enough! If you can hold out till Sunday night or even Monday then I have a 1 and Like ready for you (I can guarantee I won’t last past Sunday).

So from the AndMine team and the #Fam, Have a happy, relaxing, life filled long weekend – and if you’re joining me “Going Offline for Easter” let me know how it went (afterwards of course, not during… unless I bump into you)

- Michael (and hopefully many more of the team!) #OfflineForEaster

Why am I bringing up Google? It is essential to talk about a once-startup endeavour and search engine, to deliver home my arguments on using the recently unveiled, friend-based Facebook Graph Search. FGS is the newest search engine of our digital age and has the potential to modify the existing search fabric and online business.

Why do we need FGS when we have Google?

Google provides the same general information to every user for a specific query but FGS provides user-specific personal information to its users for that same search query. Simply put, Google search results for a given query are the same for all users, but FGS’s results for a given query will be different for every user depending on the level of personalisation by the user.

Given Facebook’s one billion plus users, the possibility of receiving answers to questions such as “What movies have my friends seen?” and “What music do my colleagues like” from Facebook is greater than that of Google. Given its huge base of user-personalised data, no existing search engine can deliver answers to such personal queries.

If Facebook correctly rolls out the FGS by equipping it with various search variants and enables it to intuitively learn from user behaviour – which I’m sure it will – it will be too irresistible not to try. After all, everyone loves to find out more about people in their lives.

Where does business fit in?

Like all social media channels, Facebook is all about people and relationships and, therefore, business. Companies spend billions of dollars in the search industry every year to rank higher on search engine page results. And FGS is the all-new social search engine, with attractive promises. It’s time you braced your business for the next big search engine opportunity: Social Search Optimisation.

How do you optimise a Facebook search?

Actual details of FGS are yet to come. But on the basis of the information Facebook has rolled out so far, here are five tips to enhance your business for Facebook’s search engine:

1. Get on Facebook to better understand how it works. Open a personal page and start building relationship with people you know and people you would like to share your interests with.

2. Be professional. Start a business page that reflects the philosophy of your business. Post inspiring stories that cater to the interest of your business and followers.

3. Be responsive to your page followers by keeping in mind they are your potential clients. Prompt and appropriate responses – even to negative criticism – is essential to maintain a thriving business page.

4. Stick to your brand. The Facebook business page is about socialising your brand. Well-written and brand-related stories can earn you loyal customers and increase brand loyalty in the long run. Don’t stray away from your brand.

5. Register for the Graph Search Beta to remain informed. Prepare beta digital and promotional strategies to benefit from the FSG when it starts materialising.

Like radio and television, social media is our generation’s online channel. It is the place where people talk, share and comment on things happening around them. Advertisements can yield investment returns only if the intended audience comes across them. Get serious about social media, take your business on Facebook and let it grow.

But together with this potential, exists the undercurrent of pseudo content that degrades the worth of online channels, imposing barriers for sustained success. Off shore reviews, timeline content or even worse, fake friends and followers are some examples.

Have you ever felt while reading an online review that it was staged? Or, did you ever feel that there is a sudden though odd increase in support for a product, service or campaign online? Sometimes it might even have made you wonder that a certain brand had a surprising number of followers. This case looks even more obvious when you find that the page for that particular product, service or campaign has insignificant number of comments while they have unbelievable number of likes or followers (A good rule of thumb is 0.5 – 1% of a real fan base comment or like a post).

This practise has been recently observed in Facebook and Twitter where we can see an incredible swell in the number of followers in an unbelievably short span of time. One example is when US presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s Twitter page collected over 100,000 followers on one single day last July.

The problem stems from a combination of variables. Support does assure an initial good impression – therefore, it is a lucrative business for off shore armies – designing packages like those that create millions of fake profiles, often copying part of legitimate profiles to aid credibility, offering 10,000 likes for $19.95! On top this, the significant influence of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) rankings and content creators provide equally large incentives.

Now the question is, is there any value in these low cost alternatives? The answer is yes, but with a considerable warning. If you are not incredibly savvy about the inherent value and potential dangers of illegitimate content or followers, it can have a long-termed detrimental effect on your business. You even need to be aware of the onshore providers outsourcing your work for incredible mark-ups. In the end, nothing beats well earned and real supporters, who will be engaged by your online strategy and become positive advocates of your brand reputation.

There are no short-cuts to your online brand management, social media popularity and content strategy, as such. But done right, you can create consistent new online channels to promote your brand. Here are our top five tips to achieve this goal:

(1)   Plan: Plan out the content strategy for your product and/or service at least 12 months in advance. Make sure that you stay true to your brand values and developing online character. Incorporate a good mixture of campaigns, general discussion, competitions, advertising and affiliate networks. It is always good to know where your visitors are so that you can customise your products/services to local regions.

(2)   Be your brand: Interested followers are the ones you have relationships with. If everyone else is talking about a particular current event, add a creative, on-brand slant on the topic, or simply post about something else. Think of your brand online as a person with a consistent character with a touch of liveliness. It can mature in time, but the personality shouldn’t jump around.

(3)   Listen to your audience: Not just online, but at restaurants, offices, shops, salons etc. Social media is all about transparent brand recognition so listen and respond to both the positive and negative opportunities. Don’t just monitor the social channels you have a content strategy for, search consistently or purchase a cost effective software tool to help monitor in near-to-real time, to hear discussions of your brand transversely, over all online platforms. Transparency is a possible key to success here.

(4)   Go the extra mile: More and more people are getting socially savvy. Stories that inspire often have similarities to old-world service. Go the extra mile and truly connect with your customers and clients. You will convert followers to advocates and constantly build a positive brand reputation.

(5)   Avoid Fakery. Buying fake followers or fake reviews will not benefit your brand for long term. People are becoming more and more aware of fake stories, reviews and profiles. It’s like the old buyer beware warning: If it is too good to be true, it often is. Be genuine. Then the clarity you provide to your audience and your analytics will be real, measurable as your channel grows bankable.

It is obvious that social platforms are worried about their revenue a lot more than mitigating grey and black hat content. However, we will also see platforms become more responsible and close the gap for our very human need for transparency. For example, Facebook is rolling out Graph Search, which will bring another level of clarity to ‘real’ endorsements.

I know it may be alluring to have hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans, twitter followers and farm out your business reviews so you can have a hot rating, for, say for your restaurant on Urban Spoon. But as people and platforms become more attuned to counterfeit content, steering clear of it in the pursuit of genuine strategy will at the end bring in sustained and long-term success for you.

Each collection is inspired by art and nature, and demonstrates the intuitive creativity that shapes their distinctive work in jewellery and homewares. With nature being core to their inspiration, Dinosaur Designs also takes responsibility for their environmental footprint and supports environmentally sustainable initiatives, such as Earth Hour and donating to the World Wildlife Fund.

Over the past 28 years Dinosaur Designs has forged an important place in Australian design history and continues to go from strength to strength. They collaborated with international designers such as Louis Vuitton and Paul Smith and had work exhibited at London’s Victoria and Albert museum. Pieces have featured in Carolina Herrera runway shows and have been worn by Kate Winslett, Rachel Weiss, Elle Macpherson, Hillary Swank, Chloe Sevigny, Anna Piaggi, and Alicia Keys.

Louise and Stephen are passionate about design and about providing design solutions which last a life time, ‘When you create a piece from scratch, you really bond with it, that’s why we design pieces to last a lifetime. We’re excited by the new possibilities and creative challenges that designing and hand making each new collection provides. We feel as passionate about Dinosaur Designs today as we did 28 years ago when we started and we’d like to continue for another 28 years.’ Louise Olsen, Designer, Creative Director and Co-founder.

Dinosaur Designs have stores in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and New York as well as an online store.

For more information visit www.dinosaurdesigns.com.au

Features :

• Kitchen, Bathroom and Shower Facilities
• Secure Entry with 24-hour Access
• Broadband Internet
• Digital Printing (Commercial Xerox Printer)
• Phone System and Telephone Lines Available (great call rates)
• Boardroom and Meeting Room Access
• Filtered Cold and Hot Water
• Weekly Cleaners and Car Spaces Available (additional fees apply)

Spaces Available :

• 1 Person Hot Desk: $100 Per Week
• 1-2 Person Office : $200 Per Week
• 2-3 Person Office : $300 Per Week

Inspections welcome during office hours :

Please contact Michael using our Contact Form