Research in the US undertaken by LinkedIn in 2012 identified that investors  research information about their financial decisions on LinkedIn.

I recently had the opportunity to deliver a workshop for women who are in the Pensions industry about how to use LinkedIn to develop productive and profitable relationships and you can find a summary of the areas I covered below. The workshop was focused on individuals using LinkedIn and therefore we did not go into details of using LinkedIn Company Pages.

1. Define your PURPOSE for using LinkedIn – As with all networks you join, identify your goals and objectives so that you can manage and prioritise how you will engage on LinkedIn and who you will look to connect with.

Your reputation and personal brand is impacted by your online presence. Increasingly people search for us as individuals not just the organisation we work for. LinkedIn is a great platform to use if you have a limited online profile as you can customise what information from your profile is accessible in search results.

If you are in career transition, LinkedIn is a great platform to keep up to speed with news about organisations and the their current vacancies by following Company Pages and participating in Groups.

2. Refer to your company social media and compliance POLICIES – It is especially important if you are in the financial services sector that to ensure that you comply with industry regulations and your company social media policy.

3. Review Your LinkedIn PRIVACY Settings – As with any other social network you join , take the time to review and refine your privacy settings to help you manage the security and online visibility of your data

4.Create a compelling LinkedIn PROFILE – Refine your profile ensuring that you use a professional image not a logo; add the key words that you want to be found for and enhance your profile adding multimedia.

In addition, you can edit your profile URL so that you have a shorter link to promote your profile. You can also add a link to a relevant page on your company website including a call to action to help you attract more traffic to your website.

Enhance your profile with multimedia, for example YouTube videos and SlideShare presentations or documents to your profile – consider  how you could use this functionality to attract new business.

5. Take the time to actively PARTICIPATE in LinkedIn – Invite people to join you on LinkedIn using personalised invitations. Keep connected  and share relevant updates. Identify LinkedIn Groups to join to support your professional goals.

Build your visibility using Groups  and when you join a Group, take the time to review the guidelines posted by the moderator before you start to post updates. You can reply publically or privately to discussion topics. And of course you can consider creating your own Group.

6. Integrate and PROMOTE your profile – Dependent on your company policy, cross promote your LinkedIn profile on your business cards, email footer, your website and social networks.

i also recommended that the delegates in the workshop consider claiming their place in cyberspace – you may want to invest in purchasing your own domain name that you can use throughout your professional life. If you are not ready to develop a personal website you could point your personal domain name to your LinkedIn profile or to a social hub such as About.me.

I hope you found these tips of assistance and of course you can contact me if you have questions about how to make the most of your LinkedIn presence of to learn about the in-house LinkedIn workshops I customise for professional services and financial services clients.

What have you found helps you nurture business relationships on LinkedIn?

You can find the slides from my presentation here.

6 Steps To Using LinkedIn To Develop Productive And Profitable Business Relationships is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

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Dan recently participated in a Google Plus Hangout with PinLeague and this is a recap of some of his ideas and perspectives about Pinterest as a super user with over 1.5 million followers. Yes I know you usually expect me to share tips about content marketing and social media for business, but I think you will find the ideas Dan shares provides an interesting insight into what a Pinterest super user thinks.

Dan started to see his Pinterest boards grow at a fast rate in 2012, building from a few thousand followers to over a million followers.

He commented that he initially started sharing his own photography which he cross posted from Flickr, but he soon realised his photographs were not repinned, commented on or liked, so he started to share other peoples content.

Dan stated that he avidly tracked the performance of his pins making a spread sheet to monitor which pins were getting the biggest response – of course we can now avail of Pinterest analytics if we have a business account directly from Pinterest and there are other independent Pinterest tools available such as the hosts of the Pinterest Google Plus Hangout PinLeague.

Dan’s biggest board in terms of numbers of followers is his gardening board (examples of the content are in the image on this page) which currently has over 1.46 million followers. Dan carefully manages his account and regularly ‘prunes’ his pins. He explained that he if his content does not get around 150 – 200 re-pins in the first 24 hours he will analyse if that is because his content did not hit the Pinterest feed at the right time. In some cases he re-pins his own content to give the pin another chance of being seen by his followers. However if his content is not responded to well, he will delete a pin.

He also made reference to the fact that he attracts about 1000 – 1500 new followers a day.

His success on Pinterest has attracted attention from some brands who have approached him to try new products and services – consider it ‘Pinterest Outreach’ just as you would refer to Blogger Outreach’ and influence marketing programmes.

Dan summarised his view of Pinterest as being like a magazine and had a healthy warning for brands as he does not want the site to be turned into a catalogue with just product shots. I am noticing some brands treating Instagram in the same way where all they post are products for sale, rather than being imaginative with their visual content marketing.

When asked how to grow your following on Pinterest, Dan commented – “Be objective, we all have our favourite things. If you want to be unique you need to have a niche”. He commented that we need to share content that is different and not  what many people share.

Three Tips For Pinterest Business Accounts From A Super User

Dan is retired and therefore his personal use of Pinterest is not going to reflect how you would use the platform for your business, but here are three points worth considering that can apply if you are looking for advice on how to use Pinterest for business:

1. Do not just pin content that you think people will like – analyse what content is doing well and be prepared to ‘prune’ your boards and pin great images

2. Review the times that you post your pins – examine if your content reaching your followers when they are online, just as you plan your content on Facebook and Twitter to ensure you attract the maximum reach

3. Remember that people on Pinterest are not looking for a replication of your website or a catalogue of your products – develop a content plan for Pinterest but stay true to your brand and ensure that the Pinterest boards you create reflect what your business stands for. Some of the most progressive businesses on Pinterest seeing results from investing in the platform have a content policy where they also curate other peoples content.

Additional Resources To Help You With Your Pinterest Marketing

Access my the slides and notes from my recent webinar about how to get started using Pinterest for business plus access to additional resources.

Follow my Pinterest for business marketing tips board that I curate on Pinterest.

Check out my curated board of organisations on Pinterest to inspire you in how your business could use Pinterest in your content marketing plan or contact me about the content marketing training programmes I deliver – most of my open workshops include best practice guidance for using Pinterest.

Discover how to create eye catching content for your Pinterest boards in this training programme.

What have you found is working for you when looking to use Pinterest for your business?

How To Use Pinterest For Business – Three Tips From A Pinterest Super User is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

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In 2011, the first organised celebration of ‘Star Wars Day’ took place in Toronto, Ontario and this year Disney’s Hollywood Studios planned to celebrate the day with events.

We also saw a number of brands participate through their visual marketing and these included:

- Harrods who did a clever photo editing job with the shadow of their concierge sharing it on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

- Oreo shared a picture of blue milk and a cookie on Twitter

- Paypal created an image with a light saber which they shared on Twitter and Instagram

- and Urban Outfitters shared an image of Star Wars nail art on Instagram and posted a Vine video of a hairstyle like Princes Leia.

You will find more posts under the Twitter hash tag #MayThe4thBeWithYou.

USA Today took a different approach and invited people to send a Vine Video with their best Chewbacca impression tagging them #ChewieVine which they curated at Rebel Mouse.

As you consider the your content marketing plan have you considered adding in celebrating and recognising dates in the calendar not just related to traditional public holidays?

What other brands did you see participate in Star Wars Day this year?

Five brands embracing Star Wars Day #MayThe4thBeWithYou is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

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But perhaps you have wondered how you could turn the images you create into a PDF that you could then print and use in your meetings perhaps with your team or with clients?

This is where the content curation platform Clipzine.me just might prove efficient for you. I recently tested the platform to turn a Pinterest board I had curated after an event into a PDF and JPEG presentation and below you will find a summary of how to use it in conjunction with your content marketing.

Turning Your Pinterest Boards Into A PDF Or JPEG Image

1.  Create your free account at Clipzine.me

2. Add the Clipzine.me bookmarklet to your browser tool bar

3. Open the Pinterest  board you want to curate as a PDF or JPEG

4. Click the Clipzine.me bookmarklet tool and you will then have the opportunity  to select multiple pins from your Pinterest board

5. You can reorganise the content of your curated pages including identifying which page is to be the cover of your PDF or JPEG

6. Edit and style the content including setting the style of your fonts

7. You can then download the Clipzine you have curated from your Pinterest board images as a JPEG or PDF file – the PDF will have a live link back to your Pinterest board

8. The option is then available to embed your Clipzine on your website or blog, pin it to Pinterest or share it on Facebook.

Additional Clipzine Features In Development

The site indicates that the following features will be available (you get a unique URL for your Clipzine so can cross post to social networks in the meantime):

- Sharing to Delicious, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Twitter (plus other social bookmarking sites)

- Sharing the content to Blogger, Tumblr and Typepad (plus other sites) – cross posting to WordPress.com is already available

- Publishing to SlideShare, DocStoc and Issuu – posting to Scribd is already available

- Sharing the image to Instagram and Flickr plus other photo sharing sites.

Enhancements I Would Like To See From The Clipzine.me Platform

As a free service if you want to curate your Pinterest board the service is helpful. Here are some changes I would like to see to enhance the service:

- I personally dislike having no option other than to register for an account on a technology platform other than with a Facebook account which is how Clipzine is currently set up. Registration using an email and password address would be welcomed.

- Once you have logged into the platform there is no way to disconnect your Facebook account – I’d like to see this feature added.

- At the time I registered and tested the platform, the help desk was not working so I could not contact the site owners about questions I had about the platform.

- There are some elements of personal data (such as location and date of birth) that are required when registering for your account which I think are unnecessary – if these do need these to be provided I would like to see a notification that these are not going to be made public .

- You can curate content from several boards or event other peoples Pinterest accounts into a Clipzine. However if you want to add separate pins or content rather than curating from one Pinterest board, the styling of the Clipzine means that there are large spaces for text which do not seem to be able to be reduced – it would be good to have the same styling available as you have from a curated board.

Overall for a free platform, Clipzine.me will be a platform that I am sure a number of Pinterest users will appreciate. There are many curation tools available which offer similar functionality but the promise of the future functionality for me identifies it as a platform to watch in the future.

Bonus Tip For Creating A Quick PDF Of Your Pinterest Boards

If you do not want to create a Clipzine of your content and just want a simple PDF of your boards for reference (note I do not consider this the best way of ‘backing up’ your account and recommend specific services for that) then follow these tips:

- Navigate to the board that you want to print as a PDF

- Either click ‘File Print’ in your browser tool bar or click ‘Control P’ on your PC which provides you with the option to print – set your printer to save the document as a PDF rather than sending it to your printer

- Save the PDF to your hard drive.

Do you ever turn your Pinterest boards into JPEG’s or PDF’s so you can refer to them when not online? What other approaches do you use to do so?

If you would like to see the visual content that I am bookmarking over on Pinterest you can follow me there.

How to turn your Pinterest boards into a PDF or JPEG image so you can refer to them off line is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

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But even if you have great visual content to share, I came across a challenge at a recent Pinterest training programme I was running where  the course delegates were in the fashion and beauty business. They post great images to their blog, mostly when on location, and often have only their smart phone which they use to create and share content.

Here are two recommendations that I provided for them which I hope you will find helpful if you have limited design skills and only a smart phone. For both of these ideas I am suggesting you invest in the iPhone app Diptic.

1. Include information on your blog post images – you may not wish to do this for all the images that you post in your articles, however on one of the images in your  blog post I recommend that you describe what your article is about and if this image is then posted to Pinterest it will increate the possibility that people will click back through to your website to find out more information.

You can see this in action with the image that I have posted at the top of this article.

Ideally, make this a square image so that you can also use it when posting images to your Facebook Page.

2. Consider creating longer images that work especially well on Pinterest – taking a selection of the images you  are including in your blog post and develop a longer graphic, or even an instructographic, including guidance and tips on how to achieve the issue you are covering in your article.

In the case of the people I was teaching from the fashion sector this could be how to create a certain look or providing fashion tips, both hot topics on Pinterest.

An example can be seen here where I created an instructographic on how to create a Rainbow Cake for St Patricks Day.

Or this example of a longer graphic that I created showing how Pinterest inspired a school project for one of my daughters who had to make an Easter bonnet with a difference.

These instructographics were created using desk top software but what can you do when you only have your iPhone?

This is where Diptic is a very useful application.

I have countless apps on my iPhone to use for visual content marketing and of course for fun, and had invested in Diptic some time ago but was no longer using it. Then I discovered they have released a new feature which means that you can now:

- create collages

- change the aspect of the collage so that they can be tall narrow images (perfect for Pinterest instructographics)

-  add text to your images using many different fonts

- add a frame to your images

- change the angle of the frames (in the example below you can see how I made a V shape at the top of the instructographic I created in just a couple of minutes using Diptic)

- use the new feature where you can fill empty frames in your collage with solid colour and of course add text over it as you can see in this example below.

Two Features I Would Like To See In A Future Release of Diptic

I do think Diptic is worth the investment of US$0.99 and it is also available in the Google Play store for Android phones. However there are two developments I would love to see – I have been in contact with the developers about these ideas so here is hoping!

1. It would be great to install your own fonts – the selection is extensive on Diptic but if you want to use a custom font to match your online visual identity that would be terrific.

2. Secondly it would be great to have numerous font fields to use to create your instructographic – at the moment there is only one font field. A work around at the moment would be to create an image with a solid colour, add text, save the image and then import those instructional images back into your collage.

Of course it would be great to have a designer to assist in creating stunning instuctographics – but we don’t always have the resource to do that for every article we craft, and as in the case of this weeks workshop delegates, sometimes all we have to hand is a smart phone.

I would love to know what your favourite apps are to create great images for your Pinterest marketing and blog articles when you only have a smartphone to hand. And if you create some instructographics using Diptic or another smartphone app please do share them with me over on Facebook.

And don’t forget if you would like to see the visual content that I am bookmarking over on Pinterest you can follow me there.

Pinterest Visual Marketing Tip – Using Diptic To Create Instructographics is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

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I have to declare that I am not a huge fan of online influencer ranking tools though they have a place in helping you identify people you could potentially connect with and build a relationship with as part of your influence marketing campaign.

An example though that is worth exploring is the partnership model offered by PeerIndex and a brand that has that done so is Guinness in the UK had with the PeerPerks campaign.

Let’s take a step back though and remember that Guinness is far from a novice in influence marketing (I know having been on the board of the company for a number of years in Asia, North America and in Ireland).

Going back to 2009 we saw the launch of their Arthurs Day campaign which has continued to grow from strength to strength. I was invited to the launch event in July 2009 and I don’t think anyone realised how inspired it was – to create a ‘birthday’ celebration about their Founder which had the opportunity to attract more consumers into the ailing off-trade in an economic downturn, an important route to market for the brand.

Moving forward to the Fall of 2012, we see the Guinness brand team in the UK partner with PeerIndex to offer a number of opportunities for consumers.

If you were based in the UK you could check on the PeerPerks site to see if your PeerIndex score would enable you to avail of the offer of six limited edition Guinness glasses as part of their #GuinnessClass promotion.

In addition, in selected pubs across the UK every Friday and Saturday between 6pm and 8pm over a number of weeks, Guinness was giving away private jet trips to Dublin to one lucky winner and their friends – winners would be flown to Dublin to experience the best of the city’s nightlife before being flown back to the UK before sunrise.

Note the similarity again to the Arthurs Day campaign – getting people to meet up with their friends in the off trade, in this case at time when people may not ordinarily be in the pub.

The PeerIndex partnership was only part of the #GuinnessClass campaign which ran for about nine weeks and most of the winners were selected from being in the pub at the time that the Guinness representatives were in the outlet.

Checking the online word of mouth at the time, I noted there was not too much online conversation even from those who won the tickets. But does that really matter? This comes back to what you measure in terms of social media success. Online conversations and sentiment are only one measure and what I would have wanted to know if I were in the Guinness brand team is what the impact was to sales over the course of the campaign.

I did find one blog post from someone who won a ticket and I had to wonder what the Guinness brand team would have thought when reading “Even as a BrewDog shareholder, I wasn’t about to turn down such an opportunity” given the unpleasant situation (you could call it a PR disaster) between BrewDog and Diageo in 2012.

I can only assume that the campaign went well as I noticed over on the Guinness GB Facebook Page that they have been hosting the #GuinnessClass campaign again in connection with the Six Nations Rugby and of course for this weekend for St Patrick’s Day weekend.

But what I think has been an inspired move in the area of influence marketing is that of the Guinness Storehouse here in Ireland. You see influencers do not be people you have never met – they could be your neighbour.

And influence marketing can expand to your employees – an employee brand ambassador programme was one of the things we implemented when in my role in Guinness in Ireland, yet all too often organisations forget the impact their people can have in relation to word of mouth marketing and client or customer attraction.

At the end of January 2013, Jasmine Guinness launched the Guinness Storehouse Ambassador Programme for the year of ‘The Gathering’ inviting Irish residents to apply to receive one of 50,000  ambassador cards entitling them to complimentary admission to the Guinness Storehouse throughout 2013.  Their friends and family who they bring to the venue will also receive a 10% discount off admission.

As part of The Gathering  Irish people are encouraged to invite family and friends ‘home’ to Ireland.

Throughout the year, active ambassadors will be entered into a competition to win their own Gathering party for 100 of their friends in the Gravity Bar at the Guinness Storehouse with food, refreshments and entertainment provided.  Card holders are being offered a range of benefits during 2013 including exclusive competitions to win tickets to Guinness events, Guinness merchandise and a range of special Guinness Storehouse experiences to be won throughout the year.

This is smart influence marketing – many people in Ireland have still not visited The Guinness Storehouse which this year celebrated a record number of visitors for 2012 with almost 1.1 million people visiting, 80,000 of whom were from Ireland. Now Guinness are inviting them to bring their friends and family to the home of Guinness – where of course you can experience the visitor centre, store, restaurants and bar.

And when you register as an Ambassador, you also join their mailing list so you receive reminders of events and opportunities to visit, such as for the three day St Patrick’s Day celebrations this weekend.

So yes online influencer marketing tools can be a useful indicator in terms of who to connect with, but don’t forget those people close to home – we can all be influencers and looking at an online score is not always the important factor when planning an influencer marketing campaign.

What could you learn from the approach Guinness in Ireland is taking with their brand ambassador programme for ‘The Gathering’? What other great examples have you seen of brands partnering with ‘The Gathering’?

Additional Resources About Influence Marketing

Read a case study of how Dell connected to influencers if you are marketing in B2B

Read about one of the first blogger outreach events in Ireland that was hosted by Diageo for the Budweiser brand

View the slide presentation about how Innocent Ireland connected to online influencers to build awareness of a recent social media campaign

You can find screenshots of the Guinness influence marketing case study in this article over on my Flickr account.

And I would also watch out for the book to be published this Summer by Danny Brown and Sam Fiorella about influence marketing – it’s on my Amazon wish list already!

Influence Marketing: Guinness, The Gathering And St Patrick’s Day is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

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Here are four ideas that caught my attention.

#O2tweetheart

O2 in the UK have been hosting a Twitter Competition where they were giving the opportunity to participants to have their Valentine’s Day message to their loved ones appear in store windows – taking online conversations into the real world. They also had a host of competition prizes to be won.

Marmite in the UK hosted a similar campaign at Christmas time, where participants names appeared on Oxford Street in the Christmas lights display.

Marks And Spencer Ireland Facebook Competition

Marks and Spencers in Ireland hosted a Facebook competition. They always have a nice simple interface to their Facebook competition apps and also integrate the opportunity for participants to join their mailing list, which therefore builds their data base. This is an important aspect to integrated content marketing.

What was different this time is that when you entered the competition, they also provided all participants with the opportunity to avail of a discount in their online store.

Tiffany & Co Drop A Hint Campaign

Tiffany & Co the luxury jewellers went one step further than integrating the usual social sharing, email sharing buttons and wish lists on their websites. They have introduced a ‘Drop A Hint’ button.

This allows you to personalise an email message to someone to ‘drop a hint’ of what you would like to receive as a gift. What a great idea. Ufortunately no I did not receive the gift I hinted at!

Generosity Day

If you dislike the commercialisation of Valentine’s Day then take a look at the Generosity Day campaign which originated in 2011. Over on Facebook they are encouraging people to share acts of generosity with people – if you are a non-profit, think how you could use a similar approach for pledges.

I hope these campaigns have given you some inspiration for your digital marketing programmes.

What other Valentine’s Day marketing campaigns have you noticed that caught your attention this year?

For more inspiration for your content marketing read my other St Valentine’s Day article about how to put a little L.O.V.E into your content marketing.

Four Valentine’s Day Campaigns To Inspire Your Digital Marketing is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

The post Four Valentine’s Day Campaigns To Inspire Your Digital Marketing appeared first on Krishna De: Content Marketing, Social Media And Social Business Strategy, Education And Mentoring.

Here are four areas to consider:

Step 1 – Listen

As with all online communications and social media marketing, we need to learn to listen. This may reveal challenges that our customers have using our products, opportunities for new product lines or enhancements, and it will help us identify how we can create for the different stages of the buying cycle.

A common mistake I see content marketers make is creating content for the sake of creating content – rather than consider how the content they create and publish (both online and offline) can help them achieve their strategic business goals.

Step 2 – Optimise Your Content For The Mobile Web

Many of us carry the mobile we in our pockets in the form of a smart phone. When was the last time that you looked at your website through the eyes of the mobile buyer? And what about your Facebook Page?

I have been researching what it will take to move this site to a responsive design so that it provides a good user experience what ever the mobile device (I’ll share more in a future article).

If you are managing a Facebook Page, I highly recommend that when you use competition and sweep stake apps, you ensure they work effectively for the mobile visitor to your Page if you want to increase participation in your promotion.

Step 3 – Visual Content Is Essential

I know it is challenging, especially if you are a service based business, to have great images to accompany every press release, article and blog post on your website. But it is important to consider if you want to maximise the opportunity for your content to be shared across the social web. Pinterest, LinkedIn Company Pages, Facebook Pages and many more sites enable you to decide which image appears when it is posted.

An attractive image can encourage people to take the next step to start to engage with your content. And you can be sure that your story is more likely to be picked up by the media is you have high impact images to accompany your press release.

Step 4 – Evaluate How Your Content Performs

As Spring is approaching, it is a good time for a content audit to evaluate which content is performing effectively as you review it against your marketing goals. You can also determine what content needs to be refreshed and what new content you need to create.

It’s a challenging and time consuming job, especially if you have published content online for many years, and perhaps have never done a full content review. However this can help you attract relevant traffic to your website and convert that traffic from being a browser to a becoming a buyer.

What actions are you taking to put some L.O.V.E into your content marketing?

For more inspiration for your content marketing and social media campaigns, read my other St Valentine’s Day article which features four digital campigns that you  adapt and apply, what ever the time of year.

Oh and if you liked (or even loved) this article, I don’t usually ask, but as it’s Valentines Day perhaps you could share a little love my way – you know what to do -Tweet it, Like it, Pin it, Gplus it! Thank you.

How to put a little L.O.V.E into your content marketing is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

The post How to put a little L.O.V.E into your content marketing appeared first on Krishna De: Content Marketing, Social Media And Social Business Strategy, Education And Mentoring.

The UK Safer Internet Centre conducted a survey of 24,000 young people and reported 96% of the respondents aged 11-19-years of age are using some form of online communication tool.

Here in Ireland Irish a recent report by EU Kids Online identified that children are online at least once a day for an average of 61 minutes.

There are a host of events being hosted and one that I thought was particularly good has been the live Internet radio show hosted by SaferInternet.org .uk with guests from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and many other organisations.

Recently my twin daughters, aged 11 years, were invited to participate in a private social network hosted on Make Waves. The platform provides a social learning environment for social media for education and enables schools to create and safely share videos, podcasts and blogs.

I have been impressed with the way that the teacher involved in the school project has provided a framework for positive online behaviour to the classes involved. Whilst my daughters have been actively using children’s social networks such as Club Penguin for some years, many of their friends have already established an account on Facebook even though they are under 13 years of age (the legal age for accounts on Facebook, Google and Twitter).

My daughters were also encouraged to write an article about the theme for this years Safer Internet Day, “Connect With Respect”. The image in this article is an extract of one of the articles that my youngest daughter wrote.

I’ve been impressed that so many corporates have been getting behind Safer Internet Day for example the Disney Club Penguin TV advert about connecting with respect.

Encouraging children to learn good practice on how to safely participate online can not however be left just to schools, the media and legislation. Our role as parents has evolved and we need to talk about online privacy with our children. I am sure will become more challenging as my children enter their teenage years and are perhaps dismissive of my suggestions!

Here are ten areas for you discuss with your children to help them stay safe online and managing their online reputation and digital footprint:

1. Think before you post any message or content – once it is published online it is not always easy to delete
2. Search for yourself in the search engines and in social networks to see if people have been posting things about you
3. Consider the language you use and be respectful of others views even if they are different to your own
4. Protect your access to your accounts by using secure passwords
5. Do not share your password for your social networks to your friends
6. Log out of your social networks and online accounts when you have finished using them
7. Manage your privacy settings for your different social networks especially if you do not want everything you publish online to be seen publically
8. Discuss with your friends what they will tag and the type of content you do not wanted be tagged in
9. Learn how to manage and opt out of content you have been tagged in
10. Know who to tell if you have a problem or have been bullied online.

Six Resources To Help Keep Your Children Safe Online

There are many tools and resources now available. Here are a couple that you may find of assistance:

The Google Family Safety Centre providing tools for parents and guardians.

Understanding YouTube and digital citizenship resources for teachers of secondary schools

The ‘Digital Universe of Your Children’ is a new resource that covers tips for parents to help them manage their children’s activities online and has resources for people in Belgium, Czech Republic,Germany, Hungary, Ireland, The Netherlands, Spain and the UK.

A resource on the BBC website for teachers to help them educate children on how to use Twitter for reporting and journalism.

Here in Ireland check out resources from WebWise. They have also launched a new site called “Watch Your Space” which is a portal for young people to show their support for victims of cyber bullying.

Argos in the UK have a partnership with Norton Online Family and have made the software available – it encourages discussion between you and your children about what they do online so you can teach them safe behaviour and good cyber habits.

What do you other resources do you recommend in terms of encouraging young people to stay safe online while at the same time developing their digital literacy which is going to be imperative for their future careers?

Connect With Respect – Teaching Our Children To Be Safe Online Safer Internet Day 2013 is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

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AdAge reports:

During the strange interlude, CBS more or less stopped showing commercials from Super Bowl advertisers, choosing instead to keep to short breaks with promos for its own programmes.

But then real time content marketing took place – with a great example from Oreo.

They posted a Tweet saying:

Power out? No problem

The picture in the Tweet showed an Oreo with the caption:

You can still dunk in the  dark

How did Oreo manage to respond in real time to this event? Buzzfeed reports:

“We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity,” agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed. “Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes.”

“You need a brave brand to approve content that quickly. When all of the stakeholders come together so quickly, you’ve got magic,” Hofstetter said.

Do you have your brand team and agency working together in real time for major events you sponsor? Could this approach help you create and publish content in real time?

The Oreo social media accounts will also provide you more inspiration for your content marketing – take a look at their Facebook Page where their use of images with brand placement is very creative. And head over to Instagram where you will see then inviting followers to tag their photographs #cookiethis or #cremethis with the comment that they may re-create the photograph.

They even have a TV spot promoting the Oreo Whisper Fight Instagram campaign.

I hope this has given you some ideas for your real time content marketing.

Just a final comment about the image for this article sourced from Flickr thanks to Wally Gobetz – the clock was photographed at Chelsea Market, New York and was a factory, office and railroad complex built between 1890 and the mid 1930s for the New York Biscuit Company which later merged with the American Biscuit Company and the United States Baking Company, forming the National Biscuit Company (NABISCO). and yes Oreo’s were baked in the ovens there!

Real time content marketing case study – Oreo and the Super Bowl is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

The post Real time content marketing case study – Oreo and the Super Bowl appeared first on Krishna De: Content Marketing, Social Media And Social Business Strategy, Education And Mentoring.