Here’s a little humour for all of you the next time you deal with a professional photographer. Chances are, you’ve probably asked one of these questions (or several). One thing I can tell you, from personal experience, a lot of people try to tell professional photographers what to do. Try to let photographers do their job.

A marketing or communications plan can be like an octopus. There can be lots of tentacles going in many different directions. You jot down notes. You hash out ideas. And you go around and around in meetings that never seem to end.

Almost everyone talks about the first necessary component of marketing anything, be it a product, service or event. That component, of course, would be: Who is the intended target audience?

But here’s the question that is often forgotten when developing any marketing or communication plan: “For us to call this a success, what results are needed?”

This is a question that must be addressed early. Very early. Like, right after the target audience question. Include this as part of your early marketing or communications planning and you will be well on your way to setting targets and building a plan to reach them. The key words here are success and results.

Don’t just think in terms of financials or attendance. Think in terms of specifics. Maybe, if it’s communications oriented, you want to achieve three feature stories in local media. If it’s marketing related, you might want to capture 1500 email addresses for a mailing list.

Yes, it’s basically goal-setting. But this is about getting more specific. So, go ahead, ask yourself “For us to call this a success, what results are needed?”

It’s easy to forget the little things when you’re tweeting up a storm. One of the most forgotten parts of any social media account is the need to continually review your profile wording and how you are best putting forth your brand. So take a few minutes and start putting your Twitter account through a little tuneup.

Here are 10 easy things to do on your Twitter account today:

1.  Have you added your Facebook url to your Twitter bio? It’s another easy way to drive traffic to your other main social media stream. Just type the FB url directly into your bio field under > Edit your profile

2. Edit often. You have 160 characters to work with in your bio. Take advantage of that space. Every character is precious. Are you wasting characters by just duplicating what you already have in your Name field? Your bio can be edited and revised often.

3. Are you using the Name field in your profile to its best potential? Twitter allows you to tweak your Name (this is not the same as your Twitter @username). Perhaps your Name is just the name of your institution or business. That may work if your username is not as direct. But your Name field can capture more. Could it be a tagline that pulls people in? Look at how your Twitter account shows in a Twitter stream (see the top line above each of your tweets). Is your Username just repeated by your Name? Eliminate duplications. Think strategically with every word in your profile. It has to be looked at as a package all working together to pull people in.

4. Doublecheck your Location field on your profile. Do you have town name and province? Every little nugget helps you on Twitter searches!

5. Are you tweeting too much with a @username to begin your tweets? If you are, you are potentially missing out on the crowdsourcing component of Twitter in front of your full followers. Starting a tweet with @username is a reply. Your tweet will only be seen in the stream by that user and people who are following both of you. So you automatically reduce the volume of people seeing your tweeting.

6. What is your RT to tweeting ratio? Some people on Twitter do nothing but RT (retweet) what other people are saying. And worse, they add no comment to the RT. If you tend to do this, you may end up losing followers because people get the impression you aren’t interesting in joining the conversation. Strike a nice balance.

7. Are you automatically connecting your tweets to be auto-posted to your Facebook account? Twitter allows you to configure this in your Twitter profile. But be forewarned: this can be extremely annoying to your Facebook followers. Have you looked at your Facebook stream lately? Your tweets could be clogging up the Facebook stream of your friends. And worst of all, you really aren’t on Facebook to realize it. Wow, some ‘Friend’! #fail. Maybe it’s time to disconnect the Twitter to Facebook feature on your Twitter account.

8. Get a different perspective. It’s always a smart idea to see how your bio looks, along with other tweeps. Look at a Following or Followers list to see how your bio stands out, or goes thud. Looking at your bio in this manner can give you a whole new perspective as a regular person seeing bios and who stands out and who doesn’t.

9. Take a regular little step than shows you care. There’s nothing worse than a tweep who doesn’t care about doing housecleaning on their Followers list. We’re not talking about folks you simply don’t wish to follow anymore. We’re talking about the fembots (ladies that um, er, say they like to do certain things in their short bios), obvious spammers, or Twitter accounts that are obvious bots where no actual human is present. Clean out the crap from your Follower list. If nothing else, it says you care.

10. Does your bio have some personality? Your bio is essentially your invite to others to join you in conversation. It’s your 160-character greeting. It’s either deadpan or it’s welcoming. Put your bio through a warmth test. Does it best mirror what you would tell someone really quickly in person about why you’re terrific to follow?

If you are an organization or small business based in a rural area here’s a dose of reality: some of your audience may be on dialup Internet. Yes, as prehistoric as that may seem, dialup still exists today. Just take a drive out into the country and ask. There’s a lot of pain out there when a big file takes forever to download on someone’s email.

So, what does this mean for communications and marketing? Well, if your audience is partly on dialup, be mindful when sending info via email (ie. newsletters, etc.). Clogging your dialup audience’s email with files that take forever to download will generate anger and lead to unsubscribes.

You need to think lightweight with any PDFs, email newsletters, etc. Actually, you should be thinking this way anyways. But in a rural area it is an absolute must. Try to keep your email newsletters to below 100k (below 50 k is even better to ensure fast download times). That means resizing photos to small file sizes too.

Sadly, far too many businesses today are still dismissing Twitter as a useless tool with little value. These businesses will often point to tweets by teens as an example.

Here’s what a business owner recently told me: “I do have to wonder what “VALUE” and what impact promoting Twitter does …. I wouldn’t get caught up in that culture personally.”

The business owner used a specific example of a tweet by a teen: “$84 dollars later “well there’s a nice t-shirt”#happybirthday bearf—–.”

I love this tweet (expletive, aside). Why? The teen spent $84. Hello? What should that immediately tell you? Yes! The teen is a consumer.

If you sell products or services geared toward teens, you will likely want to be capturing this demographic today. Following a teen on Twitter doesn’t mean you endorse them. It’s simple marketing in the social media sphere. You are building a virtual marketing list.

And, of course, eventually teens become adults. The last time I checked, a consumer is a consumer as they age.

One recent study showed that teens (12-17 and 18-24 year-old demographics) are now the fast growing segment on Twitter. Initially, teens were slow to embrace Twitter, but that is changing fast.

Before you dish teens on Twitter, you’ll have to decide if they are part of the audience you want to capture for the benefit of your business either for today or for the future.

Building an audience on social media like Twitter takes time and patience. You absolutely MUST think about who your customers will be tomorrow, too.  Savvy businesses now this.

READ > Twitter Crushes Facebook for Marketing
Although Facebook has a larger social media presence and more users, Twitter gives businesses more clicks.

You need to answer the questions: Who do I want to connect with and why?

Social media works both ways. You want an audience that is prone to sharing your information. Are teens prone to see your business, product or service and share it with their friends, parents or other adults? (BTW, this is called FREE marketing!) Or, are teens in a househ0ld that uses your product or services. (Ah ha, see the area of influence is started to expand now, isn’t it?)

It’s funny, some businesses will build traditional email lists and never know if these lists contain teens. But throw social media into the mix, where businesses get to ‘see’ and ‘read’ users, and they immediately show disdain.

Stop jumping to conclusions about teens on Twitter. Start thinking about how – or if – they fit into your marketing plans.

Social media is an incredible tool for companies and businesses to showcase their public relations expertise at dealing with customers. On the other hand, used the wrong way, it can be a public relations bomb (and for all you hipster language folks, I don’t mean da bomb, or any other bomb in a good kinda way).

Take this example of a US woman who recently purchased an electronic device from BodyBugg and soon discovered it to be defective. She emailed the customer support department (the company includes email as an option to reach them for support) twice within a week and did not get a response.  Frustrated, the customer took her anger to Facebook.

This is where the company failed in a very public fashion. See the Facebook screengrab (at left for the company’s FB response to the customer). If your jaw is dropping, you are not alone. This represents an extreme example of a social media failure.

This is just one snippet of the Facebook stream. Other people started chiming in with their disgust at the condescending attitude of the company employee.

Obviously, the lessons here are simple. Treat every customer with care and concern, rather than a doofus. Have compassion. Be helpful. And remember it’s never about you. It’s ALWAYS about the customer.

Oh, and of course, every company must never forget that any post on social media is never between just you and one customer. It’s in front of the entire world, potentially. That would be like 500 million plus people in Facebook, if you’re counting. Get your response wrong, and your bad public relations may spread faster than any virus (sorry, not even Dustin Hoffman can stop it when it gets this sickly!).

Social media has changed everything for how we do business today. Companies with their heads in the sand forget that unhappy customers take their beefs to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and any other tool they can find.

When customers use these tools in a negative way, your company better have a very big shovel handy. Screwing up customer service on social media will leave you digging out of a big hole.

Oh, and one more thing….. you never know who you are dealing with. In the case of BodyBugg, it got sarcastic on social media with a woman who just happens to be the social media director at a U.S. university.

Giving back is something that many of us hold in high regard today. In the communications business, especially when you’re based in a rural community, you hear many stories from small businesses. Many of these stories are the same: the same old traditional marketing approaches aren’t working any more. The other dilemma? Marketing budgets are limited. So, what do you do?

I love my community.  I don’t want to see it fall behind in the digital technology age. We have to have investment from within to solve problems. Gone are the days when we could hope others would arrive on a white horse and create solutions for small businesses in our communities. Giant media corporations are slashing their focus on local with each passing year.

Well, as a communications professional, giving back means helping a community as a whole. That’s what I’ve decided to do. I’m drawing on my 20+ years in the media industry to develop a new online hyper-local advertising site. Making the site hyper-local (which means intensely niche) creates a focused ecosystem for local businesses and local consumers.

This project has been planned and in development since the summer of 2011.

The service will aim to make digital advertising incredibly affordable, or even free for every small business so owners  can adapt to the ever-changing online world where local consumers now hang out.

As communications professionals, we realize that online platforms that once operated on a massive scale are today being replaced by online platforms that now shrink down markets and audiences to a very local scale.

My new online startup is not a daily deal site. Small businesses in rural communities aren’t embracing these sites for a reason: when you already operate on small margins, offering up to 90% off is an approach that makes little sense.

Look for Norfolkian.ca soon in Norfolk County, ON.

The other day I decided to surf the web and call around to inquire about dinner reservations for New Year’s Eve. A few things immediately stood out. Some restaurants have let their communications efforts fall way, way by the wayside.

What’s so interesting is that each failure is so minor yet leaves an enormous negative impression and may even cost a restaurant some business.

You know you have a communications problem when…..

• The phone number listed on your website doesn’t work
• You’re open for New Year’s Eve dinner, but three days before the big day, you can’t tell a caller what’s on the menu
• The last entry on your restaurant’s Facebook page was six months ago

These may seem like minor points, but each one represents a glaring communications fail.

Why not start 2012 by ensuring every part of your business’s communications is updated and not broken. Create the correct impression. Literally.

The Ontario Ginseng Growers’ Association’s new website has been launched by WorkCabin Communications. Prior to the new site, OGGA was relying on an outdated and extremely rudimentary CMS (Content Management System). The overall design was also outdated. It was far too complex for OGGA to manage by itself.

WCC set out to create a superior dynamic design with far more visual appeal. Ginseng is traditional and revered herb, so it was also essential that the overall design remain elegant and respectful, given the large traffic received from visitors in China. The colour palette chosen for the new site also better reflects earth tones which complements the essence of ginseng farming.

The site will soon be linked to a future OGGA website built specifically for the Chinese market.

The new Canadian website is based on a WordPress CMS. The association can now easily update its own website, grower and buyer lists, thereby reducing the previous expense of outsourcing all website maintenance work.

WorkCabin Communications is pleased to deliver an exciting new website for the Ontario Ginseng Growers’ Association.

Anyone can try this experiment. Oh, um, wait a minute! Many of you probably have done it. If the results annoy you, you are not alone.

Social media experts often do tests where they attempt to engage big brands in discussion on social media. The results are usually less than flattering. Media tends to be the worst, according to one recent study, responding to only one per cent of wall posts. Overall, the study found only five per cent of wall posts ever receive a response. That’s bad. How bad? On a tool called social media, it’s viewed as being ignorant.

This trend isn’t confined to big brands. Sadly, it tends to be prolific among mom and pop businesses too. It shouldn’t be that way. Mom and pop businesses like to promote themselves as having a unique advantage: personal, friendly service.

Ironically, small businesses like to play up the ‘community’ aspect of doing business. So, it’s surprising when there’s failure in a social community like Facebook.

Ignoring people on the phone, in person, or on social media is all the same in today’s digital age. It’s a snub.

Often, small businesses will shun the cost of having their own website, and instead use Facebook. This can be a risky strategy if you are not 100% committed to this social network.

As the number of fans grows, there’s glee. Quickly, it becomes only about how many fans you can get. Every day, you look at the total. Yipee! Another three fans! You receive Facebook email notifications that fans have posted wall comments. But you choose to ignore them. Over and over again.

And this is how the social sinkhole grows deeper and deeper every day.

Fans are following you for a reason. They ‘Like’ you! Just as fast, they will quickly realize when you aren’t interested in them.

Rather than obsessing about the number of fans on your Facebook page, start counting the number of times you respond to wall posts and interact with your fans.

That should be the true measure of your social success with Facebook.