Jan Walker's CSIT 155 - Spring 2021 Class Blog

 Wrapping It Up This has been my second attempt at this class. Life demands got so great I didn't finish it before. In that class I used my business, Matigan Golden Retrievers, as my project. Even without finishing the class that time I took many tools with me. I had previously only used social media for personal use. I was able to grow my following on Facebook from nothing to 1.6K with limited and irregular posting. My daughter had started an Instagram account for me but I had never learned to use it and she had only put a few pictures on there. Over the last few years I forced myself to use it more because it seemed like Facebook was fading out and Instagram was taking over. Now I have 397 followers. My social media marketing with the breeding business has been successful. In fact too successful. I cannot keep up with all of the calls and messages. That was then and this is now. This time around I had to take the marketin...

  Social Media Management Tools Social media management tools help you to streamline the operation of your social accounts by consolidating your social media tasks into a single interface. Some of the most common features that they offer include a dashboard for scheduling posts, managing comments and messages, and analytics. Some of the interfaces allow for teams manage the media as well. With the need to keep your content fresh and current, social media management tools can simplify your life. I am not currently using any social media management tools, unless you count the Facebook/Instagram Business Suite or Canva. Because of their limitations on which platforms they can post to, I will review several others. Three of the platforms that offer the most functionality are Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer. HOOTSUITE Hootsuite is the first Social Media Management tool that I became familiar with. It was launched in 2008. ...

Social Media Calendar In the previous post I detailed a plan for the social media marketing efforts for Trident Pacific Consulting. Using that information here is next months plan using Google Calendar. Times of posting are varied to try to get data on best posting times. I will review analytics at least weekly to adjust posting times if necessary. Here is a screen shot the Google Calendar for June:  https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/5?cid=cTFvamtlbWNpdXFzZTM1bmRvMWh0MjJxMGdAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ     If the image is not visible, the blue/purple blocks are "national days." If low on inspiration I can go to those. Sundays: Write the weekly blog post for Tuesdays post, review Analytics Monday 1:00 pm: Facebook/Instagram - Meme - Motivation Monday or Monday Motivation Tuesday 7:00 am: Post blog on website and repost on LinkedIn/Facebook 7:00 pm Instagram post Wednesday 11:00 am: Instagram post 2:00 pm: Facebook - repost a periodical link Thursday 10:00 am - ...

Social Media Plans for Trident Pacific Consulting It has become apparent that Trident Pacific Consulting needs a plan. It is not the type of company that can just post on a whim and expect to maintain a following.  I've had the last semester to think about how this plan might look. As far as the social media platforms that are the most valuable for a small business consulting firm like ours, I would rate them as follows: LinkedIn Website Blog Facebook Twitter Instagram Email newsletter Our ultimate goal is to post to Facebook and Instagram daily , LinkedIn and blog weekly, and Twitter daily. Twitter will probably need to stay on a back burner until the other mediums are developed more.   I hope to mine email addresses from the website. The traffic to the website is likely to come from social media marketing. With an email list, we can send out a monthly newsletter.   While ambitious (for me), I hope to spend at least an hour per day total on social media marketing. I will...

  Write a thoughtful post (minimum 5 paragraphs) analyzing the information available through your FaceBook Insights from your business page.  If you have this option available, review the FaceBook analytics on the top of your business page in the Admin Panel.  Click on Insights to find more information. Review all the content and write a blog about what has changed this month in your FaceBook analytics. You will need at least 100 page likes to view your analytics. If you do not have likes or followers to see your data, use the data I provided above from my pages. Review what you find and use the information to write up your post about what you can discover from the data that is collected by FaceBook.   _____________________________________________________________________________________ Like Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics supply us with key data to determine if our marketing efforts are successful.  To be honest I thought the Page Insights...

  Google Analytics Google Analytics is one of the more than 270 tools in Google's arsenal. Google Analytics is an easy (mostly) and free reporting service offered by Google to track website traffic. The data supplied from Google Analytics can help you to learn what is working and what is not thus it helps you make better decisions about your online presence.   What exactly does Analytics do? In short, it collects data, processes and analyzes the data, and generates reports from the data. Google Analytics records the activity of your user from the moment he arrives until he leaves your website by u sing a combination of cookies and JavaScript.    Out of all the data and reports generated by Google Analytics, the following are what I feel are most important to Trident Pacific Consulting. I can't figure out how to install it on his Word Press site yet, so the screen captures I included are from my class Blogger site.   Acquisition   The Acquisition sectio...

DRAFT Assignment Instructions: Sales and marketing are the not the same thing. The hope, is eventually your marketing leads to a sale, especially when you're paying for advertising. Every activity you do on social media needs to have a point, whether it's to bring awareness, engagement, capture an email, etc. If you know the objective and the point of your activity, you can accurately measure its success. Collecting and studying your analytics (next week - but feel free to take a look if they are available) will help you make the connection between online advertising and actual conversions (sales) turning it into something you can measure. As you start to put together all of these tools, you need to understand how they work together to help these activities get you a return on investment. For some businesses email marketing converts 3x more than social media on average. You can decide if part of your ad budget should be spent on collecting email addresses as a way...

Part 1: Analyzing Facebook and Instagram Ads FACEBOOK I opened up my personal Facebook page to check out the ads for this assignment. There was one post from a Facebook friend, then one ad. Thereafter it was 3 posts to 1 ad.  I took screenshots of the first 6 ads. Not surprisingly, most ads were either advertisements for apps or businesses having to do with social media marketing, considering that I had just been reading our assignments on my computer.  Having about one ad per 3 posts itself is annoying. The ads themselves are targeted to my life so I can get distracted clicking on them at times, which then makes me annoyed with myself! The following are the first 6 ads that showed up in my feed. Kelley Blue Book My son totaled his car last moth. As I await the insurance payment, I've been researching used cars as a possible replacement. The car he totaled was a Mazda 3. Face book sent me this ad. When I click on this ad (a static photo) I get sent to a web page where the ar...

  One great way to get your name known is to write a book or even articles for periodicals. A number of SEALs have written articles for Forbes, and Inc. All of the articles are linked online. If you write a book, then reviews will be listed on Amazon, B&N.com, or Goodreads. Yelp makes me really nervous. People can be passionate in their reviews. One bad review cannot be undone. Google Maps does not make sense for our business. The consulting will be brought to the customer.  BNI - BNI Wave of Success is comprised of local business professionals who meet regularly, in a positive and supportive business environment, to strengthen relationships in the local business community - and to help one-another build business through the exchange of warm referrals and personal introductions. MeetUp - Good old fashioned MeetUp groups is a great way to informally meet new people, enlarge your network and  have fun at the same time. There are mountain biking meetups,...

In today's world there are a dizzying number of online tools for businesses. Depending on your industry you can go down a number of rabbit holes. I would prefer to take advantage of modern digital tools than the way we used to do even just 20-30 years ago. In 1993 I opened my brand new acupuncture office - with no patients. How did I try to get clients back then? A tiny but very expensive single line in the Yellow Pages. It had moderate success. After that it was word of mouth, mailed coupons, and door to door hanging of flyers and distribution of brochures. If I could overcome my fear of speaking in public, I would go to a few networking groups. I hated it.  When researching online tools options, I realize I already use many of them. I am the corporate secretary for a nonprofit martial arts organization. I switched the whole corporation to Google Suite tools. They have a nonprofit version that we will move to next. We use mainly Google docs and Google drive and gmail. But G-suite ...

Business Marketing with Twitter I signed up for Twitter in 2009. It never appealed to me. I quickly got overwhelmed by the fast-paced  nature of the platform. Unless you could engage often it seemed like a waste of time. If you didn't engage often then it was a waste of time. Catch 22. After dusting off the username and password to get into my account, I did a little researching and exploring. My researching revealed pros and cons of this platform. Benefits of Twitter Frequent and carefully scripted tweets can promote brand awareness and help your business create a larger and more robust online digital presence. Frequent tweeting helps you to control the narrative about your business. If you're not actively speaking for your brand, other people can speak for you. It may not be worth the gamble to leave it to chance.  Creating a community around your brand helps to you to learn about and finely tune your target market. Having a dedicated following strengthens your brand and ...

 I commented on the following blogs: Jonathan Golding Teri Lendy Sydney Gardner

 I commented on these classmates' blogs: Caleb Sanchez Anthony McCarthy Tess Truesdale Haruka Yamaguchi

Email Marketing What does a company put in their newsletters? All kinds of things it seems. How often do entities send out emails? For some of the consultants that I get emails from it appears that once a day is the most common.      I think I receive a hundred plus emails a day. Most of those are some sort of marketing email. I seldom open them. But for this assignment I burrowed a bit on my junk mail account to see what is happening. Since starting this class and taking on the challenge of marketing my husband's consulting business, I have been lured into buying some programs that were advertised on Facebook on how to increase your followers, how to develop content, etc.  So naturally I get lots of emails to buy additional programs.    Billy Gene sends me emails at least once a day. He is a flashy, high profile marketer and has some good advise. Great headlines! The emails are mostly plain text with lots of white space between each line. It's easy to rea...

 Adding Google Analytics  

Blog Categories I have been on enough blogs to know that I truly appreciate when the posts are broken into categories. It makes information easier to find, plus it provides an overview to see if I'm interested in staying around to read more.   For my own site, I have researched blog categories and I have found out that they organize your site and allow readers to find the information they want. They serve as a type of table of contents that organize your posts by topic and sub-topic. I makes navigation easier for your visitors.  In addition, I found out that the more you blog and use categories the better your SEO becomes.   Who doesn't get writer's block now and again? When you have categories you have a sort of built in writer's prompt. It helps with planning as well. Right now Trident Pacific Consulting has a blog at https://tridentpacificconsulting.com/blogs/ Currently it only has one category. Forrest would like to have categories for: Organization Devel...

Making Your Blog Personal Who wants to read a boring blog post? Who wants to read anything boring? Unless it's something necessary, like the directions on a box of cake mix, no one. And how do you write something that's not boring? By making it place where people connect. By making it personal. By letting people get to know you or your customers. Sometimes that's easier said than done. What are some tips and tricks to luring in your reader with compelling content? By providing human interest to your content. If you’re trying to establish a personal, welcoming brand voice, you’ll need to write in a way that people can emotionally relate to; to become a member of your tribe.    Share a universal struggle or universal joy.  My business is providing quality golden retrievers to families. I write about my dogs, the pain of losing one to disease, the disgust of cleaning up a puppy who rolled in his own poop, the joy of seeing families with their new puppy.  What do these ...

tridentpacificconsulting is a brand new Instagram account. I have been running one for my own business at matigangoldens and matigangoldenretrievers for a while. There are not very many followers on my husbands account yet. Below are the 6 posts I have made to date. I made all of the memes myself on Canva. I am new to Canva so I think I am getting better with practice. I have settled into a branding color scheme of blues and oranges and tan.   So far the greatest number of likes is 6. My classmates are not really liking my stuff, maybe because I am at the end of the alphabet. I continue to like and comment on all new posts of my classmates.  For some reason the cross-posting to Facebook stopped working. I am going to see if I can troubleshoot that. It was working before...  The following are hashtags that I have used so far (newest first): #emotionalintelligence #emotions #mindfulness #selfmastery #beyourbestself #positivemindset #positivity #mindfulness #auth...

 Instagram Business Research Trident Pacific Consulting is a business consulting firm and also an individual life coach. A new mindfulness course in in the works. So I was unsure which way to approach the research. I kept getting bogged down exploring what other people are doing and it was very hard to find exactly the same niche. I didn't want to just stick to former SEALs but in the end I did a lot of research there too. As for former SEALs, there are many doing some kind of coaching or business consulting. They are most active on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.   I also had a hard time finding the big consulting firms on Instagram. Maybe Instagram is not the right tool for them.  Here are some of the non-SEAL people/businesses I looked at : Elan Solutions (New Zealand firm) Organisational Effectiveness Consultant & Coach (1 Consultant) 281 posts 218 followers Around the first of the year in 2021 Elan's Instagram changed dramatically. Before that dat...