Source: Mashable!

Here are some tips for getting started from the book Stepping out of Line: Lessons for Women Who Want it Their Way… in Life, in Love and at Work:

1. Start with the end in mind
Write down or cut out pictures of what you ultimately see for yourself and others in your life, love and work. The more specific you can be, the more likely you will be able to communicate your vision to others so they can help you get there.

Watch the video:

MIT Media Lab Identity, 2011 from readyletsgo on Vimeo.

Read More at FastCo >

Sign #1. Making Promises that are Too Good to be True
Sign #2. Using “Black Hat” SEO Techniques (technically not illegal but still frowned upon: keyword stuffing, doorway pages, invisible text or linking schemes)
Sign #3. Targeting the Wrong Keywords – its not ‘survivial of the fittest’ here
Sign #4. Employing Shoddy Linking Schemes such as Link Trading or Automated Link Building
Sign #5. Promising to List Your Site in Hundreds of Online Directories (only 4 to 6 engines or true value)
Sign #6. Redesigning Your Site or Creating New Pages Without 301 Redirects – Don’t lose what you have built
Sign #7. Focusing on Metadata Instead of On-Page SEO
Sign #8. Creating Bad Content - ‘Content is King’
Sign #9. Driving Irrelevant Traffic
Sign #10. Offering a One-Time Fixes with No Ongoing Maintenance


Source: HubSpot

This got me thinking, with more and more young kids going online each day, how does one translate high tech of the web into kid-friendly tools?

I ran across a few helpful hints that I thought I would pass along:

1. What you’ve learnt about navigation on adult sites applies just as much to kids’ sites — consistency, clarity, a degree of standardization — and one especially for kids — try not to make your navigation more than one level deep.
2. Avoid asking kids to become members or to subscribe as most will have a family rule against giving their real details on the web.
3. If you are going to get details, remind the kids to ask their parents if it’s OK.
4. Avoid using pop-ups — these confuse kids, they don’t understand when the normal forms of navigation are removed. Recently a Palmerston North parent received a $1,200 bill. Their child had unwittingly clicked on a pop-up that connected them to an ISP in Liechtenstein. Damaging! There are some valid exceptions to this rule.
5. Kids do not distinguish between advertising and content. Worth thinking about if you are going to do any advertising on your site.
6. Don’t do fancy things with fonts, or make them too small - both on- and off line. Kids are still developing their reading skills.
7. Engage kids immediately (but don’t confuse them). They aren’t patient. They’re pretty black and white about what they like and don’t like.
8. Use sound and movement to add interest — but be judicious with your file size.
9. Have a section for parents. Make it clear that it is for parents (to avoid kids wasting time going there).
10. If you are going to have characters (kids generally respond very well to these), do what you can to get the kids to interact with them.

Source: Origin

Young adults ages 18 to 29, minority groups — 13% black and 18% Hispanic — and urban dwellers are among the groups with the highest level of Twitter use. The report reveals that women and those with college educations are also slightly more likely than other groups to tweet.

One-quarter of Twitter users check the service multiple times per day to see others’ tweets, while one in five never look for new updates. Here are some select statistics about the actual tweets that are going out there:

• 72% of Twitter users say they post updates about their personal life, activities or interests.
• 62% post work-related updates.
• 55% use Twitter to share links to news stories.
• 53% use the service to retweet others’ material.
• 40% use the service to share photos with others, while 28% use it to share videos.
• 24% tweet their location.

The report was compiled as a result of multiple surveys: Data on overall Twitter usage and demographics is from the Pew Internet Project’s November 2010 tracking survey. Information on how often people use Twitter, as well as the topics they post about, were from two October 2010 surveys.

According to the center, this is the first time it has conducted research that focuses solely on Twitter users. This is because Pew typically looks into general online activities, as opposed to particular brands. So in most instances, the center’s research has involved asking Internet users if they “used Twitter or another service to share updates about yourself or to see updates about others?”

View the mini-series by American Express FORUM now:

For all the praise that brand advertisers have for social media, they must be aware that it’s very much a double-edged sword. And for all the free marketing, advertising and brand promotion via Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and other platforms used to help build an identity and relationship with your customers, it can just as quickly turn on you and your brand.

Social media disasters occur for a number of reasons, the first being that your company probably messed up. It may not have been intentional, but something, somewhere down the line, went wrong enough for someone to complain and it was enough for others to vocalize that complaint en masse. One mistake is all it takes for social media to turn against your brand.

No one is perfect and you can’t expect to please everyone all the time, so the best trick is to be prepared for how to handle things if your company finds itself under attack in the social realm. Here are three examples of companies who were attacked by social media and how they handled, or should have handled the situation. Learn from their mistakes or successes so you can stay on social media’s good side.

1. Ann Taylor

This past July, LOFT, a brand owned by Ann Taylor Inc., posted photos on its Facebook page of a tall, blonde model wearing LOFT’s new silk cargo pants, with a click-to-buy link in the captions.
What happened next is a perfect example of how social media can suddenly turn on you, even when you’ve done nothing “wrong,” or seemingly out of the ordinary. Fans of the brand complained that while the pants looked good on the model, they weren’t so flattering on anyone who wasn’t 5′10 and stick thin.

Fans requested that LOFT prove their pants could look good on “real women.” And they did. The following day, the company posted photos to Facebook again, this time with their own staff posing in the pants. The “real women” came from different company departments and ranged from a size 2 to size 12, and in height from 5′3″ to 5′10″.

++What to Learn from Ann Taylor++
This is a perfect example of how to turn a possible threat via social media into an opportunity. Ann Taylor had the good sense to stop the attack before it escalated. Here customers had a direct and valid complaint about a product and how it was featured. The company did the best thing possible, they stayed calm and listened to the comments. They took the comments into consideration and came up with a constructive resolution.
By responding to Fan requests to post photos of women of different sizes wearing the pants, the company proved that they really do listen and care about their customer concerns, and they were able to back up the product. It’s a double win for Ann Taylor as they actually gained customer support, while avoiding a potential disaster.

2. Southwest Airlines

This past February, Southwest Airlines kicked director Kevin Smith off a flight from San Francisco headed to Los Angeles for being too fat. Smith had apparently failed the armrest test, meaning that because he couldn’t fit between the two armrests, he would have to purchase an extra seat. Since he was flying standby and the plane was full, there were no extra seats for him to purchase and he was asked to get off the plane, and was offered a $100 voucher by the airline, but the incident was far from over. While it’s somewhat refreshing that Southwest provides the same customer service to all their customers regardless of their level of fame, it might not have been the best idea to tick off someone who is very vocal on Twitter and has 1.6 million followers.

Smith countered that he wasn’t large enough to be the safety risk Southwest claimed he was, and he tweeted up a storm that caused a social media disaster. According to Position², a search and social media marketing firm, in a span of six days, the incident generated 3,043 blog mentions, 5,133 forum posts and 15,528 tweets.

For their part, Southwest was quick to respond — 16 minutes after Smith’s first tweet regarding the incident, they tweeted: “@ThatKevinSmith hey Kevin! I’m so sorry for your experience tonight! Hopefully we can make things right, please follow so we may DM!”

Of course, it didn’t stop there as Smith continued rant-tweeting about six tweets for every one response from the airline. The tweets finally stopped as Southwest posted the whole story, including a briefing of a later conversation with Smith, explaining to others what had happened on the plane, and the company’s explanation for why it happened, which included an apology.

++What to Learn from Too Fat to Fly++
Southwest had a plan, which is something that is necessary if you want to avoid being burned by social media. They monitored their online presence, quickly identified a problem brewing, and responded in a quick and friendly manner.

Because of this, many of the responses on their own blog were sympathetic to the company’s side of the incident. Not only did the company apologize, but they offered a refund as they had clearly embarrassed a customer. But they also made sure to take the opportunity to restate their police of requiring larger customers to purchase two seats, so as to make people understand why the incident occurred in the first place.

Make sure your company is alert and monitoring your presence on social media sites, and make sure you are ready with a plan to remedy the situation. Here, responding quickly saved the company a lot of time and effort later.

3. Pretzel Crisps

Most recently Pretzel Crisps launched an ad campaign in New York City with four slogans, including “You can never be too thin.” The campaign launched in early August with that slogan gracing bus shelters and ad stands and caught the attention of the blogosphere after a photo was posted online.
The photo was re-posted to the women’s blog Jezebel and was followed by condemning posts, tweets, and videos from other bloggers. In fact, I was one of the people who vocalized a problem with this particular campaign. The slogan the company picked is a “thinspiration” motto used by the pro-anorexic community, and was called “irresponsible” and accused of promoting unhealthy weight loss.

The company responded first on Twitter to offended tweeters with replies of, “Thin just happens to be a good word to describe the shape of our product.” As outrage escalated the VP of Marketing participated in interviews with bloggers and explained, that they were a small company and simply wanted to launch an ad that would grab people’s attention. As bloggers continued to post, a video made its rounds of one New Yorker’s protest calling the ads a “disgrace” and listing facts about eating disorders.

The same day, Pretzel Crisps sent out an e-mail to bloggers thanking them for their feedback, as well as tweeting, “We didn’t intend to advocate unhealthy weight loss with our ads. Thanks to all for the feedback. The ads will be taken down asap.”

The blogosphere rejoiced feeling that they actually accomplished something, only to learn that the company replaced the offending ad with another play on a pro-anorexic slogan, “Tastes as good as skinny feels,” from the initial campaign.

Further outrage from bloggers was met this time with the brush off: “While dialoging with some of the bloggers, I mentioned that ‘you can never be too thin’ was just one of four tag lines that we had running throughout the city…The only one that people commented on was the ‘too thin’ ad. So we removed them and replaced them with one of the other three.”

The ultimate fallout from the campaign is still yet to be seen, and many blog commenters agree that it was probably the company’s goal to anger people and get the free publicity. But is free publicity really worth tweets like, “Congratulations; you have ruined your product for me forever with your pro-ana ad slogans. It’s too bad–I loved you,” and “How can you people sleep at night? No matter how you may try to justify it, you are promoting eating disorders.”

Finally, a week later the company agreed to take down all the offending ads.

++What To Learn From Pretzelgate 2010++
For all intents and purposes, Pretzel Crisps did a great job of responding to a social media attack on their product. They directly and individually responded to complaints over Twitter, and made themselves available for interviews.

The company offered their reasoning, and then listened to the reaction of the blogosphere. They took responsibility, they apologized, and they swiftly took action to fix the problem.
And then they messed up: they lied. They lied and they refused to understand why their other ad was just as offensive as the one that had been taken down. The company claimed they didn’t receive any negative reaction towards the other campaign slogans, which simply wasn’t true.

If you want to maintain integrity, you need to be honest and transparent, and if you’re not, your customers won’t want anything to do with you. Honestly is the best policy. Your company needs to be open and take cues from its customers, and know when it’s time to quit.

These three case studies illustrate how your brands should (or should not) handle a social media crisis. Let us know which tips you’ve learned along the way in the comments below.

Source: 08/30/10 by Stephanie Marcus