A cure for blogger's block

While my last post about Twitter and my mixed feelings about what constitutes an appropriate Tweet did generate several positive comments from readers in my off-line world, it didn't do a whole lot to help me to figure out what I should be digitally dissecting on Twitter, here, or elsewhere.

As I tend to do when I am stumped by such things, I asked my pal Google for help.

Inspiration came from an article titled “100+ SMB Blogging Ideas to Kick Start 2010” and in particular item number 10 under the section called “About Your Business.”

The suggestion: Blog about how you are using Facebook.

Although our Facebook use with respect to our corporate identity as Zephyros Inc. has been minimal so far, the Zephyros team has leveraged the power of Facebook quite well in the area of community service. Specifically, we have used Facebook to promote a local blood drive sponsored by the MOMS Club of LME.

This year’s blood drive, our third annual, will happen on Thursday, October 28, from noon through 7 p.m. at the Emmaus Public Library. As in past years, we are working with Miller-Keystone Blood Center, the only supplier of blood in the Greater Lehigh Valley. As you can well imagine, Miller-Keystone handles quite a few blood drives each year, and we are proud to say that they have termed our community blood drive among the most successful they have ever seen.

To ensure that that success continues, as in past years, we will be booking donation appointments prior to October 28. And, as in past years, we will be creating a Facebook event page to promote this event and secure donors. In the meantime, please email me at jmmarangos@zephyrosinc.com for more information about the blood drive or to set up an appointment to donate.

Of course any members of the business community who would like to help promote the blood drive within their organizations, provide incentives for donors, or come out and share a pint or two on October 28, are encouraged to get in touch as well.

Oh my, I just got the chills. I think I just felt the true power of social media marketing…

If you don't have anything nice to tweet...

True confession time: I am having a real problem with my new, self-assigned role as social media guru at Zephyros Inc. and I don't know what to do about it.

I have done a lot of research on the topics of blogging, tweeting, and the like.

I have spoken to many people who employ the packaged popular social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook to their business advantage, as well as the looser forms of electronic communication like Twitter.

I have advised people in my professional and personal lives on how to use these tools to their advantage -- and quite successfully, I might add.

But, I find myself at a loss in terms of how best to leverage these things to our company's advantage.

I know that a silent blog is a dead blog.

I know that studies are showing that the vast majority of users with Twitter accounts are silent, with 80 percent of accountholders, like me, having a lifetime tweet total of less than 10.

But I also know that the hit rate on our fledgling company Web site has gone up considerably since I started on this journey, albeit a meandering one, a few weeks ago.

I sent out a tweet earlier today. Actually, I re-tweeted an article about the 18 things a business could tweet about.

I didn’t tweet because I wanted to, but because I felt like I was “supposed” to. As a communicator, I am not sure I feel good about that. In many ways, I just added more noise to what I view to be a pretty deafening landscape.

I would welcome any thoughts on this topic. Is there value to tweeting? Is there business value in tweeting? How about blogging? Can a small business owner use a blog to some sort of business advantage?

Or if you don’t have anything nice to tweet about, would it be better not to tweet at all…

What's in a name?

It's been a week or so since the Zephyros team has focused its energies on this long overdue push into self-promotion, but it doesn't mean we haven't been thinking about it!

As pretty much every small business owner knows, internal marketing projects get "backburnered" when a client needs something, right?

But, we're happy to report that we do have a couple of new Web pages on the Zephyros site -- a revised services page that's visually improved from where it was earlier this month, and a newly developed FAQ page, which answers, among other things, how Zephyros, Inc. got its name.

We hope you enjoy our story and we'd love to hear the story behind your company name.

Giving credit where credit is due?

One of the items on the Zephyros Inc. to-do list as we work to enhance our virtually non-existant online presence is the construction of a more robust company Web site. We took the first tiny step down that path last week, uploading a new "home" page for our site, http://www.zephyrosinc.com/.

While we have designed and maintained Web sites for a variety of entities in the Lehigh Valley and beyond over the last decade, we have always been tripped up by the best design for the Zephyros Web site and how to most appropriately represent ourselves on the Internet. Fearing to take a mistep in this area, for a long time we haven't moved.

That changed last week, but I would be lying if I said giving birth to that single page was easy. Still hung up on the design-side of things, we began our construction efforts with a Web template we found through http://opensourcetemplates.org/. The template we selected was created by http://Studio7designs.com/. We changed the code and the graphics, we took care of browser incompatibilities, and fixed code bugs to make the template fit our creative vision.We provided a credit line to both organizations in the footer of our new page.

In sharing free Web templates, OpenSource invokes the Creative Commons Public License (CCPL) as a means of protecting its work. Our reading of the CCPL is that "you can use our stuff and change it as much as you like, but you still have to give us credit." So, that's what we did.

On some levels we "get" it, and on some levels, quite honestly, we're not sure. If an author writes a story about a shark, is he obligated to give credit to Jaws creator, the late Peter Benchley?

We would welcome any thoughts on this subject...

Blogging, the next...version

So, Zephyros Inc. officially took it's first, and long overdue, step into the world of self-promotion yesterday. In particular, we are focusing on marketing in the electronic world for obvious reasons.

Our journey began yesterday with the posting of a single, simple Web page in our Web space: www.zephyrosinc.com. The new home page now sits above the rather crudely designed services page that has served as our company placeholder page for far longer than we would ever care to admit. The text on that page gives you a bit more information on our self-imposed mission.

Today's task was to start a blog. Something that pretty much everyone has been doing for a long, long time. And, because blogging is nothing new, we figured that we would be able to cross this important and seemingly simple task off of our list before pouring our second cup of coffee.

Boy were we wrong. More on that to come.

For now, we remain committed to the challenge we've given ourselves. And pledge to our clients that from this point on we will only be using the phrase "do as I say and not as I do" with children.