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Articles filed in: Strategy
25 Ideas On Using Instagram For Business
Instagram is a ‘real-time’ photo sharing application currently available as a free App for iPhone and iPod with plans to extend to a website and other mobile platforms in the near future.
More than that though it’s a storytelling, entertainment and engagement platform with 3 million users and growing, (update now at 10 million+) from every corner of the globe. You can see the world as it is, as it’s happening through the eyes of real people, share your own images and start conversations. Instagram also enables users to share their photos on other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Four Square.
Why are people using it?
The beauty of Instagram is that it erodes all of the problems of photo sharing. It’s fast and easy to use on the go. It makes photos, even ordinary ones look beautiful with a series of filters you can apply in seconds. It integrates seamlessly with other social sharing platforms. There are an increasing numbers of websites and platforms which allow Instagram users to share and buy physical products of images. It connects and entertains people. It allows them to tell their story. And it’s free!
Why should brands and businesses be interested?
Instagram is a place where people are sharing and telling their story through images in the moment. It goes beyond Twitter’s; ‘what are you doing?’. In fact many commentators are describing it as Twitter meets Flickr.
It provides ‘real time’ insights into how people are interacting with the world and most probably your product. This platform will enable brands to connect directly with users and customers like never before and gain ‘real-time’ insights into how consumers are interacting with their brand.
How and why businesses and brands should use Instagram?
1. It helps brands to find products for their customers not just customers for their products.
2. It’s an opportunity to conduct real-time market research.
3. To drive momentum.
4. To get people talking about what you do and why you do it.
5. For customer engagement and intuitive marketing.
6. To deepen relationships.
7. It enables you to put the customer front a center.
8. For running competitions.
9. To see and hear what consumers believe about your brand.
10. To get opinions before you need them.
11. As a way to create a buzz about what you are doing.
12. As a platform to help fans find and interact with each other over a shared love of what you do.
13. It’s free!
Getting started
14. Download the Instragram App and create your profile.
15. Obtain the all important username (many brands have yet to act on this, think Twitter).
16. Post photos of your products and behind the scenes of your business.
17. Announce your Instagram arrival to your followers and fans on other social sharing platforms.
18. Ask for feedback.
19. Listen to comments.
20. Interact with your followers.
21. Search hashtag categories to gain insights into how people are interacting in your space.
22. Tell your brand story in new and interesting ways.
23. Post regularly and monitor your account.
24. Share your photos across other social sharing platforms.
25. Optimize.
UPDATES:
How non-profits are using Instagram to engage with their communities.
Is your business on Instagram?
How to run a photo contest on Instagram.
Instagram tips from top beverage brands.
Image by Xava du.
How Apple Succeeds By ‘Thinking Different’
filed in Strategy
“We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know.” Steve Jobs.
Lots of people can do what you do as well as you can do it. If that’s not the case and you’re lucky enough to be the best in the world, or even better the only one in the world, then you probably won’t be for long. Plenty of other companies make good reliable computers. That’s what they are about. How Apple succeeds is by understanding and communicating what they’re not about.
“What we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done.” Steve Jobs
What Apple wants us to know and believe about them is that their company has a soul, that they don’t respect the status quo and that they work to help people with passion push the human race forward.
What are you not? And what do you want your customers to know?
Image Nathan Makan.
So…. What Do You Do?
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
Have you ever had difficulty explaining the really cool project you’re working on to people? You’re not the only one! Even really smart people get stuck at trying to tell us what they do.
The founders of Instagram, (the iPhone app that is taking communication in the social space by storm), Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger made an admission during an interview last week. They realised the project they were working on before Instagram, (Burbn a location based app) wasn’t going to fly because they were having difficulty explaining it to people. So they changed tack and built something that they could explain in a single sentence. Instagram is, “a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures.”
If your audience doesn’t ‘get it’ then how are you ever going to resonate? Resonance is what makes ideas fly, and spread. It’s what elects leaders, creates lovemarks and propels movements.
We need to get better at helping people to understand what we do and why we do it, so they can figure out where our ideas, products and services might fit into their lives. We have only thirty seconds to convince them, that’s one sentence, maybe two.
And perhaps most important of all we need to give people a reason and the language to share us with their friends.
Image by Paul G.
Framing Your Scarcity
filed in Strategy
Do you know a woman on the planet who wouldn’t get excited if she was handed this blue box?
I bet if a behavioral economist studied this they’d find that on a scale of one to ten, the excitement about the contents would rate lower than the elation experienced on receiving the box. The scarcity of the blue box is what creates the value Tiffany & Co. This works for your brand, business or idea too. Framing your scarcity enables you to demonstrate your value.
Understanding and acknowledging what’s rare or unique about what you do, or how and why you do it is the key.
Perhaps you make beautiful one off silk scarves? Maybe you only work with two design clients at a time? You might have the ability to stop people censoring their dreams? Or maybe you’re launching an event that sells to just 140 people? Can you build a website in a weekend, or an amazing iPhone app that’s scarce because everyone wants to try it?
Have you spent the best part of four years bringing about the dream of opening an Artisan Bakery that only opens for five hours and sells out of a tiny range every day?
Unless you’re making brass thumb tacks, there is an element of scarcity in what you do and how and why you do it, a combination of your story and your superpower.
Uncovering that and working out how to tell the world about it is your goal.
Image by Andrew Hoyer.
Your Best Idea….
“There is no map. You are the mapmaker.” Shoshana Zuboff
Your best idea…..
… is not always the one that will make the most money.
… may be the one that people laugh at.
… is true.
… could be tested or implemented for close to free.
… can be explained in 140 characters or less.
… might seem insignificant.
… may not be yours.
… is scarce.
… might be exclusive.
… is already out there.
… is original.
… makes a promise.
… is not for everyone.
… is untested.
… could be instinctive.
… might be strategic.
… is carefully planned.
… is accidental.
… has been tried by others.
… tells and old story in a new way.
… connects people.
… scares you.
… is impractical.
… is generous.
… creates meaning.
… happens out of the corner of your eye.
… is at the edge of what already exists.
… doesn’t need the permission of others.
… is the one they said wouldn’t work.
… could be given away for free.
… is your passion.
… could be boring.
… might fail.
… deserves to see the light of day.
… is an opportunity.
… changes the way people think and act.
… solves a problem.
… benefits others more than you.
… hasn’t come to you yet.
… needs a deadline.
… brings people joy.
… is easy to share.
… changes how people feel.
… matters.
What else?
Image by John Cooper.
There’s Only One Orla Kiely
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
There’s only one Orla Kiely but a hundred ways to experience her brand. A brand that appeals across generations from teens to youthful grandmothers.
That doesn’t mean that Kiely’s multicolored designs inspired by the 1960s and 1970s appeal to everyone, quite the opposite. You will either love them or hate them. Orla says that “they are for confident women who know what they like and who are not necessarily victims of fashion.”
I’m guessing that when she moved into designing handbags rather than hats (after her father noted during her first London Fashion Week that everyone was carrying a handbag, but no one was wearing a hat!), that Orla didn’t design things for everyone. She already had a clear picture in her mind of the women she was making things for.
And because they weren’t for everyone her bags were something to covet and once you had one, to share. I was introduced to a friend’s purse once with the words; “this is my Orla Kiely”.
Whatever your idea is, whatever you hope to sell or spread, you need to consider how and why your customer will share it with her friend. There may not be a scarcity of handbags or designers out there but there is a shortage of stories we care enough about to share.
Create those kind of stories and who knows maybe one day your design will be featured on a bus, car, or maybe even a postage stamp.
Image by Tilde Shop.
What Makes A Good Tagline?
filed in Brand Naming, Strategy
As entrepreneurs and brand builders we like to think that our tagline could be the thing that positions our brand uppermost in the minds of clients and customers.
We want something original and unique, a brilliant one liner that will make us unforgettable. I am asked what makes a great tagline a lot.
I could write a list and tell you that it needs to:
- Be memorable.
- Resonate with your idea and your mission.
- Include a key benefit of your brand.
- Appeal to the senses not to logic.
- Help to recall the brand name. “Coke is it.”
- Differentiate your brand.
- Communicate positive feelings about your brand. “Love where you live.”
- Convey the brand strategy.
- Avoid current trends. Like the one word tagline which anyone could ‘own’.
- Avoid corporate speak and jargon. Anything that sounds like a bank tagline.
I’d like to re-frame the question though by asking what does your tagline do?
Does it fill the white space on your business card and website header? Or does it communicate your intention to staff and customers? My friend Angela runs ‘Australia’s best cafe’.
Does your tagline stand for something customers can believe? Zappos’ really is, ‘powered by service’.
Does it tell and old story in a new way, ‘3 socks, 2 feet, 1 you’?
Is it easy to spread because it’s true, Moleskine, sells, ‘legendary notebooks’.
Does your tagline create meaning? Is this something your customers, clients or donors care about?
Are you making a promise you can keep, because that’s what really matters?
Image by Jamison Weiser.
Make Meaning
filed in Strategy
Sharing your idea with the world has never been easier.
You don’t even need the marketing budget of Revlon like you did in the old days. Today the best brands tell stories that people want to believe and make meaning before making money. Some of the biggest successes of our time, Facebook, Google and Twitter made meaning first and money later. Tiny charitable foundations have found their voice in a crowded marketplace through their ability to tell and share a story that people wanted to believe.
Each of the foundations below started with the passion of just one person and their will to tell a story and spread an idea that would change something.
Childsi Foundation
Shelterbox
charity : water
Room to Read
Designers, cafe owners and shoe retailers have done this too. There are a hundred different ways you could do this for free and nothing to stop you.
Image by Bethan.
Why Magical Trumps Logical
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
Look around you. Think about the last thing that you bought. It might have been a $4 cup of coffee, the latest iPhone or an ecourse online. Now think about why you bought it. Was it something you needed? Or more likely something that you wanted.
If customers bought everything based purely on logic then Jimmy Choo would be out of business and everyone would be buying shoes from Target.
If every product sold purely because of its features and benefits alone then Alex wouldn’t be willing to wait (first in line) overnight outside the Apple store in Sydney so he could be one of the first to own an iPad 2 tomorrow morning. When I asked him why he would do that; (the magic of Twitter), he told me it was 90% passion, people, excitement and 10% product. He’s there for the story he can tell himself, for the “excitement of meeting people from all over with a common passion for something, a goal.”
“90% of lining up is the company you meet and 10% is the product. You will always have the product to use, but the mates you meet last longer and sometimes forever. Perhaps it is being in line for hours on end with nothing to do but chat with your fellow comrades; or just the excitement that you get from dreaming about having the latest gadget. It’s truly an experience and it’s simply exhilarating. Not easily replicable, but often compared to queuing for U2’s concert tickets or that End-of-Season sale at Manolo Blahnik. In one word, it’s passion.”
Alex Lee (via email from the front of the line 24/03)
Listen to how Apple introduces us to the iPad using adjectives like, magical, awesome, magnificent, gorgeous and unbelievable.
Your customers want you to tell them these kind of stories too. They want to get excited about what you do. They want to trust you to keep your promises. They want to connect and belong, to share in the story.
Most of all they want your brand and your products to be unique, incredible and magical so that they can feel that way too.
Image by mbeo.
Questions To Ask Before Launching An Idea
It’s not that hard to get really enthusiastic about your own great idea for a business, product, service or movement. But how do you work out if other people will be excited enough about it to spread the idea and buy what you’re selling?
Launching something new might mean that you don’t have all the answers, perhaps though you could start by asking yourself some simple questions?
1. How is this idea different and better than what already exists?
2. What shortcut does it offer? A miracle, pleasure, money, fun, safety, social success or something else?
3. What does one person say to another when they recommend it?
4. Does it appeal to logic or to the senses?
5. Who is it aimed at?
6. Why will people want this thing, book, website or service?
7. Can I tell a story that nobody else can tell?
9. Will this change how people feel about what already exists?
10. Will it make someone laugh? Will it make them cry?
11. Can it be implemented on a tiny scale for little or no money?
12. How will I know when it’s working? What’s my metric for success?
Even if you don’t have all the answers you can still ask yourself the right questions?
Image by Simon Elgood.