Social Media Style Guide

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Marketing Musings, Social Media

Hi everybody. Your social media handyman Brian is here with another tool for your social media toolkit. To learn how you can build your own social media style guide, grab your hammer and a bag of nails and read on.
It should go without saying that every company should have a social media style guide for many of the same reasons that communications departments have style guides. What is a style guide, you may ask? It’s a reference document that provides communication uniformity. You want to maintain consistency across multiple communications channels. You don’t need to develop an elaborate AP size style guide, but you should have a basic outline for internal use.

Let’s start with the basics, using me as a test case:

Username – If at all possible, you should attempt to use the same username for all of your social media properties. What that means is your Twitter account has the same name as your YouTube channel and the same name as your StumbleUpon account. If your username is on the longer side, your style guide should have a couple shorter variants for those websites that limit the length of the username. For instance, my Twitter name @captainchunk could also be @cptnchunk.

User image – Having a user image is one of the best things you can do for customer engagement. Even though the effort to post an image to a social media account is minimal, the visual cue that a viewer gets when they click a link on your Twitter post and jump to your YouTube account lets them know it is your content and your brand.

Bio –There is a little more leeway in what you can use for your bio across social media tools, so you might want to include a few different versions in your social media style guide. Your bio might be tailored to different social media websites depending on the kind of social media and the number of words the websites allow, or the personality you are trying to show off. For example, your Twitter bio is brief, limited to 140 characters, whereas with LinkedIn you want to be more detailed.

Links – This is another important section to have in your style guide. You could specify a single link that all of your social media outlets would link back to, but I would suggest having a few different links to choose from depending on which social media website you are setting up. For instance, you might want a LinkedIn account linking back to your career page, or you might want the link in your Twitter account linking to the webpage for your latest product launch.

Those are the four main sections any social media style guide should have. Let’s see how we (Projectline) does? Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Delicious. We use a common image and user name across all four accounts, tailor our bio for each account, and link back to our website – it’s a start!

If you have suggestions for a social media style guide, post them in the comments.

Until next time, don’t forget to be a social (media) animal!

Infographics for fun and function

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Design Services, Marketing Musings

This is a guest post by Eric Burgess. A grad student at the UW, Eric is studying for his Masters of Communication in Digital Media. Eric is a Social Media geek and recovering skateboarder, having spent the last few years blogging and building up communities in the action sports industry. When he’s not blogging about being a fashionable dad, he can be found spending time with his family, shopping, and tweeting.

What are Infographics?

From Wikipedia: ‘Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.’ They are a great resource for solving communication problems. Truthfully, the best way to describe their purpose is that they allow us to graphically digest large amounts of data that we’d otherwise have to read and sift through to learn.

Infographics not only help readers quickly digest lots of information in a visual way, they can also serve to help drive traffic to a website. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but even the most basic infographic can drive new visitors to your site. The use of infographics in newsletters, RSS feeds, blogs, white papers and other pages throughout your site won’t only help drive additional traffic but it also helps with brand awareness and organic search rankings.

For a recent client infographic, we really looked hard at the data that was presented to us in this case study. Microsoft’s Windows Azure had helped Lockheed Martin scale their business in a fast, flexible way. Additionally, Lockheed Martin gave their customers cost-effective access to IT resources. We took a very simple theme of “cloud computing” and built the graphic around that. We also used a “word cloud” to call out the benefits of Windows Azure and drew a plane to symbolize Lockheed Martin. In the end it worked out really well and we were pleased with its simplicity.

Since the image file was saved as a .jpeg, we were able to email it to our clients for distribution on blogs, Twitter and Facebook. It’s the perfect medium to have them link back to the original case study which was ultimately our goal.

For more information on infographics, check out Alltop’s infographics section.

Projectline: Seattle’s Favorite Small Company

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Marketing Musings, News

For the third time in the past several years, Projectline has been named Seattle’s Best Small Company in the NWJobs People’s Picks Awards.

Projectline team members had an opportunity to vote in support of the company, as well as submit comments about what makes Projectline a stand-out employer. Projectline’s open and supportive work environment, its commitment to community involvement, and its thoughtful perks (like Green Commuter benefits) topped the list.

This recognition speaks to the fulfillment of Projectline’s mission statement, “To positively impact the people we work with, the people we work for, and the people in our community.”

“The fact that our employees continue to vote for us year over year is awesome,” says Projectline Human Resources Manager Leisl Hill. “As we’ve grown, we’ve tried to maintain an atmosphere that accommodates not only productivity, but growth and fulfillment on both a professional and personal level. It’s great to receive feedback that shows we’re succeeding.”

A division of NWSource, a Seattle Times Company, NWJobs is the premier Northwest employment resource website, where local job-seekers can search for great positions, post resumes, and get tips on interviewing, salary information, and more.

Campaign Desk Coordinator Support

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Job Openings

Position Overview:

Are you passionate about marketing and technology? Do you thrive in a fast-paced, informal, but exceptionally efficient environment? Were you at the top of your class in marketing, enthusiasm, and formal grades? Do your friends consider you a likable, humorous, generous, positive, and exceptionally decent person? If this sounds like you, then please read on!

Projectline is looking for talented people to be part of a marketing team that will be working directly with one of our largest clients. Years of experience are not as important as innate talent and willingness to work hard and learn. This is a great opportunity for a recent graduate or someone just getting started in marketing to start your career from the ground up and learn from some of the best.

This team will work full time out of our Bellevue office, but some opportunities for flexible hours and/or telecommuting may be possible in the future. You’ll get to work with some of the most talented and down-to-earth people in the business with plenty of project diversity and client challenges to ensure you’ll never be bored.
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