Saturday, August 30, 2014

Giving back - Boy Scouts and Social Media

All these years of working in Social Media, I've been trying to learn more about the best practices, best way to run a social site,  how to engage the audience and really communicate.   Well,  now I've got a chance to pay back - I've been selected to help build the social presence for the Trailhead District of the Heart of America Council of the Boy Scouts of America.  I'll be an editor and helping drive their social presence starting with the Facebook page for Heart of America Trailhead District.

We've got some challenges, starting with having both a page and a personal profile.  That should be easy enough to fix.  After that will be developing a content strategy and driving engagement with the page.

We'll need events and activities, photos and videos from what we're doing. It's an interesting challenge,  not only from an engagement point of view, but from a management position.  I don't know the brand or legal restrictions,  and as a volunteer, I'm limited to evenings, weekends and the occasional lunch meetings to build relationships within the Council to educate and expand the vision of social media.

Should be a great time!

Monday, August 25, 2014

Plantronics BT-300M and the Mac!

The work laptop has been giving me fits today, so on a whim I thought I'd move the BT-300M bluetooth dongle over to my vintage 2006 Mac Book Pro.  I've got Lync 2011 installed there for teleconferences and such.

Well, much to my surprise, the BT-300M was fully recognized on the Mac, and provides full call control from the Plantronics Voyager Pro headset!  Mute, call end, call answer, everything.  Very nice news - another way to avoid using the clunky work laptop.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

A personal note on SEO

A personal note on search engine optimization of your web pages. I've spent quite a few hours making sure that our Cub Scout Pack is well represented in the major search engines. If you search for Overland Park Cub Scout , our pack comes up number one in the search results in all the major engines. Tonight, it paid off. We had a new scout and parents come to our meeting who found us by searching for Cub Scouts on Google. We are able to help them join a Cub Scout Pack and build our Cub Scout Pack membership simply because I took the time follow the basic rules of search engine optimization with our Cub Scout web page. As you can tell, I'm a bit proud of this accomplishment and I'm very pleased that this band will have a chance to have their son in a great Cub Scout Pack in the future.

Today? Search challenges and Paying Attention

Today I paid attention at work.  Searched for a few things.  And found more SEO problems than I really wanted to. Pages with no machine readable content. Out of date pages so highly optimized they're still coming up in the first page of search results. I found a bunch of problems like this. I am just a Business Analyst. Its not my day job to pay attention to production issues. The first thing to do is find the stakeholders for all of these pages. Most of these changes are pretty simple. About 90 seconds maybe 2 or 3 minutes to really make the change in some of the pages. But since I'm not operations, I have to take it to the business owners to ensure that the changes I want to make are the same as their 'vision'.

So tomorrow, we meet with stakeholders and process people and more to start fixing some of these SEO issues we find on the production site.

It seems that by paying attention I've only made more work for myself and everyone else on the digital team. But the upside to paying attention will ensure the customer has a better experience and can actually find what they are looking for when they search for our new key words.

When it comes right down to it, paying attention benefits a customer. And that's what it's all about right? Taking care of what our customer needs.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

What have I been doing? New Plans from Sprint!

Been off the blog all summer - heads down with Scouting and Sprint!  We've been quietly developing what I feel are some of the most outstanding plans in wireless.  We're back in the game, competing to be the best third place phone company out there!

T-Mobile has been buying gross adds (new customers) by giving away the house on their plans - $100 for 5 lines, 10 GB shared data among the lines. Pretty sweet deal, no contract, etc.

Well, now we're upping the ante.  We kicked off the Family Share Plan with a splash this week, where $100 will get you up to 10 lines, 20GB shared data, 2GB per line exclusive data. Oh yeah, and unlimited talk and text.  And that's just the start.  Our creative teams, IT teams, planning, analysts, and everyone on the Digital team has been laser focused on getting this rolled out and launched.  Fascinating and fun work when we're all driving to a great customer focused goal.

Want to find out more?  New customers to Sprint get the best deal - but existing Sprint customers can still migrate their plans (up to 4 lines) and get unlimited talk and text and 20 GB (or more) data.
Plan Grid comparing Sprint to the rest.  #DoubleIsBetter

Find out more from Sprint:

(ObDisclaimer - I work for Sprint, I do not speak for them, nor was I compensated for this post.  Just excited about the new plans!)