Paul Kortman

For those of you who follow me due to my social media strategy, this is a little break from the norm. I am a nerd and I used a lot of resources to develop this script, so in an effort to give back to the community I’m gonna nerd out for a post.

The Problem with ISO-8859-1 aka Latin1

I am not an expert in character encoding, so I’ll break it down in human terms. Latin1 cannot hold as many characters as UTF8. This becomes a problem when you have encoding from applications such as Microsoft Word, or different languages. UTF8 on the other hand can store everything latin1 can and a whole lot more. As an example, and to learn more about how to make your websites UTF-8 compatible, see Geir Berset’s Mother of all UTF-8 Check lists. Continue reading »

Try this video on for size. It is how I try to explain why social media is important to your brand. Anything Social about your brand (on or offline) is important to sales. But don’t take my word for it: Continue reading »

Policies: The Blame Game?

I recently asked for help in Drafting up some example Social Media Policy and Strategy Documents, I have had a number of responses both on twitter and offline.

I’d like to highlight a couple of those today regarding Social Media Policy. Continue reading »

Thanks for the Love John.

I’ve heard some Social Media Gurus/Experts refer to LinkedIn as dead, or at a minimum the refer to it as not being social media. I have disagreed with this for a while but never really spoke up.

Until now that is. LinkedIn has a lot to offer, especially in a business context. I hope to help you understand how you can utilize LinkedIn for your business and integrate it into your social media strategy Continue reading »

From flickr user blue out

At a presentation this morning it was made plainly clear to me that businesses are looking for example social media documents. I have been tasked with writing up a couple of examples and would appreciate any help that my community would be willing to give.

I’ll be writing the following example Social Media documents

• Best Practices – Learn from others mistakes?
• Social Media Strategy – How do you enter and what is your reason for being in the social channel
• Policies and Procedures – Do updates need approval?

Continue reading »

WARNING: Do not read this post if:

1. You already have a corporate blog
2. You blog more than I do
3. You think I am a faker

There… now for those who are considering adding a blog to your online strategy, consider the following as a brief tutorial of things/concepts you should know before beginning. Continue reading »

from dianafayt @ flickr

Too often people start with the tools of social media. They, and admittedly I do too,  suggest a tool or combination of tools within the first few minutes of getting an idea of what the client does. Perhaps we need to step back and deal with the general benefits of social media. Why would a company spend the mega millions I cost on consulting (Ha, yeah right) to have me tell them what to do or how to do it? It’s because I know how to make the tools fit their needs, not make them fit the tools. Continue reading »