About Talia Whyte

Posts by Talia Whyte:

Upgrade Your Brand Standard Guide

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Brand standard guides used to be things only big, Fortune 500 corporations would create for their brand.  But now with the proliferation and accessibility of marketing tools today, small businesses are also expected to maintain a brand identity.  This is especially helpful for any vendors you employ, including graphic and web designers, product developers, and other marketing and sales professionals, to better understand how to use your brand.

Before we start, let’s define what a brand identity standards guide is for those who don’t know.  A brand standard or style guide is a set of instructions that let others know how to use your brand identity, and, thus, create consistency with how your brand is viewed by others.  The guide will provide instructions on how to use your logo, colors, layouts, images, and typography in a variety of media, such as package design, stationery, social media, website, email, banners, etc.

A standard guide can be in any format, including a PDF file that can either be downloaded from a website or printed or a dedicated brand standards page on your website.  You should choose a format that is easy to update, as your brand standards may change regularly.

Depending on the type of business you run and who your client base is, the size of your standards guide could vary from a couple of pages to dozens of pages.  All standards guides should at least have the following components:

  1. Introduction: Tell users the general purpose of the guide
  2. Organizational MIssion: What does your organization stand for and why you selected this brand identity.
  3. Logo: What you can and can’t do with it and what’s acceptable.  Show the logo in both color and black and white.  Should there be a clearance space around the logo?  What are the dimension restrictions?
  4. Color Palette: What are the official colors your company uses to represent its brand?  Show the actual color(s) in RGB, CMYK, and Pantone.
  5. Typography: Show the entire alphabet, numbers, and other special characters in the font(s) that your organization uses.
  6. Images: Show examples of photos that are acceptable and show specific styles.  Be specific about what images are not acceptable.
  7. Copy: What type of copy or text is acceptable to express your brand?

Again, this is a very basic explanation of a standards guide, and every company has a different approach to using one.  This is a great time to create a standards guide to start your organization off on the right foot!  For more information on creating a brand standards guide for your organization, contact my company.  

So You Want To Talk About Race

I recently read Ijeoma Oluo’s book, So You Want To Talk About Race, for an upcoming book discussion.  It is such a fabulous, easy to digest read on many lightning rod issues around race today.  Each chapter focuses on one issue, then the author presents the problem with the issue and how to address it.  Issues range from intersectionality to model minorities to black hair.  I highly recommend it for those you who plan to attend any virtual Thanksgiving dinners or online holiday parties and need a way to defend yourself against your Blue Lives Matter family and friends.  The book gives you more confidence to speak about these issues with more authority.

Are Black Supremacist Groups A Thing?

Speaking of white supremacists, there was a time when the Nation of Islam was considered a black supremacist group.  The Southern Poverty Law Center still considers it a hate group.  However, in the black community, NOI is a highly respected organization, namely for its civil rights activism and its association with Malcolm X.

In 1961 Malcolm X, who was still part of NOI at the time, did a radio interview with James Baldwin to discuss the failures of integration and the racial turmoil the country was in.  The conversation sounds like it could have happened today.

Content Audits: An In-depth Look

The world "Content"

What is a content audit?

No, a content audit has nothing to do with your taxes.  Rather, it is an inventory check of the content on your website, social media, or other online platforms.

Why would I want to do a content audit?

The main purpose of having a content strategy is to make sure the information you are presenting online is consistent with your organizational messaging and brand identity.  It’ a good idea to do audits to keep your content on point.

What things should I be looking for in a content audit?

This depends largely on what the goals are behind your content strategy.  An audit can be an inventory of your whole website, or certain parts of it.  Some audits might look at the effectiveness of the video or Twitter strategies or blog posts.  There is also something called content sampling, where you randomly select content on your website to review.

How exactly do you conduct a content audit?

In the simplest fashion by using a spreadsheet, a basic audit for a website will include columns for the following: Page Title, Page URL, Keywords/SEO, Description, Date Published, and Audit Date.  There you want to go through your website and fill in the rows with the metrics you are auditing. If you use a web traffic reporting tool like Google Analytics or Hootsuite, you would need to match the traffic with the pages.

You will spend your time reviewing the conversion rates and content for your pages on the spreadsheet.  Are images easy to view and tagged correctly?  Are pages meeting the standards for web accessibility? Are blog posts written with proper grammar and embedded keywords?

Now would be a good time to correct and/or delete any content that no longer serve your purposes. Depending on how much content you are reviewing, like a website with hundreds or even thousands of pages, the process might take a while and you will need to get your co-workers or colleagues to help you.

How often should I do a content audit?

It depends on what your content strategy looks like.  Most people do it quarterly or annually to coincide with company financial reporting.  Others do it monthly or even weekly.  No matter how often you do an audit, it is always a good idea to review how your content strategy is working for you.

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