RssA1: 25 New Social Articles on Business 2 Community

luni, 26 noiembrie 2012

25 New Social Articles on Business 2 Community

25 New Social Articles on Business 2 Community

7 Lessons from Over 2 Years of Guest Blogging

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 02:41 PM PST

I’ve been guest blogging for over two years now.

That might not seem like a long time in the world we live in today, but it’s a long time in the internet marketing world.

In fact, it’s a VERY long time in the world of guest blogging.

2 years ago, people were barely guest blogging and a guest post on a major blog could instantly result in 500 visitors to your website the week it went live.

Not anymore.

A lot of things have changed and I’ve learned quite a lot in the process.

From my experience guest blogging in the past two years and writing around 2,000 guest posts for myself and my clients, here are 7 guest blogging lessons I’ve learned:

Lesson #1: Guest Blogging for Links Can be Very Effective

You will notice earlier on in this article that I said I’ve gotten as much as 500 visitors in a week from guest posts on popular blogs; that’s like regular occurrence.

On the better end of things, I’ve gotten as much as 1,000+ visitors from a few guest posts on A-list blogs, too.

Guest blogging for traffic was very effective then.

Today, if you can get 100, no, 50 visits from your guest post on a popular blog then you’re lucky.

Of course, everything is relative and the quality of your content matters, but the times also have changed.

Those getting results from guest blogging today are not those expecting instant traffic; they are the ones writing guest posts that can get them links and improve their search engine rankings.

It’s about thinking long-term, not short-term.

Lesson #2: Don’t Listen to Guest Blogging Pundits

There are a lot of them these days, a lot of whom know little to nothing about guest blogging or have hardly published a guest post themselves.

In my two years of guest blogging, while I’ve benefited from guest blogging advice from some guest blogging experts most of the guest blogging advice I’ve read is BS.

To be more specific, I got results by doing the exact opposite of what I was advised to do.

My point here is this, and this applies to stuff from me too, don’t just blindly follow what an “expert” says. The only way you can get results is if you get out there and do the work!

Lesson #3: Quality Always Trumps Quantity

When it comes to guest blogging for links, most people are of the belief that the best way to get results is by writing poorly-written guest posts for crappy blogs.

It doesn’t work that way.

Based on my experience, quality always trumps quantity.

Even if your sole aim for guest blogging is to gain backlinks, you’ll only get lasting results, immune to constant Google updates, by focusing on the quality of the guest post you write.

Quality guest posts also benefit your host blogger and create future opportunities for you to work together.

Lesson #4: Your Homepage Shouldn’t be a Priority for Your Guest Posts

When I just started guest blogging, my guest posts were always linking to the the homepage of my blog like everyone else was doing.

I thought this was the best thing to do since everyone was doing it, but 2 years of experience have proven it is not.

Funny enough, a lot of people still do the same thing today. It doesn’t work!

If you’re writing guest posts for links, let your guest posts link to a content landing page on your website that is comprehensive enough to get good rankings, or to an article on your blog that sells your product or service.

If you’re guest blogging for traffic, instead of linking directly to the homepage, create a special landing page for your guest posts designed to convert traffic to subscribers.

Traffic alone is useless. It’s not about the numbers, but about the actions.

Having dedicated content or landing pages is the best way to get people to take desired actions.

Lesson #5: Case Studies Work Best

In my two years of guest blogging, a very important lesson I’ve learned is that case studies work best.

While there are various forms of content you can write as guest posts, case studies will always result in more traffic and leads; everyone can write a guest post and give tips and advice, but very few people have the results and experience to prove what they’re saying.

Case studies showcase your expertise and results, and more people will pay attention to case studies and check them out than ordinary guest posts.

In my own experience, case studies result in 3 times more traffic and subscribers than other forms of content.

Lesson #6: Sometimes, Numbers Matter

While quality should always be your priority, numbers can make a lot of difference sometimes.

When you have the opportunity to contribute more than one guest post to a big blog, make proper use of this opportunity.

When done right, I’ve gotten better results from a carefully planned out guest blogging spree than a one-off guest post.

That should be obvious, but it’s worth stating.

Lesson #7: Your Blog Matters a Lot

While most people will give you tips and advice on how to get the best from guest blogging by properly formatting your guest post, linking to landing pages etc., something much more important is often ignored; your blog.

Don’t ignore your blog because of a particular guest blogging campaign.

The more active and updated your blog is, the more impact it will have on your guest blogging efforts.

These days, guest blogging alone won’t do the trick. However, guest blogging plus effective content marketing will make a difference.

The End of Search as We Know It

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 02:20 PM PST

As the world shifts to all things mobile, anew reality is emerging: mobile devices are killing search as we know it. This is one of the many insights from an excellent article on the future of search recently appearing in Ad Age, written by David Berkowitz, VP of emerging media at 360i. In the post, Berkowitz notes that mass consumer adoption of mobile, coupled with the rise of big data, are creating a world in which consumers will seldom, if ever, need to actively search for things. Thanks to advances in predictive analytics, consumers' needs will be anticipated and fulfilled before they are actually expressed (or even realized) in the form of a constant stream of predictive recommendations sent to their mobile devices.

Predictive recommendations represent the creepy side of the Internet, giving birth to a sort of chicken and egg/virtuous cycle emblematic of many a technological advancement. As Berkowitz writes, "people will train technology with their behavior, and the technology will train people as the relevance of its recommendations increases."

Creepy, indeed.

ENOUGH (CONTENT), ALREADY!

To confuse the picture further, big data combined with the trend of big brands as (content) producers will equal a big headache. Imagine Exxon mobile providing fresh and original content (as Google encourages brands to provide for better SEO) targeted to the multifarious segments of its target audience-i.e. we gas guzzling masses. Worse still, what about P&G, with its scores of products and brands? Give a company like P&G the capability of predictive recommendations and the utility of robo-content providers like Narrative Science, and you've got a veritable hydrant of content spewing all over the Internet in unprecedented proportion. It will be interesting to see whether (or how) Google and other search engines adjust their algorithms to keep up.

Makes you sort of long for the days of the simple, full-page ad in Life Magazine…

RAILROADING SEARCH

Enter Google, who like a bad penny always seems to turn up when there is an Internet trend that is both cutting edge and creepy.

As the old saying goes, the only constant is change. Google had a great ride with search; now it's time to adapt to the next big thing, which in this case is mobile. Traditional search engines are not conducive to mobile. Yes, voice search technologies such as Google Now and Apple SIRI may address this reality in the near term, but it is a mere bandage; the fundamental reality is that search as we have come to know it is an antiquated approach to discovery. Once the Pandora's Box of predictive recommendations has been fully opened, traditional search may slowly fade into practical irrelevancy.

Aided by the proliferation of specific-use apps (think Yelp, etc), a growing number of mobile users already go through their daily routine without the direct use of a search engine, even though the apps themselves may be using data from search engines to function. This makes me wonder whether the search engine as a technology will go the way of U.S. railroad trains: in general, they no longer house passengers but still haul tons of material (content) throughout their vast networks.

To better understand how predictive recommendations might alter the existing search paradigm, let's take a quick field trip.

GOOGLE'S FIELD TRIP APP

Officially rolled out in late September, Field Trip is an Android app that uses triangulation technology to determine a user's exact location, honing in on signals from nearby cellphone towers. Field Trip is a kind of virtual mobile tour guide, recommending to the user nearby points of interest such as shops, restaurants, cultural venues, and historical information about local landmarks.

Users can personalize Field Trip's mobile notification settings to meet their specific interests. For example, because Field Trip is integrated with other Google services like Google Now, Google Offers, and Zagat, users can decide which highly localized information, coupons, deals and reviews they want to receive; with Bluetooth, users can even talk to the app hands free while driving in the car.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that Google will likely integrate this technology into its augmented reality Google Glass project, turning us all into mobile, deal-hunting proto-cyborgs, as we stroll down the avenue with our computerized glasses feeding us the latest offers from nearby businesses.

Welcome to the world of augmented reality.

DIGRESS WITH INGRESS

But wait, there's more. Google has taken yet another step in melting away the distinction between the virtual world and physical reality with the release of its new free mobile app, Ingress. Dubbed an "alternate reality game," Ingress is the brainchild of Niantic Labs, a tech start-up that is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google (interestingly, Niantic also created the Field Trip app).

The world of Ingress revolves around the tech-based conspiracy of a shadowy group called the "Enlightened" who are trying to establish portals around the world that will let them control people’s minds. They are opposed by the aptly named "Resistance," whose mission is to stop the Enlightened. Ingress invites users to pick a side and then get out into the real world to find clues that will help them in the game: think of World of Warcraft on your street corner.

Check out this link to the Ingress promo video.

So next time you spy a pimply-faced kid on a busy street corner absently staring at a local landmark with smartphone in hand, he may not be a tourist, but an Ingresser.

GOOGLE AS SELF-DISRUPTOR

Even though the world of predictive recommendations and augmented reality may seem far away, the fact that Google is embracing such technologies suggests otherwise. Considering Google is the leader in search who also runs the world's largest mobile operation system (Android), the gang at Mountain View is acutely aware of the limitations of traditional search on mobile devices. As Berkowitz aptly points out, in an age when disruption is the new norm, Google is wisely disrupting its own search technology.

None of this means you should ditch your search engine just yet. However, predictive recommendations and augmented reality are two technologies whose progression businesses and marketers should keep a close eye on.

By the way, if you do see that kid standing on the street corner, you may want to ask him if he is a member of the Resistance or the Enlightened. I'd like to ask the same question of Google's leadership as well.

“Oldie But Goodie” Techniques to Get Followers to Your Blog

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 01:50 PM PST

The greatest feeling in the world for veteran and rookie bloggers alike is receiving a new comment notification in their inbox. It shows that people are actually reading what you put out there and that you're reaching out to people to the point of compelling them to get involved in a public forum. Attracting new followers to your blog can be challenging, especially if your niche is something commonly covered by thousands of other bloggers and mainstream media outlets. Those wondering about the benefits of blogging in today’s digital world will find the answers below.

Create Mail & Postage

One of the oldest and effective ways to grow your audience is by sending out mailings, such as holiday cards, requesting the recipient to follow your blog. All you must do is get a mailing permit from the local post office, pay a small annual fee and you’re allowed to pay commercial prices for bulk mail. Keep in mind, your mailing permit is good for 365 days after you pay the annual fee. Of course, the cards should always contain the URL, any logos and slogans for your blog, along with any message you choose to include. Keep in mind direct mail, commonly referred to as "junk mail" by consumers, is frequently discarded immediately, so it’s very important the cards capture the attention of the recipients immediately. Mailing lists targeting your potential readers can be purchased in bulk from various services such as InfoUSA and Directmail.com.

Create T-Shirts

How hard can it truly be? There’s only two basic steps that come to mind. A) sell t-shirts, b) profit! If your asking someone to wear and represent your blog, that’s a huge deal. So, if you’re going to make shirts, you should have specific purposes for your customers.

To make this work, your shirts should clearly represent what you’re trying to sell and be interesting enough to attract the curiosity of your customers.

Remember that your t-shirts should always include the URL for your blog, and any logo and slogans you use. Advertising is all about placing your product in front of enough eyes to generate a response. The best free advertising you can get is when people subsequently walk around a crowded shopping mall or college campus admiring your logo and URL. And the exchange of business cards with potential customers is another inexpensive method for breaking the ice in a new marketing business. OvernightPrints.com and other online print websites deliver business cards, brochures, postcards and much more within 48 hours time. It makes your next step in self-promotion fast and simple with no obligations.

Web Forums

An often overlooked method of drawing more attention to your blog is direct participation in popular online forums. For instance, let's say your blog is about fishing, and a big story about a 100-pound catch in the Gulf of Mexico is being talked about all across the web. You can create an account at any number of websites which allows you to comment on their stories about the big catch. The key is to always include the URL of your blog site when the registration form asks for it and make your user name (the one in which everyone sees) the same as your blog's name.

For example, if the name of your blog site is fishingwithdave.com, make this your user name, but use the word "dot" instead of the actual period, as many websites will block your registration if the tag seems like self-promotion. Most websites don’t allow you to include URL's in comments you leave, so you most likely will not be able to draw visitors that way. The key is to make your comment relevant to the story, witty and add a fresh perspective to it. At the end of the comment, simply sign it with your name and website, without using any code. This is the fastest and most direct way to see immediate results for new visitors coming to your site.

Try Email Marketing

Finally, the easiest and cheapest way to grow your audience is email marketing. People who are unfamiliar with email marketing often wonder what all the fuss is all about. Didn’t spam destroy emails as a marketing tool? And if spam didn’t kill it, what about blogs, Twitter and all the other social media communications? Isn’t email outmoded?

Those wondering about the advantages of email marketing tools in today’s ever-changing online marketing conditions consider these tips:

  • Allows targeting
  • It’s data driven
  • Direct sales
  • Builds relationships, customer loyalty and trust
  • It supports sales through other mediums

Webmasters

A webmaster can never do too much market research to determine the demographics that make up their readership. The more you know about the people coming to your site, the easier it is to find more of them. WordPress offers several plug-ins, such as Statcounter or Wassup, which give real-time statistics on the number of visitors to your site. Google Analytics is also very effective for this purpose. If your research determines that a vast majority of your readers the past month are from Russia because of an entry you wrote about President Vladimir Putin, you should write a follow-up. Those readers will ultimately come back to your site and likely recommend a few others to do the same, as long as you continue giving them what they want.

Importers, Exporters, Small Businesses Look Ahead to 2013 (Infographic)

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 01:35 PM PST

Trade show season in Hong Kong recently drew to a close. While business people from all over the world were in town, Alibaba.com took the opportunity to conduct a man-on-the-street survey, asking 399 small business owners, big buyers, sourcing agents and business developers what they expected economic conditions would be like in 2013–and how they were preparing. With recession in much of Europe, the slowdown in China and the “fiscal cliff” in the U.S., a majority of those polled said they expected 2013 would be more challenging than 2012.  Most were laying in strategies that would help them grow even if markets remain sluggish. Here’s an infographic on the survey findings:

The Connected Workplace: How Connected Are You…Really?

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 01:30 PM PST

How connected are you…really?

All this thinking about the connected workplace has made me question just how connected am I…really? My whole life feels like it revolves around connecting with people though technology, both in and out of the office. I spend my days emailing, IM'ing, Facebooking, Tweeting my friends, family and colleagues. Even if I accidently leave my laptop at home, I'm still able to connect through my Blackberry (or Crackberry as it's more commonly known these days). If I need to check something whilst I'm on holiday, I can pop into an internet café and log into our shared systems in the cloud. Short of an awful accident, there is literally no reason for me to be offline or in a communication black hole. I am ALWAYS available.

I definitely consider myself to be what Forrester's Simon Yates' calls in his blog an 'Anytime, Anywhere iWorker'. I meet his criteria of using at least three connected devices for work (Blackberry, laptop, iPad), working from three locations (office, home and ad-hoc when travelling around the world) and using over 7 applications for work in any given month (Twitter, LinkedIn, Mindjet, DropBox etc.). It turns out that I'm more connected than 84.9% of American iWorkers (Information office workers). Want to see how connected you are? Take the test for yourself and feel free to share your results underneath!

Is being so connected actually helping?

As Parker mentioned in his last post, these multiple ways to connect can often leave people feeling the need to unplug. I have to admit that I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the amount of information that comes from all of my touch-points and devices – making me feel in need of a digital diet! According to research we conducted last year, it seems a lot of people, at least in the UK, feel the same. So why is it that connecting, something which is supposed to be a help in business, has turned into a hindrance? Surely connectivity should equal collaboration.

A recent McKinsey report illustrates, that connectivity does not necessarily equate to collaboration. In fact, the assumption that being more connected with make you more collaborative could be doing you a lot more harm than good. Effective collaboration isn't solely about sharing information. Independent consultant, Dr Graham Hill, sums it up well in a ZDNet article. He believes that collaboration requires 'a conscious effort to create a way of working that promotes cooperation between different parts of the company to achieve their shared business goals'. It's not about burdening ourselves and our teams with connected devices, and multiple communication and collaboration apps that pop up on our screen and distract us. Instead, it means finding processes that allow us to work better together and effectively utilise and action anything important from the information that we are constantly receiving from being so well connected.

One solution to collaborate us all

There are lots of social collaboration tools out there at the moment: Yammer, Sharepoint, Chatter and Socialcast, to name a few. These tools only address a small niche: file-sharing and instant communication. They arguably don't provide enterprises enough assistance from a strategic or project management point of view. Truly effective collaboration solutions need to infiltrate every area of working life, for them to drive innovation and initiatives forward. They must clearly show how they can help businesses tap into the 20-25% increased productivity and $1.3 billion savings highlighted by McKinsey. Some of the more mature vendors, like IBM, have acknowledged this and developed service-led models that help customers analyse requirements, create sensible expectations, and deliver against them. At Mindjet we've been busy updating our multi-user project management solution with added social planning and task management in our quest to develop a quantifiable social enterprise collaboration solution. We want to provide software that doesn't require a huge change in the way that people are working today, but instead supports existing work practices, while bringing people, ideas and plans together. I'll be talking more about this in my next blog post so look out for it.

US Alternative Financial Service Industry Statistics

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 01:15 PM PST

Nearly 10 Million (8.2%) US Households don't have bank accounts. 28.3% of U.S. households are either unbanked or under banked.

25% of US households have used at least one form of alternative financial service and about 12% of households have used one of these products in the past 30 days

Not enough funds (33%)  is major reasons for not having Bank account followed by no need of Bank accounts ( 21%) and don’t trust banks (7.5%)

US Alternative Financial Services Usage

Infographic by- The Credit Examiner

Zombie Businesses: Four Businesses That Came Back To Life (Infographic)

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 12:55 PM PST

It’s a suffering time for businesses with the economic crisis we are pulling out of, but how many companies are still living to tell about it? Four companies stand out amongst those who were on the edge of death and were brought back to life. Companies such as Apple, Old Spice, Ford, and Lego all saw the end in sight, but luckily were able to pull themselves back up.

In a 1908 ad campaign, “even you can afford a Ford” was used for the Ford Motor Company. However, cars started going downhill after that time. By 2005, Ford’s corporate bonds had been downgraded to junk status, as a result of high U.S. health care costs for an aging workforce, soaring gasoline prices, eroding market shares, and an over dependence on declining SUV sales. In 2008 the recession brought forth the worst new-vehicle market in 30 years. However, Ford was the only American automaker to survive the recession without filing for bankruptcy or receiving a government bailout. For the first time in 50 years (aside from a brief GM strike) Ford outsold G.M. in February 2010.

This is just one example of companies witnessing the “zombie effect” and coming back to life. Here you will find out just what the other companies went through to resuscitate their businesses. Check out the infographic below presented by Best Accounting Schools to learn more.

Zombie Businesses: 4 Companies That Came Back to Life After Almost Dying
Image compliments of Best Accounting Schools

Top 5 Data Center Challenges [Infographic]

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 12:44 PM PST

Just like Rome, the Web wasn’t built in day. The gears behind the Internet – the servers, networks, hardware – will be facing some serious challenges over the next few years.

At the core of most of the challenges data centers will face is data, or the rapid increase thereof.

It’s no joke for all the geeks that keep the Internet – and the world as we know it – ticking.  For them, they will have to deal with a 800% increase in data growth through the next five years, with 80 percent of it being unstructured.

The infographic below spotlights the Top 5 Challenges for Data Centers.

Lessons Learned: The Top 10 Twitter Mistakes of 2012

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 12:40 PM PST

For brands, there's perhaps nothing more daunting than the virality of social media. Careless posts, tweets and video can go to newsfeeds, be retweeted, shared, and captured in screenshots faster than the human hand can hit "delete."

Here are ten large-scale lessons learned in 2012 that we can all use to drive service and social media response forward in 2013:

Personal Posts on Brand Accounts Don't Mix

1. A KitchenAid staffer posted this poorly-punctuated, poor-judgment tweet about President Obama's deceased grandmother during the first presidential debate:

2. A StubHub staffer was obscenely happy it was Friday and that he was leaving work – presumably after this tweet (edited for this blog post), for the last time:

Never Take Advantage of Others' Misfortunes

3. The Gap was among many brands who incorporated sales in relation to Hurricane Sandy:

4. From Sears:

5. Urban Outfitters' free shipping deal tweet during the deadly storm:

6. President's Choice:

7. This Celeb Boutique tweet drew an angry response, naturally so, following the Aurora shooting:

Rethink Robo-Responses

8. A high-profile example of automated disappointment comes from Progressive, best known for its lovable, empathetic and chatty spokesperson, FLO. For every individual who reached out to Progressive through Twitter about the company's actions surrounding a recent driving death court case, the company replied again and again with a robo-post:

Be Careful What You Tweet For

9. McDonalds' promoted hashtag #McDStories went viral, just not the way the company hoped for. Instead of sharing McDonalds' food favorites, the stories took a turn for the worse:

Don't Just Tweet About Service, Make It So

10. Time Warner Cable found that sometimes, it's not just your average customer tweeting for service. Sir Patrick Stewart, who had recently moved to Brooklyn, became frustrated with the wait time for getting cable installed in his apartment, so he took to the Twitter-sphere to voice his new-customer discontent:

Time Warner Cable responded to the post within two minutes, a fantastic response time for customer service on social media:

But the next day, they re-engaged on the very public channel without having provided the service Stewart needed:

In the coming days, Stewart finally brought the conversation stream, and his account, to a close in front of his more than 180,000 followers:

The saying is very true that we can all learn from our mistakes, and the above examples provide some valuable lessons regarding the importance of service, response and responsibility on social media. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social channels have become powerful tools for brands to better connect with and serve consumers. Remember that with every social interaction, your brand's reputation hangs in the balance. Tweet and post responsibly.

Finding the Hidden Gems in Social Engagement

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 11:18 AM PST

With holiday shopping in full swing, it's all about the great find – that hidden gem that speaks to you and more importantly, to the lucky ones on the receiving end. And that was my mission in scouring the pages and pages of research in Comblu's 2012 study – to look for those nuggets of great online community engagement in not-so-expected places. Here are some of my favorites:

Got Potential

New in 2012, a beta online community by Wells Fargo focuses on "engaging parents, students, guidance counselors and financial advisors to discuss and share information about college planning." What's cool about it? First, it's got great bones – clear and easy navigation, mission appropriate engagement and active discussions, faceted search to help you find the answers you're looking for, consistent community management, and good return motivators (reputation management and member recognition).

Wells Fargo Beta Community

Second, it's a bright spot in the fairly lackluster banking and financial services sector. Not a whole lot of high performing communities in this highly regulated industry. And third, we're speculating that if the beta takes off, it'll likely serve as a "hub" for additional 'life event' centered communities, like retirement planning and first time home buying, for example. As with any new community, it's all about acquisition upfront – building a base of members to fuel those discussions. It'll be interesting to see if it lives up to its potential.

Room to Grow

The debate continues about the relative merits of Facebook vs. online communities. While we're strong proponents of a 'better together" integrated approach, there are some brands who make great use of Facebook as the backbone of its community strategy. Beyond the usual timeline posts, Westin Hotels, part of the Starwood Group, engages fans on its Discover tab. In addition to showcasing select highly rated destination properties with guest feedback and access to reviews, consumers can shop for Westin's Home Collection bedding and spa products, book their stay, share their feedback and experiences, and engage with its 'resident' fitness expert about staying fit on the road.

Sounds simple but you'd be surprised by how few brands do more than the standard "blocking and tackling" on the social network, even when it's their primary community engagement hub. Westin integrates its Facebook community well with the main website and also extends the Discover experience to mobile – another rarity in our study.

Live-Social Integration

With the exception of Starbucks, the beverage industry has not been tearing it up in the study historically. But this year, the sector made major leaps in engagement. With Coca-Cola joining Starbucks among the 'bright lights' in 2012 and four of five brands demonstrating cohesive strategies, there are some great lessons to pick up here. One element that stands out to me is the close integration of online and offline engagement.

Take Bacardi and its 'community without walls' approach. The brand crowd sourced two live events – in New York and Las Vegas – based entirely on its Facebook fans' preferences in music, food, leisure activities, forms of entertainment and, of course, cocktails. Consumers could win an invite to one of the "Like it Live, Like it Together" events by sharing their best experiences with friends.

In synch with its brand POV of getting people together (over a great cocktail made with Bacardi), there's the Bacardi Party Planner widget on Facebook. You tell it how many guests, how long the party will last, the theme, the meal and they provide you with drink recipes and a Spotify playlist that you can easily download right from Facebook.

Bacardi party starter widget

So what do all of these 'gems' have in common? They're:

  • Consistent with who the brand is and wants to be;
  • Relevant to the target consumers' interests and needs;
  • Not an 'island' – they play well with other social assets; and,
  • Pretty easy to engage with ongoing.

We found countless examples of brands doing it right when it comes to creative, on-target engagement. I just cherry picked a few of my favorites – a few surprisingly from segments not cited for their community prowess. You never know where great inspiration will come from – when you find it, consider it a gift.

Twitter Chats for Inbound Marketers [Guide]

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 10:30 AM PST

Want to know the secret to Twitter success? It's simple: participate in Twitter Chats.

Why?

  • Fast access to like-minded community (hello, target audience!)
  • Great way to make friends, not just connections
  • Sounding board for questions and ideas
  • Stay current on industry trends and news
  • Build your personal brand

At first glance, chats are often confusing and intimidating. Don't let the hashtag fool you! After a few chats you will be a pro.

Here's how to fake until you make it.

Twitter Chat 101

A good chat should have two things: a topic for discussion and a moderator.

  • The topic should be promoted via the hashtag on Twitter a few days prior, so all participants know what to expect. (Many chats also have websites or blogs for chat archiving, and will post the chat questions.)
  • A moderator is in charge of conversation flow and pace. They ask the questions and encourage conversation while keeping an eye on the clock.

If you aren't sure how to wade into the tweeting waters, start small.

  • Introduce yourself (name, position, location) and mention it's your first chat. A chat pro will most likely Tweet you a warm welcome. They'll also show you the ropes of the chat if you ask politely.
  • Follow the moderator and the chat pros who welcome you to easily DM them questions about how the chat works if they follow you back.
  • Remember, you don't have to jump into the conversation until you're comfortable!
  • An easy way to participate is to RT Tweets from other chatters that you like, agree with and/or share good information. For example, "RT @lediamedia: A1 Britney Spears is a Living Legend, I agree #LivingLegendChat".
  • Another easy participation trick? Put your response before the RT.
    For example, "She is inspiring RT @lediamedia: A1 Britney Spears is a Living Legend, I agree #LivingLegendChat".

Don't forget the hashtag! Pinky swear!

Chat hashtags are important for two reasons: it signifies your participation and ensures you show up in chat archive or recap posts.

  • When responding to the question asked by the moderator i.e. the official chat topic question(s), use the letter 'A' followed by the question number, your response, and the chat hashtag. For example, "A1 Britney Spears is a Living Legend, I agree #LivingLegendChat". This lets everyone know that your response is on topic
  • Failure to use the A# tag in responses may mean your response will not be included in the official transcript or recap. Why this is important: part of personal branding is getting your name (and Twitter handle) out there for the world to see.
  • When answering a fellow chatter's mention or asking your own question, only use the chat hashtag. This lets participants know you are going off-topic.

Twitter Chat Pro Secrets

  1. After the chat is over, thank the moderator and anyone who RT or mentioned you.
  1. Anyone stand out in this week's chat that you want to get to know better? Follow them and Tweet at them an open-ended question about this week's chat. It's the perfect icebreaker!
  1. Use Tweetchat.com to easily follow the chat and save you the hassle of typing the hashtag every time. You control how quickly the Tweet stream comes at you, so you can go at your own pace. Warning: the slower the refresh, the more delayed your responses will be.

You are now ready to get your chat on! A complete list of Twitter Chats, including times and topics, can be found here. A few of my favorite chats are #BrandChat #SMManners #CmgrChat #SEOChat #SocialChat #ToolsChat.

Looking for more social media marketing help? Check out our free guide: Increasing Conversions With Social Media.

5 Reasons Your Social Sales Aren’t Making the Grade

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 10:00 AM PST

Social marketing has created the biggest buzz in marketing in the last decade. It's a no brainer; everyone benefits from it – mega conglomerates to mom and pop shops. Have you knocked the socks off social media as we all know it?

If your answer to that question is yes, then carry on with your day. We're writing for those of us who could use a pointer or two on how to knock social media out of the park.

If your answer to that question is no, then why aren't you? Why does your social marketing fall flat on its face? Any of the 5 following problems could tank your marketing efforts: not enough quality content, fail to focus on lead generation, a poor website, not understanding client side issues, and failure to make your business exciting.

Poor Content
If your marketing copy doesn't grab the attention of your prospect from the very first sentence, your message will probably end up in the recycling bin before your prospect reads the second sentence. In the digital age, content is so prolific that no one could read it all in their lifetime. You need to make yours worth reading. Entice your prospects with something of value or you'll lose them.

Inability to Generate Leads
Sometimes, great content gets shared, but does not generate sales. Do you measure quality of content by volume of shares or by volume of leads? If you develop content purely for brand engagement, you're missing an opportunity. Content marketing with social media allows marketers to build brand awareness and engagement at the same time they generate leads. Construct your content to collect leads. Build in forms, develop and track a clear click-through path, and position your message in a way that makes it imperative for the reader to get your product to take care of this important problem. And most importantly, always include a single, concise call to action.

A Poor Website
If you have a great sales pitch and a social media delivery system that gets people excited and generates clicks, you need to have a website that offer consistent quality. If your website is cluttered, outdated or hard to navigate, all the work you've done getting the prospect to your page isn't going to matter. As soon as something becomes hard to do, the Internet savvy client will look for an easier way to do it, and your competitors will be the first to offer it to them.

Client Side Issues
Sometimes everything looks great on the server end of things, but when computer code is translated to a new format, it might look a bit different. It is important that you take the time to look at how all of your content looks on multiple platforms. Check websites and html emails in all of the major mobile and traditional web browsers (firefox, internet explorer, chrome, opera, safari, etc.). The quality of your content is immaterial if your prospects can't read it.

Boring Your Customer to Death
You could produce a powerhouse of consistently high-quality content, but at the end of the day, we all need a break from the monotony of our routines every once in a while. Make your content entertaining, and if you can't think of anything particularly clever, say something funny every once in a while. Tweet memes that make you laugh. Some marketing copy is full of great facts and fantastic reasons to buy, but if it doesn't sound fun or exciting, it's not going to make a sale. Encourage your prospects to have fun with your brand. Most of us have to work, so we should have some fun doing it. Provide that fun, and your prospects will keep coming back to you.

5 Free Twitter Tools You Can Use to Your Advantage

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 09:45 AM PST

There are many, many tools available to you as an entrepreneur to use Twitter to promote yourself and your business. From tracking your influence to market research, from mobile phones to alternate interfaces – it's all there. And best of all, many of these tools are free. Yay! Here are five free tools you can use to help build your online business.

TwitterMail - Use Email to Post Tweets
TwitterMail is especially useful for people who have phones that can send email, but don't have an app for Twitter. Basically, TwitterMail allows you to send an email to post to your Twitter account. You can specify when it'll be posted (e.g. four hours from now). Now you can tweet from anywhere, and you don't need an iPhone to do it!

Twitscoop – An Alternative Twitter Interface, with a Unique Cloud
Twitscoop allows you to send tweets, receive tweets and manage friend requests without ever having to leave the page. Unlike Twitter, where you're constantly loading and reloading, Twitscoop saves you time by never needing to reload. In other words, it's a faster, free, alternative Twitter interface. In addition, Twitscoop also features a unique Twitter cloud that can help you keep track of all the most talked-about topics in the twittersphere. So convenient!

Retweet Rank – How Many Retweets Are You Getting?
When you send out a tweet, how many people in turn tweet that out to their friends? How does your "retweet-power" measure against other Twitter users? Retweet Rank can tell you. You don't need an account; all you need to do is go to their site and type in your username. Super easy and very informative!

Twitter Grader – How Influential Are You?
Ooh, this one is super juicy. I bet everyone is going to click this one right now and see what their influence is. So, do you want to know how you stack up against other Twitter users overall? Twitter Grader can show you. In addition to stacking you up against other Twitter users, it'll also offer brief suggestions for improving your Twitter account. Don't be afraid, take a look! Hopefully the truth won't hurt.

Qwitter – Know Who Unfollowed You!
Ever wondered who clicked the Unfollow button? Ever wonder how many unfollows you're actually getting? Just because your follower count is going up doesn't mean people aren't unfollowing – you could just be getting more new followers. Qwitter will send you a daily email, showing you exactly who unfollowed you. This can be enormously useful both from a personal perspective (i.e. knowing if someone influential is losing interest), as well as from a statistical perspective (i.e. finding out your average follower retention rate). I love this one because I feel like a highly trained spy. Get rid of those fair weather friends and keep the ones who are going to pay you some attention!

These are a few free yet useful tools available to online entrepreneurs. Why not give them a try today? It won't cost you anything and can save you hours in the future. Please comment below and let me know what you think!

Calculating ROI From Social Media Intelligence

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 09:05 AM PST

measuring ROI Social media IntelligenceWe’ve been tackling social media intelligence and its advantages within inbound marketing in a few previous blog posts (here, and here), but we’ve yet to touch on an issue that is both a little more technical but essential for long-term success: measuring the return on investment (ROI) on your social media performance.

Regardless of what your social media intelligence data says about how “hot” or “trending” your business is in your social networks, you can’t determine your ROI if you can’t measure your social marketing performance. Sure, the attention is great and you’re building up your brand, but you simply need a a concrete way to measure your progress.

Define and Measure

So let’s say you have a Facebook Page and you have tons of Fans. What does that mean in terms of ROI? In other words, in terms of your reach and revenue, what sort of ROI does your Fan’s “Like” give you?

It’s a question of definition and measurement: you need to define the metrics that are important to you, and then you need a means of calculating them.

Share of Voice

For example, if we want to isolate the reach and revenue generated by a single “Like,” we can determine a value to its reach by using the computation for "share of voice" (or SOV).

Marketo (www.marketo.com/) recommends this SOV formula:

SOV = Your Brand Mentions / Total Mentions for Your Competition

In this case, SOV uses “Mentions” and not “Likes,” but the approach is the same. Your total “Like” share from this calculation can then be divided by your total “Likes,” (Like Share / Total Likes) giving you a measure of the influence of a single “Like”  on your page.

This shows how much reach one “Like” has for you, and this number can then be used for both inbound marketing and social marketing A/B testing.

To measure the revenue gained from a “Like,” Radian6 (www.radian6.com/) recommends this formula:

Your revenue from “Likes” = Your Total Monthly Facebook traffic revenue / Your Total “Likes”

This is pretty broad, but it helps give you insight into your progress. Using your actual revenue figures will give you a good idea of what happens to your revenue from “Likes” when you test something new on your social campaigns or start integrating your social campaigns with inbound marketing.

The Value of a “Fan”

If you’re still here and the formulas haven’t made you want to switch over to YouTube yet, then let’s dive a bit deeper.

In summary, your total “Likes” merely reflect how many Fans you have and how many people are talking about you on Facebook. If you're planning to invest in improving your “Like” metrics, you need to determine the "value" of these Fans first.

ComScore (Comscore.com) and Facebook say a Fan’s value is determined in three ways:

  • Depth of engagement – strength of loyalty among your Fan community (branding)
  • Incremental purchases – increased revenue generated from growth in social media "likes"(profit)
  • Influence - how many Facebook users a single Fan can influence.

Remember that “Fans” can be both leads and/or influencers and while you want to increase the value of a Fan in all of the measures above, most of the time you will need to focus on only one. In sales, for instance, profit through incremental purchases would be the priority. For inbound marketing, word of mouth marketing as well as branding are the typical priorities.

If this all sounds like a little more than you want to deal with, fear not – this is why social media marketing and the mining of social media intelligence are done by specialists.

Your inbound marketing and social media partners will walk you through these and other assessments and will handle most of the gritty stuff, but you should know the concepts and the numbers.

Mining all this Social Intelligence will help you determine your ROI and measure your success through social media. Otherwise, why bother?

Build Your Brand, and Your Website, with WordPress (Infographic)

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 08:40 AM PST

Being in the corporate realm, and working with the various Content Management Systems that proclaim to the best for the corporate sector, I can honestly say that WordPress blows them all away in ease of use and performance. I do a lot freelancing on the side, and always incorporate WordPress as the Content Management System for my clients. There are so many great features on the platform that it is hard to pinpoint one, so I am going to share a few that are important to me and the businesses I develop websites for.

First, is the ease of developing content, and we all know blogging is a must for developing content on your website, as well as, increasing your SEO. With WordPress you are able to develop a website and a blog all on one platform. This keeps your brand and message consistent, and most importantly, it keeps people and customers on your website. You do not have to send them to a separate blogging platform to see your latest news, they stay on your website the entire time which may lead to users exploring other areas of your website which can also lead to new business.

Next, the social features of the platform are remarkable. Developers are constantly rolling out new plugins to help brands reach a wider range of their market on various social media platforms. In addition, the newly released Facebook plugin is quite impressive allowing for developers to easily incorporate popular and desired features such as, Facebook Comments and the Recommendations Bar. The Facebook plugin, furthermore, is a phenomenal tool for keeping all your posts visible to your subscribers and getting those year old posts read again. Additionally, keeping content on your website fresh is extremely easy with the various Twitter plugins available to incorporate in your website.

Finally, to put it simple, WordPress is just easy to use. Users are able to create blog posts and pages in a very similar manner, and the learning curve is very small. With the platform being completely web-based, individuals unfamiliar with developing and updating websites never have to worry about unfamiliar website tools like FTP client or purchasing expensive software like Dreamweaver. WordPress is a perfect match for the web developer, designer and the user.

Stop Pasting The New Facebook Guidelines, It Is A Hoax

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 08:18 AM PST

5 Years back in time

Monday morning you walk into the office with the blues. Later you grab a coffee and then you discuss how your weekend was with your favourite colleague clinging to his cubical. The next action plan would be checking your mail and the second or third mail would be – "XXX no of people have got YYY amount of wealth and if you forward it to 10 people in the next 10 mins you will get the same wealth or in next 30 days you will witness a loss of so much of wealth." And thus started the spam email chain without even seeing what is it and I have also been a victim at times.

Fast forward today

Everything is the same today but there is an extra addition to our mundane work – checking Facebook. Like all others at around 9 A.M. I checked my Facebook account second time from the morning and instead of weekend party photos, I was seeing a lengthy message being copied and pasted by every alternate guy and popping on my feed. I found some influential guys doing it and that is when I seriously thought I should not be missing out if it is an important news or development in the social or digital world.

hoax_facebook_policyBut it took me 2 minutes to understand that this is spam and people are doing just Ctrl C & Ctrl V without even reading it. The message appears like the one pasted in the screen grab and I am sure by now you have either pasted it on your profile or have read someone blasting on his wall that please don't post this rubbish on my news feed.

Is the Facebook policy a hoax?

Yes it is a pretty known hoax and has been confirmed by the Hoax-Slayer and Snopes. Both the websites are well known sites who debunk rumors. You can read the extensive explanation in the above embedded links if you are interested.

However, if you were trusting this line to be real : UCC 1-103 1-308 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICES, then Hoax and Slayers has this to say: "Shame that law has no relevance to Internet privacy isn't it? Those particular paragraphs pertain to Commercial law – that's why it's called "Uniform Commercial Code" and are meaningless in the context of this inane piece of crud that is virally being posted all over Facebook."

However, if you do not agree with Facebook's stated policies then you have three choices, as shared by Snopes.com:

1. Decline to sign up for a Facebook account.

2. Bilaterally negotiate a modified policy with Facebook.

3. Cancel your Facebook account.

Else you can also follow the steps shared by Nameet Potnis to protect your Facebook privacy:

facebook privacy policy settings

So please don't copy paste such texts, we have enough spam going around in Facebook!

Scaling Social and the Future of B2B Social Marketing

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 08:11 AM PST

Scaling Social

Here's a quick shout-out to the Salorix team for getting lots of great coverage in the recent Social Media Ecosystem Report. They were talked about, quoted, and got to submit a chart too… all in the section: Big Data Enables Enhanced Business Intelligence.

But why did this early-stage company get covered in this report – alongside IBM, Google, and Adobe no less?

Well, it turns out the "big data meets social media" thing is hard. Or as the report puts it,

"scaling social with intelligence is extremely challenging"

You see, we can no longer be happy simply responding to brand mentions and  boasting about our likes, retweets, and followers.

We need to also:

  • Identify relevant and influential brand-related conversions
  • Engage the consumers doing the talking
  • Get them to amplify your brand message to their social network

That does sound hard, especially, since 90% of those conversations are happening outside of brand-controlled properties (this is what Salorix says). Makes me long for the days when ad banners still worked. (When was that exactly?)

As B2B marketers, we've traditionally done a good job embracing the role of influencers; perhaps even leaned on them to know the moods and minds of our prospects when we do not. We can no longer be happy with that, either.

If we want to engage prospects directly, it's critical that we:

  • Develop robust buyer personas that incorporate on how our prospects behave on social media
  • Create content based on the what our prospects are saying and sharing across the social web
  • Optimize our content for social engagement and social distribution

So, how are you adapting your marketing practices to connect with prospects, customers, and influencers? Let us know in the comments section, or tweet us @Leadtail, and let's keep the conversation going.

The Social Media Ecosystem Report –Rise of Users, Intelligence, and Operating Systems was put together by the folks at Jordan Edmiston Group, an investment bank focused on media and marketing services, with support from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).  Download the full report from the IAB website.

Is Social Media a Passing Fad?

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 07:55 AM PST

I've been reading a lot lately about predictions for the coming year. Many of those predictions have to do with social media — whether or not it will stay relevant, whether or not anyone will figure out how to really measure its return on investment (ROI), how many social media "agencies" will survive, etc.

These are interesting questions and remind me of days past when similar questions surfaced and when there were as many answers and opinions — mine among them with this writing! — as there were people brave enough to venture them.

How do you measure the impact of social media expenditures on your bottom line? Do you have real numbers in terms of dollars spent vs. dollars gained or in terms of debits and credits or do you just know that social media is working for you?

Social media has created the biggest self-employment boom in recent history. Virtually anyone can lay claim to being a social media "expert," as they did with website search engine optimization until Google foiled them and created the current content craze. I have personal and business/company/fan pages on Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, XeeMe, Biznik and several others. I know how to use promotions and advertisements on most of these platforms. My website has all the requisite social media buttons and even uses a WordPress Facebook plug-in for you to leave comments — which I hope you will, by the way — on articles such as this one.

So am I a social media expert? I certainly don't pass myself off as one, even though I think I know more than enough to be a little dangerous! But what I most certainly don't know is how I would measure my effectiveness as a social media expert were I to take someone's money to do social media implementation and optimization work. So I don't do it. I do higher level strategy work and farm out the implementation to people who have actually helped my business increase its revenues through their improvements to my social media efforts.

Most of my clients are small companies — one to a dozen or so people who have had no formal marketing strategy training r whose marketing manager got the job because he or she knew how to use Facebook and Linkedin a few years ago. I help them figure out who their real target markets are, what messages will resonate with them and what media is most likely to be most effective in delivering those messages to those markets. It may sound simple, but it isn't. And I normally do recommend that they invest in social media to at least some extent simply because they "have to have a social media presence" in this day and age to be considered a real company.

But am I giving them good advice? I think back to why we attended trade shows when I was in the electronics and software businesses. We had to be there because our competition was there. Until we became successful enough that we could afford not to be there and to let our customers and prospects know that it wasn't due to lack of money or customers that we were foregoing our future trade show appearances. We were going to use the money for something that would benefit them more than our fancy exhibit booth and lavish hospitality suite. And they respected that.

Trade shows didn't die, of course. They still have their niches and their purposes. But they have changed dramatically. And I think our fascination or even obsession with social media may become subject to similar pressures in the future. Because if you can't measure the ROI for an activity, the bean counters are going to make sure that it is severely curtailed if not completely eliminated.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic and will share them with the "gurus" of social media to whom I am connected. Thanks for reading. I hope you found this content useful.

What Is the True Marketing Value of Guest Blogging?

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 07:35 AM PST

Content marketing has been on the tip of most marketers' tongues the last two or so years, and with good reason. It's number one way to maximize the number of keywords driving traffic, improve visibility across all inbound channels and build or grow a brand's community. However, the explanation above doesn't necessarily address marketers' questions concerning specific content marketing tactics like guest blogging.

Guest BloggingWhat is Guest Blogging?

Guest blogging is not the same as content syndication or curation. Guest blogging occurs when an author creates original content for another relevant web property. Brands can be the recipient of a guest post or the contributor to another brand's blog.

Benefits to Being a Guest Blog Post Contributor

Every blog, in some form or fashion, represents a community. Communities are formed around a cause or topic. Its members consume, comment on, share and evangelize the content that resides on the blog. Not all communities are created equal and can vary in size, scope and fervor.

When contributing to another blog, it's critical to respect the cause or topic of the community. Guest posts should be relevant and prudent while providing value, and a helpful call to action for conversion. Over time, this process will slowly draft new community members into the contributor's online community. Below are seven benefits to being a blog contributor.

  • Exposure to a new audiences and communities
  • Natural and prudent link building
  • Organic social sharing by new people
  • Algorithmic brand signals
  • Diversification of AuthorRank
  • Incremental growth in traffic, leads or customers
  • Referral traffic

Referral Traffic

Guest blogging that respects the cause or topic of a community and provides prudent calls to action can see high performing conversion rates. The above graphic shows average conversion rates for referral traffic at 15 percent. Other channels generally hover in the 1 percent to 3 percent range for conversions. Guest blogging is one of the most efficient lead capture or conversion tactics on the Internet today.

Benefits of Being the Recipient of Guest Posts

According to the Content Marketing Institute's 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks Report, 64 percent of content marketers cite producing enough content as a challenge. This means most blogs will be receptive to publishing relevant guest posts.

Guest authors and the brands they represent have a vested interest in promoting their content. This promotion exposes the publishing web property to new social audiences. Each time a guest post is published, it's likely to attract new community members that previously resided outside the recipient's sphere of content influence.

If a guest contributor is savvy, they will take ownership of their written content via Google's authorship attribution. Authors who do this are establishing their expertise around a certain subject matter directly with Google. This has many positive search engine benefits for the publisher of the contributor's content. Other benefits include:

  • Exposure to a new audiences and communities
  • Organic social sharing by new people
  • Brand alignment with attributed (by Google) authors
  • Incremental growth in traffic, leads or customers
  • Encourages other authors and brands to contribute
  • Fosters community and collaboration

Publishing and contributing guest blog posts leads to many valuable content marketing outcomes and positively affects all inbound channels. It helps brands foster and grow their online communities and further aligns them with industry experts.

People go to the Internet to solve problems or be entertained. Businesses are in the business of solving peoples' problems. As a result, perceived industry expertise across the Internet should be valued and coveted. Guest blogging is one of the many content marketing tactics that grows and expands perceived industry expertise.

For more help with content marketing, download The 5 W's of Content Creation.

Image: Rooster306

Easily Track Your WordPress Feed Stats with the Feed Statistics Plugin

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 07:30 AM PST

How Many Subscribers Are Readers Of Your WordPress RSS Feed?

We've talked a lot about the many benefits of hosting your own WordPress Feed rather than using a third party service.

Feedburner, which appears to be going away, had two distinct advantages over our native feed…

(1) we could make the feed display right in Chrome (here's how to do that in WordPress) and …

(2) it offered (albiet often very incorrect) statistics for the Feed.

We've already covered the Chrome issue so lets take a look at one alternative to get statistics for your native WordPress based feed.

WordPress Plugin: Feed Statistics

Available free in the WordPress repository, the "Feed Statistics" plugin for WordPress gives you stats based on your native WP feed.

The only thing you really have to know about it is that, like all statistic options, it's data is inaccurate for the first couple days. In fact, this is the type of plugin that probably should run a good 30 days before you really dig into the data it provides.

Fast, cheap, and easy… the plugin has very few settings and adds it's settings and data tabs to the lower left sidebar.

Displays a list of the feeds most often requested by your subscribers. Note: a subscriber that follows multiple feeds will only be counted once in the total subscriber count, but all of the feeds that they subscribe to will appear on this page.

Displays which feed readers your subscribers are using.

If you have post view tracking turned on (it's enabled by default), this page will show the posts in your RSS feed that are most popular.

If you have clickthrough tracking turned on (it's disabled by default), this page will show the links in your posts that your feed subscribers are clicking on.

If you're looking for a way to have RSS metrics for your self-hosted WordPress feed, then Feed Statistics comes in really handy.

Do you track you RSS subscriber numbers? Do you self host your feed or use a third party?

PS: I would say that the market is really ripe for someone to bring all of these RSS tools together in one comprehensive plugin. An all in one solution that provides improved feed branding, improved display in Chrome, and statistics all in one really would be lovely.

Cause for Concern: Intellectual Property Rights and Social Media

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 07:10 AM PST

Social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, are being touted as a great way to network professionally and to generate business.

However, what you may not know is that, by agreeing to these sites' Terms of Service, you essentially permit these platforms to use whatever you publish online and license that material for their own commercial benefit. Furthermore, you are not entitled to any royalties or other compensation for your efforts.

So, what happens if you've already tweeted about your invention idea or sent a LinkedIn publisher the first draft of your book?

Your Rights Under Current Intellectual Property (or IP) Law

On its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities Facebook proclaims "Your privacy is very important to us." And that may be, but so is your content.

By agreeing to Facebook's terms of service you also agree that for any content which has intellectual property rights that you post on the Zuckerberg express you give "non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use."

This means you give Facebook the right to transfer, license and use your content royalty-free – for NO MONEY. Not a big deal for grandma posting pics of her new grandkids but a huge deal for professional photographers trying to make money off their photos.

In lawyer speak, Facebook could conceivably – if they wanted to – sell all your content to a third-party and not pay you a dime. And in fact that's what has already happened. Take the case of the Smiths (a real couple mind you).

In 2009, a happily married man from Lynchburg, Va., was on his Facebook page when a curious ad appeared, according to MSNBC.com's Redtape Chronicles.

"Hey, Peter," the Facebook ad read, "Hot singles are waiting for you!" Not only was Peter Smith married but the photo used in the ad was of HIS WIFE. A third-party application had mined Facebook's data, collected a photo of Cheryl Smith and used it in its advertising. Cheryl, who runs culturesmithconsulting.com blogged about her experience. Facebook eventually stopped the ad but didn't LEGALLY have to.

The only thing stopping this from happening to you is Facebook's good graces. Facebook said the ad was a violation of its terms of service and the offending ad was removed.

On April 14, 2010, the Library of Congress announced it would archive every public Tweet and make them available. That may sound great on the surface, but what if you're an inventor and you Tweeted a pic of that widget that's going to solve our energy problems? Twitter can sell that Tweetpic to anyone it wanted.

All social networks seem to have the same lawyers because their terms of service agreements do not favor you.

To protect your content as much as you can, be sure to do watermarked copyright symbols on content such as professional photos and slide presentations. You can also mark all written content that has a copyright with the copyright symbol when you post it. Taking this step will hopefully dissuade your IP recipients and third parties from infringing on your rights.

What If Your IP Is "Scooped"?

If you notice that your IP has been "scooped" and reposted without your authorization, take steps immediately to alert the person responsible. Hopefully, the perpetrator will comply with your request and no further action will be necessary. You can also alert the place where it is posted. Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Twitter and other social networks do give you an out if you think your IP rights have been violated.

If you file a complaint with them, they'll look into it and in many cases the content will be removed. That's how the Smith's ad got pulled. But you have to prove that you own the content. This means filing for copyrights, trademarks, registering work, etc. This, of course is an onerous burden for a small creative business. It puts all the responsibility of protecting your content onto your shoulders.

Of course, the person who posted your material may send a counter-notice to the service provider and state that, under the terms of fair use, he or she thinks that the material was taken down unfairly. Fair use is a legal defense stating that copyrighted material may be used for limited and "transformative" purpose without permission of the copyright holder. Should this happen, the service provider may put your material back online unless you file a lawsuit.

In the case of plagiarism, you may want to follow additional steps to fight digital plagiarism.

How to Instruct Your Employees

If you're conducting training on social media use for new and current employees here are some easy guidelines to follow to help everyone steer clear of IP violations:

Post your own content. If you do this you only have to worry about battling social media giants for the right to use it.

Use free-use, public domain content. Not good at creating your own images? Then go check these open use image websites out:

When in doubt avoid using any image when you haven't determined its copyright status. You could get caught like the copywriters at Webcopyplus who had to pay $4,000 for a photo they just grabbed from the web. "Well, frankly, we screwed up," the website wrote about its costly boo-boo. "It's an expensive lesson on copyright laws that we wish to share with other marketers, so you don't make the same mistake."

A short course on copyright and patent law also may be in order if your employees work in highly sensitive fields, such as software development, financial services or health care.

Social media can be a great tool to support marketing and customer service for your small business. Actively engage with your contacts online and off with the help of a free simple CRM like Base.

Great Search Engine Optimization Tools

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 06:55 AM PST

If you have a website online that is simple and attractive, then there are very minute chances that it will attract the high traffic and most importantly help you to make money online. It is important that a best website must have more excellent features than just the flashy or visual appeal. When a site is in on the World Wide Web, then there is a very high chance that it may get tough competition from the various other sites already present. The bad ranking of your website means that it has no place in an Internet World.

As a business owner, if you are seriously looking to promote your website online, then with the help of the search engine optimization tools you can achieve success and create a robust presence on the Internet. If you are totally alien about the SEO concepts, then you can seek the services of a reputed company that provides the search engine optimization and marketing services. Here are the various important tools that will help you a lot to improve your business visibility online by leaps and bounds:

SEMRush

If your competitor’s search engine rankings are higher than you, then certainly it is not a good news for you. You must always try to keep an eagle’s eye on the keywords of your competitors so that you can incorporate them on to your website and gain good rankings. For this very purpose, you can use a popular tool that is known as SEMRush. It is essentially a free and paid tool used for the purpose of finding keywords to optimize and driving traffic to the website. That is not all as you can do lots of other great things with this particular tool.

Besides digging out the keywords, you can also get the statistical details about the traffic; search volumes and the amount spend by the competitors on the AdWords ads. The best thing here is that you can export all the pivotal data in an Excel spreadsheet with the help of the tool. The tool helps you to efficiently analyze your competitors SEO strategy and improve your webpage positions in the major search engines.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a marketing software company that provides a convenient package or the tools to improve the traffic of the website, creating the unique and attractive content, converting the sale leads and analytics report. It makes every effort to drive a considerable amount of traffic on to the websites by efficiently marketing them through blogging and the various social media websites.

Microsoft SEO ToolKit

It is a great tool to that provides the tools to identify the SEO issues that are affecting the ranking and traffic of a website. The notable thing here is that this kit can be used in the various search engines such as the Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc to optimize the performance of your website. This tool also helps in increasing the traffic of the website and revenue, keep the search engines updated with your latest website information and discover the issues in the website design rectify them and enhance the user experience.

GTmetrix

GTmetrix is one of the best free tools that helps you to figure out the speed or loading time of your webpage. In today’s busy time, users do not have much time to wait and if your page eats up a lot of time to get loaded, then it is not good for your business. This tool creates a test score for your different web pages and also provides the useful measures to rectify the problem. If you are into an online business and desire to attract the prospective customers and excellent sales leads, then usage of this tool is a must for you.

AHref

Ahrefs is a great collection of the various SEO tools that helps in analyzing the new and the lost backlinks. There is a site explorer option where you can get the important information about the total backlinks, referring subnets, referring pages, backlink types and referring domains. So, with this excellent tool, you can look forward improve your website's performance and enhance your market presence.

SEOmoz

SEOmoz is primarily a software development company that provides great SEO software's that help in increasing the visibility and ranking of a website. Some of the best search engine optimization tools are as follows:

  • Campaign Manager: This tool helps in analyzing the website traffic, keyword rankings and detects the errors on the web pages.
  • Followerwonk: This tool helps in increasing the social presence. With this tool, you can connect with the people on various social networking websites, analyze their activities and market your product.
  • Link Analysis: This tool helps in analyzing the backlinks that is bringing the traffic to the website. You can also sort out the links to get more insights into the follow and no follow links.
  • On-Page Analysis: This tool helps in enhancing the optimal performance of the websites by providing a full report about the pages that have been optimized by using the targeted keywords.
  • Rank Tracking: This tool helps you to have a close tab on the rankings of your website in the major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo).
  • Crawl Test: This tool helps in identifying the problems in your website that is preventing the crawlers to index your web page.
  • SEO Toolbar: This tool helps in having a closer look at the link metrics and gets the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) results.
  • Keyword Analysis: This tool helps in analyzing the keywords that can boost traffic to your website.

Therefore, it is crystal clear that the search engine optimization tools are one of the best ways to optimize your website, increase the traffic and revenue.

How to Avoid a Dud Social Media Campaign

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 06:50 AM PST

Social media is still in its infancy. Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Reddit – these stalwarts of social media are less than a decade old. As such, many users as well as marketers are still stumbling around the field, trying to make sense of it. Until a few years back, marketers did not even have reliable analytics tools to measure the success of their social media efforts.

[Photo by catspyjamasnz]

In many cases the ROI of a successful social media campaign can be hard to measure. A lot of a time the real ROI can happen a lot further down the line. The number of clicks, impressions, likes and fans are just a small factor into measuring a successful campaign. Turning these numbers into meaningful conversions will be something that many social campaigns will struggle to achieve. This can be disheartening especially when cost per lead is a lot easier to measure through other channels. The big question is: how do you avoid a dud social media campaign?

1.     Pull, don't Push

Social media is not very amiable to traditional push marketing. Social media is about conversations, and if there’s anything that can kill a conversation quickly, it is a heavily branded, obnoxious advertisement. Brands that try to replicate traditional advertising on social media channels usually find little to cheer later.

Social media responds very amiably to pull marketing. When a prospective customer likes you on Facebook, or follows you on Twitter, they are opening up to your marketing messages. Thus, they're a pre-qualified lead and is far easier to convert.

2.   Know your audience

Research is key when planning a social media campaign. Social media monitoring tools like Brandwatch can offer you quick insight into where your audience exists, what they talk about and what sort of marketing messages they respond too. Compared to traditional market research, social media monitoring is relatively cheap and can provide a large amount of relevant data at the click of a button.

With traditional market research gathering information from large sample sizes can be a lengthy and expensive process. The opposite is true with social media monitoring, the data available to you is huge; making sense of that data is the tricky part.

3.   Don’t Be Besotted With Numbers

The quantity of your followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook matters far less than the quality of those followers. Social media marketers often obsess over their Twitter follower/Facebook friend count, regardless of whether these leads were grown organically, automatically added, or grown via advertising. A Twitter user who follows you only because you chose to friend him is merely responding to the quid pro quo social rule of Twitter and is worth far less than a user who followed you willingly. Numbers matter little; what matters is how you grew those numbers. Ultimately which is better, 1k unmotivated and unresponsive fans or 100 engaged fans?

4.   Content is King

In the noise of social media, it is easy for brands to get lost in the conversation. It has never been more important for brands to create top-notch content that stands out amongst this noise and gives them a platform to attract attention organically. Content is the foundation of any good social media marketing campaign. Create great content, engage in conversation with your followers, and you’ll soon find your social media influence skyrocketing.

5.    Engage and Converse

The Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ad was one of the most successful campaigns in social media marketing history. It was successful because it spoke to its audience in its language. The original ad was funny enough to strike a chord with viewers, but Old Spice upped the ante by creating ads responding to specific tweets. This was a great example of how brands can listen to their followers and engage them in conversations through quality content. Any superstar social marketing campaign should hinge on this very principle.

6.  Measure and Improve

Once your campaign is out in the big wide world, it doesn't end there. Even a dud social media campaign can deliver interesting insights that will help you improve for your next campaign.

Google Analytics launched its social media reporting back in April 2012. Social Actions data in Google Analytics is still quite basic at this stage and only gives top level stats. More popular social actions like Tweets and Likes are not tracked unless you customise your tracking code, and even then there are gaps in what this information can tell you.

If Google can persuade Facebook, Twitter and the other major social networks to join them as Hub Partners and share their data then we will be getting closer to a complete social media monitoring platform. Until then you may find yourself doing a lot of number crunching to properly establish whether you achieved your social ROI.

It’s About Time For Your Print Advertising To Be More Social

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 06:35 AM PST

Reality today is such that social media should be considered when executing virtually any corporate communications program. Opportunities to drive traffic to your social properties, promote your content, integrate technology, and more, should not be overlooked.

Despite this, my experience has shown that there are some media channels, such as print, that seem so antiquated that marketers don't think about how social media and technology can be influenced by the medium, or vice-versa.

Well, lets aim to make this a mindset of the past and start encouraging our coworkers, clients, leadership and partners to think 'social', even when producing print ads and printed collateral. Following are a number of ways that your print advertising can be more social and be better integrated with technology:

PROMOTE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PROMOTIONS

Print advertising can drive a huge amount of traffic to your social media promotions. If you're running a photo or video sharing contest, print advertising can be particularly effective because you'll be communicating with your consumers while they are away from their computers living life in the real world, which is probably where you'll want them taking photos or video for your contest.

GET CREATIVE AND INSPIRE SOCIAL AMPLIFICATION

Dazzle your consumers with print ads that are so incredibly creative that they feel compelled to share their experience with your ad with their social networks – Carlsberg created the print ad bottle opener, Volkswagen gave you a virtual test drive, and Lexus amazingly added audio and video to their print ad. Argue all you want about how many readers actually interacted with these ads, but without a doubt those that did, found them impactful, were left with a lasting impression, and shared their experience with their friends.

PROMOTE FOURSQUARE CHECK-IN SPECIALS

You can significantly increase redemption and participation with your Foursquare check-in specials by promoting them in print advertising and collateral. If your offer is compelling enough, you might even convince non-Foursquare users to register an account. Also, because of Foursquare'sincreased commitment to cross platform integration, consumer check-ins, reviews and tips are going to be seen by an increasing number of people on other social media networks.

GRANT ACCESS TO EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

There is an inherent perceived value in just about anything that is exclusive, or gives people the sense that they have insider knowledge; so tap into this. If you are creating compelling content for your print advertisements or advertorials, you might want to consider granting access to exclusive bonus content to your consumers on social media, only available to those who have seen your print-based advertising.

DRIVE TO A COMPLIMENTARY MOBILE WEBSITE

If you're able to successfully create an emotional response to your print ad, or feature compelling enough communications, think about how you can extend that experience or further educate with a mobile website. Consumers are never far away from their mobile devices, and after engaging with your print ad could be a perfect opportunity to drive to your mobile site, that should feature social integration.

INCLUDE A COMPELLING CTA

All too often I find that advertising features a social media call to action that really falls flat. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Find us on Pinterest. Come on, give consumers a reason to get involved with your brand on social media. Give them a sense of the value that you will provide them in exchange for taking time to hunt you down on their computer or mobile device. Tell them how you'll educate them, entertain them, or provide utility in your CTA.

When creating print advertising, do you think about how you can make it more social friendly?

How have you used print advertising in support of your social media marketing?

Have you effectively integrated technology with your print advertising, or seen a particularly great example that you'd like to share?

Let me know in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial, it'd be great to hear from you.

Original Post

40 Tips to Rock Cyber Monday & Everyday Online Sales

Posted: 26 Nov 2012 05:10 AM PST

photodune 2142389 shopping cart against the background xs 1 40 Tips to Rock Cyber Monday & Everyday Online Sales

Cyber Monday… either you are ready or you're not! Many businesses miss out on a great day to increase sales and connect with their audience because they think it's only for the big online retailers. Wrong! You don't have to be Best Buy, Wal-Mart, IBM or Apple to tap into the power and fun of Cyber Monday.

Are you a business leader thinking "big bummer, I wish I would have planned ahead to be ready to rock some additional online sales on Cyber Monday"?

Well we have good news for some of you. It might not be too late. You don't have to be a rocket scientist nor be a social media wizard to take advantage of Cyber Monday, even if you didn't plan ahead like you should have.

You Need an Online Presence

Since Cyber Monday is all about deals online, this means you need a presence online. However, even if you don't yet have a truly functioning website, never fear. The fact that you found this article is a bonus and probably means you have some type of online presence or at minimum wish you did. However, it is highly unlikely that if this is your first day hopping online or on the social networks that you will see much success with sales. You should instead focus your objectives on building relationships, supporting other businesses which you like, etc.

Check out these quick tips and ideas to help you rock cyber Monday and every day online sales! Most of these tips are good for any day, not just Cyber Monday!

photodune 3467461 hand cursor flies from box of cursors xs 240x300 40 Tips to Rock Cyber Monday & Everyday Online Sales Get Your Cyber House in Order

  1. Check Server Readiness: If your Cyber day is a success your web traffic could obviously be higher than normal. Therefore, ensure your server can handle the load. If you are not sure how to check this, call your hosting provider. Remove any extra files from your server that aren't needed. Do your server house cleaning as appropriate.
  2. Freshen Up Content: Cyber Monday is a great excuse to freshen and tighten up your content. Delete redundant content. Minimize and/or unpublish pages that aren't adding value or driving conversions. Less is often more when it comes to content. Tap into your Google Analytics to help you make decisions on what should stay or go.
  3. Test All Key Functionality & Website Optimization: If you haven't tested your shopping cart in a month, now is the time! Do a quick test for all possible payment methods. Be sure your site is optimized for mobile and tablets. Optimizing for computer desktop viewing along no longer cuts it. We optimize all of our sites from day one to avoid such fire drills.
  4. Optimize for Search Engines (SEO) and for Social Search: If you haven't checked out your Google Analytics report lately, then shame on you! It is loaded with useful data to help you make important decisions on content, keywords, as well as learn about your audiences and their behavior on your site. Use the data to determine what pages you should keep, enhance or delete. Also be sure to check out what keywords are driving organic traffic to your site as well as what words aren't driving traffic that you should be. Priority is to optimize for keywords as well as analyze user behavior.
  5. Setup Landing Pages: Don't just send Cyber visitors to your home page for all communication. Setup a few landing pages to support specific content and deals. This will help you minimize confusion for your Cyber Monday website visitors as well as keep them focused on the specific call to action.
  6. Call to Action & Conversion is #1 Priority: Remember, your Cyber Monday visitor is looking for deals. Don't spam them with a page that has nothing to do with the offer. Make it easy for them to learn about the offer and purchase.
  7. Seamless Brand Experience: If you have time, take a stroll thru your website, blog, Facebook page, Twitter profile page, Pinterest, LinkedIn and any other social media profiles you have. Check for consistency in brand and content. Key priorities are of course the low hanging fruit such as logos, colors, key words, descriptions, headers etc. Even a few minutes spent on brand consistency can enhance your viewers first impression of you and your platform exponentially.

Decide on a Cyber Offer

  1. photodune 3227406 hot offer and percentage xs 300x199 40 Tips to Rock Cyber Monday & Everyday Online Sales Know Your Audience: Decide the top 1-3 primary audiences you would like to market the Cyber Monday offer to. Do your research on the audience to determine what communication methods will best reach them. Included in your research should also be what social media platforms will work best to drive traffic to your website and/or provide the specific offer. Download our POST audience analysis worksheet to help you identify and prioritize your top audiences.
  2. Determine Your Product or Service Cyber Offer: For each audience selected determine the key offer. Obviously you can have more than one offer per audience. However, unless you are a large business, keep it simple. People looking for deals online are going to be bombarded with information. Don't blast noise on your landing page or they'll probably bounce out within seconds.
  3. Determine the Terms & Conditions: Plan this up front. In addition to the regular return, payment and shipping policies think in Cyber terms. Can the Cyber Monday customer take advantage of more than one offer on a transaction. For example if you have a coupon code available via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest & LinkedIn decide up front if they can use more than one coupon code per transaction. If one offer includes free shipping can they combine free shipping with a Facebook coupon for example?
  4. Differentiate: Don't just pick a boring offer on your boring website that looks like everyone else. Focus on how you can stand out from the crowd. If you don't have the budget to add graphic to your website, no worries! Purchase a photo or two from a photo stock website. Simply picking a unique offer and way to communicate such can help you differentiate. It doesn't have to cost a fortune.

Example Cyber Offers

  1. photodune 3271467 in press like symbol for business concept xs 300x300 40 Tips to Rock Cyber Monday & Everyday Online Sales One Day Deals: This one is a no brainer. Select and launch an offer with an expiration at midnight. Don't state it's a one day deal and leave open for two days. You'll appear as desperate. Instead, launch for one day and select a different offer for launch right after if necessary.
  2. Social Media Platform Deals: This includes a deal per social media platform. For example you could have a different offer for Facebook fans, Twitter Followers, LinkedIn connections etc. Get creative with these and use them as a way to test different audiences. If you have a good following on each of the platforms you could even break some of the offers down by the hour to test user behavior per platform as well as time of day.
  3. Host contest on Facebook: This is a great way to engage your current Facebook fans as well as possibly obtain new fans. Be sure to check out the Facebook terms and conditions first though to ensure you aren't breaking any rules. Remember, the big brands who spend more money with Facebook for advertising get more leniency than the common fan page biz owner does. Just because Coke or Best Buy is doing a specific type of promotion on Facebook, doesn't mean it's okay for you to do the same.
  4. Pinterest Pin it to Win It Promotion: This is a fun and easy way to have a contest. Make sure your web page where the deal is located is "pinnable" and has a working "pin it" button. Don't forget to also check that the right image is available for pinning. You can leverage email, Facebook, Twitter and all other social networks you are active on to communicate and announce your deal. Invite participants to Pin the deal / page to their Pinterest account. At the end of the day select a winner to receive the grand prize. This could be a free product or service, massively discounted offer, free consultation and the list goes on.
  5. Twitter: This one is quite easy. The obvious opportunity is if you have a cyber deal, then tweet about it. Make sure you use the hashtag #cybermonday. You can also setup a Twitter specific campaign only for your Twitter followers. Use a coupon code, secret word or push them to a scavenger hunt as described below. Many people will be searching Twitter for Cyber Monday deals so if you don't already have a Twitter account, this might be a good excuse to get one!
  6. Scavenger hunt: I LOVE scavenger hunts when they are developed and executed effectively. Create a fun scavenger hunt for your audience that inspires, educates and entertains your audience. Use it as an opportunity to educate them on your services as well as engage them with your brand. Don't make it too difficult though as you'll either get no participants or you'll lose them part way thru. Make it easy and select a few secret words they have to find across several of your platforms. Don't forget to test it from start to finish to make sure you have no cyber holes. Best bet is to engage a friend or colleague and have them walk thru the contest and offer real-time feedback of their experience.
  7. Word of the day: This one is easy. Select a word of the day and either share it for them to use as a coupon. A second option might be to ask them to share the word. Ask them to post it on your fanpage, tweet it to you. If you have the supporting personnel resources you could then have someone ready to respond to tweets.
  8. Shipping Deals: This one is a no-brainer. Offer shipping discounts for purchase. Could include free or discounted shipping with a certain purchase amount or across the board free shipping. Whatever it is, make it clear. Support costs can be high for a cyber shipping discount promotion gone bad.
  9. Foursquare check-ins: I love this option. Even if you haven't engaged your business on FourSquare yet, this is a great day to do such! Offer discounts for the Mayor or simply free products or discounts for check-in. Be sure to train your staff who will be on site. The last thing you want is for a new customer to visit your store or place of business with their iPhone in hand, smile on face only to show it to your employee who has no clue what the offer is about. This would be what we call in social media a big fat #fail and will probably end up the topic of someone's blog post the next day, guaranteed.
  10. Extra Affiliate Bonuses: If you have an affiliate program, this is a great day to offer an extra incentive to your affiliates. It's a great opportunity to not only share with them and remind them of your products and services and how they can make money but also remind them that they too can make money by partnering with you. Offer extra affiliate payout percentages or even free or discounted products when their efforts help sell a certain amount of your product or services.
  11. Blog Comments: Ask website visitors to comment on a specific blog post or two. Inform them that if they comment and leave a Twitter user name or email that you will follow up with them with specifics on how to get the deal or coupon code. This is a great way to do market research, get feedback on a specific campaign, creative element or obtain other data needed.
  12. eMail Subscriber Deals: Offer an exclusive email or newsletter subscriber deal. If you have time inform your audiences via Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms that you'll be launching a Cyber Monday deal for subscribers. If executed efficiently this could help boost your number of subscribers substantially if the offer is worth noting.
  13. YouTube: Record a quick or professional YouTube video to share your offer. One idea it to include a coupon code that is only offered at the end of video. This is a great way to engage your audience with you and your brand. Remember don't make the video too long or you'll lose your audience before they get to hear the offer!

Determine Communication & Announcement Strategy

  1. photodune 1991601 social network xs 300x240 40 Tips to Rock Cyber Monday & Everyday Online Sales Determine communication strategy:Bottom line, your offer will do nothing if you don't let people know about it. Determine up front how you will communicate your cyber Monday offer to your key audiences. Your top goal is to educate your target audience and inspire them to take action. An effective communication strategy is key to your success.
  2. eMail: Communicate to your email subscribers the specific offers. Use this as an opportunity to communicate the offer as well as invite them into your community more intimately. Engage them in an active discussion or scavenger hunt on your Facebook page. Remind them to check out your Tweet stream for special Cyber Monday deals. Get creative here and think integration. eMail is one of the greatest communication mechanisms to help integrate your offline and multiple online platforms.
  3. Blog & RSS Feeds: Blog posts are a great way to communicate your Cyber Monday deals. Even if you don't have a lot of subscribers to your RSS feed today it may be a good method of obtaining more subscribers if blog and website visitors find your cyber deal and content useful. Your blog will also work well as a hub for your Cyber Monday activity. Use it in combination with your Facebook Fan Page and Twitter stream to keep people informed of how your specific deals, key words, scavenger hunts etc. What a great way to pull them into all you have to offer in a fun way!
  4. Tweet About It: Being a Twitter addict myself, this is one of my favorites. I think tweeting about your Cyber deal is a must do for all businesses. Even if you don't have a Twitter account, do yourself a favor and get one. Share information about your Cyber deals, shipping discounts, scavenger hunts etc. Offer time sensitive Twitter deals but be ready to manage. The worst thing you could do is announce an offer and not be ready to manage appropriately. As mentioned above, don't forget to use the proper hashtags at the end of your tweet such as #cybermonday
  5. Facebook: Announce on your Facebook personal and business page as appropriate. Remember, spamming and posting the same message over and over is not a smart strategy and will only turn your community off.
  6. Pinterest: Pin an image and link to your offer page. Consider creating a new board for offers. Don't forget to include the price on the pin. Simply add the $ £ symbol followed by the item's price in the pin description. You may be lucky enough to find that Pinterest featured your pin in their gifts section! You can even add an app on Facebook and integrate the campaign there. You can select to include only the one board that includes the offers! You can then grab the unique url for the tab / app on Facebook and share it to your community via the appropriate online and offline mediums.
  7. LinkedIn: LinkedIn is great for business. We get leads from LinkedIn every day. I laugh when I hear people write and say LinkedIn is for resumes or for old people. If you're not on LinkedIn you are missing out. Why not post a status update on LinkedIn to share your Cyber deals. If you don't already have your RSS blog feed integrated to LinkedIn, now is the time. You can also post any Tweet to LinkedIn by adding #Li to the end of the tweet.
  8. Share on Local Business Friend Pages: If you are member of local or national organizations, Chamber of Commerce etc. post a short announcement on these sites. Make sure it isn't written as "spam" but instead focuses on more than just the coupon but on the value of the offer and how the customer can benefit.

Overall Success Tips

  1. photodune 2714825 success board showing achievements or wealth xs 300x209 40 Tips to Rock Cyber Monday & Everyday Online Sales Set objectives and goals. Yes a priority should be sales. However, don't forget other objectives and goals related to audience engagement, social media community growth, email subscriber growth, opt-ins, readership etc. Get creative and use Cyber Monday as an opportunity to show off your online goods or launch them if you've been hiding behind the avatar!
  2. Know your audience. The more you know about your audience the better your results are going to be. Where are they hanging out online, offline? What are their pain points? What problems do they have that your products or services can help solve? How can you reach your target audience with the right product or service. If your target audience does not hang out on LinkedIn or Pinterest for example, then by all means do NOT promote a "Pin it to Win it" contest all day on LinkedIn! icon smile 40 Tips to Rock Cyber Monday & Everyday Online Sales You'd be surprised how many businesses we work with who try these mis-matched tactics and wonder why they don't have a positive ROI. Setting goals and objectives and knowing your audience are key to ensuring you achieve a positive ROI.
  3. Offer something of value. Just because you can have a promotion or deal doesn't mean you have to just because it is Cyber Monday. Be sure your offer is relevant and offers value to your target audience.
  4. Remember SPAM does not nourish your audience. Even though you'll see many businesses SPAMMING their audiences on Cyber Monday, it doesn't mean you should too. Focus on providing communications, information and offers that provide real value. Share the information several times during the day but don't over do it. Don't send a tweet for example 20 times in 1 or 2 hours. If you need more clarification on this or have problems with people spamming you, simply send them to my spam stomping "Pet My Pig" campaign and I'll take care of the rest. You can learn more about it here–> "Pet the Pig Campaign"
  5. Use the tips above to create an enjoyable experience for your audience. Make your website comfortable. Invite them in. Make it easy for them to stroll over to your Facebook Fan Page, Twitter profile etc. The brand experience should be as seamless as possible.
  6. Be honest! If you just signed on to Twitter, let them know. Why not share with them this is your first day on Twitter and they should come join you! You'll be surprised how many newbies might follow right behind you if you are authentic.
  7. Don't just sell your every day stuff at the every day price. Offer something different. Should be cheaper, better, or faster!
  8. You have one time to make a first impression. It is better to offer one deal and do it right than offer ten and screw them all up. Focus on quality, not quantity.
  9. Perfection is the enemy of good. Remember, the #1 rule of marketing is it will NEVER be perfect! Focus on good, really good if you have to. However, if you wait for perfect you could be waiting until Cyber Monday 2014. Just get it done and get it out there. Get-R-Done folks!

So Where are You?

Are you ready to rock Cyber Monday? Did you plan ahead and as a result you are ready to rock some additional sales to set you with a strong zoom into 2013? Or did you not plan ahead and are now wishing that you did? Even if you missed the opportunity this year, it isn't too late to use these tips to turn up the volume on your every day sales. These are things you should be doing as part of your business and online marketing strategy anyway. Social media and online marketing is not a band-aid for a broken business. You should not look at Cyber Monday as something to fix all your problems. Your goal should be to integrate the opportunity with Cyber Monday into your overall strategy, plans and communication. If you have no idea how to do any of the above, call us and we can help.

Take Action & Get a Grip on Social Media

This is part of the series titled "How to Get a Grip on Social Media." The series will include a free newsletter, webinars, whitepapers, tips and best practices to get a handle on your business and social media.

Subscribe to stay updated and be the first to be invited to upcoming events including free webinars.
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