10 New Social Articles on Business 2 Community

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• Social Trust Factor: 10 Tips to Establish Social Business Credibility
• The 3 Types of Search Queries & How You Should Target Them
• Social Media Metrics – 9 Calculations To Tell If Your Twitter and Facebook Marketing Suck
• 3 Brand Marketing Holiday Shopping Pinterest Trends
• Local Search Optimization—Capture Your Inbound Market
• How Was Your 2012 On Facebook And Twitter?
• Google+ Hits One Out of the Park with Customer Responsive Updates
• Social Media Analytics: Predictive Analytics
• How Delhi Safari Maximised Facebook Engagement With Images And Games
• Don’t Overuse These Buzzwords in LinkedIn

Social Trust Factor: 10 Tips to Establish Social Business Credibility Posted: 16 Dec 2012 12:05 PM PST When building an online persona and brand usually we start with the most basic aspects including over arching brand, logo, colors, core messages etc. All of these are foundational to success. We develop our plan, develop our platform, create and launch our brand presence, integrate social with our business goals and start the social media engagement. However, after a few months goes by we realize nobody is buying from us. Nobody is opting in to our email lists. What has happened? Why don't they want to further engage with our brand? Do they not trust us? Do they not think that we could bring them value? Do you lack the trust factor? There could be many different reasons why your communities are reluctant to engage with you. One of the most common reasons is that they don't trust you. You have all the pretty colors, bells and whistles for your online presence but you lack credibility. You lack the trust factor. In real life and offline relationships, trust is built via word of mouth, client and partner referrals. One person talks to another person who knows good and bad about you. You earn a reputation for being who you are and the quality and service you deliver. You may have a solid reputation and trust factor offline but are finding it difficult to establish such online. If this is the case for you, don't you fret! This could be for many reasons. It could be you are practically starting over with online relationships. If most of your offline contacts, partners, colleagues and friends are not yet online, then yes you are starting over to some degree. However, you can also leverage your relationships offline to bring credibility online. Building trust doesn't happen overnight. However, there are some simple things you can do even if you are just starting out to increase credibility and the trust factor. 10 Tips to Establish Credibility and Trust 1. Establish authority. First and foremost you must establish authority. Your must know your stuff. Faking it online will not get you far. Social media is far different than handing someone a business card. In the social realm it's easy to validate who you are, where you have worked, what references you have, who your clients are, who your contacts are within only a few clicks. Your content on all social platforms must scream results. It must be obvious you know your stuff. We need more than one bullet and short paragraph that tells readers you are an expert at whatever it is you do. Give credit to your sources and never take other people's work as your own. Back up your claims with social proof such as blog content, references, client testimonials, client logos, guest blog posts and more. 2. Social proof. Yes, even though you may have spent far too much money on that beautiful Twitter background, custom Facebook page and blogsite, you still need to prove to me who and what you are. This isn't as hard as what it sounds. Don't ignore this step. Instead make this one of the first things you do when you hop online. Take time to update this content at least once a month. Good examples of social proof include testimonials, customer references, partner references, kudos from other thought leaders, examples of work completed, links to work completed, guest blogs you have contributed to, links to blogs where you and your content has been cited, white papers, ebooks, and the list goes on. Social proof should be instantly available within one or less clicks on your site. I should not have to dig, double and triple click to find it. Make it pop out at me from the front page please! However, be careful here. You must have the work experience and proven results to back it up. 10,000 purchased Twitter followers is not real social proof. I'd rather see 500 that were earned by providing relevant and valuable content. 3. Walk the walk. Everything about your online persona, website, blog and social profiles must not only talk the talk but your actions must walk the walk of whatever you say you do. If you claim to be the best social media and advertising agency this side of Texas and know how to deliver results, then your own website and online persona should not look like a fifth grader developed it. Fix the fonts, fix the colors, fix the content. Take the time to do what you say you are so good at doing! It's like a dietician that is 150 lbs overweight telling you that they don't worry about being healthy themselves that they focus only on you. Any good agency, agent, salesrep, blogger, copywriter, consultant, business services provider should be doing themselves what they say they can do for you. "Eat your own dogfood" is what we use to say in the big iron corporate days of the dot bomb era in high tech. Delete the jargon and talk in real words that establish you as a walking testimonial of what you can do for clients! If you don't take time to fix your own identity, online persona, brand, website, content, sales processes, business process why should anyone else believe you can do it for them? You are your own best social proof and will be amazed at the number of clients you will get if you start doing this! 4. Be consistent in both life and business. The days of separating online and offline personas are over and done. You can't be one person offline and a better, different person online. You are one business, one team, one person regardless if you are online or offline. If you are a one man or one woman business consultant this is even more important. Who you are on Friday night at the bar is the same person you are on Monday morning. Your offline behavior reflects your online success. Be who you are as you are only one person. However, my point is don't fake it. There is only one you so be that person. Hopefully that person is honest, sincere, real, open, and communicates well with people both online and offline. 5. Hang with the right peeps. If you hang out with 9 brokes, chances are you are going to be the 10th! Hang out with people you learn from, people who build you, empower you and make you a better person. Avoid the people who kick you down, criticize you and overall envy your success. Be sure you hang with the people who are going places. Establish real relationships and work together. Take time to know and research the people you hang out with. Don't just trust everyone on first tweet. Just as you need to establish trust with your community, expect the same of those you bring into your inner circle. 6. You had me at first tweet." I hear this a lot from many businesses who eventually become our clients. What you tweet matters. Don't be negative Nelly all day. Give your Twitter and Facebook readers good nuggets of information that help them, inspire them and enable them to get to know you better. We have numerous clients who we have met from one single tweet that inspired or educated them. Don't minimize the power of inspiring people to engage with you and your brand and start the first stages of trusting you even in 140 character increments known as tweets! 7. Take time for relationships. I see many businesses and consultants get too caught up in the science of social media that they forget the most important aspect, the art. I am not talking about art as in brand and colors. Instead focus on the art as in relationships and conversation. The tools of social media can be learned by almost anybody. It's the art of engagement that will differentiate you from the masses. If you are finding it hard to build real relationships online then chances are you are not taking the time to get to know someone. Take time to truly connect with others. Ask them questions. Comment on their blog posts. Reach out to folks you feel comfortable with and build a relationship. There are new pockets of peeps, partners, crowd sourced blog communities and potential real life friends popping up every day. Get to know some of the folks in the communities. Start your own communities. 8. Build a platform that invites conversation. If your platform reads like a billboard or corporate collateral from the 1980′s then chances are you are not going to inspire much conversation. Ensure that everything from your content to blog share buttons, commenting systems, opt-in forms, contact forms, colors, and lanugage are all inviting. If you are not getting the engagement you need, then ask a trusted 3rd party to do an assessment for you. Ask them specific questions about how your content makes them feel. Ask them where and how they would engage with you on our social platforms. Unless you invite folks to engage with you and your brand, chances are they won't. There is definitely not a lack of other businesses successful at doing such that are going to steal their mindshare from you. 9. It's not about you! As much as you want to think that your Twitter profile, tweet stream, Facebook business page and blog are all about you, they aren't. Yes, you can use these platforms to establish authority, build community and trust, it is not a walking billboard of YOU. Your online personas should scream helpfulness, content that inspires, conversation that engages. Talk to your communities in voices they like to communicate, not in web speak. Ask them what they want if you don't know. Take time to know your audience, partners, clients and more. The better you understand your audiences, the better you will be able to help them. The more you help them, the more they will trust you via your actions. 10. Author content. Chances are you are in business because you know something. You hopefully know something that is going to help a business or individual otherwise you probably won't be in business long. Make certain you establish your own content. I am a big believer in sharing and curating awesome content I find across the web with my communities. However, I am also a believer in creating my own content. It is through your own content that people get to know YOU! It's where you can establish trust, thought leadership, expertise, relationships. Businesses and individuals that are not creating content are missing out on incredible opportunities to connect with people in a way that brings them close to you and your brand. 11. Be honest. I added this one as a bonus mostly because it should be common sense. If you have an issue with a product, service, software, network, Twitter feed, Facebook post, blog post or other just be honest and acknowledge the issue. Hiding from it is not going to do anything that will bring benefit to you or your business. Don't under estimate the power of your community and relationships. They are much more resilient when the relationship is built on trust and credibility. Bottom line, if you lose my trust, you lose me. I could write a book on this topic and probably should. However, a blog post has to end somewhere. There is no price tag we can put on trust. It is simply invaluable. Take the time to not only be a person people want to trust but ensure your online persona helps you establish such. Your Turn Do you struggle with establishing trust in your markets or online? Did this article help you? Or are you a pro who has tips you can share with others? Let's all help one another as feedback from others is a great way to learn on these types of topics. 35 Social Media Truths This is part of a series on social business titled "35 Social Media Truths". It is part of a keynote presentation I gave at Rochester Institute of Technology. If you want to hear more, sign up for the 35 Social Media Truths Newsletter and you will receive all 35 of them over a period of time. Included will be different mediums such as video, blog posts and more.

The 3 Types of Search Queries & How You Should Target Them Posted: 16 Dec 2012 12:00 PM PST Search queries – the words and phrases that people type into a search box in order to pull up a list of results – come in different flavors. It is commonly accepted that there are three different types of search queries: Navigational search queries Informational search queries Transactional search queries In the search marketing world, we tend to talk more about keywords than search queries (news flash: they're not quite the same thing). But today we're talking search queries. Let's go into a little more detail on what these three types of search queries are and how you can target them with your site content. Navigational Search Queries What Is a Navigational Search Query? A navigational query is a search query entered with the intent of finding a particular website or webpage. For example, a user might enter “youtube” into Google’s search bar to find the YouTube site rather than entering the URL into a browser’s navigation bar or using a bookmark. In fact, "facebook" and "youtube" are the top two searches on Google, and these are both navigational queries. How Should You Target Navigational Search Queries? The fact is, you don't stand much of a chance targeting a navigational query unless you happen to own the site that the person is looking for. True navigational queries have very clear intent – the user has an exact site in mind and if you're not that site, you're not relevant to their needs. Google, which classifies this type of query as a “go query” according to some reports, has even taken the step of reducing the total number of results on the first page to 7 for navigational brand queries, leading to a 5.5% reduction in overall organic first-page listings. However, some queries that appear to be navigational in nature might not be. For example, someone who googles "facebook" might actually be looking for news or information about the company. Tip: Make sure you own your own brand's navigational query. Ideally, your site will appear in both the top organic spot and as the top sponsored result in a search for your brand or company name. As Brad Geddes has pointed out, "in many cases, it is worth buying keywords even if you rank organically for them," because your total profits will end up higher. Branded keywords tend to drive both clicks and conversions. Informational Search Queries What Is an Informational Search Query? Wikipedia defines informational search queries as "Queries that cover a broad topic (e.g., colorado or trucks) for which there may be thousands of relevant results." When someone enters an informational search query into Google or another search engine, they're looking for information – hence the name. They are probably not looking for a specific site, as in a navigational query, and they are not looking to make a commercial transaction. They just want to answer a question or learn how to do something. How Should You Target Informational Search Queries? Informational queries are hard to monetize. Google knows this, which is why it's been pushing the Knowledge Graphto address these types of queries. The best way to target informational searches is with high-quality SEO content that genuinely provides helpful information relevant to the query. Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is pretty good at providing basic, reliable-enough info on an extremely broad range of topics, which is why they rank on the first page for about half of all searches (well, that and their enormously powerful link profile). Wikipedia leaves a lot to be desired for a lot of informational searches, though. That's where you come in! Here are some of the ways you could target informational queries to drive traffic and leads to your site through organic search: Write a blog post full of tips that would be useful for your prospective customers – if you're a PR consultant, for example, you could write a blog post on how to create a press release. Create a how-to video that is relevant to your business (like this home improvement dude who made a video onhow to build a tree house). Write a detailed, step-by-step guide that elucidates a process relevant to your business (for example, take SEOmoz's great beginner's guide to SEO). Design an infographic that illustrates a concept (like our infographic on how the AdWords auction works). There are many ways to approach informational content. Get creative. The goal is to position yourself as a trustworthy, authoritative source of information, not to try to cram your products down the searcher's throat. This is the time to build awareness of your brand. If you can answer a searcher's question, they'll be more likely to think of you positively in the future if they need the kind of offerings you provide. If you're looking for more direction when it comes to content marketing, check out these related posts: Aligning Keyword & Content Types with Business Goals How to Rank for a Keyword in 10 Steps A Beginner’s Guide to Content Strategy for the Web: 10 Things You Need to Know Transactional Search Queries What Is a Transactional Search Query? A transactional search query is a query that indicates an intent to complete a transaction, such as making a purchase. Transactional search queries may include exact brand and product names (like "samsung galaxy s3") or be generic (like "iced coffee maker") or actually include terms like "buy," "purchase," or "order." In all of these examples, you can infer that the searcher is considering making a purchase in the near future, if they're not already pulling out their credit card. In other words, they're at the business end of the conversion funnel. Many local searches (such as "Denver wine shop") are transactional as well. Vertical searches are a subset of transactional search queries, and they represent people looking to make a transaction in a specific industry. These include local searches, restaurant searches, hotel searches, flight searches, etc. Google’s moves in recent years to directly target vertical searches have led to accusations of antitrust violations. How Should You Target Transactional Search Queries? We recommend a two-pronged approach here. There is no reason not to target transactional queries with organic content, like optimized product pages and local SEO strategies, but you should consider using PPC to target these search terms as well. Here's why: These are exactly the kinds of queries that are mostly likely to deliver ROI in paid search. If people are looking for a specific type of product to buy, a sponsored ad is just as likely as an organic result to deliver what they need. Sponsored results take up a lot of the available space on the SERP for commercial/transactional queries. If you want visibility above the fold for transactional keywords, you should consider PPC. Google offers lots of bells and whistles for sponsored ads and product listings. For example, you can include a picture of your product. Your options in organic results are more limited and less controllable. In one study, we found that people click on paid results over organic results 2 to 1 for queries with high commercial intent. This is probably because sponsored results take up so much of the above-the-fold real estate on these types of searches, because the new ad formats are so eye-catchingly clickable, and because lots of search engine users can't tell the difference between ads and non-ads. (NB: Commercial search queries are just a small percentage of total search query volume overall, so organic results still take the lion's share of overall clicks. More on that here.) These are some of the reasons we recommend using AdWords for transactional search queries. It's a scalable and cost-effective way to drives leads and sales. However, know that if you want to drive more overall traffic, your best bet is to build out your SEO content as well, since there are more informational queries than transactional ones. Any questions about these search query types and what they mean for search marketers? Let us know in the comments!

Social Media Metrics – 9 Calculations To Tell If Your Twitter and Facebook Marketing Suck Posted: 16 Dec 2012 09:40 AM PST How can you easily measure social media ROI or social media metrics? Call me old school, but I love the envelope when it comes to that question. It's so versatile. It can mail a birthday card (well, I should be mailing more birthday cards), it can serve as a temporary coaster for my coffee or beverage of choice, or it can be used to scribble quick calculation! I am sure that you have hear the phrase, "back of the envelope calculation.". I have made this type of quick multiplication, division and, yes, algebraic estimation many times for insurance questions, Costco purchases and even SAP social media marketing campaign performance estimation. However, for the meatier and more in-depth decisions, I rely on professionals and deeper discovery. The back of the envelope though is still way to help you get a quick delivery on basic social media insights. Here are 9 back of the envelope calculations to help you develop quick insight into your social media marketing performance: 1. Are Your Facebook Fans Really Interested In Your The Content You Are Posting? I like this metric because it answers your followers' question "I've liked your Facebook page, but am I motivated to stay engaged with it"? A Facebook page can be compared to a library, where a successful one is not based on how many cards are registered, rather, how many times the users come back to borrow books! If no one showed up again, then the library would have no reason to be in business. This percentage, which should be between 2-5% for your brand or page, indicates if you are giving a reason for your followers to engage. 2. Is Your Twitter Content Relevant Enough to Maintain Interest With Your Followers? Content is king and if it is 'royally relevant', then you will engage your followers to keep them coming back for more. The by-product is a larger network with whom to communicate! More followers! You always want to pay attention the question in back of your followers' heads of "I've decided to follow your analytics page, but are you really giving me relevant content?" Make sure that your percentage of unfollowers is decreasing on a month-over-month basis, vs. overall number unfollowers. This decrease lets you know you are headed in the right direction. 3. How Sharable (and super relevant) Is Your Twitter Content? Sharing social media content is the biggest vote of confidence that you are creating relevant information! It's like the icing on the content cake! You want your followers to say to themselves "I value your retail content enough to pass it on to my own network. It's my vote of confidence!". You will want to target your monthly RT total to increase. 4. Is Some Of Your Twitter Content More Interesting And Valued Than Other Types Of Your Twitter Content? You want to be able to compare the relevancy and value of your content on a relative basis vs. a gross-number basis. After all … fair is fair! This determining will help you rate how your followers' value compare your editorial vs. others, so you can then decide how to optimize your messaging. With the retweets per tweet calculation, you want to be increasing this ratio month over month. 5. How Much Of Your Facebook Messaging Is Actually Being Seen By Your Followers? If you build it (your Facebook page) and they come … that does not mean the will ever come back again … you need to find them! 95% of Facebook Likers never return to a brand's page. This low revisit number means that you have to make your number work harder to break through into the newsfeed, which is never easy. Only 15% of your Facebook messaging, a statistic directly reported by Facebook, ever makes it through to your followers' news feeds. You want to ensure your content leverages video, graphics and other ways to break through to at least 25% of your followers feeds. 6. Are Your Tweets Really Engaging? Your followers see your tweets. They see a lot of tweets. How do they place their vote for the most valuable and engaging? With clicks. At SAP in North America, we measure Twitter engagement in two ways – by those who click curated-content (i.e., clicks to Wall Street Journal, Business Innovation content) and those that click with a call-to-action in a campaign. For both we can gauge how engaging these tweets are and if they are performing well against our 80 clicks per tweet benchmark. 7. Is Your Following Strategy Too Needy? Why is it that you when follow someone in your industry but they do not follow you back? You can't start to improve on this challenge until you know how many are not following you back. It's not that you want everyone to follow you back. However, you do want the potential influencers to follow you. Take this percentage and move toward a smaller percentage month over month by employing an influencer outreach strategy. 8. Are You A Follower And Not A Thought Leader? Perception is a reality and your position as a thought leader needs to be managed! How can a ratio help you with that "what people think of you" management? By having ratio between 2 and 3 you are moving toward the right amount of people that you follow. For instance, the @SAPNorthAmerica account has a ratio of 6, so it is certainly perceived to be a thought leader and a resource that adds value to the B2B social conversation. You want to avoid being too unattached (i.e., all followers and no one that you follow) since that is not supporting the 'dialog' or 'two-way conversation strategy. Someone who looks at your follow-to-follower ratio and sees a nice balance of the two will think that there is the potential for a great relationship vs. being just tweeted to. 9. Are You Paying Attention To The Faceook Posts That Your Followers Like Best? Yes, the people are talking number is a great indicator if your collective content is engaging. However, what do you do if you want to start to maximize that engagement? Start by bucketing your content into 3-4 types: video, graphics, pictures, polls and text. By following the above formula, you can determine what type of content is driving interaction among your Likers. With this insight, you can answer your followers need for a particular type of content and requests to "give me more". Please leave a comment below or contact me directly on this blog if you need help with some of these back of the envelope social media performance calculation! Or, you may have some more of your own! Good luck on turning your Twitter and Facebook marketing around and giving a second life to that envelope on your kitchen table!

3 Brand Marketing Holiday Shopping Pinterest Trends Posted: 16 Dec 2012 09:30 AM PST Pinterest, "the out-of-nowhere social network" as CNN writer John D. Sutter dubbed it, is on many people's minds this holiday season. And it's not just consumers scheming how to stealthily pin gift ideas for friends and family on (gasp!) only three secret boards who are utilizing the photo centric social media platform. Big brand marketers, too, are scrambling to build Pinterest brand pages in time for holiday shopping. Why? Shoppers referred by Pinterest are 10 percent more likely to make a purchase than visitors who arrive from other social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. They'll also spend 10 percent more on average. A study by RichRelevance confirms the numbers, showing the average retail order from shoppers coming from Pinterest is $169, compared to the $95 people spend when they come from Facebook and the $71 they spend when coming from Twitter. Full disclaimer here: While my job involves social media strategy and daily posting and monitoring, I'm not a social media manager, and I don't oversee Pinterest accounts on behalf of any big brand clients. However, I am your typical Pinterest user. According to recent data, I fall into the largest demographic percentage of users for age, gender and household income. So while I'm not actually creating a strategic Pinterest holiday shopping plan, I've had my feelers out to see what others are doing. Here's what I've noticed: "Pin it to win it" Contests Are Still Strong Brands have been using "pin it to win it" contests as a way to increase engagement and followers pretty much since they jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon. This holiday season, it seems just about every brand is encouraging people to repin for swag. "Pin it to win it" contests range from the relatively simple to the downright involved. Agloves, maker of touch screen gloves and number one on our list of holiday tech tools on inbound marketers' wish lists, just wants users to follow and repin to win, where HuffPo Taste wants users to navigate a myriad of rules for their chance at a Williams-Sonoma Cuisine Electric Pressure cooker. Wish Lists & Gift Ideas While secret boards are great for planning gifts to get others, big brands want you to share your holiday wish list with the world. After all, other people can't see what you do on your secret boards until you invite them to collaborate. Gap wants your followers to see your wish list so badly, they're offering a $50 gift card for followers to share its products. Other brands like Macy's are simply populating gift idea boards and encouraging users to "Be Santa." Increased Male Targeting Men may only make up roughly 20 percent of Pinterest users, but recent data shows men's purchasing power is steadily increasing. Forty percent of men are now the primary grocery shopper in the home, and men have actually surpassed women as the chief buyer in the American household. While I haven't seen too many brands targeting men this holiday season, Pinterest-like sites such as Manteresting and Dudepins lead me to believe brands will be spending more time targeting men in 2013. Do you share my enthusiasm for Pinterest? What brand marketing holiday shopping Pinterest trends have you noticed?Lisa Gulasy is a young public relations professional highly interested in social media brand management, copywriting and grammar. Lisa works as an Associate Consultant at Kuno Creative where she creates content and assists senior consultants. Find her on Twitter and LinkedIn. Photo credit: Macy’s “Be Santa” board

Local Search Optimization—Capture Your Inbound Market Posted: 16 Dec 2012 09:00 AM PST Local Search According to Google, almost three quarters (73%) of online activity is related to "local" content and 97% of consumers (that's pretty close to all) search for local businesses online. Do these statistics surprise you?  It's true—when it comes to daily searches for information, the majority of people are looking for local products or services that will solve or at least ease their everyday problems. So, is your company and online content meeting the needs of local customers?  Whether it's on your website, your blog, your social media accounts or anywhere on the Web, if your content isn't optimized for local search, you're missing out on a huge opportunity to capture your share of this lucrative market. Let's look at a short list of some of the ways you can optimize your local SEO, both "on-site" and "off-site:" On-Site Local SEO The content on your site itself, and the SEO techniques that you use to categorize it with search engines, have a big effect on your visibility with local customers.  A few points to consider— Long tail local keywords—start with a good selection of highly targeted local keywords and phrases.  For example, Denver business owners are far more likely to search for the term "internet inbound marketing service Denver" than just "internet marketing service"—which could take them anywhere.  Insert these geo-targeted keywords into each page of your site, at a density (frequency) that reads naturally for humans. Optimize for each location—if your company has multiple locations, create pages optimized for each one.  For example, your Aurora store will not show up under keywords and meta-tags designated for Greenwood Village or Denver.  Each location and its page should have unique meta data and content that refers specifically to that geo-location.  It's like having a home page for each location (only better from Google's perspective), and it’s good for your inbound marketing efforts. Use rich snippets—Once Google understands what your content is about, you can add a feature called rich snippets.  These are short lines of text that appear under search results that describe to users what the page is about.  This is a great tool for local users who want to know information such as customer reviews, a restaurant rating or a piece of interesting news from the company. “Off-Site” Local SEO Apart from your site, there are many ways that you can optimize your content for local search.  Utilizing third-party sites and services, for example, can give your content a real boost by helping you to categorize and distribute it so that interested consumers can find it: Google Places (now being migrated to Google+ Local) —Google offers this free service as a type of online Yellow Pages (you remember those, don't you?)  Claiming your Places/Local listing gives you an opportunity to get found by the local market. Just like a Yellow Pages ad, you can include relevant information about your business such its category, hours of operation, payment options, reviews, etc. It adds keyword-rich content to your company's online content library and gives you visibility for your keywords, to improve organic search rankings. Google Plus Business Page—If you don't have a Google Plus business page, get one.  With the advent of "social search", and search engine algorithms designed to give it a more prominent role in rankings, social media content that is optimized for local search gives you a powerful edge in your local inbound marketing efforts. Social content is shared, and, it has a lot of clout with search engines.  You can create an entire network of connections with your page and market it on your site, your blog, etc. A Great Local Search Tool A great site to use to ensure you are signed up with all the local search directories is www.getlisted.org.  This is a free service that looks at the local search directories to verify that your business is listed there.  It also provides a link to each directory so you can claim your company’s listing if you are not already on it. (Note: we do not have any connection to this service.) Link Building Link building—Having others link to your webpage, blog or other content, especially from other local businesses, strengthens your local presence on the Web.  Links usually come to you when someone discovers your content and finds it compelling enough to share with others.  Links can come from other social media accounts, related blogs and reviews of your business on other sites. Bottom Line Do the above suggestions sound a little too technical for your taste?  Contact an inbound marketing specialist to give you a hand.  While the concepts are pretty straight forward, they won't do you any good unless you implement them.

How Was Your 2012 On Facebook And Twitter? Posted: 16 Dec 2012 07:20 AM PST 5 years back I would rush through the newspapers to know about my new year. But I always wished if someone would run down the memories of the year that had passed by. Social media is a life saver again and for all those who live with Twitter and Facebook today, you can now go back in the past and see how the year was for you, along with the popular trends of the world. This year both Facebook and Twitter have come up with smart apps that allow you to go back and revisit your 2012. Not only that, you are also provided with a snapshot of how the world behaved in 2012. See your 2012 via Facebook Some time back Facebook had launched Facebook Stories to share some extraordinary stories which were life changing. We shared Mayank Sharma's inspiring story in which we spoke how Facebook has been one of the sources to make his life beautiful. Now along with many other such stories, Facebook is sharing stories from 2012. The site is now sharing stories that shaped 2012 for US and rest of the world. In the India Trends section, the social network shares two very interesting data sets of 2012 along with a timeline snapshot of your entire year in 2012. 1. Songs of 2012: It is a list of top 10 songs that have been shared most on Facebook in 2012. 'Tum Hi Ho Bandhu' from the movie Cocktail topped the charts followed by 'Daaru Desi' again from Cocktail and 'Pani Da Rang' from Vicky Donor, at number 2 and 3 spots respectively. 2. Check-ins of 2012: Similarly, Facebook has released another infograph where it shows the trends of checkins made. Based on the checkins Delhi-ites seem to have been more proactive, as most of the checked-in places are from the capital of India. According to the data provided, Select City Walk, a popular mall in south Delhi, is the most checked in location on Facebook for 2012. In addition to the popular mall in south Delhi being the most checked-in location on Facebook for 2012, Ambience mall from Delhi, Inorbit mall from Mumbai and The Great India Place in Delhi NCR are also within the overall top 15. See your 2012 via Twitter Twitter hasn't been behind too and the platform has come up with a cool way of showcasing 2012 visually. The platform has created a microsite 2012 Year on Twitter with multiple sections such as Golden Tweets, Pulse of the Planet, Only On Twitter, Trends, New Voices and of course Your Year on Twitter. Each and every section that has been created by Twitter, summarizes the activities that changed the world via Twitter. However, the interesting thing to note here is the way Twitter has showed that it is no more an information site but a content site. Golden Tweets is the section where you can find the tweets or activities that not only created history on Twitter but impacted the world too. The most lovable hug – after Barack Obama won the US Presidential chair for another four years – no doubt tops the list! "Only On Twitter" were the moments on Twitter that came to life just because of Twitter that grew organically. For example "The Deepest Tweet" was one such tweet that James Cameron tweeted from 35,755 feet beneath the sea. "Year On Twitter" is the section that might interest you more since it tells about your activities on Twitter. Powered by Vizify, the page helps you to relive your moments but only for 3200 tweets. So go ahead, have a look and find out who were your Golden Follower and what you ranted about most in 2012. I was disappointed to see that Indians didn't make a mark on Twitter. Maybe one of the reason could be the lower penetration of the network in India. Nevertheless, I think both the initiatives from Twitter and Facebook are really cool and I am sure in the coming days there would be lots of apps who will use the API and come up with such initiatives. But for now these two should be good enough to keep you glued and share with your world.

Google+ Hits One Out of the Park with Customer Responsive Updates Posted: 16 Dec 2012 07:10 AM PST Google recently wowed the social media crowd with its Google+ communities but immediately the Google+kins were voicing their concerns and complaints. There were a few things that people wanted changed and the users were very vocal about it. Google+ employees were all over all week talking to users, explaining how it worked and sharing tips. One of the biggest complaints is the public vs. private communities. In the rush to start their communities, most people picked public and now regret it. The difference between the two was clearly stated: in a public community your community will be open to the world and in a private community only invited members can join the community and see what's shared. Choose wisely. I was in a community that started public, realized the mistake, closed and re-opened a private group. While all the members didn't move to the new group, those truly interested did. If you have a great community and are running it well, people will move to a new private group that you create. It's only been a week, you don't have that much content there yet. Also, maybe you will lose a few spammers in the transition. Everyone was flooded with invites and overbooked their social space with notifications and people. You have the ability to fix these things, Google doesn't need to do that for you. What Google+ did roll out is a fantastic bunch of features that people were asking for and some sweet extra bonuses! The roll out was announced here: Google+ 'Tis the Season for Shipping and includes eighteen new features. This is what I love so far: Super easy posting from your smartphone. I'm an Apple girl so these screen shots are from my iPad. You can easily view your circles and communities for sharing. And they are in alphabetical order! This is what the post looks like and I can see who I'm sharing with with (by the blue person) and what text is posting (next to the green pencil), it's very clear and easy to use. There's also a cool little photo preview with a larger grayscale version of the photo behind it. From Google, "The iPhone app now applies a subtle pan-zoom-scale effect to pictures in the stream." This is the expanded photo once I clicked it. There are ads on this but they are no big deal compared to Facebook's mobile version where almost half of what I see in my stream is sponsored posts or suggested pages. Google and Facebook need to pay the bills, I think Google did a much better job incorporating ads in their mobile version. This is the new mobile menu with communities! Hooray for communities on mobile! It's really easy to share in the different categories or just to review what's been shared overall. This is the center drop down menu in community view. You also have the ability to share to your circles and communities with one post. When I view my Google+ profile on the mobile view, I see posts that I made in my communities and on my public wall. See the little blue titles next to the date? This shows where your post was made. One of the benefits of community posts is that they show in your own private stream. One stop shopping to check all your posts, no need to hop from community to community (or group to group on Facebook) unless you want to. Brilliant. One on my very favorite new features in this roll out is the transitioning comments under the post. So slick! From Google, "On iOS, you'll see new conversation cards that really shine a light on your content—from longer snippets to bigger photos to comments that slide in beneath each post." View one, see Cedar's comment to me under the +27, which transitioned to the second view with the SMILE photo and my response which showed on my screen as a smooth transition to the next comment. Wow! I'm absolutely LOVING these new features and this is just my first spin through them but what I love most is that Google+ listens, truly listens, to it's community and is in the field with them helping them learn to use their product. I just don't see this at all with Facebook. While the new features they've added in the past week are amazing, to me it's this customer service that really wins it for Google+. In the social media world much is said about responding to your customers on social media and Google+ is the only social platform that does this. Try talking to someone at Facebook or Twitter when you have a question or need help, it just does not happen. I'm dubbing Google+ the people's platform. I hope you check it out if you haven't already. Well played, Google+, well played. Great quote from Vic Gundotra "Google+ is the fastest-growing network thingy ever." And this is why. Circle me here and if you are a writer and interested, please join my community. We are a private community but open to everyone who requests to join. Have you tried the new mobile Google+? What are your thoughts and what do you love/hate about it? Photo courtesy of Nicholas "Lord Gordon" via Creative Commons.

Social Media Analytics: Predictive Analytics Posted: 16 Dec 2012 06:20 AM PST Predictive analytics have been around a long time in finance and economics. Slowly, these analytic tools are finding their way into the marketing and social media arenas. What are predictive analytics? Predictive analytics use data regarding past behaviors to predict how individuals will behave in the future. For instance, your credit score is a predictive model including your repayment history and other information to predict whether you're a good credit risk or not. Predictive models commonly include a number of variables, such as # of late payments, and weighting factors that reflect the importance of that variable in predicting future behavior. These are commonly regression-type models. Modern predictive analytics use similar data and build similar models to predict how groups of people will behave, in general, or classify individuals into such groups. For instance, we might build a model that predicts how much of a product we'll sell if we lower (or raise) the price. While we won't be able to predict WHO will buy at the new price, we really don't care. We only need to know if we'll sell more at the new price. Thus, predictive analytics help us determine which marketing strategies will produce the best ROI (Return on Investment). How businesses use predictive analytics Businesses use predictive analytics in a number of ways, such as the one discussed above. In addition, a number of tools, such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) use predictive analytics to determine marketing strategies. Another type of predictive analytic is CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) which uses purchase information to classify customers into groups and determine the level of profit reflected by each group, which is used to build marketing strategies to each group. Descriptive models and predictive analytics Descriptive models are often overlooked as tools for generating predictive analytics because they suggest strategies that will generate better results without being able to quantify how much better the results will be. An example is the TRA (Theory of Reasoned Action). This model states that buying behavior is impacted by a consumers attitudes and beliefs about the products, as well as the norms related to that purchase. This theory, of course, underpins how social media works. Social media helps build attitudes toward products based on the most credible sources — our friends — and establishes norms of behavior when we see all our friends buying the product. So, why aren't these descriptive models used more frequently in businesses. In part, that's due to poor exchange between businesses and academics who seem to speak different languages. Predictive analytics and social media Marketing in general, and social media marketing in particular, are not heavily influenced by predictive analytics. Although, that's changing as supercomputers allow organizations to use massive data captured during transactions to build predictive models of what consumers buy and factors that impact their purchases. Still, relatively few companies use predictive analytics to drive marketing strategy. Sometimes, when I pitch to prospective clients, I'm shocked at how few demand any true analytics from their agencies and almost none even understand the concept of predictive analytics. If the agency provides any analytics, it's commonly simple ones such as # of Fans, # or RT, or other somewhat meaningless data. Agencies and in-house marketing employees often develop simple correlations as a way to build social media marketing strategy. For instance, they might notice that certain types of content drive more engagement or that posting at certain times generates more engagement, so they do more of this. But, this lacks to depth of understanding necessary to build predictive analytics. I have several proprietary predictive analytics tools I use to help clients optimize their ROI. For instance, I have a complex algorithm (model) to help businesses generate leads for the sales force from their email marketing programs. In other cases, I build predictive models from scratch or use descriptive models to generate predictive analytics, such as my hierarchy of effects in social media.

How Delhi Safari Maximised Facebook Engagement With Images And Games Posted: 15 Dec 2012 06:40 PM PST A Facebook case study on how the animated movie 'Delhi Safari' managed to gain maximum engagement on Facebook by posting creative content and adding in some gamification. Delhi Safari – India's first stereoscopic 3D animated feature film made by Nikhil Advani and produced by Krayon Pictures – combines Bollywood masala with the global cause of deforestation and wildlife protection. In the movie, a group of animals namely Bagga, Bajrangi, Alex, Yuvi and Begum plan a trip to Delhi in order to ask the prime minister, why the forest they live in is on the verge of destruction. Delhi Safari provides for good entertainment as well as food for thought for these causes. The movie got digital agency, Socio Square to create an exciting Facebook page that not only highlighted the creativity of the movie but also encouraged fans to interact with the page as much as possible. Objective: Being an animated movie, the Facebook page for it had to be something as unique as the film. The main objective while working on this page was to create a perception for this movie that is very Bollywood in nature. The emphasis was on fun and entertainment rather than monotonous content to build maximum fan engagement. Strategy: To extend the content of the page beyond the things that are already being done on other movie pages. Capitalize on the weekends for engaging fans via creative content like fan activities, puzzles, etc. Solution: Gamification – The new trend for engagement! Content was strategized in the form of picture games to engage more fans over the weekend. Every weekend, the page had game-centric posts that required fans to give some input. There was no kind of gratification on any of these posts as the intention was to hold on to a fan's attention and give them something more to do than just reading a post or checking out a picture. Posts like the Maze Game, Solve the puzzle, Spot differences, Spot the words and Comic Strips fetched a good response. Results: Most Viral post: The maze game Spot Differences The original post was made on August 19th, when the page had about 140K fans. As you can see, the post received more than 1000 likes, 250 shares and had over 150 responses in the comments. Interestingly, all this was achieved in less than 3 hours. Crossword Puzzle The original post was made on August 5th, when the page had about 50K fans. The post received more than 250 likes, 60 shares and a good number of successful responses in less than 2 hours. The solution was shared the next day. Jigsaw Puzzle: Learnings: Fans are ready to engage with the page, provided not too much is asked from them in return. In the maze game, fans were asked to just reply with the right answer in the options A, B, C or D. Since a single letter reply was expected, comments kept pouring throughout the day. It was also observed that the best time to fetch attraction from the fans is the weekends, especially for movie brands (starting Friday evening to Sunday). Be it movies or products, brands can always capitalise on the basic human need to play games, solve puzzles and find answers. The Delhi Safari Facebook campaign brings out a smart content strategy where the community is treated to something fun and creative and at the same time, also gets them involved. How did you like the content strategy for Delhi Safari on Facebook? Let me know your thoughts.

Don’t Overuse These Buzzwords in LinkedIn Posted: 15 Dec 2012 06:00 PM PST The business networking site LinkedIn has released its annual list of overused buzzwords – verbiage that is written too often in their users' profiles. They issue a worldwide list, broken down by country, of the words most frequently used in their 187 million members' profiles, as well as the words most overused in the United States. Here is the list for the U.S.: Creative Organizational Effective Motivated Extensive Experience Track Record Innovative Responsible Analytical Problem Solving Incidentally, "creative," "organizational," and "effective" were also in the top three in the U.S. last year. Two new buzzwords on the list this year were "analytical" and "responsible," words that were not on the 2011 list. Analytical, of course, is a word that is growing in popularity due to the growth of data analysis.  Two words which got knocked off the list were "dynamic" and "communications skills." The problem with buzzwords Now, while these all seem like important words which have their time and place, the problems with them, aside from them being overused, is that many of them are supposed to be a given in the business world. It's like when people put the description of them as being "hard-working" on their resumes. They're supposed to be hard-working, after all. It's like putting "bathes regularly" or "brushes teeth everyday" on their resume. In addition, these days, employers don't want to hear verbiage saying how wonderful you are. They want to see results. For example, instead of saying that you are creative, why not show examples of your creativity, such as a link to your portfolio? If you really are innovative, explain exactly how innovative you are. The same goes with problem solving and the other words in your LinkedIn profile. Show, don't tell What it boils down to is something career coach experts talk about — the idea of showing and not telling. You should use numbers and statistics and results to explain what you have done. It is not enough to say you have a track record of success; you should show that track record of success. What now? So what do you need to do now? You can remove these buzzwords from your LinkedIn profile, but you may need to use other words to describe some of those things. For example, "responsible," as in "responsible for," is a word you may need to use in our profile, although you can also use words like "managed" or "produced" – that is, until they become overused in LinkedIn profiles!

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