20 New Social Articles on Business 2 Community |
- Facebook Marketing Data: Photos Rock
- 3 Reasons Video Is Paramount To Achieving SEO Success
- Profile of an Online College Student [Infographic]
- AT&T: Engaging Customers with Personalized Videos
- How to Find Contact Details on LinkedIn Outside Your Network
- Make Every Facebook Post Count – How to Work Your EdgeRank
- How Google Authorship Can Boost Your Local Business
- From Data to Dollars: Operational Change Through Social Research
- What Facebook’s Year in Review Reveals About Us
- The Power of Pinterest for Small Business
- Leverage Quora for Inbound Marketing Campaigns: 3 Tips
- Is Twitter Cruising for an Utter Fail by Losing Instagram?
- Sunsilk Launches The Straight Hair Experiment On Social Media
- Buy Yourself The Gift Of Time: Social Media For The Holidays
- Integrate Your Social Media with Offline Advertising
- Are You A Blog Farmer?
- The Results Are In: An Experiment in Social Influence
- How to Use Google Trends to Complement Your Keyword Research (Examples + Screenshots)
- The Decline of American Entrepreneurship [Infographic]
- How to Start Your Corporate Blog
| Facebook Marketing Data: Photos Rock Posted: 17 Dec 2012 02:00 PM PST Hubspot posted a great blog last week–as they often do–about content sharing. One of the hidden nuggets of data buried about 647 pages into the blog post was about Facebook marketing. Specifically, Hubspot found that Facebook posts containing photos generate substantially more likes–53% more–than the average post. Hubspot crystallizes what this pretty startingly data means: Today’s social media platforms reward visual content. It should be a major piece of your content strategy. So to summarize: photos generate more interest than your other posts. People like photos. They love photos. They even love photos about your business (as long as they’re not boring and crappy). So, how do you capitalize on this social media love for visual images? Here are some ideas:
Pretty simple. There’s no lead to have a giant list to tell you to do something that is more obvious than Charlie Sheen’s craziness. Just take more pictures and post them to Facebook. Not. Complicated. So what do you take pictures of? Basically anything you find interesting. You could take pictures of your employees doing funny things, your customers using your product, or your employees at work. Take pictures of company parties, funny habits of employees, or pretty women that are also clients. Take pictures of stuff and post those pictures to Facebook. That’s it. If you do that, you will get more Likes and more Shares. Also, keep this in mind: just because something may seem boring to you doesn’t mean that it will be boring to your audience on Facebook. Just because you have seen something done a billion times at your business doesn’t mean that your clients won’t find it interesting. A Caution Don’t just post ANYTHING. Okay, when I said above that you should post stuff on Facebook, I meant it. However, a picture of your keyboard isn’t Facebook-worthy. Nor is a picture of your phone. Don’t be stupid. Another Caution Don’t post things that could be offensive. Just because you talk about it in your office doesn’t mean it should appear on your Facebook page. Seriously. How To Increase Conversion Rates with Call Tracking |
| 3 Reasons Video Is Paramount To Achieving SEO Success Posted: 17 Dec 2012 01:55 PM PST Ten years ago, SEO was an extraordinarily simple task; all you had to do was stuff as many keywords as possible onto one webpage and as if by magic, you’d start ranking for those keywords. Obviously, this was never going to be a technique that lasted very long and sure enough, Google soon realised that people were able to manipulate their search results and updated their algorithm to ensure this didn’t happen. Google has been regularly updating their search algorithm ever since and unfortunately, the life of an SEO has become increasingly more difficult with every update. Sure, Google might favour high quality, less-spammy sites these days, but SEO is becoming more time consuming and more expensive. Luckily, SEO’s are starting to realise (much to their dismay) that content really is king, especially since the recent Penguin and Panda updates. However, a lot of SEO’s are still neglecting certain types of content; particularly video content. Personally, I think video content is paramount to achieving SEO success these days, especially for larger brands; here’s a few reasons why: #1 – Google LOVES Video A Google search for “Gangnam Style Cover” showing Google’s YouTube SERP integration. Perhaps the most obvious reason that video should be an important part of any SEO strategy is that Google loves video. What do I mean by this? Well, Google has been incorporating video content into their SERP’s for a while now and I’m sure you’ll have noticed (as I have) that video is becoming a lot more prominent. Why is this though? Why does Google love video? Well, perhaps the most obvious reason is the fact Google owns YouTube. Google has a number of reasons for making video content more prominent in the Google SERP’s with the main reason being that it will significantly increase their revenue. Think about it; if Google displays ten standard website results on the first page of their SERP’s for a particular keyword, most of the searchers will navigate to one of those websites. At this point, the visitor has nothing more to do with Google and thus, Google will not see any further revenue from that searcher. However, if Google displays a number of relevant YouTube results on that first page of the SERP’s, visitors are going to navigate to YouTube; a website owned by Google that features an array of advertising, thus bringing in more revenue for Google. If Google loves video, then you should too as it’s Google you’re trying to impress (as you already know). #2 – Video = LinkbaitLinkbaiting is nothing new; in fact, it’s has been used by SEO’s for years now. Common forms of linkbait include “top 10 lists”, infographics and even educational resources. However, most SEO’s would still rather pile their budget into creating an infographic than creating a video. Linkbaiting is considered paramount to achieving SEO success in most niches as it’s one of the only ways to attract links from highly authoritative sources. However, in a world where nearly every webmaster is being constantly bombarded with guest post requests, embeddable infographics and “educational resources”, it makes sense to try and stand out from the crowd and give webmasters something their visitors will love; a well-produced entertaining video, like this one: With over 21 million views, this video got links for DC Shoes from all over the web as it was mentioned by authoritative websites around the globe. Sure, if you’re a smaller company that doesn’t have a massive marketing budget, you might have to set your sights a bit lower but then again, DollarShaveClub.com achieved tonnes of links and press attention with this video and it only cost $4,500! It’s important to remember that SEO is not about following your competitors, it’s about doing things better than them and attracting more, higher quality links than them. In order to do this, you need to stand out. Sure, infographics and other forms of linkbait are always going to work and will always be great link acquisition methods but there’s no denying that people love video and usually, video content creates more of a buzz than traditional forms of media, thus leading to more links. #3 – It Boosts Social Signals Video being shared in the Facebook News Feed. Every SEO knows how important social signals are these days; in fact, there have even been reports of websites ranking almost entirely on social signals alone. The reason that Google is placing an increasing large amount of weight on this factor is because getting genuine social signals isn’t easily done. It means that REAL people have to actually be sharing your content which of course means that it has to be good quality. There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t see a video pop up in my Facebook or Twitter newsfeed which pretty much confirms that people love to share great video content. If a video does pop up in my news feed, I’ll usually watch it as most of the time, I don’t even have to leave Facebook or Twitter to do this. More importantly, if I’m impressed by what I see, I’ll click the “Like”, “Share” or “Retweet” button and sometimes, take a look at the other content from that website. In reality, it isn’t the social signals that’s the most important thing here, it’s the fact that video effectively engages an audience on social networking websites and often leads them to investigate your business further. What’s the proper word for this? Brand Engagement perhaps? Still, the social signals are a nice bonus! So What Should You Do About All This?I’m not saying that everything has to revolve around video, because it doesn’t. However, what I am saying is that video is an underused SEO technique that will inevitably become as common as guest posting and directory links eventually; so in a way it’s paramount to your long-term SEO success. Getting involved in video marketing now will help push you ahead of your competitors which ultimately, is your main goal anyway. You know what they say; the early bird catches the worm. |
| Profile of an Online College Student [Infographic] Posted: 17 Dec 2012 01:37 PM PST From the mail-order correspondence courses of the last century to today's high-tech learning environment, distance learning has changed the way some college students learn and earn degrees. Online education continues to make strides in educating new generations of students, as witnessed by the double-digit growth of people taking at least one class online in the past several years. According to a collaborative study by the Babson Survey Research Group and the College Board, while less than 10 percent of college students were taking at least one class online in 2003, nearly one-third of college students are now taking at least one of their courses online. While students come from a variety of ages and ethnicities, they do seem to have some things in common, particularly when it comes to their gender and household income. They also have similarities when considering motivations for taking online rather than on-campus classes. Have you ever taken an online class, or would you take one? And just who are the nearly one-third of higher education students who are taking at least one online class? Do you fit the online college student profile?
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| AT&T: Engaging Customers with Personalized Videos Posted: 17 Dec 2012 01:22 PM PST The Challenge: Gaining customer attention and engagement is tough. Marketer’s attempts at “personalization” have not been effective. Can personalized videos engage customers? AT&T thinks so and has the results to prove it. How important is a personal connection with your customers? Critical, says Danny Kalish, co-founder of Idomoo, “Today’s consumers are nostalgic for the personal relationships they once enjoyed with their service providers. This type of emotional connection engenders loyalty, which is as valuable to organizations as innovation in products or services.” Today’s customers are overwhelmed with the flood of marketing “spray and pray” blasts. To really engage them, marketers need to make it obvious that unlike their previous messaging, new communications are truly and obviously personalized and relevant. With this in mind, AT&T has been testing auto-generated personalized videos in its billing for its wireless services. Subscribers receive an email with a link to a video, which addresses the subscriber by name before going through each element of their personal bill, anticipating and answering customer concerns along the way. The content the customer sees are his or her own, not generic examples — and it’s all clearly laid out. The results have been very encouraging: 1. Over 85% of customers have found the bill helpful. 2. Almost 80% of customers open and watch the video bill to completion. 3. Significant reduction in bill-related calls. 4. In July, AT&T and SundaySky won the Global Telecoms 2012 Consumer Service Award for Consumer Billing Innovation. Key Takeaways for Marketers 1. Add new dimensions to your communications. 2. Engage customers throughout the lifecycle. 3. Relevance is the key. 4. Constantly test. |
| How to Find Contact Details on LinkedIn Outside Your Network Posted: 17 Dec 2012 01:00 PM PST You have read everything on our Resources page haven't you? Readers, you are in biz dev, you want leads for your business and you need to get contact details of key personnel in target organisations: Have you read the B2B Lead Generation slidedeck? It's linked right there on the Resources page – top of the list. Today we add in more goodness to that research process. How to find contact details for someone outside your networkThis is a fabulous process from Andy Foote's blog. LinkedIn makes money by limiting search. One of the most annoying restrictions is being unable to see Last Names on LinkedIn searches. Fortunately Google to the rescue. Here are step by step instructions on getting full name Profiles. (1) Start the search in People. My example: "hr manager accenture" (2) "Mary F" is the prospect but I need her Last Name. – Linked in will only show a limited profile because she's outside my network. But it does say that she is an Outsourcing Manager at Accenture (3) Copy "Outsourcing HR Manager at Accenture Toronto Canada Area" into Google and click on the search icon. (4) Bingo! Click on the Google Search result and you find the full name Profile (of Mary Frank). How cool is that? Read Andy's full blog post of 5 Exceedingly clever LinkedIn hacks |
| Make Every Facebook Post Count – How to Work Your EdgeRank Posted: 17 Dec 2012 12:00 PM PST
Utilizing these tools is not so simple. While great communication is possible, to really make your Page effective, you have to understand the ins and outs of Facebook EdgeRank. If you haven't heard about it yet, EdgeRank is the algorithm that controls the Facebook newsfeed—i.e. the mechanism that controls how well you voice is heard on Facebook. To many marketers, algorithm is a word that comes up a lot, but they never bother to understand every aspect of it. EdgeRank is different—understanding is key to taking an advantage. Essentially, EdgeRank has three components:
Of course, at this point, you might be wondering, "what the heck is an edge?" To be honest, I don't understand the name either. But for Facebook, an edge is all of those actions that people use to express themselves publicly—a status update, a comment, a like, tag, etc. Weight & Time Decay Factor are pretty much intuitive. Every social media marketer knows that choosing the right messaging medium and timing it right have a huge impact on the reach. In contrast, affinity is the mystery ingredient for Facebook's EdgeRank. Kelvin Newman of Econsultancy shed some light on this topic by explaining affinity as "how 'friendly' you are with someone. You've probably seen this in action. Spy on an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, snoop on their profile and suddenly they're in your news feed all the time." The problem for companies is that it only works one way. Companies can't visit their favorite fans, and hope that they'll start showing up on the fans' newsfeeds. The fans have to come to you! The key is to attract by building on what EdgeRank you already have going for you. So, we have some tips for you. How to build your EdgeRank strategy, one step at a time.1. Prioritize photo-sharing to get started. Sometimes we forget that Facebook really started as its generation's Pinterest—an innovative, photo-friendly interface that drew people in through sprawling albums and picture tagging. Today, Facebook photos easily are the most viral aspect of Facebook content. The reason their helpful with EdgeRank is that your core Page fans will be much more likely to add edges (i.e. shares, comments, likes) to a photo than a status. 2. Make yourself "Facebook Stalk-able." This is the content creation component of EdgeRank building. You want to produce a high level of quality content through daily Facebook posts, full photo albums, a well-stocked timeline, and a great “about” page. If your page is "stalk-able," you simply will have more edges for users to grab onto—raising your potential for affinity points. 3. Push your available network toward new content by using other Social Media. Have you ever thought about promoting one social network over the other. Well, if you're trying to build EdgeRank affinity, promoting Facebook content (including photos) with Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest could be really helpful. This can help your time decay also, by accelerating how fast your followers see content. 4. Engage, engage, engage! Last but not least, with any social media (especially Facebook), make sure you’re dedicating time to engage with your followers! This is the hardest part for many B2B marketers who are still acclimating to devoting time to social media and who think they can do the bare minimum and still see results. Show your paying attention by responding to comments and questions promptly, ask your followers engaging questions, or create a contest. All are ways to engage with your followers, which increases their activity on your page and with your content. Hopefully this post inspires you to take your EdgeRank to the next level. If you’re still looking to master some of the basics of your company Facebook page, grab a copy of our free Facebook for Business Tip Sheet.
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| How Google Authorship Can Boost Your Local Business Posted: 17 Dec 2012 11:31 AM PST
Google+ is the search giant’s own social network and although it’s not as popular as facebook, it’s gaining a lot of traction and attention lately. How Can you Use This Tool to Boost your Local Business?Even if you’re not into social media, there’s an obvious benefit to using it if you would like more traffic from the search engines. If you publish content and have a website for your business here’s why you need to use it as soon as possible. 1. To claim ownership of your content in the search enginesSite scrapers and competitors can steal your original and well written content and outrank you in the search results. They can do these even if you wrote the original content because they might have a more popular domain. Using Google Authorship can help minimize these events. 2. It can help increase your CTR in the Search ResultsCTR or Click through Rate is the percentage of clicks you get per impression. If 100 people saw your website and 10 people click to your site, then your CTR is 10%. The average CTR for a number 1 ranking is 18.20% according to this study. Since not all website and content owners use Google authorship, you’re website will be able to stand out from the rest. A small preview of your Google+ profile image will be shown beside your website.
Numerous studies have been done online and it shows that CTR can increase by as much as 22% through integration of Google+. 3. Social signals (FB likes, tweets and G+1′s) are driving SEO rankingsA lot of people are wondering if social signals are playing a role in the serps. An infographic showing a study done about this shows that 100 Google Plus followers can boost search engine rankings by 14.63%, 300 GooglePlus +1 votes boosted it by 9.44%, Facebook promotion was boosted by 6.9% and tweets and retweets, boosted it by 2.88%. And the control in the study has no social activity and there was no meaningful change in the search results. Here’s a Quick Step-by-step guide to get Google Authorship for your website: 1. Sign up for a Google account. If you have a Gmail account, then you’re good to go. Otherwise, you can sign up for one here. 2. Create your Google Plus profile. Use your Real name. According to Google’s TOS, you can use pen names if you are publicly known as that name. Will.I.Am is an example of a G+ profile using a pen name. You also need to use a real picture in your profile. Use a headshot image that you’d like to use publicly. Don’t use stock photos or corporate logos. You can use your logo for your Google+ business page. 3. Complete your About page by logging into your account, then clicking on the profile circle on the left tab and click on the edit profile button. Fill in all the relevant information. 4. You need to link your website and your Google Plus profile. You can do this by adding your website to the Contributor to links in your Profile. Add subdomains of your site as well. If you have a blog subdomain, like what we have for our Internet marketing blog, you’ll need to add that as well. 5. Then get your Google+ profile url. It will look like this: https://plus.google.com/100638437358385248683 Then add this GoogleAuthorship Tag ?rel=author The Final HTML code would look like this. <a href=”https://plus.google.com/100638437358385248683?rel=author”>Ryan</a> 6. Include this link in your website. For most website owners, they can add it to their author profile (see image below)
Or you can also add it to the footer of your website. If you are using wordpress, you can edit the footer.php file and add the link in the footer of your site. This way all your pages will be claimed for Google Authorship.
If you have a Multi-Authored blog, it’s best to use the author profile link method than the footer method, because it would be a sitewide link. 7. Last step is to verify if your Google Plus authorship is working. Publish and make your article live. Use Google’s Rich Snippet’s tool to check out if it’s working. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets If it’s working, you’ll see something like this:
Congratulations! Now you’ve completely setup Google Authorship for your website. Now’s the best time to leverage this tool from Google. They are pushing Google+ in almost all of their products-recently with Youtube and Google places. If you have a small business or a local business owner, you’re missing a lot of free opportunities to get more traffic from the search engines. Did you like this Google Authorship article?If you do, then you’ll love our award winning guide. Get your complimentary copy by clicking on the button below. |
| From Data to Dollars: Operational Change Through Social Research Posted: 17 Dec 2012 11:30 AM PST There are plenty of data sources out there that can help you create efficiencies and improvements in your brand or business. One commonly overlooked source is social research. We have written about the importance of social research many times, with its opportunities for proactive customer service and online reputation management. However, the most lucrative aspect of social research is its ability to convert data into dollars. Here are some key operational changes you are able to make based on intelligence gleaned from social listening. Competitive Analysis Competitive analysis is imperative for staying ahead in the digital world. Therefore, social listening does not have to be restricted to your business, brands, product lines, etc. It can also encompass your competitors' brand and products. You are not only able to assess how customers respond to your deals, customer service, website and more, but what your competition's new and most successful initiatives are through the eyes of the consumer. For example, perhaps you and your competition both offer price matching, but your competition also offers free shipping. Therefore, the customer is saving even more money. Social research can tell you if people choose that brand over yours for this reason. Inventory In addition to staying competitive, social research can tell you how many people successfully and unsuccessfully search for your products and brands on your site or elsewhere online. If there is a large spike in customers tweeting that they wanted to buy a product on your site that was either not available or not in stock, you may be able to predict–based on trended data over time–what products will sell best at certain times of the year. You will also be able to assess whether or not you should expand brand and product line offerings based upon demand. Opportunities for Product Improvement Unsolicited consumer opinion about your product or service is a gold mine. With social research, you are able to analyze what consumers like most and least about your product or service and find opportunities for improvement. Let's say, for example, that you are a shampoo company that just switched over to all natural ingredients in an effort to be more environmentally-friendly. While some loyal customers think the new ingredients smell funny, the eco-friendly community has lauded your efforts and promoted you on every imaginable channel, which has increased sales. With the help of social research, you are able to calculate the profitability of adding natural ingredients to more of your products. Opportunities for Expanding Markets Social research does not have to be restricted to certain languages, countries or continents. Therefore, it is possible to ascertain what other markets in which your product or service might do well. By listening to consumer conversation in other potential markets, your company can assess whether or not there is enough demand for your product in other regions of the globe and expand. Price Sensitivity Analysis Prices are a very popular subject on social media. People do not hesitate to tweet about a great deal, especially when there is incentive to share. Likewise, they are not afraid to share when they feel a product is not worth its price tag. Therefore, social research is a great place to conduct a price sensitivity analysis (e.g. how much people are willing to pay for a particular product or service). |
| What Facebook’s Year in Review Reveals About Us Posted: 17 Dec 2012 10:20 AM PST
The promise of big data is that it can reveal to us the truth in our behaviours, not just our beliefs. Just think, for example, about your internet use over the last year. Or month. Or even week. What did you do? What sites did you visit? What did you click on? Why did you share a page or two, a link or a video? Now, imagine if we did the same thing for your friends – if we knew what they looked, liked and loved?
If we could overlay that in some way to create a visual tag cloud, we may just get a sense of what is important to our communities. We may garner some magical insight into what it is like to live in this rapidly changing world. Well that's what Facebook Stories is doing. Of course, it works best if you are a heavy Facebook user (I'm not), but it's an interesting experiment that shows everything from your own personal timeline stories through to the trends that impacted us by country and by category. But, for me, the most interesting thing that Facebook Stories reveals is where the pulse of our humanity lies. Take a look at some of the trends – you'll see what I mean. |
| The Power of Pinterest for Small Business Posted: 17 Dec 2012 10:00 AM PST Pinterest is, in my humble opinion, a MUST for small business. Pinterest has had explosive growth in 2012 and now boasts about 12 MILLION unique visitors a month and continues to climb, according to comScore. Pinterest for small business becomes more apparent as Pinterest generates more referral traffic back to websites than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. More targeted traffic from Pinterest really puts small business products and brands in the spotlight. If your product, small business niche has a high percentage of women as your targeted customers, it's imperative that Pinterest be a part of the small business marketing plan. Even high profile female entrepreneur Ali Brown believe in the power of pinterest for small business:
It's also no wonder that Pinterest—the virtual scrapbooking site—has fast become one of the hottest social media platforms around, especially among women. TechCrunch reports that the site hit 10 million monthly unique views earlier this year—that's faster than any other standalone site EVER! And it's not surpassed LinkedIn as the #3 most popular social network. Millions of retailers now use Pinterest to promote their goods. And for small business owners like you and me, it can prove to be a valuable, fun way to build brand awareness for your business via visually driven content. ….More at "5 Tips for Using Pinterest to Promote Your Business" by Ali Brown … The power of Pinterest for small business gives the opportunity for businesses to share their unique story through boards, with their pins of products, tips, ideas that can directly connect with their followers. Images and products that are sharable, pin-able to their followers' circle of influence. Pinterest offers small businesses another way, like Twitter or Facebook, to enhance their relationship building ability while helping to drive traffic back to their website, create new customers, expand their social reach and product exposure while building brand loyalty.
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| Leverage Quora for Inbound Marketing Campaigns: 3 Tips Posted: 17 Dec 2012 09:30 AM PST
What is Quora?According to the site's "About" page, "Quora is a collection of questions and answers that is created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The main goal is to be the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about each question." Quora is a Wikipedia-like resource that allows users to ask and get answers to any question they can think of. It stands out amongst competitors like Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers by requiring users to use their real names when answering questions and, as a result, the site's content quality is extremely high. Publishers like Forbes and Slate have started using Quora content on their own news sites, and other media outlets have begun experimenting with the best ways to leverage the site's potential. I've used Quora in several different ways in my own business, and I've found it to be an excellent tool for a lot of the activities central to inbound marketing. My Quora ExperienceI own a small, young content development agency that targets marketing managers at medium-to-large-sized SaaS companies. To get some insight into what my target buyers are talking about online, I follow Quora's SaaS-related topics. I also use Quora to ask my buyers specific questions. Recently, I was interested in targeting marketing professionals at large nonprofits to find out how they work with freelance writers and content development companies. To get more insight into their operations, I asked things like:
We got some great responses and now have more insight into the ways our target buyers think about their relationships with outsourced content creators. We also have an entirely new buyer persona - "The Small Hospital Marketing Director" – which we didn't even realize existed before we started our research. Quora Strategies for Enterprise Inbound MarketingMid-to-large-sized companies that use inbound marketing for lead generation and revenue growth can get the most out of Quora if they use it to develop buyer personas, source ideas for new content, and maintain a competitive advantage. Here's a breakdown of some Quora inbound marketing strategies for enterprise organizations: Optimize Your Buyer Personas Refine your existing buyer personas. Buyer persona development isn't a one-time activity. Your ideal customers are constantly changing, using new technologies, and facing new challenges. Following topics that your buyer personas follow will help you stay current on your customers' top-of-mind concerns, and your personas will stay fresh and accurate. Develop new buyer personas. When you follow topics that are relevant to your industry, you find out who is actually researching your product. Listen to user's questions and concerns to get a sense of what they want out of your product, and turn to their user profiles for instant demographic data about their job titles, geographic locations, gender, and age. Source Ideas for New Content Get ideas for your blog. By following topics relevant to your industry, you can generate new ideas for blog posts, FAQ's and whitepapers. Tip: Pay close attention to Quora's "Most Followed" and "Most Viewed" question lists. Perform keyword research. Using Quora to find out how potential leads word their questions about your product can lead to new insights into which keywords will have the most impact on your SEO. Perform a Competitive Analysis Keep your finger on the pulse of your industry. There's no shame in following your competitors on Quora. According to John Paul Titlow of ReadWriteWeb, "Checking up on what kinds of questions a competitor is following, or better, the answers they're giving, can tip you off to what they might have in the pipeline." What Not to Do on QuoraDon't Try to Market Your Business. The Quora community values transparency, and outright sales pitches aren't generally well received. Don't Put Your Foot in Your Mouth. Journalists and bloggers regularly mine Quora for story sources, so if you're going to publicly answer a question on behalf of your company, make sure your response is well-thought-out and well-written. Final ThoughtsUsing Quora for business development is a relatively new idea, but a number of companies have already begun to take advantage of the platform. As marketers continue to search for new and innovative tools to augment their inbound marketing efforts, I think they'll definitely find Quora to be worth looking into. Do you use Quora for business development or marketing research? Has it been an effective tool? photo credit: Marco Bellucci |
| Is Twitter Cruising for an Utter Fail by Losing Instagram? Posted: 17 Dec 2012 08:19 AM PST Will Photo Filters Bring Down the Tweet Empire?
Not long ago, the social media world was in an uproar because Facebook purchased the Instagram app for a billion dollars and moved the entire team to the Facebook headquarters. For a short time, we all wondered what this might mean for our beloved photo-sharing app, but it turned out to be no big deal. After a few weeks, we all returned to our usual Tweeting and Facebooking ways, still using the Instagram app as we always had. This time, things are different. This time, the Instagram staff is taking the slight personally. As of Monday, December 10, the formerly friendly partnership between the two fell apart, leaving us all wondering once again what it all means for our social media marketing and communication. As of today, we're all looking at these potential problems and outcomes: Kill Two Birds with Two StonesThe connection between Instagram and Twitter allowed users of both social media platforms to communicate with followers of two separate programs with one post. The efficiency in reaching out to two social media groups with one click of a button made the Instagram/Twitter connection exceptionally attractive. We're busy and important people. We want to do things once and be done with it, which means we'll all need to make a choice. Eenie-Meenie-Miney…Without the ability to post to both platforms at the same time, users will likely choose one or the other. Since Instagram still offers the ability to share on Twitter, most will probably continue to use the app out of habit. The only drawback Instagram users will likely find is that the photo no longer shows up automatically in tweets, but links still lead to the image. The Wall Street Journal also offers up some workarounds, such as uploading your Instagram shots to Pinterest, which will then show up in your Twitter timeline as it always has. The Case of the Disappearing PhotosA quick glance through your recent images on Twitter will show you any Instagram photos you tweeted in the past are no longer available. For those who used Twitter as the main source of image sharing, this is a serious bummer, since there is now no way to keep all photos together in one place. Many who have been using Twitter to share Instagram photos may simply choose to continue using Instagram so as not to take a chance on losing any more photos in their timelines. For those willing to drop their Instagram addiction, Twitter's new photo filters look pretty similar. Just remember, if you slack on using one or the other, you'll miss out on the followers you've gained. Eh, NBDSave for the flailings of the overdramatic, the change may not matter in the long run. As consumers, we're adaptable, and to be honest, we're all pretty fickle, too. For now, this is the dumbest thing Twitter could ever do to us, but that won't stop us from using Twitter, Instagram, and anything else that comes along in the future—such as the new Flickr app from Yahoo, which Forbes touts as the best mobile photo app out there at the moment. Regardless of how we all feel about the changes, we must be ready and willing to adapt. Technology will continue to evolve, no matter what our thoughts may be, and we will all continue to roll with the punches. We watch new social media programs and apps come and go, laugh at or lament their demises, and quickly move on to the next big thing. With 72 million active accounts and 360 million tweets per day, it doesn't look like Twitter is going anywhere soon.
image credit: SDGLN |
| Sunsilk Launches The Straight Hair Experiment On Social Media Posted: 17 Dec 2012 07:35 AM PST It's the season of winter chills and dry frizzy hair. And, it's the season of parties too when all you want is a chic hairdo that sits well with your stylish attire and is easy to groom too. Hair care brands are cashing in on this with Unilever owned Sunsilk launching a one-of-its-kind campaign called 'The Straight Hair Experiment'. The experiment seems to be a great launch platform for a hair straightening product from Sunsilk, however I do not yet know which is the product. The brand is running major campaigns involving bloggers and its Facebook community with the idea of sourcing crazy hair straightening ideas! I am a member of Indiblogger, a community of Indian bloggers and came across the The Straight Hair Experiment blogging contest by Sunsilk through the Indiblogger newsletter. Sunsilk has invited bloggers to share about their craziest, wackiest, wildest experimental idea to get the perfect straight hair. In return, there are exciting prizes to be won – a grand prize worth Rs. 25,000 and 5 of the best blogs will be featured on iDiva and Yahoo! Besides, there is a cool incentive for every blogger in the form of a gift hamper which has the solution to perfect straight hair.
As per the usual rules in the contests at Indiblogger, this contest does not seem to have any Terms & Conditions page as yet. However, a thread has been started on the forum regarding the contest even while more than 70 ideas have already been blogged. The blogging contest also displays the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube page of Sunsilk. The Straight Hair Experiment on Facebook and TwitterThe Sunsilk Facebook page, which has more than 600K fans is also running a contest called 'Perfect Straight Hair', on a specially designed Facebook app. The contest is similar to the blogging one on Indiblogger where fans have to share their craziest, wildest, experimental idea to get perfect straight hair in the form of pictures, videos or text. However, the grand prize here is 2 couple passes to a party in your city. The app suggests some crazy ideas to get you started like ironing your hair with a clothes iron to using a rolling pin to flatten your hair, and even as crazy as placing heavy encyclopaedias on your hair while lying on the floor. The contest is however, restricted only to female fans. The Sunsilk Twitter page, with more than 1000 followers, is seen to be creating conversations around the benefits of straightening hair. In addition, the tweets are keenly focussing on curly hair vs. straight hair and the celebs who are sporting straight hair this season. A fun co-creation with consumersThe Straight Hair Experiment is an interesting pre-launch buzz, marking the beginning of other levels of user engagement with the product. The brand that has been co-created by hair experts, has now taken the concept of co-creation to its consumers with this experiment. I like the concept of having bloggers and Facebook fans participate in finding fun ways to straighten hair. Firstly, it helps the brand gain visibility and spread the word about the new product. But, what deserves a mention in this fun campaign is reaching out to bloggers as well as Facebook fans simultaneously and providing a product hamper for every idea shared. Perhaps, this is an early phase with more interesting things lined up on social media. But the Straight Hair experiment is fun, cool, and a clever way to launch a product, just as Sunsilk promotes the Keratinology range of salon style hair care products through its interactive YouTube hair salon! What is your crazy idea to straighten hair? Do let me know your thoughts on the 'Straight hair experiment'. |
| Buy Yourself The Gift Of Time: Social Media For The Holidays Posted: 17 Dec 2012 06:12 AM PST
With only 8 days until Christmas, and 2 weeks until the New Year, the holidays are officially upon us. If you're like me, you're chomping at the bit to enjoy the season with family and friends, and to have a few days away from work. It's incredible how a few days of relaxing can reinvigorate your enthusiasm for getting back to the grindstone and kicking the New Year off right. Breaks like these help you avoid burning out, and getting back to work with a clear and refreshed mind can help to stimulate great new thinking. The dilemma is that the world of social media doesn't take a break just because you are. So, following are a few ideas for how you can prepare your social media properties for the holidays so that you can focus on your personal time away from your online communities: Blog – Schedule Posts Or Notify Your Readers Of Your Holiday Schedule You can prepare your blog for the holidays by writing and scheduling posts to maintain your regular posting schedule. Alternatively, you can write a pre-holiday post to inform your readers of the days that you won't be posting, and when they can check back for your first post-holiday update and return to your regular schedule. If you decide to schedule posts, your readers will be happy for it, though you can expect your readership, page views, and engagement to dip. If you decide to let your readers know you're going to forego a few updates to enjoy some time with family and friends, I'm sure they'll understand and come back when you return to your regular publication calendar. Also, you may want to consider adjusting your comment settings so that all comments are directed to your moderation queue for your review prior to posting so that nothing inappropriate is posted on your days off. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn – Set It And Forget It… Kind Of Pretty simple; write your updates and tweets for the holidays and schedule them with HootSuite, TweetDeck, or Facebook's native scheduling tool. Even though you will be wanting to take some time away from social media, you might want to consider checking in to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn accounts for moderation purposes to make sure there isn't anything offensive or inappropriate being posted by trolls. Pinterest – Plan Using Secret Boards If you're planning on updating your Pinterest boards over the holidays, you can make things easier on yourself by loading one of your secret boards with pins. This will let you login, move an image from your secret board to the appropriate public board quickly and efficiently, with no need for capturing, creating or curating content. BONUS TIP Visual Assets – Update For Christmas And New Years Eve If it makes sense for your brand, you might want to consider updating your Facebook cover photo, and your Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ header images to celebrate the holidays and/or the New Year. This might be a nice way to connect with your consumers. A little bit of planning and advance work can save you a great deal of time for the holidays so you can focus on your family and friends, and not what's happening online. Do you have any tips you'd like to share for preparing your social media activity for the holidays? If so, please feel free to share in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial |
| Integrate Your Social Media with Offline Advertising Posted: 17 Dec 2012 06:00 AM PST Integrating Online and Offline MarketingCross listingSet up your social media with memorable vanity links so when you share them offline, customers can find you easily. This way, when you put your Facebook symbol in your ad, customers can find you easily on Facebook (or Twitter or Foursquare, etc). Getting a vanity URL on Facebook is easy. You request a vanity URL and, unless someone is already using that name, it's yours. It's a good idea to claim your vanity URL even if you're not ready to launch your Facebook page yet — so someone else doesn't claim it first. Now you can put your Facebook logo (plus Twitter, Google+, etc) on everything from advertising to stationary to business cards. With so many smart phones, it's also a good idea to use QR codes — those funny boxes composed of black and white elements. These connect your print ads to everything from your website, to your social media, coupons, to specific information. Now, you can even get QR codes in the shape of your logo — like a Coke bottle — to further connect your branding with your digital presence. Make it easyYou can also put Facebook symbols around the store and encourage folks to fan you. However, you'll probably need to give customers a reason. One local business we visited gave customers a coupon to use on their next visit if they promised to LIKE the company on Facebook. Now, you can argue that not everyone who gets a coupon will go to Facebook and LIKE you. But, the law of reciprocity suggests many of them will. It's a tit-for-tat situation where I give you something and you feel obligated to give me something in return. Besides, even if they don't join your social media platform, they'll likely visit your store again and may become a regular customer. Use QR codesQR codes are very versatile and There are lots of places to get QR codes, like here. You can put QR codes around your store and encourage folks to scan them with their smartphones to get coupons or other special offers. It appeals to the geek in us and draws folks into your store. You can also put these in advertising to make it easier for folks to Like your Fanpage. FoursquareFoursquare, Google Places and others use what's called location-based marketing. You encourage folks to check in to your Foursquare site from your store — they have to be within a short distance of your store for this to work. When they check in you might offer a coupon or discount or you can encourage frequent visits by offering specials to the "mayor" of your store — the person who checks in the most. These mobile technologies have huge opportunities for businesses because the person is already in your store and they give you the opportunity to modify their behavior. Larger businesses might also use Shopkick, which is a more expensive technology that allows you to communicate with customers in the store based on which part of the store they're in. For instance, a customer visiting the children's department might receive a discount coupon for toys (encouraging them to visit that department). Visitors might also get coupons/ discounts for behaviors that translate into sales, such as visiting a particular department, the in-store restaurant, or the fitting room. Yelp and other review sitesDon't forget to encourage customers to comment on Yelp and other review sites. And, don't neglect filling out your Yelp profile including your menu and service hours. For many small businesses, this is the most cost-effective way to create an online presence. But, don't forget to integrate your social media with offline advertising. Include those great Yelp comments in your print advertising or brochures your create for your business. Be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter, where you’ll get even more insights to make your marketing SIZZLE Hausman Marketing Letter |
| Posted: 17 Dec 2012 05:00 AM PST
Both camps have valid points. The simple truth - Google values content and ranks your site based on the value of your content. If your business is on the web, you’ll need to create content. Content could mean a regularly updated portfolio, a useful enterprise inbound marketing blog, or a glossy eMagazine. Content creation must be viewed as a regular business activity for you – much like recruiting, sales prospecting, or paying employees. Wait, you say you outsource recruiting and, oh gosh, you even have someone else (ADP, probably) pay your employees? How dare you. How could someone know your company and culture well enough to recruit the right people to work for you without being part of your company themselves? And geez, you can’t even hand write a check to thank your employees for their hard work every two weeks? No, you say. Why? I think we all know why. You have a business to run, clients to serve. You have to scale and work efficiently as an organization. When you selected your recruiter, you provided her specific instructions as to the type of candidates you were looking for – years of experience, type of experience, type of industry, pay range, etc. Similarly, you instruct your payroll vendor on how much and when to pay your employees based on the amount of hours they work and type of employees they are (contract, seasonal, salaried). As a CEO, do you ever find yourself saying – my recruiter hires the best employees for me, or ADP pays my employees well? Probably not. So why would it be any different with content outsourcing. Ultimately, whether you are the CEO, CMO, or a marketing manager for your company, you guide any outsourcing efforts. You are responsible for them. The more prescriptive and detailed you are with any outsourcing effort, the better your results will be. So – about content outsourcing. Don’t be worried about becoming a blog farmer. After all, real farmers had to figure out how best to scale their efforts with machines, irrigation and other techniques to serve a growing population. You to, with the proper guidelines, details, and examples can outsource successfully.
Photo: Marwa Morgan |
| The Results Are In: An Experiment in Social Influence Posted: 17 Dec 2012 04:00 AM PST
As many of you know, I recently asked fans of {grow} to support a charitable cause through a post entitled "The kid who wanted a door for Christmas." I'd like to examine the results of this appeal as an example of "social influence" in action. What happens when a blogger asks his audience to do something beyond clicking a "like button?" What happens when a social media audience actually has to commit to an action and open a wallet? What can you learn from this example that will help you ignite your own business or charity? The results from this blog post provide a fascinating lesson and case study: The business situationAsking for money on the Internet is a notoriously difficult proposition. In short, it usually doesn't work. I document this extensively in my book Return On Influence and point to several examples where even celebrity-level influencers could not move the needle and create real action through tweets to their vast audiences. The reason for this failure is that most social media connections are very weak relational links. Sure, we might be willing to help somebody out by clicking a "like" button or sending a tweet … but opening our pocketbook? No. It doesn't happen. So, going into this project, I knew this was a very risky proposition. Based on my own research and knowledge of the subject, I knew that there was a good chance my appeal would fall flat. Perhaps I would even be publicly embarrassed. Still, this was a worthy charity in need, so I decided to take a risk and ask for help. Let's look at what happened. The resultsSo far, my appeal to help the Amachi charity resulted in 92 individual donations totaling $4,352 (excluding the PayPal fees). I consider this an extraordinary result since this total is not inflated by "friends and family" donations. The total I am reporting represents the new value I created for Amachi by establishing an effective social media presence and creating new connections that did not exist prior to the time I started blogging in 2009. But we need to take a much closer look at the results to really discover the true nature of social influence. Here's an indicator of what we're up against. My blog post was tweeted 446 times but only 92 people actually made a donation. So the reality is, 354 people encouraged others to donate without donating anything themselves. Let's peel the data back a little more by dividing the donors, to the best of my ability, into "strong" connections (people who are known fans of {grow} and regular contributors to the community) and "weak" connections (people I do not recognize from the blog who possibly donated via a tweet about the article or a Facebook post). Here is the breakdown of strong connection versus weak connection donors:
I am pleasantly surprised that as many as 30 people could have come across the blog via Twitter and donated to the cause. I think the number is actually much lower because I'm sure some of the donors in this category are actual readers of the blog who I don't recognize. But nevertheless, about one-third of the donors were people who do not have a personal relationship with me, which is pretty cool. Here's a second indicator of how the weak connections represented by social media "friends and followers" is not a very actionable group of people. A couple social media heavyweights with more than 100,000 followers (and even more than 500,000 followers!) heavily tweeted my post to try to help. I estimated they generated more than 3 million Twitter impressions. Here is how many donors this activity generated: ONE. So the "celebrity influencer" conversion rate on Twitter was 1 out of 3 million possible impressions. Sad, but not surprising. Digging even deeper, we see that the strong relational connections from the blog community had a powerful impact on both the number of donations and the average amount of the donation:
ConclusionsContent is powerOne premise behind Return On Influence is that the ability to create content that moves through the Internet is a legitimate source of power. In fact, this is the ONLY source of influence I have over most of you. It's probable that you only know me through my content that is shared over social media platforms and, through time, you have come to trust and like me enough to act on a personal request. Think of the incredible potential we all have here. From a standing start in 2009, I have been able to create a global community that responded to an appeal in one blog post and contributed $4,352 in 48 hours. It took hard work to get to that point, but you have that opportunity — that power — too. The real power is in strong connectionsNot all social media fans and followers are created equal. As this example suggests, the real power of online influence comes through the strong connections created over time through the personal interactions on a blog or other community. If you want to create personal power on the web, you need to build an engaged and loyal group of advocates, not just a big number of Twitter followers. The numbers don't matter as much as the relationships. The critical importance of reciprocityAnother tenet of Return On Influence is the power of reciprocity (re-paying favors). My friend Jay Baer states in the book that reciprocity is the engine that powers the economy of the social web. As I look at who gave the biggest donations — yes, I've done many of them favors along the way. I had built up a bank of "social capital" and my appeal for donations was an opportunity for those folks to return those favors. This is not something I planned or manufactured. I help people every single day without an expectation of reciprocity because I enjoy doing that. I'm not sure you can have a reciprocity "strategy." You just have to be kind to people. Where Klout failsKlout, Kred and the other social scoring platforms provide an indicator of a person's relative ability to create content that moves on the web. That's an extremely important "leading indicator" of power because without that consistent presence you will never influence anybody on the social web. In other words, you can't be an online influencer if you can't move content. That stream of content to your followers creates the consistent, small "provocations" that eventually lead to those critical strong relationships that will take real action. However, Klout does not dig deep into blog communities and other forums where the strong links are born, and until they do, they cannot really grasp the "actionable connections" powering the web. This is changing, however. For example, the start-up Appinions has patented technology that analyzes data across an incredible 5 million online data sources – including blogs, forums and traditional media – to create a glimpse of content in context. This represents the real future of social influence measurement and offers mind-blowing opportunities for marketing insight. Your action planIf you are an individual, company, university, or non-profit, your ability to create measurable actions across the weak links of social media platforms are negligible. Remember … I had one conversion over 3 million impressions. In terms of igniting "weak links," I could have probably had better results taking out a Facebook ad! This is a glimpse of the limits of "influencer" outreach. The donations didn't come from somebody else's vast community. They came from the strong relationships in my own community, which were built by delivering a lot of helpful content, engagement, and authentic helpfulness over several years. There is a lot of potential to build awareness, social proof and validation through influencer outreach. But don't overlook the need to do the hard work and build a real community for your brand. The role of social media in the marketing mix is to consistently provide provocations through content that lead to that type of genuine, actionable community. Over time, you then have an opportunity to turn that work and "social bank" into loyalty and even passion for your brand or cause. And only then will the wallets open. I've covered a lot of ground today on a rather controversial topic. What do you think of this example of social influence and my conclusions? And by the way, if you missed the article and would like to help me support a charity that is turning lives around, you can learn more in my original post. Thanks again to all who have been so supportive and generous! Illustration courtesy BigStock.com Mark Schaefer is a marketing consultant, author and college educator who blogs at {grow}. You can also follow him on Twitter: @markwschaefer. |
| How to Use Google Trends to Complement Your Keyword Research (Examples + Screenshots) Posted: 16 Dec 2012 08:24 PM PST i. What is Google Trends?Google Trends is one of the more underrated Google products, which in my opinion, doesn’t do justice to its ease of practicality. Since Google first launched its Google Insights for Search in 2008 (which the search engine giant later merged with Google Trends), savvy marketers have use the service in conjunction with Google Trends (then a separated service) and Google’s Keyword Research Tool to identify potential search trends and advertise or market accordingly. Today, Keyword Research Tool is still a wildly popular tool many search engine marketers would swear they could not live without. Paling in comparison, Google Trends were rarely, if ever, mentioned. Truth it, anybody can use Google Trends to great effect and it’s so simple business owners without any technical skills would feel perfectly comfortable with the tool. Unlike the Keyword Research Tool, users do not need an Adwords account. How does it help business owners, then? Several answers surface, and one of the most common is its contribution in helping businesses choosing an advertising message that fits and resonates. ii. Google Trends: Comparing search terms and interestsTo illustrate how Google Trends can help businesses market better, we’ll use MJM Yachts as a case example (Disclosure: I am in no way affiliated to the company!) below. MJM Yachts call themselves the World Leader in Fuel-efficient powerboats and many of their builds were marketed as boats that “burn as little as half the fuel necessary” for boats their size while crusing at 25+ knots. MJM’s mantra is crisp and to-the-point: TWICE THE FUN, HALF THE FUEL.  MJM’s fuel efficient powerboats Assuming we’re back in 2004, a year after MJM Yachts was founded. As MJM looks to expand its business, the company decided to run a branding and advertising campaign to promote these fuel-efficient yachts it makes. To ensure its core competitive advantage is most relevant to the ongoing search trend, MJM has to make a strategic decision – whether to wrap its advertising message around the ‘eco-friendly’ keyword, or to focus on the keyword ‘bio-diesel’, or just bank on it’s ‘fuel efficiency’ to market and re-brand itself. I know what you’re thinking. Google’s Keyword Research Tool can do the job just fine. To some extent, yes. But you’ll quickly find out why Google Trends will do the job more efficiently. Prettier even. iii. What Google Trends tell us about web interests over timeHere’s the web search interest of fuel efficiency, eco friendly, and bio diesel in the United States, April 2004 – May 2005.
Note that the number 100 represents the peak search volume. Thanks to Google Trends, we can almost draw some pretty conclusive findings from the chart alone. MJM would do better with their branding and advertising message wrapped around the “fuel efficiency” theme, and maybe tap on the growing search trend for the “bio diesel” term. MJM could of course, devise a tagline surrounding the “eco-friendly” term but would that would mean a lot more work (and a lot more inefficiencies). iv. What Google Trends tell us about regional interestsTo further optimize our branding message, we want to factor in the regional interest shown for each search term and see if that matches our intended demographic or audience group. Apparently Google Trends has a neat way to present this column of data as well.
I’ve said that Google Trends is an incredible tool for insight-based research. Here, we’d see that MJM would prefer to use the “fuel efficiency” search term in their advertising message supposed most of their customers or leads are from California or New York. If the business is largely based, or is planning to expand into the Washington market, it might find “bio diesel” a more attractive term. Google Trends does the job, and does it simply enough. v. What Google Trends tell us about forward-looking researchWhat we’ve learned till is mainly concerned with the present. The current web search interest (assuming we’re still in 2004 with this MJM Yachts case study). This probably violates what we’re told about a forward-looking marketing plan. But I’ll show you why this is not the case with the Google Trends — the tool that packs in a Forecast engine. You’d be surprised and how handy this all turned out to be, because as we move into February 2007, what has been the most unpopular search term skyrocketed in search volume and consistently become the industry’s standard term. Yes. Eco-friendly is the industry standard term after February 2007, and MJM Yachts will be glad their brand has created a strong case by planting strong associations to this attribute it wants to be known for.  Fuel Efficient, Or Eco-friendly? Fortunately enough, toggling Forecast and News Headline in Google Trends are simple and straight-forward to perform.
vi. Final wordsGoogle Trends is nowhere near as technical as the arguably more powerful keyword research tools that are available out there. That should not discount its appeal to the mainstream users and non-technical business owners out there. Google markets the new Google Trends as providing “insights into what the world is searching for” and helpfully pointed out four key areas it can help advertisers and business owners with.
Share your thoughts, or dive into Google Trends and experiment it here. |
| The Decline of American Entrepreneurship [Infographic] Posted: 16 Dec 2012 07:56 PM PST Many of us are aware of the current global economic slowdown. The slowdown has effected nearly every nation, including the euro zone and America. While there are currently large businesses that are wildly successful, how is entrepreneurship performing? How has the economic slowdown effected American entrepreneurship? This infographic by Trinity Digital Marketing, a sister company of Premere Auto Detail, put together an infographic that shows us just how American entrepreneurship as a whole has been shrinking and needs support to grow. Support American entrepreneurship and be sure to share.
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| How to Start Your Corporate Blog Posted: 16 Dec 2012 05:15 PM PST
We thought we would try to ease your fears as we head into the new year. If you are thinking about starting your blog, this is the advice we are currently giving to our clients. Pick the Platform Your first question is where you want your blog to be. There are many options, but the first choice is a basic one. You can host your blog on your site (the URL might be "yourcompany.com/URL) or you can host your blog externally and link your site to your blog. There are pros and cons for both options. Self-Hosted If you decide to host your blog on your own site, you will need to create a way to easily update your blog as needed. We recommend uploading WordPress.org software and then investing in a framework like Genesis. Genesis and frameworks like it take the HTML programming out of the equation. Designing and developing your blog, not to mention updating your blog, can now be done intuitively and primarily via point and click functionality. The advantages of a self-hosted blog are numerous. By hosting the site you increase your branding efforts (when people visit the blog they are still seeing your corporate name). You are increasing the SEO of your website by adding all of that content to your site, and you are increasing the likelihood that someone will click from a blog post to another page visible in your site navigation. The disadvantages of a self-hosted blog is that it does require a lot of work on the front end. If you are not skilled or experienced in web programming, even the process of uploading the WordPress software and other programs can be intimidating. There is also an investment necessary for a self-hosted blog that is not necessary when hosting your blog externally. Hosting externally There are numerous free websites where you can host a corporate blog. The site you are seeing now is WordPress.com. Blogger and Tumblr are two other commonly used sites, although Tumblr really is best matched for short posts or image-heavy blog sites. Blogger is owned by Google but does not offer the same strong social media sharing options that WordPress offers. WordPress.com also offers more user-friendly designs and makes it easier to emphasize SEO. The advantages of hosting externally are that you don't have to worry about uploading programs and you don't accrue any additional investments in terms of producing the blog itself. You can also create inbound links back to your corporate site, and your corporate site can add incoming links to your blog. There are disadvantages to hosting externally as well. Many people feel that a corporate site hosted externally is not as credible as a blog built into a corporate website. WordPress is free but you have to purchase an ad-blocking plugin or you will see random Google ads at the bottom of your posts. You also are keeping your online community one step away from your actual website when you host your blog externally. Designing the Blog There are a few key points you need to remember when designing your blog. Many of these points hold true for your corporate site as well. 1. Is your company name featured prominently on the blog site? 2. Is the point of the blog easy to understand and easy to find via a tagline or brief description? 3. Do you offer easy-to-find ways for people to subscribe to your blog posts? 4. Do you offer links to important pages of your website? You also want to make sure that your blog posts are easy to read. Avoid the temptation of using a really flowery font or reversing out your type. You also must be sure that your blog is mobile-friendly. WordPress offers a plug-in for just that purpose. What is Your Point and Your Plan? Just as we discussed in regards to your e-newsletter, before you do anything you want to have a plan for your blog. This will help you avoid the dreaded fate of leaving a blog site to rot in vacant bloggy purgatory. What are you hoping to accomplish by writing your blog? What kinds of readers do you want to draw? Is this a branding effort or a lead generation effort? Again, as with the e-newsletter, we highly recommend you develop an editorial calendar before you make any move to start your blog. We actually highly favor the approach of beginning with one weekly post for an entire year. Post on the same day so that you build expectation with your audience. This will give you enough experience to learn how it feels to create content along with learning what works and what does not. Adjust Your Expectations If your company is wanting to start a blog because you want to increase sales, we must warn you that a blog is not a silver bullet, nor is it a quick fix. We generally warn companies that it can take 6 months to a year for a blog to gain attention and traction. That initial time period can be exasperating, as you will be producing content but perhaps not getting any comments or social media shares. That is normal. It takes time to build trust, credibility, and community. Your plan and your editorial calendar will help you keep on track. Corporate-Wide Agreement on Action Plans Part of your blog plan should include who is going to be responsible for what. We offer blogging services so this can reduce some of the work load on your team. You will want to determine who will give the green light for publishing blog posts or writing blog posts, who will respond to comments, and perhaps most importantly, how you will react if you receive a negative comment or worst still, a "troll" comment that is only meant to cause you trouble. It is much better to over-prepare on the front end than to be caught off-guard once you are engaged in the process. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to starting a corporate blog, but considering these tips will start you off on the right foot. If you have any questions or need any assistance, please let us know! Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/4455035915/ via Creative Commons |
A Facebook Page is one of the most straightforward ways for a business to represent itself in social media. You communicate with a defined audience—your fans. You have advertising and promotion opportunities at your fingertips. And, you have the power to grow your audience by mobilizing your base of followers.
If you are using Google for your everyday online search (
And if we did the same with their friends, and their friends' friends.
As we've 
Recently, Twitter announced the new photo filters that allow users to 
I’ve seen a number of recent discussions around the outsourcing of content creation and whether it’s beneficial to an organization. Opponents of content outsourcing argue that outsourced writers will simply never culturally understand their business and therefore won’t capture it’s essence in a blog post, case study, or whitepaper. Proponents of content outsourcing see the value of regular content creation and the time saved from not having to sit down and physically write their own content.
Earlier this week we talked about getting your e-newsletter started. Maybe instead you are thinking about starting a blog. In a lot of ways, beginning a blog can seem more intimidating than an e-newsletter. Emailing has been around for awhile now and the general concept may seem like second nature to you now. Blogging may seem more like a wild jungle where people can leave negative comments, where your blog can be abandoned and left for dead, or a place where you invest a lot of time for seemingly no reason.| You are subscribed to email updates from Social | Business 2 Community To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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