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Sunday 10 July 2011

Too Busy For Social Media Marketing Could Be Fatal



I have a friend who runs a nationwide “traditional” business, and business has been down, like it has been for most people. I suggested that he add some social network marketing initiatives, and his answer was he is “too busy.” He is not alone, according to a recent study, which concludes that only 47% of companies use social media today for marketing, despite the fact that 78% of executives polled feel it’s critical for success.

What’s the problem? It seems to me that there is abundant proof in the marketplace of the financial returns to both large and small businesses, the low cost of entry, and the ubiquity of social networks. Dell announced years ago that it had earned $3 million in revenue from using Twitter, and other businesses report daily on increases in web traffic up to 800%.

I suspect that a good part of the problem is that startup and small business owners still don’t know where or how to start. They don’t know if they should move to social networks for lead generation, branding, customer loyalty, or for direct marketing and e-commerce. My advice is to pick one, start slow, and spread out as you learn. Here are some specifics:

Create a business profile on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. A business profile starts with a business account using your company logo as your picture (avatar), rather than your photo or a picture of your cat. If you are in consulting, you are the business, so use a professional headshot. Don’t mix your personal and business profiles or messages.
Develop a marketing strategy specific to this media. Don’t use the same message on Twitter you developed for email blasts and postcard blitzes. Social media demands two-way communication, rather than outbound only. Read everything you can about viral marketing. It’s not free, so budget appropriately, but not excessively.
Start social networking with peers. Pick a base, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, to be your community, and work the territory, much like you may have learned to work a room of peers at a tradeshow or convention, or local business organization. Find out what other people are doing, and what works for them. People love to share what they know.
Experiment with social media tools. The basic tools are the platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But don’t stop there. There is TweetDeck to help you use Twitter, and YouTube for video sharing. A most valuable tool is WordPress or TypePad for blogging. You need these to add the human element to your business or service.
Proactively learn from the experts. Maybe it’s time to sign up for a few free Webinars, or even invest in an expert consultant in this area. Successful people don’t wait for their kids to teach them about new technologies, or wait to be the last one on the block to try new things. It’s all available for “free” on the Internet, but your time is a valuable resource.
Define relevant metrics and measure. That means first take some baseline measurements of, for example, lead arrival rate today, and costs associated with your current media marketing. If you don’t have this baseline, you will never know if you are making progress. Then continue to measure and learn what works, at what cost.
If used correctly, I guarantee you that social media marketing can improve your business with new leads, by bringing traffic to your website, creating a buzz around your product or brand, creating inbound links to increase your search engine ranking, and improving loyalty and trust with your customers. How could you be too busy to work on these things?

Of course, if you found this blog though your own initiative, I have to give you credit for being ahead of the pack. So print it off and deliver it to a friend who is not so high-tech. My challenge to you, then, is to kick it up a notch! When is the last time you produced a video for your business, or a podcast, or sponsored a contest with free gifts? Or are you too busy?

Saturday 9 July 2011

Day 1 of our Live workshop today in London

Right now sitting at the back of our workshop in London, Paul explaining our strategies on Twitter and everyone seems really interested and interacting with us.
We have a full room and everyone came here early, its great to see people so motivated!
Later on I will be sharing our strategies on Facebook, it is great to be able to have these Live workshops and be able to have 1 to 1 with all the people here, that is way we keep our workshops to very low numbers, so we can get to interact with everyone and make sure they come out of the workshop been able to just keep running their business online.
Here a look of how our workshops are....

Friday 8 July 2011

Facebook integrates Skype video calls



Kicking off what he promised would be the start of “launching season 2011” as well as the start of a new era of social networking, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an integration deal between Facebook and Skype during an event at company headquarters in Palo Alto. The service will allow Skype users to see Facebook updates within the Skype application, and Facebook users will be able to video chat with each other.

Skype jumped the gun and pushed its Facebook integration page live before Zuckerberg had actually gotten around to announcing the deal at the press conference, and Facebook’s own blog followed suit.

See more of our latest Facebook coverage
or add an alert for future coverage of Facebook.

Social networking has evolved into an era in which the question of whether or not this concept would grow into a real movement has been answered, Zuckerberg said. He confirmed that Facebook now has 750 million users, but downplayed the number as less important now that Facebook has become nearly ubiquitous in much of the world: “You don’t measure the value of the Internet by how many people are using, it, you measure by the quality of the apps and how people are using it.”

The new video chat service is just part of a redesigned chat service that lets Facebook users only see the friends they exchange the most messages with in their chat window, as opposed to just anyone from their friends list who is online at a given time. Facebook also launched a multi-user chat service that lets you set up a chat conversation with three or more people as part of the new chat service.



But it’s the video chat that will get the most attention, given Google’s recent launch of Google+ and its Hangouts feature. Skype is the engine for this service, and it’s pretty simple: just click on the name of one of your Facebook friends and click a video icon to request a video chat. Group video chat isn’t available yet, and it’s also not available on mobile, but the video service is rolling out to Facebook users over the course of the day.

It’s an interesting gambit for Skype, given that Facebook has more users than Skype and the service would allow people to bypass Skype’s desktop application completely. Skype CEO Tony Bates pitched his company’s participation as a gateway to the Web for Skype, a company which is pretty much a standard voice-and-video-calling service on the desktop computer and has rolled out several popular mobile applications.

But users of Skype’s application will also be able to do a lot of the things they do within Facebook right from that application, such as read status updates, post new status updates and chat with friends. And Business Insider reported that the two companies are working on a way for Facebook users to call phone numbers, perhaps using Facebook’s budding payments system, Facebook Credits. That’s something Google (NSDQ: GOOG) also allows from within Gmail Chat, although Google’s service is free inside the U.S.

Of course, it’s also worth noting that Skype is folding into Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), a large investor in Facebook with close ties to the social networking service. Zuckerberg said that Facebook and Skype were working on the integration project anyway when the Microsoft-Skype deal started to take shape and pushed ahead once they both realized that Microsoft—perhaps Facebook’s biggest friend in the tech industry—wouldn’t stand in the way of anything.

Wednesday 6 July 2011

10 Things to Consider As You Move to Google+



Something interesting is happening with Google+. We’re all freaking out because we can’t import our Facebook and Twitter friends.

Here we’ve spent years (in most cases) building communities on something we don’t own and guess what? Our friends and fans aren’t moving to the newest platform with us. Or they are but we don’t know it because not only do we not have their email addresses, we don’t have their Gmail addresses.

This is why it’s so important to build community on a platform that you own. Sure, you need all the social tools and the content curation and the fun apps that make your stuff look cool, but they all should drive people back to something you own.

In this case: A database.

Following are 10 things to consider as you add the newest social network to your toolbox.
1.Who are your customers, prospects, and referral network? You have to know this. And you should be building a database of everyone’s email addresses. You can do this through blog subscriptions, newsletters, and registered content. Yes, you need to have Twitter and Facebook and (now) Google+. But you have to be driving those people back to something you own, where you can collect their data. We don’t know yet what or if Google will be providing businesses, in terms of data on its customers, so best to collect it yourself now
2.It’s hard work and you must be willing to do it. And this doesn’t mean just on the social platforms. It means with content and building community and engaging your audiences and stroking their egos by commenting on and sharing their content.
3.Your content had better be good. If it’s not all good, publish only that which is. If that means you only publish a blog once a week or a white paper once a quarter, so be it. If you’re charging for content, price it accordingly, but make sure it’s better than anything else in the industry. Find different ways to share your content. Things such as an Instagram feed of photos from work, a Tumblr blog of those photos, a podcast series of two minute segments that help your audiences, or videos that show how your product works in the real world.
4.Video. I mention video above, but there had better be tons. And it all needs to be on YouTube and then embedded on your blog and your website. We do this in the sidebar of Spin Sucks and on the home page of Arment Dietrich. It’s easily shared in about, oh, three seconds. Don’t worry about making it professional or snazzy (sorry, Tony Gnau!). Buy yourself an HD camera (I have a Flip, though they’re going to be extinct soon, and it cost me $150) and start shooting stuff. Even your phone will do.
5.Access. As a consumer, how exciting is it when the CEO answers your email or allows you to voice your concerns? Steve Jobs (though not very good at it) does this and it blows people away. Granted, we’re not all Steve Jobs, but people want access. Maybe it’s once a week or once a month. Add the element of surprise and do something simple like answer the customer service line or return emails. It will go a lot further than any PR, advertising, or marketing campaign.
6.Virality. I’m not saying you can plan to make something viral, but you never know what is going to go so you have to do a lot. What will spread (cough, a blog post about nothing, cough) is what you least expect so don’t be afraid to put something out there that isn’t perfect. People like to know that we’re all human.
7.It’s not about the numbers. It’s about making the web work for you 24/7. It’s about monetizing new products and services via the social platforms. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 followers, or 100,000. If only 50 of those 100 or 100,000 buy, those are the 50 you need to engage. And let’s be real. Wouldn’t you rather have 50 percent of your followers to buy than less than one percent?
8.The A-list sucks. You’re not a star. None of us are. Read Geoff Livingston’s guest post about this on Danny Brown’s blog. Think about it. Absorb it. And then do business just like you’ve always done…by treating your customers, prospects, and advocates like human beings whose opinions matter to you.
9.Add in some personal. No one likes to talk to the person at a cocktail reception that can only talk about work. The same goes online. I built a Tumblr blog of the recipes I create. People love this. It’s automatically shared on Twitter and I get as many, if not more, comments on that stuff as I do all the business content I post. And I tweet maybe once a day; every other day most times.
10.Grow from the bottom up. Just like in real life, we all have to start somewhere and that means the bottom, in most cases. You want to look like you’re all about your community; your customers, your prospects, your advocates, your influencers, your stakeholders, and your employees. If you look like you’re in it only for the money or you’re only using the social tools to push your message, no one will care and no one certainly will give you any access to them, including an email address.
And, above all else, make sure one of your goals is to build your database. Don’t abuse it. Don’t spam people. Have it in cases such as moving your community to a new platform. Or for an emergency such as Twitter or Facebook dying.