Archive for business profile
Common Sense Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
Posted by: | CommentsWith the death of the local newspaper and the explosion of social media websites, people are changing how they seek information, share opinions, and research products/goods/services before they buy.
On the internet are tools that allow consumers to share content and information as well as to exchange views and recommendations of those products and services they are buying. They can give starts, digs, and thumbs ups or downs on vendors and service providers that can be read by millions of people instantly. Social media sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Yelp, Jane’s Book, and Angie’s list are the new “word of mouth” that promote or disparage products and services online.
Social media marketing strategies have the potential to make a company’s products and services go viral if businesses are able to grasp the effectiveness of establishing a brand and a brand reputation online. Social media marketing strategies are a great method of branding who and what a business is and helping that business build relationships and build a sense of community with their target audience of consumers.
So how do you build that sense of community and brand familiarity? How do you build a credible online presence that goes beyond your website? How do you use social media in a way that is inviting for consumers that sells your brand and your product without selling? By employing a few simple basic business strategies online you can create a credible and effective user-friendly web presence for your brand and your business.
How Social Networking Sites Benefit Your Business
LinkedIn, Twitter, Biznik, and Facebook are communities of people who have gathered together online to discuss similar topics or to share similar interests. Solidifying your social media community is a no brainer! The best part about social networking sites is that you don’t have to be online 24/7 to market and deliver your business to your audience anytime on time. Social networking sites let you build a business centered around a particular purpose: building brand credibility and creating zealots who will talk about your company and its products.
The first step in building a credible social networking presence is to build a credible profile that is associated with your brand. By creating a profile that represents your brand you are creating a credible presence in that social networking community. They will love the fact that you are reaching out to your audience where they “hang out” rather than waiting for them to come to you. Developing warm ‘fuzzies’ for your crowd is how you develop the ideal client.
If your avatar (photo or brand symbol) is not clear or is of you in 1974 when you were a lot younger, thinner, and had more hair, then you suggest that you are hiding something or not very authentic and perhaps a person/company not worth knowing. If you are using social marketing as a component of your marketing strategy you want to give some thoughts to the photo or “avatar” that you use. Think about them as branding images that reside right beside your name, your latest entry, or your comments.
Besides using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, there are a myriad of other searchable social media sites. Flickr, Digg, YouTube, Viddler, etc are great for depositing search engine geo-targeted images, video, and rich content that can drive your business to the top of the search results. Social bookmarks (Magnolia, Delicious, Diigo,StumbleUpon), niche social networks (CrowdVine, Naymz, ClaimID,Gooruze), location networks (Upcoming, Eventful, BarCamp,Meetup, Evite), and customer service networks (Yelp, JanesBook,Angie’s List, Google Local) all build search engine go juice for your business presence on the web.
Community Building is the Corner Stone of Business Success
The web’s social applications are growing rapidly and with a little effort you can pick two or three strategies to carve out your niche presence on it. By anchoring social media links on your business website you can engage your customers and create an atmosphere of “community” and begin to develop contacts with new and potential customers that encourage them to come back to your site and your business again and again.
Post your profile on the social media sites that are appropriate for your business and where your potential audience is hanging out. Go in and foster community building through the exchange of information and knowledge while building business contacts and connections without selling. Remember, it is about developing a niche audience that is interested in your company and your goods and services. If you just start the conversation, the community will build the enthusiasm and drive the need for acquiring your products or services. Establishing your company and your brand as the leading “go to” authority in your industry will promote your website, set you apart from your competition, and ultimately increase your sales.
Gist – A New Contact Management Tool
Posted by: | CommentsAre you trying to figure out how to harvest all the potential leads in your social media files? Are you wondering what to do with all your email contacts that you think might be in LinkedIn or might be found on Twitter but you just aren’t sure if that is the case? Are there some great people in your industry who you suspect have blogs filled with useful information? Then Gist is a tool you will want to explore for data mining your social media profiles AND your email or SalesForce CRM software for contacts and leads.
Gist allows you to have an all in one dashboard to see all the contact information and communication history or anyone in any of your contact circles (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Blog, Gmail, etc). Displayed on the dashboard for each person among your contacts are not only the publicly available social site links for their profiles as well as any news articles that mention them, emails you have exchanged, links and attachments you have shared, common connections, as well as their Twitter feed.
The potential of all this information aggregated in a single easy to access location makes for a powerful resource for your next meeting with a client, your boss, your son’s angry teacher. No more digging around in your email, searching your files for content previously attached or received, it is all right in front of you in a nice easy to use spreadsheet like format. No more mind maps to figure out who knows who and how, no more trying to remember when exactly you or they sent a file attachment and where you stored in and in which folder. No more trying to figure out what is that contact’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and email information. Theoretically you can tap into their social and professional profile and find out everything you need to initiate contact professionally within Salesforce or Outlook and create an uber intelligent contact dashboard filled with all kinds of relevant content that you can assign various priorities for processing purposes. What a boon this is for managing information and contacts for prospecting and follow up purposes. What an amazing aggregating tool for gathering all kinds of information formerly scatter to the social media winds! You will know more about your prospect than the xray guy at TSA!
The beauty of Gist is the more complete profile you build for a ‘connection’ across their various profiles on line in a centralized location. It cuts out some of the manual data harvesting efforts previously required to really figure out who your social connections are and how to leverage their connections. Gist helps you know ‘more about who you know.’ The unity of information on Gist is incredibly useful. Whether it is searching or creating a dossier of a contact’s recent activities, the intelligence this tool collects and updates regularly is amazing. Still, it has its limitations in Beta form. It relies on your importing of updated lists from your various profiles. It does not auto-update when you add new contacts or connections. It limits the number of Twitter followers you are allowed to import as well. But these are minor limitations for the tool.
As a tool to use to facilitate further engagement with your followers and contact, this is an incredibly useful resource for PR, Marketing, Sales, and Social Media Community Managers. Take the pulse of your community, respond rapidly to individual needs, and engage with more people more often. Now if I could only get them to include Google local search listings for companies. Can you imagine adding a map, video, slideshare, etc?
I am hooked. And you will be too once you try it.
Social Media “Experts” on the Rise – What is Your Social Media Moniker?
Posted by: | CommentsSo you are a social media expert? Maybe in a room full of business owners or professionals I am the ‘expert’ on social media, but I would not call myself one. I prefer the assignment of proficiency or specialist to my name.
General Definition of an expert: http://www.merriam-webster.com/netdict/expert Doing something for 10 years or 10,000 hours http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert Since Twitter has not been around for 10 years yet…I guess I can’t use the expert moniker but I can call myself a specialist! I can say that I am an expert in measurements and evaluations and statistical design models. I have done that for more than 10 years.
I was talking to Kevin Urie of Social Media Club of Seattle the other day and he asked me, “What do you think of the social media ’scene’ in Seattle?” Wow…that was a loaded question. I think it is great! I think it is exciting! I think it is an enthusiastic bunch of enthusiasts who are clamoring to learn more and more about all the latest gadgets and tools. But what I don’t see in many of the enthusiasts is a meaty need and driving desire to understand the potential of each new piece and how to measure the data points in meaningful ways. There are lots of enthusiasts and great fans roaming the west coast proclaiming the power of social media but there are more zealots and practitioners than in the trenches analysts and tinkerers. That is why he and SMC Seattle continue to bring thought leaders together for their more formal presentations to help the enthusiasts and the thought leaders exchange ideas and build a knowledge base that promotes expertise and informs the casual user as well. Kevin’s leadership and the great group he surrounds himself with is bringing great value to the Seattle social media community. They offer something for the beginner to the most experienced practitioner in the field of social media and it is always innovative and exciting.
Next I had coffee with my friend who works with a government entity that won’t embrace social media because the bureaucratic chain of permissions is so great that it would take months for a single tweet to be approved for broadcast. The burden of understanding the immediacy of social media and the potential it possesses for their organization is so beyond them that they are skeptical about anyone in the business regardless of their skill sets or experience.
I moved on down the Seattle waterfront and had coffee with Warren Sukernek of Social Media Breakfast Seattle for an interview for my upcoming book on Twitter techniques and strategies. The conversation moved from the hows and whys to the vetting of not only Twitter followers for brand engagement but also regarding the person representing the brand itself. We both knew of companies that had hired someone’s niece or nephew still in high school or college to ‘Tweet’ for the company. We also knew of cases where a social media expert’s complete work history involved a stint as a bagger at Safeway and barista at the corner cafe. And the company wonders why their social media efforts are not working so well for them? SMBC’s last presentation by Sean O’Driscoll of Ant’s Eye View briefly addressed just that question as he went on to address pithier matters about measurement of conversations, etc.
This led to a lengthy discussion with my buddy David Grigsby a tech geek like myself who lives in the heartland of America. He and I chat almost weekly about the latest tools and techniques that impact small business on the web. Gist, Flowtown, Mailchimp, CRM, Odesk, you name it and we have turned it upside down and ripped it apart to analyze its effectiveness for small business owners. Not surprising we have also analyzed the ways and means of social media. We came to the same conclusion…measurable output is critical to success on any of these platforms
The most interesting thing that came out of all the conversations with these professionals is that there were some common benchmarks or standards we are looking for in the ‘experts’ we will work with, support or engage on behalf of our clients:
1. Must be a doer not a talker. Actively participating in the social environments they propose to represent for a brand. An abandoned or inactive Twitter account does not make one an expert. Tweets must bring value and encourage engagement at a minimum. Consistency is important as is output.
2. A true dynamic web presence that is optimized for find-ability. If you are in the business of building the web presence of a brand then you need to eat your own dog food. If someone ‘Googles’ you and you can’t ‘be found’ don’t call yourself an expert. You can’t because you aren’t. As Nike says, “Just Do It!”
3. Social media projects are an integral part of a maven’s portfolio. Let your work speak for you. If you can’t point to anything you have done that is professional and represents your knowledge base you won’t impress anyone.
4. A polished, highly optimized, and professional LinkedIn profile is important to the vetting process. You will be assessed based on your strengths and weaknesses found on available online information. If you can’t be validated as a professional with appropriate education or experiences that align with what you claim, then you probably won’t make the cut.
This is not to say that there are not gems among the inexperienced. They get how it works. They stumble onto the one thing that not one of their peers has discovered as of yet. The technologies are in their infancy as are all the ‘experts’ that abound. We are all trying to differentiate who we are and what we do. None of us can claim to truly be experts at the moment. We are all practitioners building tools, strategies, and techniques built on our individual and collective experiences in the field. The reason that I won’t call myself an expert is that I am not that confident anyone is including the inventor of the technology, methods, or tools.
Your thoughts?
3/10 Tips to a Better Profile Video – Incorporating B-roll and Testimonials
Posted by: | CommentsThere are no magic formulas for what makes the perfect profile video. No one style, format, or approach will work across all industries and for all business people. Hopefully this series will help you take away some useful information that will help to make your profile video, however you produce it, be the perfect video for your particular needs.
Tip #3 – Incorporating B-roll and Testimonials
Most profile videos are nothing more than talking heads in a little square video box. One way to improve your profile video is by incorporating other elements that help to reinforce the story that you are trying to tell. Some of the elements that you might use to enhance your profile video are B-roll, stock photos and video, and customer testimonials.
B-roll is any additional footage that you might already have or that you might have shot of you or your business. This could be you or your staff interacting with customers, video of a particular service or operation that you perform for customers that is hard for people to grasp without seeing it, or footage of your business/staff/fleet in action. This is a great way for you to reinforce what you are saying with visuals and can also be used to cover up any rough spots in the on camera part of your profile.
Another option for adding to your profile video is adding stock photography or video. This stock material can be great if your business is not in an ideal location for filming (i.e. your home), if you or your clients are camera shy, or if you just don’t have the time or money to have a professional company come shoot it for you. Stock material can be a very affordable way to add a more symbolic bit of imagery to your video. Sites like istockphoto have royalty free (you don’t have to pay again to use it) photos and video that can be very affordable.
Everyone feels more comfortable doing business with someone they feel they know and can trust. That’s one of the best reasons to do a profile video in the first place. A good way to help establish credibility in the eyes of prospective clients is by having a satisfied customer give an on camera testimonial to the benefits of using your product or service. Customer testimonials can give your profile video that extra bit of authenticity that can make the difference of whether a prospect contacts you for your product or service, or keeps on shopping.
With just the right amount of additional material any profile video can go from dry and informative to engaging and compelling.
Check back for “10 Tips to a Better Profile Video – #4 Lighting Tips
Learn more about the author, Corey Lopardi.
http://www.biznik.com
Tips for Creating an Online Identity
Posted by: | CommentsThe concept of BRANDING has been sliced, diced and discussed for many years now, but the meaning behind the term goes much deeper than value or mission statements, logos or corporate color schemes. At the end of the day, all branding is founded upon telling customers who you are, what you do and how you do it. The ways in which you do it can be different than the way other companies do it, but the goals are always the same.
To take this just a little further, think about it this way: Your brand is how your particular target audience thinks about your product, and how they connect with it emotionally.
The online component of a marketing plan has often been marginalized in the past, but that is quickly changing. Most companies realize that they must direct both focus and resources to creating, fine tuning and maintaining an online identity.
In a general sense, social media makes it possible to brand yourself before anyone actually becomes your customer. It can also be the catalyst that brings them over. The idea is to join conversations, participate, become a part of the group.
If you’ve created a good weave of profiles, information and interesting content or conversation, then you’ve made some friends and maybe picked up some fans. More importantly, they’ve felt compelled to visit your website, where you have an opportunity to get one to one with them. This is interactive branding at work.
Here are a few tips to help you create a focused identity online.
DEFINE YOUSELF! When visitors arrive at your web site, tell them immediately what it is you do and why they should care about it. So many web sites shroud their identity in flashy graphics and ambiguous slogans without really telling people what the company or person actually does! Everyone has heard of WIIFM (what’s in it for me). Keep that in mind when you look at your website. Does it spell out exactly what your brand stands for? Ask few of your friends to visit the site and then quickly describe who you are and what you do for people. If it isn’t consistent and clear, redesign!
TELL EM WHAT YOU DO, NOT WHO YOU ARE! It may defy logic, but making your company name the most visible element on your home page isn’t always the best way to reinforce your brand. Sometimes, stating the benefit up front is far more effective. Which of these creates a clearer picture: The business name “Fitness Central” displayed in large letters or the more specific headline “Ways to Work a Fitness Plan into a Busy Schedule”?
GET PERSONAL! Avoid letting your site be a cold, mechanical place. Your branding efforts are far more effective when you include a recognizable, consistent human element. Think of the ways that the late great Dave Thomas promoted the Wendy’s chain of fast food restaurants. If your company has a CEO or a person who is closely identified with the company offline, make sure that connection carries to the cyberworld. If it’s your own business, then definitely include your name, photo and personal message on your web site. Nothing creates disconnection and even distrust more than a site that is completely void of any personal presence, and asks visitors to send e-mail to the “webmaster.” By the way, I walk my talk. If you have a look at the website for my company GDC Interactive Marketing Now! you’ll see my face and name all over the place!
CREATE A “FAN CLUB” MENTALITY! Many online marketing plans look to find ways to generate readers, visitors or users. That’s not all bad, but I also encourage you to switch gears a little and find ways to create fans. “Consumers” are people who visit your web site, subscribe to your newsletter or buy your products and services. “Fans,” on the other hand, cheer you on, rave about you to their friends and eagerly follow everything you do. Which would you rather have?
BE VISUAL! Content cannot be overlooked, words are important. But the look of your Web site must also support your brand image. Is your brand best served by hard edges or softer, rounded shapes? Do primary colors capture your personality or would earth tones be a better match? Find the design scheme that best compliments your identity. If you have a corporate or personal; logo, be sure that it is displayed prominently, and that the site fits around it nicely.
TAKE NAMES, ASK QUESTIONS LATER! So somebody has visited your site – now what? In my opinion, Offering a free e-mail newsletter is absolutely necessary for all business websites. It allows you to build a database of subscribers who are specifically interested in what your brand represents, and to build a relationship with them. It puts you in control of the frequency with which your audience is exposed to your brand. Offering value to your subscribers is crucial, whether it’s a tip filled weekly article, or advance notice of upcoming specials. The nice thing is that fully automated systems such as Aweber and GetResponse make setting up a subscriber form easy as easy can be!
POLLINATE THE SOCIAL WEB! Today’s Social Web offers a plethora of opportunities to project your brand. There are many specific strategies such as content or article marketing, blogging or vlogging, posting to social network groups etc., but participation is the key. Get started! Because of the direct interaction social media provides, it can be an extremely effective component of branding. It can even provide one-on-one customer service.
DIVE IN! One last note to add about the role of social web marketing in an overall marketing effort. It’s different than most traditional methods of advertising in that the results can’t always be measured in quite the same ways as those. But don’t be afraid to participate in social media just because you don’t see the ROI in the same manner as to what you’re accustomed. You’re not likely to, at least not immediately and not in a way you can pinpoint one event causing another. But over time, you can build your social reputation. This leads to credibility. And over time that credibility and awareness will very likely lead to an increase in your customer base. And that is what branding is really all about!
Learn more about the author, Grant Criddle.
http://www.biznik.com
