Archive for social media
Flowtown – Where Social Meets Email Marketing
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I recently co-authored a book on Local Search called Get Found Now Local Search Secrets Exposed and became fascinated with how local search was adding social elements. With the advent of user reviews directly on the local search site as well as aggregating reviews from other sites like Yelp and Judy’s book. Social has now become a critical element of optimizing your business for Local SEO. Suffice it to say I am looking at all things related to Geo-data as they relate to local search optimization.
Recently I discovered a really interesting tool from Flowtown that examines business communication channels with their consumer audience and then translates that information to identify not on their email address but their name, age group, gender, occupation, location, influence, and every social network they belong to (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, Amazon, Flickr, Stumbleupon, and Myspace) and participate in personally or professionally. Essentially, they have harnessed social networking and turned it into social email. The endless possibilities of social media marketing make it possible for a business to make just about anything happen on line when it comes to identifying consumers and their personal preferences in the market place converting them into social marketing dollars.
Flowtown is an incredibly innovative tool that allows B2B’s and B2C’s to target email campaigns via Mail Chimp to clients with the firm knowledge of their social behaviors and influences as well as their IP address (which reveals their current geolocation). This knowledge gives a business a ton of specific information for crafting a more targeted highly focused campaign based on demographic and social information of users that provide enhanced social email marketing.
With Flowtown’s use of Klout’s influence calculator, a user will know exactly who you as a business need to reach out and touch to get noticed and get people talking about your brand and your products/services. You can target particular customers by geographics, by which social networking site they hang out on, and by the level of influence they have on others where ever it is they hang out.
To test Flowtown the first 50 or so imports cost nothing as do the first 250 emails per month. To maximize your contacts is quite reasonable ($14.99 for unlimited contacts and up to 10,000 emails/month). With a minimal investment now you have not only a useful email marketing channel but an influence tracking device for everyone in your network. You can analyze their social profile, find out who chats with whom where as well as their other favorite social network channels. Real customer intelligence is now at your fingertips for a song!
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.
Twitter, Facebook and The Case of the Little Lost Dog
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Ruby -The Face that Twitter Loves
My son’s dog Ruby decided to go on an adventure yesterday around 2:30. Gone! We live on an island so Colin called me home from a photo shoot on the north end to our neck of the woods on the south end of Bainbridge Island, WA. Our island is small – about 7 miles across at its widest and 16 miles long. There are only 22,000 people on the island and our end is heavily wooded and not densely populated. There are lots of public lands with trails, ponds, streams and ravines. There are also coyotes. Lots of them…and our little Ruby was out there somewhere and it was getting dark. While my son is grown and lives on his own Ruby spends many weekends and holidays at my house with my hounds Luke and Mocha. She is their sister and she RULES the roost when she is here…and at Colin’s place she is the queen and his girlfriend Sam is second fiddle to a 42 pound tyrant. None of us would have her any other way either.
We first called the Kitsap Humane Society but there is a weekend answering service. They only let you report dangerous animals on the weekend. No place to leave a message to report a lost little dog. No social accounts to be found to list your lost pet. Nothing. So I moved on to Paws, a cat adoption center who acts as a clearing house for lost pets at times. I could only leave a detailed message but nothing else.
I then called the director at Furrytale Farms, Suzannah Sloan. She ran down the list of places to call and then added…you can try posting it on Big Tent Island Moms forum and then post it on your Facebook to your friends. Dang…the crazy dog lady was ahead of the crazy internet search lady! Needless to say I hung up and went straight to Island Moms, Facebook, and Twitter to post away!
The tweets and retweets were amazing. The Facebook friends who took it upon themselves to post my post as their own status was overwhelming. A little more than 24 hours later and 100 flyers posted by family and friends as well as a day of hiking over hill and dale and though ravines and into nooks and crannies I previously did not know existed on this island and I am amazed! I handed out business cards with my number on it as well as my Twitter account. Random strangers went out on their accounts and posted our search and Ruby’s photo and followed me. That little rascal was a celebrity in no time. I went to the local cafe where our son works and a stranger walks up and asks, “Did you find your dog yet? I saw on Facebook where she was missing.” Apparently she is friends with a friend. Now she is my friend. BFF thanks to Ruby. I continued walking the neighborhood calling for Ruby and spreading the word that we were looking for her. Soon people I did not know were telling me they would ‘run in and post it on Facebook and Island Mom.’ Suddenly, Ruby had a legion of friends searching for her for me and for my son Colin. Wow.
The phone rang all during the first quarter of the Super Bowl. Did you find your dog? Hey, we saw a black dog on Island Center Road, etc.
Ruby Don't Take your Love to Town
None were Ruby sightings but we did hear from a lot of great people both on the phone and over the internet. My son left for work. His girlfriend settled in to endure a second night with Ruby gone…so she went in the back of their cottage to retrieve a book, a blanket, and to try and pass the time until daylight to go looking again. She came back into the entry hall and there was that damn dog.
Ruby was sitting on the front porch as if she had merely strolled down to the postbox and back. No worse for wear, hungry, wet, and a bit stinky from her adventure. Ecstatic I ran to the Cafe where my son works to let him know she was found. His grin lit up the room. A huge hurrah went up with the staff.
Ruby gave me a good lesson in the power of social media. She also gave me a lesson in patience, persistence, and the power of community both online and off. Ruby…you are a schmuck for turning my Superbowl Weekend upside down.
You are a wonderful little doggie for making me see how big a part of our family you have become in four short years. But you are still a rascal and I now know why the song Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town! always comes to mind when we see you…Don’t you dare do this to me again!
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?
