WeTubeU, Your Digital Handshake To The World: social media marketing

Showing posts with label social media marketing. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The New Rules of Relationship Marketing

Mari Smith has been deeply immersed in social media since 2007, but even before social media started to really pick up steam, she was evangelizing the idea of relationship marketing through the Internet and email for almost a decade. In 2008, Fast Company dubbed her “the Pied Piper of the Online World” because of her thought leadership on Facebook and Twitter for business.

Smith’s new book, The New Relationship Marketing, explores how the discipline has changed and why personalizing your brand is so important. As Smith likes to say, there’s no longer B2B or B2C — the new rules are about P2P, or people to people.

In this episode of Behind the Brand you’ll learn some of the tips from Smith’s new book, including how to grow your social media followers, fans and engagement, how to become a curator to establish yourself as an expert, how to leverage OPC (other people’s content) to build real attention and how to keep your content fresh.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

11 useful tips for marketing your brand on LinkedIn

With over 135 million users, 59% of which are located outside of the United States and with 75 of the Fortune 100 companies using the network for marketing and recruiting purposes, LinkedIn has become a critical platform for building, connecting with, and growing your personal and professional networks.

As the leading business social network, LinkedIn offers the chance to connect with professionals all around the world and from all industry backgrounds. But how do you convert networks into customers, and ‘likes’ into sales?

1. Learn from your peers

Successful marketing is all about listening to what your market needs. The LinkedIn Groups feature provides a space where you can discuss issues with others in your industry and learn from their advice. You can bounce ideas off industry experts and stay informed on new developments. You also have an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in a certain industry/area allowing you to build relationships with current and prospective customers in a more organic and credible fashion.

Screen shot 2012 01 16 at 3.35.37 PM 520x335 11 useful tips for marketing your brand on LinkedIn

2. Build on your niche

It doesn’t matter how specific your company’s product or service, LinkedIn allows you to connect with companies or individuals by industry, company size, geographic location, and more. By targeting your network-building, you are able to focus your time on building relationships that count.

3. Use Company Status Updates

You can post the latest news, product updates, videos and promotions on yourCompany Profile and instantly learn how it is being received with likes, comments and shares. Just like with any community, make sure your content strategy is relevant, adds value and promotes discussion. Use feedback to adjust your posting frequency or alter your content based on what is popular or what is missing.

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4. Ask your audience

LinkedIn provides a channel to your audience, but communication doesn’t have to be one-way. You can use your Company Profile to ask customers what they think, and engage with issues they might face. Asking for feedback can provide a wealth of market information from your core audience. If your Company Profile is too limiting, consider setting up a group or groups that meet a particular need among your audience.

You can also use LinkedIn’s polling feature. LinkedIn Polls is just like any other polling service: everyone can ask any query, include possible answers (as much as five) as well as select how much time it’s going to run. There is an ability to share content out via your social networks or upload it on your website to acquire the highest possible voting power. Analytics data is what’s valuable here: you can break down voters by age, gender and even seniority.

5. Use LinkedIn Ads

If used correctly, LinkedIn Ads can offer a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising. Because of the number of LinkedIn accounts (135 million worldwide), each with detailed profile information, LinkedIn Ads can specifically target your demographic by industry, geographic location, seniority, age, or by LinkedIn Group in a way few other channels can.

6. LinkedIn Recommendations: Give Generously

Your LinkedIn profile might look great, and you may have hundreds of connections, but in a crowded market what is going to make your company stand out? How will potential clients and customers know to choose you above your competition? The answer goes back to one of the basics of marketing: a positive recommendation by others is worth a hundred times what you will ever say about yourself. The secret to attracting great LinkedIn recommendations is to offer them yourself. Businesses, whether suppliers, clients or partners, are far more likely to give you a positive recommendation if you offer one first.

7. LinkedIn SEO

When people search for your industry or product, how are you going to come out on top? Just following the basics, such as making sure your profile is complete and accurate can help, but spending a bit of time over the keywords in the Specialties section is also important for driving traffic. You can also customize your URL to give your company’s name rather than a sequence of numbers, which can help search engines to find you.

8. Enrich your profile with LinkedIn applications

You’ve driven traffic to your LinkedIn page with targeted ads, great networking, and an informative profile, but what now? You’ve got so much more great information that will benefit your customers, but how are you going to tell them about it?LinkedIn apps can help, giving you the ability to add your blog to your profile, upload presentations, add polls and your Amazon reading list, collaborate with document sharing, and many other ways of enriching your profile to help it stand out and offer new ways to engage.

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9. Meet like-minded people at industry events

The LinkedIn events tool is a great way to easily search for relevant events (physical events, webinars, workshops, roundtables, etc) where you can meet your peers. LinkedIn search will display events related to your network connections as well as industry and geographic location, both past and present. Utilize this feature to extend your network face-to-face.

10. Integrate your LinkedIn presence into your other properties

FollowUsOnLinkedin Button 11 useful tips for marketing your brand on LinkedIn Prominently display “Follow Us on LinkedIn” button on your other social properties to help grow your network.

You can also add “LinkedIn Share” button to your other properties to make it easy for people to share your content and help it travel father.

The “Recommend” button can be prominently displayed on your website to give visitors to website a little bit of a nudge to recommend you on LinkedIn. The recommend comes in two formats: one for the company page itself and also one for the products and services page.

11. Measure your success

Make sure to track your performance as you go and make changes to your strategy based on that data.
On your Company Page’s Analytics tab, you can now see how many LinkedIn members are visiting your Company Page and how many of them are following your company. You can also see what industries, functions and companies these professionals come from as well as track how they are interacting with your Careers Tab or Products and Services Tab, how many are clicking on your promotional banners, and how many choose to contact employees at your company. And for every one of these data slices, you can compare yourself against similar companies to benchmark your performance.

Just recently LinkedIn also launched a brand new Group Statistics dashboard that delivers unique insights into groups: demographics, growth, and activity.

LinkedIn can seem daunting at first. If you think of your social media marketing as an extension of your traditional marketing, you can start to think of ways to integrate your standard practices into your LinkedIn networking. You don’t have to start from scratch; much of your marketing media, from videos to presentations and documents, can be shared through your profile and used to reach new, targeted audiences, especially those you may have trouble reaching through traditional marketing methods.

Also read: 5 LinkedIn Campaigns Worth a Look

Monday, November 21, 2011

WeTubeU Video Marketing - Greenway's Digital Handshake

Monday, September 26, 2011

Facebook Launches Program to Help Small Businesses With Their Pages and Ads

Facebook is launching a small business education program this week, looking to show businesses how to optimize their individual pages and to use its self-serve ad platform to effectively target customers.

The social-media giant is partnering with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business to conduct outreach in the small-business community. The first step is to circulate webinars, case studies and tips, which will be made available starting this week, but Facebook also intends to sponsor a series of road shows in cities across the country starting in October to promote its "Small Business Boost." The third piece of the program will kick off in January 2012, when Facebook will look to award a $50 ad credit to 200,000 businesses, amounting to $10 million in free advertising.

According to an eMarketer report, 44% of small- and medium-sized businesses used social media as a marketing tool in August, and 59% spent less than $100 on social-media marketing.

"We know that small businesses who use web technology grow more than twice as quickly, bring in twice the revenue, and create twice the jobs as small businesses who don't," said David Fischer, Facebook's VP-Advertising and Global Operations. He said 9.2 million small businesses in the U.S. have pages on Facebook, but only 3.2 million of those pages have active engagement. (Some pages exist essentially as shells, created by user signals on the social graph and without action taken by the business owner.)

"You want to be in front of [people] -- maybe it's a few times a week you're posting a few sentences, talking about what's going on," said Mr. Fischer, noting that engagement is key for small business owners. "In most cases it's not a matter of this being particularly complicated."

The program also aims to teach small businesses about Facebook ad products, like its self-serve platform and sponsored stories, which allows brands to build paid advertisements out of user signals such as likes and check-ins. According to Mr. Fischer, the amount that a small business might invest in self-serve ads targeted to their desired audience could range from $20 a month for a single proprietor business to thousands each week. But he says Facebook has learned of success stories, like two auto dealerships in Massachusetts: one that said it generated $20,000 in profits off $300 in ads and another that reported a $500,000 return on a $5,000 ad spend.

Facebook itself generates as much as 60% of its ad revenue from its self-serve platform, according to an eMarketer report from January.

Mr. Fischer says there's an internal awareness at Facebook that the company's tools could help stimulate economic growth and noted that Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is a member of President Obama's jobs council.

"We spend a lot of time thinking about how we can work with small businesses, and we know we have tools that can help them effectively," he said.

Monday, May 2, 2011

HOW TO: Get Your Employees On Board With Your Social Media Policy

As more businesses become social and move past the initial excitement of adoption, they need to tackle the nitty gritty of executing a social media strategy. It will involve cultural alignment, training, and building a solid process so that the necessary parts of the organization can participate. A truly social organization is active both internally and externally. This is where things get complicated.

When we think of major corporate PR blunders, we think of those committed by careless employees and interns tweeting from branded accounts. The solution is obvious: Don’t put anyone on the branded account whom you don’t trust with the brand voice. But what about employees’ communication from their own accounts? The solution here is a bit more nuanced, because there are two contradictory impulses at play:

“This is my account! Why does anyone care what I say? Freedom of speech!” Everyone is justified to feel this way, especially if he or she isn’t in a customer-facing part of the organization.
Your employees’ personal accounts are faces of the company, especially if they identify their employer in their bio, share work-related stuff, or they are on Twitter lists associated with the company.

It’s not an easy job to help people reconcile their public and private lives, and it all comes down to training, ongoing mentorship, and establishing guidelines and best practices. It can be daunting, at best, to ensure compliance without overbearing rules that stifle self-expression and dialogue.

The best way to ensure buy-in to your social media policy is not through threat of disciplinary action. Rather, it’s by providing education and resources, and building the right processes. When writing a policy, make sure you are clear about what constitutes a major infraction and what the consequences are. Here are some tips for setting your social media policies on the right track.

Tips and Advice

Understand. Before you do anything else, you have to spend time understanding your internal culture and your employees’ facility with social tools. Understand your organizational objectives and map your goals of social media engagement to that.
Educate. Most people fall down due to lack of education. One training session does not qualify as “education.” Commit to ongoing workshops and extend the conversation.
Extend the conversation. Make sure to create a space where people can find you and ask questions. It can be an internal blog, wiki, or an internal discussion group.
Empower. Highlight the “Dos” over the “Don’ts” from your policy. Make sure to focus the discussion on positive behaviors in your governance. What do you want people to do to drive their careers and the company forward?
Create a solid process. This is the part that takes the most time, so don’t despair if it doesn’t work on the first try. For example, how do you ensure that your sales team adequately covers social media without replying to one person from more than one sales account? How do your systems talk to each other? Make sure that every part of the organization is looped in. Find a way of sharing information and collaborate around it.
Tune into “WIIFM”. People always want to know “What’s In It For Me.” Make sure to address how proper social media training is good for employees’ individual careers. When talking to sales people, for example, recognize that Twitter can augment the sales process from lead discovery to post-sales, and give your team the tools necessary to be successful.
Address problems proactively and gently. There will be things that go awry. It’s always better to politely point out the problematic tweet or blog comment in private. Most people want to do the right thing even if they make mistakes. Identify problem areas for your organization and create additional guidance around them.
Address internal social too. Make sure that your governance extends to your internal collaboration groups and networks. At my company, we advise our customers to create a usage policy that outlines the Dos and Don’ts of behaviors in their networks. One of these behaviors, for example, is to not repost private discussions into public forums.
“These thoughts are my own.” Encourage people to speak for themselves, not the brand, even when they are talking about the space and the company. Make sure that your employees as well as official spokespeople have access to brand documents and Q&As.

Creating a Policy

Post your policy in a place that’s easily found, in a format that easily digestible. While you should also have a text version of it available, create a set of slides, an ebook or a video that employees can refer to. For example, Australia’s Department of Justice created the great video above. When appropriate, share your policy with the world, so that your customer community can see what’s important to your brand.

When creating policy, make it part of a larger organization-wide effort to adapt to the realities of today’s marketplace. Make sure that legal, CIO/ IT and HR are also involved and consulted.
In addition to protecting your brand and company assets, a social media policy and governance should also educate best practices around creating passwords and using OAuth with social media sites. It’s not a good idea to put sensitive information in an unsecure channel, like a Twitter direct message.
Your policy should clearly set guidelines for public discourse and outline consequences of not following these guidelines. Make sure people know which ones constitute a minor vs. a major infraction.
If you think that blocking social media at the office is the answer, think again. With smartphone adoption on the rise, your employees will simply get their social fix on a smaller screen during work hours.

Remember: educate and empower — then you won’t have to resort to disciplinary action. What are some ways in which you have approached governance and social media policy? Let us know in the comments below.

article by Mashable

Monday, April 25, 2011

Where is Twitter headed? Is it still a social network or is it becoming a broadcasting platform?

Its supercharged adoption rates two years ago took it from 9 million unique visitors in March 2009 to 17 million the very next month. But that kind of growth has ended. For the past year, Twitter’s unique visitor number has held steady at about 27 million.

While 27 million is definitely a lot of people, unlike Facebook, which surpassed Google in 2010 as the most visited site on the Internet, Twitter appears to have hit a plateau. What will become of the site now that it’s 5 years old and flat-lining?

At the height of its growth two years ago, 10 percent of Twitter’s active users were producing 90 percent of its tweets according to a study by the Harvard Business School.

Today, it appears that even more content is being generated on Twitter by even fewer accounts. According to a report published by Yahoo, 50 percent of tweets consumed on Twitter are now generated by only 0.05 percent of its users. That amounts to 20,000 so-called Twitter elite.

The elite include traditional media sources like the Today Show with 756,000 followers or CNN with close to 2 million. They include celebrities like Ashton Kutcher with 6.5 million followers or Oprah with 5.5 million. And they include organizations like the White House with 2 million followers.

Some bloggers have also amassed major followings. The technology blog Mashable is followed by 2.6 million people on Twitter, for instance.

After five years, is it possible that Twitter is morphing from a social network into a broadcasting platform?

For brands, businesses or people who are already famous or well-known, Twitter has clearly proven itself as an excellent platform to speak directly to customers and fans. But as a social network, customers and fans are also supposed to have the opportunity to respond.

When Shaquille O’Neal, one of the early celebrity adopters, first began using Twitter, he directly engaged his fans even sharing his location and asking them to come say hello. He continues to respond and interact, but many celebrities use Twitter primarily for one-way communication with fans.

The Yahoo study found that when elite celebrity users interacted with others on Twitter it tended to be with other elite celebrity users versus fans. Elite media and blogger accounts also were found to prefer to travel within their shared circles of influence.

One point of difference was that elite bloggers tended to share one another’s content more frequently than other elites.

Twitter as a broadcast platform actually works well for elite users, but it’s not a model that works for ordinary people and businesses where the rules of social networking still apply.

For average Joes, Janes and Jones Incorporateds, Twitter is a better place to meet some new, like-minded people or cultivate a few new customer relationships and positive word-of-mouth. But growing a sizable following that could support a broadcast model is highly unlikely without a full-time dedicated social media manager.

Unless Twitter continues to grow and succeed as a social networking platform and appeal to ordinary users, it will not hold its value to elite users as a broadcasting platform.

With stagnating growth and the consolidation of its content into the hands of the few, Twitter is at the crossroads and, if nothing changes, could start losing its appeal to both elites and the masses.

Story by www.signonsandiego.com

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

marketing videos and the video platform

If you want to make successful marketing videos, your videos should be relevant to your products and services, and should help viewers to solve problems, or find innovative products that you sell, that will make their life easier.

Videos include visual stimulation, which conveys your message very well, and it does so even better than the best of copywriters can do it. Capture the viewer's interest in the first few moments, and you can give them more information about your products and services.

Videos actually don't take that long to make, if you're working with someone who knows what they're doing. You can also take a short time to learn to make them yourself. You can make a thirty second video with background music and proper transitions, using software that is made for this purpose. Marketing videos can actually take a shorter amount of time than crafting articles.

The biggest benefit of video marketing is making an impact on the people who see your video. Humans memorize sound and motion better than text, so even if the leads don't convert to sales right away, you shouldn't be discouraged. Your brand will still be playing somewhere in their heads, and they may get back to you.

Consumers are online more now than ever, on PC's, laptops and netbooks, and iPhones, iPads, etc. When you have a proper video platform in use, you can check to see what is being watched, and what potential customers are looking at.

The platform does its task by sorting out the online addresses for the various portals, and then separates views by categories like videos, channels and devices. Then your publishers or marketers will be able to obtain statistics for single views of the videos, or views of an entire library.

If you're not sure how much video content is actually being watched, the stats will tell you than in an average month, consumers in the United States watch over thirty billion video clips. Each clip averages 4.4 minutes in length.

A video platform generally is an outsourced application, used to upload, store, encode, publish, report and deliver the product to the appropriate website or network. Not long ago, these platforms were focused on revenue models supported by ads. But the revenue model is a difficult way to predict profitability.

The new types of platforms perform a task more like selling access to the videos, rather than selling the advertising spaced around the actual videos themselves. The access sold may be one view, an unlimited number of views within a given time period, or the actual downloading and ownership, that is similar to buying a DVD.

This model is different because the process of paying is built into the platform, and the publisher can conduct sales transactions and stream videos from the same platform. In this way, the experience is seamless for the publisher as well as the user. This is the main distinction between the traditional video platforms that were ad-supported, and the new video sales platforms. A video that has been published through a sales platform will be sold as a product, rather than being given away for free, along with advertising.

Sean Allen

Director of Social Media and Sales

Cell: 619 301 4533

Sean@WeTubeU.com

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