Category: Social media

  • Small business marketing basics: Social Media

    InterestOver the past week, I’ve had a chance to listen to various business owners’ impressions of what constitutes digital marketing these days. The conversations have been interesting and revelatory, so over the next few posts, I want to review the very basics of these channels for folks who aren’t marketers. If you are a digital marketer by trade, I’ll tell you up front that you can probably skip this series and go read another blog; I won’t be telling you anything you shouldn’t already know. If you have bosses, clients, or friends who are not marketers, however, this series might be helpful. Today, we’re going to tackle the state of social media in 2013.

    Most folks who are not digital marketers want their businesses to succeed and understand that social media is one of the driving forces in digital marketing today. Why? Because it’s relatively low cost to start (though that ramps fast) and results of some kind generally happen very quickly. So what matters in social media?

    • Context: Knowing what goals you intend to achieve is most important. Are you trying to generate more leads for your business? Are you trying to retain customers? Defining the context will let you know if you’re succeeding or not, and how to measure it.
    • Content: Having something worth sharing is the new table stakes in social media. Here’s how to know whether you’ve got something worth sharing.
    • Conversation: Be ready, willing, and eager to have conversations in social media – even if they’re conversations that aren’t pleasant.
    • Community: The people that make up your social media audience are going to help you achieve your results if you build the right audience, the audience that wants to talk about your topics and what you can do for them (and rarely, if ever, what they can do for you).

    Rather than rewrite the same words over again, I’m going to give you two resources that should be of help in making a general starting social media strategy for a small business. First, this simple (but not easy) one page slide that you should have in your office and reference when you’re doing social:

    Social Media Strategy

    Want to download this as a printable PDF? Click here and it’s yours.

    In terms of how to publish content on a schedule, I’ll refer you to this video (free, registration required) I did for my employer, SHIFT Communications:

    Content Strategy 2.mov
    Basic Content Distribution Strategy for Social Media

    If you can make these two sets of basics work for you, your social media program will be off to a good start.


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  • 2 Exercises To Strengthen and Grow Your Social Networks

    We spend a lot of time in the world of social media talking about content. Content marketing, content is king, content rules, and rightfully so, since content is a vital part of many people’s work. It’s effective, it scales well with the resources you give it, and if done well, helps you and your community. That said, content is only half the equation. Remember that this is social media – content is the media. There’s still the social part, and that’s a part we pay very little attention to. In fact, if you believe some of the content marketing resources out there, the general idea is “build it and they will come”, which hasn’t really worked… well, ever.

    So what’s the other half of social media? The social part. Your network, and the people in them. You can still make social media work well for you without generating much content. How? By focusing your efforts on your network. Recently, I shared a simple networking tip, saying hello to people who visit your profile on LinkedIn. That’s the tip of the iceberg. If you want to make the social part work for you, or your content marketing skills have proven to not be your strength, then look into networking. Here are two simple networking exercises for you to try.

    Be a Broker

    Of the people you know, try to connect two of them every week (or even every day if your network is large enough) who might benefit each other. Say you know someone who’s in the vacuum business and someone who’s in the pizza delivery business in your local town. Connect them, introduce them to each other, and maybe even make the suggestion that the pizza guy work with the vacuum guy on commission so as to get into more households.

    Signal | LinkedIn

    Listen on networks like LinkedIn Signal or Twitter for people asking their friends to recommend new hires or new business partners, and then make the connections. It’s really easy – just go to Signal, search for the word hiring, restrict to your first degree connections, and see what’s out there that you can make happen for someone in your network. No, there’s nothing in it directly for you, but by doing so, you strengthen your network by increasing your value to the people in it.

    Make Some Greatest Hits

    Are you subscribed to Peter Shankman’s Help a Reporter Out (HARO)? If you’re not, you’re missing out on golden opportunities for earned press – but not for you. If you’re still not familiar with this free service, it’s a thrice-daily email of inquiries from press and media sources asking for sources to contact who are experts. Here’s an example query:

    6) Summary: Financial Experts’ Tips
    Name: S.Z. Berg High-traffic print/websites
    Category: Business and Finance
    Media Outlet: High-traffic print/websites
    Deadline: 7:00 PM PST – 30 March

    Query: I am looking for financial and investment experts to provide little-known strategies (and client anecdotes) on digging out of debt, buying a car, paying for college, and other big buys or investing in stocks or mutual funds for a book/Huffington Post blog. Requirements: Prefer experts who are socially networked.

    Here’s the exercise: subscribe to HARO, and commit to finding one query per week for someone in your network. Read through the backgrounds of a dozen or so folks who are connected to you on LinkedIn or Twitter and then read HARO. Find someone in that group a single press inquiry, copy and paste it to them, and see if it can land them some ink. If you want to make an impression on someone, getting them free press is certainly one way of doing so.

    Hint for job seekers: this is a KILLER way to make a pre- or post-interview impression.

    Conclusion

    These two exercises, if you do them diligently once a week, every week, will strengthen and grow your network. People will begin to seek you out because you’re constantly providing them with value, and as is human nature, they’ll do their best to return the favor and find you opportunities as well. Want the world to beat a path to your door? Do the hard work of beating a path to their doors first.


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  • How to create content for the junkweb

    As much as I don’t like it, the junkweb (as termed by Chris Brogan) is supremely powerful. It’s one of those concepts that’s like pop-ups – you hate it, yet you cannot deny its effectiveness. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s the phenomenon of slapping words on top of images and sharing them on social networks.

    In a recent look at some of my stats and some client stats on Facebook alone, junkweb posts accounted for 8 of the top 10 most shared, most engaged items on Facebook pages. If things like EdgeRank are of concern or interest to you, then you have to consider the junkweb as one of your content generation tactics.

    Here’s a simple way to get started with creating for the junkweb. First, find yourself a list of quotes or sayings about your field, about your industry, or anything else that’s on-brand. Next, go to the Commons on Flickr or the Creative Commons By Attribution, for Commercial Use section. Find an image for each quote that’s appropriate and has relatively empty or neutral space in it that can accommodate the quote. Using a program like Over on a mobile device or Skitch on a desktop, slap the quote on top of the image, and you’ve got a piece of content for the junkweb.

    Here’s an example. We start with this quote:

    “Obedience keeps the rules. Love knows when to break them.” – Anthony de Mello

    And now we find a picture on the Commons, in this case from the State Library of New South Wales:

    Artist and dog arrive by Melbourne Express (taken for J.C. Williamson), 10/12/1937 / byTed hood

    We use Skitch to put up the words, and here’s our junkweb piece.

    All sizes | Artist and dog arrive by Melbourne Express (taken for J.C. Williamson), 10/12/1937 / byTed hood | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

    If you don’t believe in the power of the junkweb, I’d challenge you to try it for two weeks. Create a piece of interesting junkweb content every day that is relevant, targeted, and on-brand, and see how it performs in terms of engagement and sharing on networks like Facebook and Google+. Remember that these are not memes per se, and certainly don’t create anything that is inappropriate for your brand’s tone. Try it out for two weeks and see if it makes an impact on your audience.


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  • How to make shareable Facebook lists

    Robert Scoble mentioned on Facebook yesterday:

    Robert Scoble

    I’ve set up lists for myself, but wanted to dig into how to publish mine, so I did some poking around. Here’s a step-by-step for making your own lists. First, scroll down, down, down to the bottom left of the FB interface and find the non-intuitively named Interests:

    Facebook

    Hit up Add Interests and choose Create List:

    Add Interests

    Now go through and pick 5-10 news sources (people or pages) that you want to add to your list. For fun, I made a public list around Blizzard’s game franchises, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo:

    Add Interests

    Choose Public for the permissions and name it something obvious:

    Add Interests

    Your list is done. Easy, right? Two additional things to do. First, look at the List Suggestions box to see if you missed any obvious news sources that are related to your list:

    Warcraft News

    And then, of course, share it.

    Note that while Facebook Pages cannot create shareable lists, they can be part of them (add to Interest Lists), so if you’ve got a page you want to promote, an easy marketing hack is to bundle it with similar pages in a list that is shared off your personal profile. You could, for example, make a list called Boston Area Social Media Folks, and then promote and share the public URL to that list.

    How else can you use this? If you’ve got a list of employees at a competitor, you can always make a list to keep tabs on what your competitor is doing via the public updates of those employees and share that among your team members (be sure, obviously, to mark it Friends only in permissions). You could publish a select list of your own employees or pages if you wanted to keep the world up to date on what you were up to. Of course, you can and should keep an eye on the lists other people are sharing, too:

    Add Interests

    It’s a free way to do some Facebook-centric social media monitoring. Give it a try!


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  • What will kill email?

    Greg Hyer asked an interesting question in the Marketing Over Coffee LinkedIn group: what will kill email?

    The short answer is: nothing. The slightly longer answer is that anything based in an open standard is likely to be around for a very, very long time. Back in the day – and I’m talking 1995 here – the dominant form of public file sharing and discussion was Usenet, based on the open NNTP protocol. Usenet was notoriously difficult to use, from getting a desktop client set up to finding newsgroups that you wanted to participate in. When the World Wide Web and its HTTP protocol crashed onto the scene, Usenet began its long, slow decline into relative obscurity.

    End of story, right? Not quite. Usenet is still around today. Google Groups is probably the best known interface for it, but there are plenty of others, and there are still plenty of users active on Usenet, with over 110,000 still active groups. Why hasn’t Usenet gone away, when there are so many easier and better ways to get at the same information? Because the NNTP protocol is an open standard, and because it provides some basic utility, it’s still around.

    The protocols that make up email – IMAP, POP3, SMTP – are equally open standards. Anyone can get a cheap piece of hardware set up with Sendmail or Postfix and have themselves a fully standards-compliant mail server up and running as fast as you can build it. There’s no one you need to buy software from or get approval from – you just build it, connect it to the Internet, configure your DNS records, and you’re in business.

    This is why email will likely never die, at least not for a very, very long time. You can’t set up your own Twitter server. You can’t set up your own Facebook server. In fact, of all of the major social networks, the only one that promised any kind of protocol-based service with independent ownership was Google Wave, and that was killed off in just three years by Google after it failed to gain any kind of traction.

    For social marketers, this is why we’ll be on the conveyor belt of “shiny new networks” that rise up, blossom, and then die, but will not have a stable platform. Each company in the social space is unwilling to open its code for independent implementations because their business models require exclusivity of ownership. As a result, the rapid birth-death cycles of popular social networks will continue, from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook today. On the bright side, it means that for many of us in the digital marketing space, we’ll have continued opportunities to find and seize early mover advantages from nascent networks as they catch on.

    Referral Traffic - Google Analytics

    Be ahead of the curve: watch the referrers in your Google Analytics carefully. Look for new referring sites and check them out, perhaps on a monthly basis, to see what’s sending new audiences to you. The next big hit might be in there already.


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  • You are the future of marketing

    Untitled

    Let’s take a look at a few recent emerging trends.

    • Google is rolling out Author Rank. This favors giving search authority to authors who have built up a reputation for quality content.
    • Facebook is rolling out Graph Search. This favors giving search recommendations to your friends based on things you’ve engaged with.
    • Twitter’s new search algorithm rewards originators. This favors you sharing things first and/or being authoritative about your content.
    • Bing is testing out listing search results based on Klout. This favors giving search recommendations to people who have platforms and strong networks of friends.

    Sensing a theme here? The world is transforming from a “what” world to a “who” world. The reason for Google’s dominance in search was because they mastered what. They mastered being able to answer what questions – what’s the best this or that, what’s the most reputable company for this or that.

    Social changes the what equation, however. We first saw this with Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads that targeted the who. Who matches the job titles for the product you’re selling? Who matches the interests of your product or service?

    Why? I suspect that in terms of search quality that who is somewhat harder to fake. Sure, you can have dummy accounts but if search marketing platforms are rewarding long term quality then even those dummy accounts must provide value. The who matters. Back in the really bad old days of content marketing, it was trivial to take any database of information and simply republish it. If you did that today, you’d need to provide significant added value in order not to be penalized in search, and one of the most straightforward ways is to add people, from reviews to social engagement to socially generated content.

    Who is the platform. You are the platform. Digital marketing will increasingly reward both who you are and what you do, rather than just the stuff you create.

    So what does this mean for you? As a company, start thinking about platforms in your recruiting. Imagine two employees of roughly equal capability, but one has a platform. They have a social community of peers that goes with them. Who is more valuable? All other things being equal, the one with the platform is more valuable. Why? They bring more resources to bear. This is true even outside of marketing and sales. For example, imagine two PHP developers. A developer with his or her own platform is more valuable because they have that many more peers to engage with and ask questions of when they encounter difficult problems to solve.

    As a person, you need to build out your community and platform. Have a personal presence, have a network, be a resource or become a resource. Grow yourself into a hub that generates new business for whoever you work for. Participate in others’ hubs, from interacting with them socially to creating content for their platforms. Be a powerful connection for your community (whatever that community is) and you’ll add powerful influence to any place you work.

    To quote Mitch Joel, it’s not about what you know. It’s not about who you know. It’s about who knows you (and why).


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  • Yes, Google+ is still relevant

    One of the most frequently asked questions I receive from clients, coworkers, and colleagues is whether Google+ is still relevant or important.

    The short answer is that for SEO, anything Google tells you to do is important. It wouldn’t matter if Google+ had 5 users – if it impacts your SEO, it’s still important. But in the search for a slightly more fulfilling answer, I stumbled across an interesting find, GPlusData.com. It’s one of the many sites parsing Google’s G+ API and doing some basic reporting on the site. Take a look at new daily profile growth:

    GPlusData.com index growth Google+ trends and statistics

    Yesterday, by their indexing, Google+ added 235,674 new profiles. That’s not insignificant; in any other world, 235,674 new customers or users in one day would be a cause for drunken revelry. Think about that number for a second. World of Warcraft, the most popular MMO on the planet, boasts about 10 million users after 8 years of operation. Google+ at its current growth rate would nail that number in 42 days.

    Vic Gundotra, Google SVP, said back in December: “Today Google+ is the fastest-growing network thingy ever. More than 500 million people have upgraded, 235 million are active across Google (+1’ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search…), and 135 million are active in just the stream.

    So how do you leverage Google+?” is usually the follow-on question. The answer is the same as it’s always been for every other social network: find interesting people and interact with them, share interesting things with people who interact with you. It’s not rocket surgery, but it is a lot of work. Join Communities, hit the Explore button a lot to find stuff worth sharing, circle people who have interesting stuff you like, hit the +1 button on pages you like on the web that offer it, etc. If you want more details, go grab any of these 3 Google+ books by Chris Brogan, Lynette Young, or Guy Kawasaki on the topic.

    You ignore 235 million active users at your peril, especially since there’s a good chance at least some of your current or future customers are on board.


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  • How to identify different customers with Google Webmaster Tools

    In the previous post on this topic, we discussed different kinds of “customers”, such as people who write about you or people who share your stuff. In this video, we’re going to use Google’s free Webmaster Tools application and Google Docs to identify some of those people so you can follow up with them.

    Google Webmaster Tools

    Let me know in the comments if this was useful!


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  • Should you outsource your social media?

    MarketingProfs B2B Forum
    DJ Waldow using his voice.

    James O’Brien asked for my thoughts on hiring vs. outsourcing your social media efforts. This one’s pretty easy: it depends on how good you are at your company’s voice.

    Social is another channel, just like email, just like your website, just like PR, just like someone answering the phone. If you’re not particularly good at expressing your company’s voice, then you logically do things like hire a marketing agency or hire an SEO firm, contract out with a call center, etc.

    If you are good at expressing your company’s voice, then you have people on staff like a director of marketing and a marketing team, a director of customer service and a large customer service team, and so forth.

    Look at your existing structure and decide whether you as a company, as an organization, are good at speaking for yourselves. The answer isn’t always as simplistic as people saying, “Of course you should be authentic and only speak for yourself!”

    Reality is more nuanced. Some companies are simply inept at speaking for themselves. Some agencies are spectacular at speaking on behalf of their clients and being more effective in the media space than their clients ever could be. Other companies are great at expressing their voice, and other agencies truly are awful at representing their clients authentically.

    The best indicator of whether you should hire internally vs. outsource is to look at the size of your marketing team currently. If your team consists of a marketing director or manager and a rolodex full of contractors and consultants, then you’re probably going to outsource social media too. If your team is broad and deep, then either you have or will have a social media person on that team in short order.

    Thanks for the question, James! If you’ve got questions about marketing, feel free to ask on Twitter @cspenn and if they’ve not already been answered on the blog, I’ll see what I can do.


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  • 3 ways to get seen more often in LinkedIn Search

    Donna asked:

    I read your article before about LinkedIn and the various features to focus on in order to get the most of the site and had a question. I have tried to revamp my profile, change my title, change words and although I am receiving notices for jobs that I would be interested in my search results are not doing so well. On average I only seem to appear in about 11 times a week. How do I improve? What am I doing wrong?
    Thanks 🙂

    A great question. LinkedIn Profile Search, unsurprisingly, is governed not only by content, but by network. This is the foundation of social media strategy for most things these days (grab Social Media Strategy in One Slide if you haven’t already).

    The short answer to Donna’s question is that you have to first optimize your profile for the content you want to be found for, and then you have to build out your network like crazy. Get your existing network to add endorsements (or recommendations if you can get them) so that your profile is more weighted in the search algorithm. Then build, build, build your network.

    Showing up in search works better when you have more connections and a larger network, because LinkedIn not only measures content relevance, but how many degrees away a person is. The larger your network, the more likely you are in that magic 3 degrees or less radius of the people you want finding you.

    How do you build your LinkedIn network? Here are 3 straightforward tips:

    1. Ask. Ask people regularly to connect. Ask in every channel where you can.

    Twitter / cspenn: Are we connected on LinkedIn? ...

    2. Load up your address book into your GMail account and use the Add Connections feature to locate them.

    Import Contacts and Invite | LinkedIn

    3. Add it into your existing email programs, from your signature to your personal newsletter.

    New Message

    You should be using these 3 ideas regularly and frequently to grow your network. That will improve your appearances in search and generate the results you want to achieve with your LinkedIn efforts.


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