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August 30th, 2009 by
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In business school, they teach you about fundamentals for creating a successful and profitable business. But as most of us know, the fundamentals are different than they were even 5 years ago. This is hard for a lot of seasoned, experienced business owners to swallow. It’s been hard for me to swallow.
But what do I mean when I say the fundamentals have changed? I think Seth Godin summed it up in his blog post on July 22, 2009 when he asked the question, ‘What do you buy when you buy Zappos?’
We all know that Amazon already sells shoes, has technology and well-established relationships with Fedex & UPS. So why would Amazon want to acquire Zappos for such a staggering amount of money?
Godin implies that what makes Zappos so desirable, is that it exemplifies the new fundamentals for success and profitability, which are:
- A corporate culture that’s not the same (and where great people choose to work)
- A tight relationship with customers that give you permission to talk with them
- A business model that’s remarkable and worth talking about
- A story that spreads
- Leadership
Good leadership is one of the original fundamentals that is non-negotiable, even in this new economy. The items on the list above, characterize ‘remarkable’ companies like Zappos in the new economy……companies that get acquired for $800 MM Dollars.
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April 22nd, 2009 by
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Source Lifehacker.com
Twitter has become a nationwide phenomenon, and like any phenom, all the Twitter talk grows quickly tiresome. But despite what you may think, Twitter isn’t just for narcissists; it’s actually insanely useful.
So let’s assume that you already know about the navel-gazing uses of Twitter—the aspects of Twitter that most people criticize when they complain about the site. Discounting Twitter altogether because you think it’s ridiculous that people tweet about what they had for breakfast is like claiming that email is useless because of forward chains. It’s a mistake, and you’d be missing out on a great tool if you let that put you off Twitter completely.
Twitter is as useful as you make it. In fact, Twitter does several very worthwhile things better than any other tool.
1. Instant, Real-Time Search Results
Search is hands down the most useful feature of Twitter—whether or not you actually participate by posting anything to the site. Consider, for example, a very trivial example: I live on the West coast, so when the American Idol results show ends every Wednesday on the East coast, it’s only 7pm here. I could wait two hours, then suffer through another hour of the Wednesday night, up-with-people variety show, but I really just want to know who was voted off. News sites move too slowly, and at one point blogs had aimed to fill this instant-answers void, but guess what: When you want to find out who was voted off Idol as soon as the results are available, Twitter is the quickest and easiest way to get this answer. Try it sometime. Within seconds of the announcement on Idol, Twitter fills with hundreds of posts answering this question for me.
The real-time search applies to so much more. If the signal on my cell phone goes out, I check Twitter to see if there’s some sort of AT&T outage in my area. If I want to know what people are saying about something important to me, I hit up Twitter. What you get is like a centralized, searchable, real-time comment-thread for everything. Yes, like all comment threads, you’ll find a good amount of crap. But that doesn’t render the entire thread worthless. Bookmark Twitter Search now and use it next time Google or your favorite blog search engine fails you.
2. Monitoring Something You Care About
Virtually every company has a Twitter account these days, which means if there’s a product you really care about, following them on Twitter is often the easiest way to stay up to date with the latest developments. But more often than not (in the context of Twitter, at least), the thing we care about most is ourselves. We’ve already shown you how to create an ego search to monitor what’s being said about you on the web, but now Twitter is another must-use tool for getting your ego fix.
Still, even if you’re not an ego-maniac, surely there’s something that you care about that you could monitor on Twitter. Do yourself a favor and download one of the free desktop Twitter clients to help you create persistent Twitter searches so you can keep track of whatever your want without always hitting up the main Twitter search page. We’d recommend checking out TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop.
3. News Updates
We’ve been using newsreaders to subscribe to RSS feeds for years now, but newsreaders still haven’t completely caught on with the world at large. It seems less manageable to us, but many people are perfectly happy using Twitter as a tool to keep up with the latest news—which is partly why CNN has over 1 million followers. Likewise, re-tweeting (the process of copying and re-posting someone else’s tweet) spreads news like wildfire—so breaking news can reach you on Twitter a million times faster than through any of the old methods. (For what it’s worth, here at Lifehacker we have our own Twitter feed that pushes out all of our top stories.)
4. Instant Communication with Friends
This is closer to what people think about when they think Twitter. But, as I said above, Twitter communication doesn’t have to be a cesspool of “what I ate this morning” and “just flushed the toilet.” You can choose whose updates you want to be notified of and how you get those updates. Upshot: If you and your pals use Twitter well, it can be a fantastic communication tool. If not, of course it’s useless—but that’s not really Twitter’s fault. Also, if privacy is a concern, you can always protect your updates.
5. Twitter as a Productivity Command Line
Whether you want to add a new event to Google Calendar, a new to-do to Remember the Milk, or a new note to Evernote, you can do it all via Twitter. It took us a while to warm up to Twitter from a productivity angle, but this kind of integration made us admit that Twitter may yet boost your productivity, too.
6. Ask Questions, Get Answers
Provided you have enough followers (with enough knowledge), Twitter is also a powerful place to ask questions and get answers. Before I started writing this post, for example, I asked my followers what they think Twitter’s best uses are—the answers to which helped inform this entire post.
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April 20th, 2009 by
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9 Reasons you NEED social media marketing in 2009
1. Your competition is doing it.
Most of the competition that’s doing it, you didn’t even know was your competition – UNTIL they started showing up for your best converting search phrases. Why are they showing up you ask? Well, they’re leveraging social media to build global link popularity and brand awareness. You’re customers know who they are now, and know that they’re faster, smaller, more efficient, and will keep them happy. They’ve implemented the technology to minimize overhead, and are treating customers better.
2. Your customers are using it (though maybe indirectly)
No matter how non-technical your customers are – social media impacts their consumption decisions. Social media’s impact on traditional media is increasing on a daily basis. Newspapers, television, and radio, are realizing that digg, reddit, and twitter, are sometimes even faster than the AP newswire. This impacts which news is presented in a traditional sense. The geeks, webmasters, the trendsetters, and other folks who are on the bleeding edge are now watching social media outlets and republishing to the channels that your customers are consuming from.
3. Your vendors and partners are using it
You know who’s NOT using facebook, twitter, digg, delicious, reddit, myspace, stumbleupon, and other large traffic social networks well? Automakers and Banks. Luckily, they can get billion dollar bailouts.
Try getting your modem rebooted over the phone with comcast – then ping @comcastcares You can thank them and I for the time savings later.
Has your site been on the homepage of digg or reddit? Has your site been stumbled? Do you know what it is? Do you think your no overhead web based competition from the Silicon Valley knows what it is?
4. More Social = more Search.
More Search = More Customers.
More customers = More business.
Duh. The web is more de-centralized than ever. After we do our initial searches through the Google, we start looking for communities of likeminded people. Your best customers are the ones that are passionate and want to have a conversation about you, your product, or something related (news, pictures, whatever). You need to be there to have the conversation WITH your customers. Otherwise, they will have it behind your back. You might not be able to rank right away on search engines anymore, but you can get to the top of a news or industry specific site for a few days with good content.
5. Paid search prices are rising.
PPC consulting is still a great solution to improving your ROI, and decreasing your CPC – but the market is getting tougher. It is great to be able to buy your keyword phrase to your targeted audience – but everyone is becoming wise to that fact. Those awesome high conversion, high profit keywords are slowly having the ROI sucked out of them by rising click prices. This makes organic search a must have long term proposition. Any self-respecting search marketer is going to tell you that you need natural links. And the best place to get natural links is???!?!?! You guessed it Chachi – Social media linkbaiting.
6. SEO isn’t easy anymore
Man do I miss the days of buying run of site text links and ranking top for any search term. Like Jim, I would never buy links anymore (okay, maybe I’d TRADE for them if it was SUPER relevant). The days of the little guys ranking well in google is slowly coming to an end, and a glorious era will go down in history. Pretty soon, however, it will be big business as usual. Those same big businesses have a while to catch on to social media FOR SEO, but they’ll do that eventually too. Personalized search is the next big thing (and yes it’s now REALLY almost here). You need lots of people coming to your site, staying on your site, and bookmarking your site for later to prove that you deserve to be on top of the search results.
7. You can’t buy links anymore
The communists have won the war. We have declared defeat. Of course if you listen to SEO’s and search engineers for too long, you will think that there are NO links that pass value. Well, at least we can pay to create viral content, and pay for optimization in the distribution channel, and HOPE that people link to us. The content kings have one, and it’s time to get writing. You might as well start talking to your customers and actually giving them what they want. Since bounce rate is now a significant factor for search results, it’s gonna hurt you to dupe your users with crap content anyhow.
8. Your website is only a billboard
You can have the most beautiful website in the world, and without traffic, it might as well be a billboard in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. Just ask all those big corporations who paid millions to have their beautiful flash sites built, and forgot to hire a SEO. You launched your site, and now you need traffic, or it’s been there for a long time, and you need MORE traffic and exposure. You listened to the search engines, and created great content! (after all, content is king!) But you still don’t seem to have much traction, and only your Aunt Frita, Uncle Merv, and 6 other people are visiting your site every day.
9. Great ROI on the Marketing Budget
With the DIY route and use social tools, social media marketing is the grass roots, word of mouth wonder of the web. Social media is building future communication empires at the moment with the likes of facebook, digg, reddit, digg, delicious, as the distribution points for web communication. They are the portals that every dot-bust era strived to be. Social media is seperating the old guard from the new, and rewarding those that are quick to embrace the technology. Do you?
Bonus #10: It’s a distribution point.
Social media is a way to reliably disperse your message to a group of people who want to hear what you have to say. When you have something good to say – you TELL them through your selected channels. At minimum, companies are becoming aware that they need to have conversations with their customers somehow.
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April 20th, 2009 by
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S. Cohen is a writer and Director of Communications at @ALSofGNY. He is @obilon on Twitter (
).
There are plenty of strategies for approaching Twitter. It’s getting more complex each day, but in the end it can be boiled down to a few simple approaches.
From Twittering on behalf of yourself to Twittering for a company, playing the part of a classic character to being a robot, here are seven ways users approach Twitter.
Introduce yourself and tell us about your Twitter approach in the comments.
1. You are yourself
You are on Twitter for the community, the knowledge you get and give, and the sharing of resources – whether it’s for professional or purely personal reasons. Twitter is your communication device.
I can go on all day providing examples of people who Twitter for their own enjoyment or just business networking but not specifically to promote anything or anyone in particular. Here are a few of my favorites that I follow:
@john_hunter – He’s a writer from England who frequently just tweets what’s on his mind.
@MaryKnudson – A professor from a prominent school who really just enjoys having good conversations and sometimes helping people get connected.
@amykchulik – The best friendships on Twitter came from out of the blue. @amychulik and I have been tweeting for months on a number of subjects and I can’t remember for the life of me how we connected. I’m just glad we did.
@jpage – She’s a twenty-something online marketer here just for sharing and networking. We used to work together and barely got out of there alive, but we survived to tweet another day.
2. You have a personal brand
You might use Twitter under an assumed or enhanced personality and stick to a strategic plan. It’s not necessarily as insidious as it sounds, it’s just that you are your own business and you need to promote it in a certain way, with a certain angle. You pay close attention to the things you say so they align with how you want the public to perceive you, and even in times when you share personal information it only goes to further the identity you’ve fostered online.
Whatever the reason you tweet, at the end of the day, it’s to sell yourself as an expert in a particular field or to promote your products and services. Some people’s true online personalities are so unique and so attached to what they do they become unintentional personal brands.
@garyvee – I can’t go a day without imagining Gary jumping up and down in one of his videos telling me that I’m so totally awesome. Is it live? Or is it Vaynerchuk?
@BadAstronomer – Before he was on Twitter, he was a one-man brand, defying Moon landing deniers and shedding light on myths about the universe. He’s still up to his old tricks.
@henican – He’s a Newsday columnist and a Fox News political analyst and a Talk Radio Network host and… A Cartoon Network voice? His tweets are high concept mini-columns that perfectly capture his sensibilities, his humor and his voice.
3. You work for a corporate brand
You Twitter for a company that has its own history and values. Your own personality or interests rarely if ever leak into the Twitter feed, and usually it’s only if they are perfectly aligned to the brand’s strategy.
For example, you might talk and share opinions about social media itself but you’d stay far away from political discussions. Your main intent on Twitter is to advance the culture, the message and the products and services of the company that employs you. Your personality may be of a spokesperson, a brand name or even a remotely controlled rover on the fourth planet from the sun.
@shirleybrady – She’s the BusinessWeek.com community editor and a little bit of an exception to the rule. But for the most part she’s all business.
@ScottMonty – Less an exception to the rule, Scott, head of social media at Ford Motor Company generally stays on track when it comes to tweeting about Ford vehicles.
@comcastcares – As Director of Digital Care Frank Eliason’s job is to make you feel that a big cable company can be touchy-feely and your problems do matter to them.
4. You’re a fictional character or dead historical person
You are a real person but your Twitter account is entirely dedicated to promoting a character in a story, tweeting as someone from history or as a new character created just for Twitter.
@R2D2 – As the original tweeter, R2D2 is one half of the most famous robotic duo in the universe. After saving the galaxy from the evil Empire, he’s just building his network and tweeting about the old times with the Skywalker family.
@cdarwin – Charles Darwin was the 19th Century naturalist who turned the world on its ear with his book “The Origin Of Species,” proposing that random mutations and natural selection were the drivers of the diversity of life on earth.
@GeneHunt – He’s gruff, he’s offensive and he degrades women. He’s also on Twitter. @GeneHunt is the Twitter persona of Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, a character in the UK version of Life on Mars and the spin-off Ashes to Ashes.
@joan_holloway – Somehow a sexy office manager from an ad agency from more than four decades ago has embraced Twitter. And I’m not all that upset about it. Joan Halloway is a character from the wildly entertaining show Mad Men that takes a look at the culture of ad agencies and relationships between men and women in the 1960s.
5. You’re literature
Even more specific is exclusively Twittering out a story or some poetry or something of the like. Some have tried to use it as a true publishing platform 140-characters at a time, either with short stories that fit within a tweet or as an ongoing series of tweets that will make up a longer piece.
@smallplaces – A novel entirely on Twitter called “Small Places” written by N. L. Belardes.
@twitterfiction – Original works of 140-character fiction. Like a publishing company on Twitter, they take submissions for original work to tweet.
@arjunbasu – It’s not easy to put so much irony and wit into 140-character short stories, but he does it. Called “twisters,” they always have some sort of twist in the end.
6. You are a robot
You are not really a person at all. You are a bot. I’m a science fiction fan. I’m all for the rights of robots and all that, but in the world we live in bots are not exactly the highly developed neural networks that will eventually take over the world as predicted by the Singularity or the Terminator series of films. For now, if you just use Twitter to promote content that is produced elsewhere and that process is automated, then you just might be a robot.
@NYTimes – All the news that’s fit to Tweet. Yeah, I said it.
@CNN – Cable news channel embracing and succeeding on Twitter.
@Newsweek – A national magazine trying to reinvent itself. Stories are fed into a Twitter stream.
7. You’re a blend
Like most things in life, Twitter is not black and white. Many Twitterers are a blend of the above designations. I think that Twitter is more fun when people mix it up a little, putting a personal and relaxed conversational tone to their stream even if they are there to promote a brand, whether it’s personal or corporate.
@ariherzog – He’s an online media strategist for business and government cultivating his personal brand. But what he does best is chat about a variety of topics from my Star Wars addiction to the best ways a business can use Twitter. Ari is an occasional contributor to Mashable ().
@NeilDiamond – Sweet Caroline! The Jewish Elvis is on Twitter. Guess what? He’s not doing such a bad job. While he’s clearly a brand name, he’s quite honest and open in his tweets. This is one celebrity that actually feels more real and is more endearing on Twitter.
@balmeras – She used to work for The National Wildlife Foundation blogging and Twittering about children, education and the outdoors. Now she’s doing the same thing on her own terms and having lots of fun doing it. But when she’s not promoting her new blog and things you should be doing with your kids, you can find her just shooting the breeze.
@jojeda – Tech writer and author of a book on Twitter. (What else?) He’s sometimes wearing his journalism hat but mostly just tweeting about stuff and having good conversations, in English and Spanish!
What do you think?
The above examples are by no means hard and fast rules to using Twitter. Some people might say there is no such thing as a Twitter strategy and the very idea itself is anathema to the site. But we like to group people into neat categories. (Which probably explains why Psychology 101 is a favorite elective of undergraduates.) There are probably as many ways to group people as there are Twitter users themselves.
Have I left anything out? If so help out by adding to this list of approaches to Twitter in the comments below.
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January 11th, 2009 by
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Besides its benefit for higher search rankings, social media marketing has numerous other intangible benefits. Bottom line, Social Media Marketing must be incorporated into your online marketing strategy if you want to grow your presence online.
However, for social media to be effective, a few of the required ingredients are:
- Leadership
- Passion
- Content
Good leadership could mean expertise and/or credibility. Or it could mean mediocrity and pure foolishness. Whatever it is, if it actually generates a following or discussion, it could find a sweet spot within social media marketing.
You’ve also got to have passion. There are a million blogs out there, but its pretty easy to spot the ones that have passion. Passion, in whatever form it comes, is certainly an ingredient for social media marketing to be a success. Passion also generates a following.
Another ingredient for successful social media marketing is content. Do you have something worth talking about? Do people care about it? A good example is AT & T’s launch of its Facebook Fan Page. C’mon now! Is this company really suited for a ‘fan following?’ This Facebook Fan Page is an example of a social media marketing tactic the company has tried. If customers think AT & T’s customer service sucked before, is a fan base really going to help? Probably not.
These are just a few ingredients necessary for you to be successful in social media. Would anyone else care to divulge a few more?
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January 10th, 2009 by
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Of course corporate giants like Coca-Cola and Comcast know about social media marketing and its potential benefits. If you’ve heard about it, surely they have right?
Another fellow blogger, Peter Kim, like Seth Godin, gave his personal list of most popular blog posts for 2008. The most popular blog post of 2008 provided an extensive list of companies that are using social media marketing tactics and how.
I wanted to post on this because Peter Kim and his contributors do a great job of providing examples of social media marketing tactics being used by a long list of companies.
But I think the real question is, how successful are these tactics? I think the question of whether social media will work for one company over another is best answered by asking and then answering two more questions:
- 1. Does the company have a long-term strategy in place for online marketing and, if so, does social media fit into that strategy?
- 2. Does the company have the proper ingredients required for social media marketing to be successful?
Going further on question number two. What are the ingredients required for social media marketing to be successful? One of these essential ingredients is having something that people think is worth talking about.
Let’s face it. Its probably going to be pretty hard for Clorox to pull off their social media tactic, Dr. Laundry! Why? Because how much do people really care about laundry? And this is precisely what social media is about. Getting people to care about something enough to talk about it.
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January 10th, 2009 by
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One of my favorite blog posts of 2008 came from marketing blogger and author, Seth Godin. The particular post I’m referring to actually got on his own list of favorite posts from his personal blog in 2008.
The title of the post is, ‘The Secret of the Web’. (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/the-secret-of-t.html). Catchy title eh? Needless to say, I read it. In the post Seth says, “The irony of the web is that the tactics work really quickly.”
The tactics Seth refers to are online marketing tactics. Seth also adds that, although tactics work really quickly, “..its the strategy that is the hard part, not the tactics.”
I tend to agree with Seth on this point. Tactics can be successful very quickly, yielding tangible results. However, tactics can also fail very quickly and yield no results. For this reason, the real key for making any online business a success is to put a long-term online marketing strategy in place and stick to it.
With so many online technologies that come and go, new tactics, if tried, must be measured against something that is constant. With no long-term online marketing strategy to measure new online tactics against, you’re essentially just shooting in the dark expecting to hit your target. Short-term tactics with no strategy base can sometimes even hurt your brand or kill off customers.
Because I have tried random online marketing tactics with former businesses, I understand how frustrating this can be. I’ve also seen the other side of the coin. I’ve worked with multiple companies that have a clear online marketing strategy in place. Tactics, if they didn’t fit into the long-term strategy, were simply not used.
After seeing the success of these companies in the online realm, I am convinced that sticking to a long-term marketing strategy is key for the success of any business online.
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December 11th, 2008 by
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“All of Marketing Should Be About Word of Mouth Marketing”
Any marketer knows that word of mouth marketing is the best form of marketing but is the quote above an exaggerated statement?
“Anytime you ask consumers what is the biggest factor that influences their buying decisions they say that it’s the recommendations and opinions of the people in their lives.”
These quotes are pretty powerful statements and came from Jeffrey Graham, Exec. Director of Customer Insight at the New York Times in an interview he did with Eric Schwartzman on his weekly pod cast, On the Record Online.
I listen to this pod cast because Schwartzman covers an incredibly pertinent topic for marketers which is the evolution of PR from traditional mediums to online mediums. Eric Schwartzman also a great interviewer and does some pretty impressive interviews with key people in the world of PR. I love hearing their opinions and getting a whiff of their expertise.
Word of mouth should be at the center of any marketing strategy. Let’s go back to that statement which is where I started this post. When listening to this interview, I couldn’t help thinking how social media marketing is the new word of mouth marketing. These days, word of mouth is most easily built through social media marketing. With so many tools to choose from in your social media toolbox, its easier and easier to build momentum with your brand through social media.
Jeffrey Graham also says that marketers can make word of mouth the center of their marketing strategy in two ways:
1. You have to make word of mouth your objective.
You have to have something for people to talk about. This is at the heart of your social media strategy. Social media will not work for you unless you give your customers or fans something to talk about.
2. You have to target people that influence people. It’s no longer sufficient to just target a broad demographic.
There are certain types of people that talk more, that influence others more with their opinions. These are your Mavens. Most marketers know this term from Malcom Gladwell’s book, ‘The Tipping Point.’ You must target your Mavens because they are the biggest drivers of word of mouth. And where can you find mavens anymore but online? For example, if you have a product for Volkswagen enthusiasts you are going to find the mavens in the VWVortex Forums.
More and more people are beginning to go online to talk about everything under the sun. This is precisely why Social Media Marketing is essential for building your following through word of mouth. I wonder if Graham or any others would agree or disagree?
Interview Source: http://www.ontherecordpodcast.com/pr/otro/default.aspx
Posted by Corey Curwick of Butter Marketing on December 10, 2008
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November 12th, 2008 by
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From Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, which reported that 4 in 5 bloggers write about their experiences – good or bad – with a company or product, to Cone’s report that an overwhelming majority of Americans (85%) active on blogs and other social media services expect to interact with companies through social media.
- Men are twice as likely than women interact frequently (one or more times per week) with companies via social media (33% vs. 17%).
- One-third of younger, hard-to-reach consumers (age 18-34) believe that companies should actively market to them via social networks.
- The wealthiest households (household income of $75K+) also believe that companies should seek to reach them via social media.
- Two-thirds of the wealthiest households and the largest households ( those with three or more members) feel stronger connections to brands they interact with online.
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