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Posts Tagged ‘Media Marketing’

Wednesday May 5th was the first full day of webinars for the Social Media Success Summit 2010 #SMSS10. Here’s a quick recap of some the great social media marketing takeaways from the three webinars:

Optimizing Your Facebook Fan Page
@MariSmith gave a great class on “Optimizing Your Facebook Fan Page”. What I loved the most was seeing all the great examples of Facebook welcome pages. Did you know that your Facebook Fan page does not have to be just your wall of posts? You can have fans land on any page you like and if you have access to a great graphic designer, make use of Faceboook Markup Language (the FBML app) and create something that meets your business objectives like one of these:

1. This one makes you click “like” button to see it interact with you: facebook.com/CarrotCreative
2. This one uses video to engage you: facebook.com/stevespangler
3. This one lands you right on a product page to purchase and has the “like” widget next to each item: facebook.com/threadless
4. More video and a great example for a company that is not product oriented: facebook.com/EZINEARTICLES

The main goal of your Fan page should be to create a call to action. What do you want someone to do when they visit you? Become a fan? (or, now, show they “like” you?) Collect their email address? Order product? Use your Fan page to meet your business objectives. Plus, you can split test welcome pages, as each one has a unique URL. See which one works best for you!

5 Ways to Measure Social Media
@JasonFalls spoke about “5 Ways to Measure Social Media”.
I liked these 3 points regarding how to measure social media success (besides just strictly sales and google analytics):

1. Community: Fiskars has a great example of how they created a “community” of ambassadors for their product at: http://www.fiskateers.com/ Always good to keep people singing your praises!
2. Customer Service: You can measure effectiveness of social media if your customers are using it to get answers so you get less contacts to customer service, or your call center. Plus, the more ways a customer can contact you = happy customers. Compare survey results for more concrete results.
3. R&D: Use social media to help you come up with new or improved product/service ideas. No cost way to generate market research. Ie.) Dell “Idea Storm” http://www.ideastorm.com/ has received 13,000 comments. 415 ideas were used and many were revenue generating. Also, Joffrey’s Coffee http://www.joffreys.com/ reached out to bloggers and said “what coffee flavor do you like?” and created a new one based on their input called “coffee 2.0” which was then in turn blogged by them out to their followers.

Creating Ravings Fans with Social Media
And, finally, @Ramon_Deleon the Chicago Dominos Pizza owner who uses social media to WOW his customers daily talked about “Creating Ravings Fans with Social Media”:
Ramon has a huge audience of college kids on twitter and Facebook and as these kids move into corporate life, he keeps in touch with them regularly. He’s built a strong brand for himself and really keeps customers engaged in his social media spaces. I like these tips he shared:

1. Think about how you can help the customer and give them positive reasons to talk about you.
2. Promote them so they will tweet about you and share.

For example, he prints up a flyer that he puts on his pizza boxes with his favorite customers twitter handles on it, it has big impact. This is a case of doing someone a favor before they ask, so, you are on their good side when you need something. He also volunteers at many events in Chicago and always has a big Dominos sign along to get lots of photos taken to share in Facebook. He’s also great at quick videos to thank customers and even apologize for errors if needed. All these techniques using social media keep him top of mind to the customer and when someone thinks of pizza in Chicago, they think of him first.

Social Media Success Summit 2010

Ready to get on the social media marketing train but don’t know where to start? There is an awesome online conference you must know about! Social Media Success Summit 2010 is the web’s largest live virtual marketing conference that will empower you to use social media to gain more exposure, better engage customers and grow your business.

Attend webinars from 24 of the world’s leading social media gurus, such as: Guy Kawasaki (author, Art of the Start), Chris Brogan (author, Social Media 101), Darren Rowse (author, ProBlogger), Mari Smith (author, Facebook Marketing), Greg Jarboe (author, YouTube and Video Marketing), Kim Dushinski (author, Mobile Marketing Handbook); experts from Best Buy, Home Depot, Whole Foods, Foursquare and Groupon; Steve Rubel (Edelman), Ann Handley (MarketingProfs), Brian Clark (Copyblogger), Jason Falls (Social Media Explorer), Jay Baer (Convince & Convert) and Ramon De Leon (Chicago Domino’s Pizza)—just to mention a few!

This is the place where the social media thought leaders come together to talk about what’s happening in social media marketing and considering the online world is so dynamic and changes so quickly, you’ll want to know what other business have learned and are doing so you can put your social media marketing strategy in place.

TODAY IS THE LAST DAY TO SAVE 50% (Expires at Midnight Pacific on Thursday April 15th)

This virtual, online summit starts Tuesday, May 4 and runs through May 25. It will be spread over many weeks (and recorded for later playback) so, even if you have a schedule conflict, you can still play back any of the webinars at a later date.

“Consider this: 97% of last year’s attendees said they’d recommend the summit to a friend and attend again,” says Michael A. Stelzner, #SMSS10 Event founder. “Studies show that consumers prefer to work with businesses that have a strong social media presence. It’s not too late to get your business engaged with customers via social media. But if you wait, you’ll be giving your competitors a significant advantage that’ll be hard to overcome.”

I attended last year and I can’t wait to find out what this amazing group has to share with us this year! This event is THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING EVENT for any business who wants to be successful using social media to generate leads and build strong business partnerships.

Think there’s no power in Social Media Marketing? Think again! The blog “5 Minutes for Mom” is in their fourth year of hosting the Ultimate Blog Party UBP#10 and do they know how to drive traffic. Their “party” started last Friday April 9th and runs for 1 week until April 16th. As of today, they are reporting that the hashtag #UBP10 stream has had 15,704 tweets from 1,204 attendees, with combined reach 1,159,469 followers, and 29,397,282 unique messages! That’s some powerful stuff!

What’s an online blog party?
For @5minutesformom, hosted by @susancarraretto and @janicecroze, it’s a way to drive traffic to your blog, and the best part is that it’s for FREE. There are two ways to participate in #UBP10.

1. Give away a prize on their site.
2. Giveaway a prize on your own blog.

And, of course you can do both! It’s simple to fill out their online form with the prize you are offering (which had to be completed before the launch date) and once you have posted your “party” on your own blog, you just visit their McLinky page where you add your blog party URL (and your Facebook Fan page and Twitter URL as well if you like) and you have the ability from there to get tons of free exposure to your site.

The latest stats show they have over 2000 bloggers participating, and this is just half way through the party week! How’s that for activity on a free online marketing promotion?

What does this mean to you?
Social media is hot, it’s viral and it’s spreading like wildfire. If you’re not using twitter, facebook and a blog to drive traffic to your web site, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to not only generate new leads, but also make strong business partnerships that can further your reach into your target market.

My Party Blog Giveaway
If you are visiting me from 5 Minutes for Mom, thanks for coming to my party! I hope you’ll take a few minutes to explore my web site and blog and leave me a comment below telling me what you LOVE about social media. I will be giving away 1 FREE Hour of Social Media Training.

Want extra entries into the contest? Do one or all of the following!

• Follow me on Twitter and send me an @howdoimarketbiz message there telling me what you love about Twitter.
• Become a Facebook Fan and post on my wall what your favorite thing is about Facebook.

Make sure I have a way to reach you, by either enabling your email through wordpress, or leaving your email in the comment. One winner will be chosen at random by using random.org. The contest ends April 16th at 11:59 Pacific Time. I will announce the winner Monday April 19th. The winner has 72 hours to contact me, or another winner will be chosen.

And, don’t forget to head over to the Ultimate Blog Party (#UBP10) on the 5 Minutes for Mom web site! Besides having links to lots of great blogs, they are also having giveaways. If I were to win, my top three picks would be:

1. Tupperware Prize Pack – the winner will receive a box filled with fun Tupperware goodies.
   Provided by: Heather @ Marine Corps Nomads
2. 1 Month Subscription to Netflix. 2 DVDs out at a time and instant viewing to your computer.
   Provided by: 1stopmom
3. A $25 e-gift certificate to the Disney Store.
   Provided by: Kristin @ Couponing to Disney

Prizes 95, 83 and 71 would also be great! Enjoy the party!

Business Women's Mega Mixer

Thursday night I was honored and excited to have been one of the over 400 women to attend the Business Women’s Mega Mixer in Downtown San Diego, CA. It was a great in person networking event to celebrate Women’s History month. I was even more excited to see an old boss and colleague, who I admire and respect as a powerful San Diego Business Women and leader, Barbara Bry, as the keynote speaker.

It was a great opportunity for professional women’s organizations and female owned businesses to network and make important business connections. I was able to meet about 50 women while I was there, and everyone I talked to said their business either had a social media presence, were just starting one, or really knew they needed it and was so glad I mentioned it to them because they were finally going to get on board! (It was the latter told me they would tuck my business card in a special spot that evening so it wouldn’t get lost because they knew they needed to call me.)

Social media is not the wave of the future, it is here now. Social media marketing is a must for any business. In addition to having a strong web site filled with your keywords optimized for SEO and a way to collect leads, every business needs a blog, Twitter and Facebook site. People are searching for your business online daily, and you can be much more easily found and virally recommended if you are participating in the social media spaces. The percentage of people using the yellow pages to find something is slim to none. People will ask a friend or Google it! Either way, with social media, your business can win.

So, how did Social Media help me learn about this great event? I was making connections in LinkedIn one day when I came across the Ladies Who Launch group, which as a woman business owner, really resonated with me. I joined their email list and it was their email newsletter that advertised the Business Women’s Mega Mixer.

Making connections and networking online in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is powerful. Joining a actual in-person networking group is also a great way to reach out and make connections. Remember, every time someone sees your brand whether it’s through email, an online visit to read an article on your blog, direct mail, radio, TV or print, every “eyeball” helps to build your brand and keeps you top of mind. Social media is just one piece of your marketing strategy, but, a very important piece that in today’s world cannot be overlooked.

There are a lot of social media marketing companies popping up all over the internet these days. You are probably seeing a lot of their ads IN the social media spaces, like Twitter and Facebook. “Get thousands of Twitter followers….”, “Automate All Your Social Spaces!” But, the bottom line with these types of companies is this, You Get What You Pay For.

Social Media is all about networking, relationship building and connecting – one human to another. Too much automation will not give your business the “real time” and human presence you want. Now, I’m not saying some pre-scheduled tweets and Facebook posts aren’t helpful, since we can’t be online 24/7 and there are great free online tools such as SocialOomph and HootSuite for that. But, I would strongly caution against using those companies that are offering dirt cheap pricing for social media marketing assistance. You want the person (not a spambot) managing your social media spaces so that you can not only find, but connect with targeted, quality Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers. An automated service cannot provide the human element so critical for social media business success.

All businesses need a social media marketing presence in today’s world. Your customer is looking for it on your web site, catalog and email they receive from you. They want to be the first to know about your specials and coupons and are looking to you for your knowledge in the industry or just the right tidbit of information about the product or service you provide to get them to buy. Though social media is very important, it should be just one element of your marketing strategy. Traditional marketing is still necessary and the smart business owner would choose a social media marketing firm that is solidly rooted in traditional marketing basics, such as direct mail, email and press releases to ensure that a well unified campaign is executed.

Again, with social media, you get what you pay for and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If you’re ready to launch your social media presence for your business and want to make sure the person who manages that effort also has over 15 years of experience in direct marketing, brand building, and designing targeted marketing plans, give me a call. I can help!

Print is dead. Ok, it’s not really, but, it sure feels like it. How many people do you know who still use the printed Yellow Pages to find a business? I sure don’t. Those are dusty doorstops at my house. I don’t even know why I keep them. They should just go right into the recycle bin the minute they get left on my doorstep. I find everything I ever need online! All the time. I love the internet. And, if for some strange reason I can’t find the answer to my question in Google search results, (oh, yes, I’m loyal to Google!), I ask a friend to refer. Instead of picking up the phone, I text, email or post questions in LinkedIn or Facebook to my friends and business colleagues. And, that’s what social media marketing is all about: networking, building relationships and referring online.

Think about how you’ve purchased something recently. Something specific that you weren’t sure a store in town would have, or maybe it was here in town, but you didn’t know what store would carry it. Did you search for it online first? It’s very easy to search and even buy online, instead of driving all around town not knowing whether you will find the item you wanted or not. I did this a few times recently with local bookstore. I was feeling guilty that I would always just go to Amazon.com to buy the book, CD or DVD I wanted. So, I thought, no, this time I’m going to shop in town. And, you know what, twice I was disappointed because they didn’t have the item I wanted in stock or even in their computer system so they could order it and I could drive back and pick it up later. Online is easier. Online is convenient. Those who shop online enjoy the fact that the product comes right to their home, no fuss, no muss.

There are 70 million people conducting daily online searches on the internet. These people are searching for products, services and solutions to problems. The question I pose to you, is, if your customer searches for your products or services, can they find you?

Hello and welcome to social media marketing. This is where marketing is at right now. The future is here, today! No longer will the old way of marketing work anymore. Print ads and yellow pages are a thing of the past because most people are getting their information online. And, if that’s where your customer is, you need to be there too. Sure, you have a Web site, but, in today’s online world, a static Web site isn’t enough. You need a blog that is updated frequently with relevant content about your product or service. This blog also serves as a way to get an open dialogue going with your customer. They post comments (good or bad) and you reply in turn. Google spyders love it when people comment on your blog, you get better page rank and come up easier in natural search results. And, that’s the reason to have a blog, the ability to come up in natural search. And, blogs are FREE, by the way. All they take is your time. If you don’t have time, I can help. I provide businesses that dedicated social media marketing resource they need for their business. (Oh, and Twitter and Facebook fit into the puzzle too….. I’ll write a post about that later, so, come back and visit us again).