Leverage Social Media

For most, participating in social media is like going to a rock concert.  You find yourself surrounded by people that all have a common interest (be it AC/DC or real estate).  You like the familiar, loud music, you like the energy of the crowd, you feel connected.  But, at the end of the show, there are only a select few that the whole crowd remembers.  It was those on stage, leading the audience to be connected, who made the biggest impression.

So with your efforts in social media, you need to make the choice: Are you going to be on stage, making the lasting impression?  OR are you going home in an overpriced souvenir T-shirt, telling all your friends how great it was?

Social Media has made it all too easy to organize a formidable community.  Now, to be successful in leveraging that community to “work” for you, it is your responsibility to get up on stage, in front of them, night after night, and start leaving an impression.  If you go to the show just to hold a lighter, you’ll always be just a face in the crowd.

1. Get there early to develop the largest amount of followers as possible.
2. Regularly provide relevant, compelling, eye-catching, and impressionable content for the community to consume – and share.
3. Update your status regularly with relevant, compelling, eye-catching, and impressionable bite-size content.
4. Participate (comment, message, tag, nudge and friend) in the Greater Community to grow your reach, relevance and influence.
5. Lather – Rinse – Repeat.

We can’t stress enough how important it is to learn to use these social tools of today. Be certain, they aren’t going away. The generation coming up under us will make sure of that.  So get up on that stage and make a lasting impression!

Source: Adapted from an article by Jim Cronin

5 Email Designs Must Haves

Even with the mad rush to embrace all the growing social media platforms into one’s marketing, there remains value in a good old email marketing campaign… if done correctly. The average email subscriber faces an inbox filled with clutter. Once they sort through a variety of personal, professional and marketing messages, they won't look kindly on messy or incoherent email offers. "Without a well-crafted, clear and consistent design for your brand, your email is going nowhere in a hurry," says John Murphy in an article at MarketingProfs. Here's how to avoid such a pitfall: Use a good balance of text and images. Many spam filters consider an email's text-to-image ratio when deciding if it will reach a recipient's inbox. If there's too much text or too many images, it risks banishment to the spam folder. Assume that images will be blocked. There's a good chance your subscribers will only see embedded images if they actively click on a link to display them. Because of this, the text in your message has to make sense even if its images don't show up. Provide a back-up option for image-rich backgrounds.A number of clients—Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, for example—don't support background images. But there's a workaround. HTML allows both an image and a color to be coded in the same tag, which means that if a mail client supports background images, the images will be displayed; if it doesn't, then the chosen color will appear as the email background instead. Include a table of contents for lengthier messages.When an email has several sections, ease its navigation with a simple table of contents that links within the message to the topics a subscriber wants to read. Remember a call to action. You've sent the message because you want your recipient to do something—so make sure they can. How it works matters as much as how it reads. Don't sabotage your strong content with weak email design. Source: MarketingProfs

Just 'Glympse Me'

Imagine, you’re at the NAR® convention, among 1000’s of people, and an associate is trying to find you…

Or you’re at a listing, about to show it to potential buyers, but they’re new to the area and lost.

Just Glympse™ them! Huh??!

Glympse™ is a brilliantly conceived mobile application that lets you share your real-time location via SMS, email, Twitter, or Facebook. It's a useful, easy-to-use tool that doesn't require you to sign up, create any profiles, or invite contacts. Your location is only shared for the duration you specify and then stops.

With Glympse, you don’t send the address; you merely send a Glympse of your current location, and with a tap on the recipient’s screen, they navigate their way there. Or if you're not yet at the location, you might send them a Glympse showing it on a map, as well as your real-time location as you make your way there. There are so many possibilities with such a powerful, location-aware application.

The Glympse app is clean and refreshingly simple to use. To get started, launch the app, hit Menu, then Send a Glympse. Next, input a phone number or e-mail, or choose to share a Glympse with Facebook or Twitter. Set the duration (anywhere from 10 minutes to 4 hours), and that's it. For the allotted time frame, your contact(s) will be able to view your real-time location on a map, from a mobile device or desktop browser. If you're on the move, you can also input your destination, so your contact can see where you're headed.

For those who routinely use Glympse to transmit a location (e.g., children with eagle-eyed parents), the app includes a nice Favorite feature, which saves the recipient(s) of your Glympse, duration, and destination, all for easy sending later. The app also comes with an optional home-screen widget, which puts Favorites, Glympse History, and Send Glympse functionality right on your home screen.

Glympse is an incredibly useful app that has the potential to become incorporated into many of our daily routines. Try it out for yourself, and see if you and your friends start saying, "just Glympse me."
It’s available for Android, iPhone, WinPhone7, and Blackberry. http://glympse.com/get_glympse
Sources: CNET, Glympse

Social Media's Impact on Brands

Social media has infiltrated the purchasing funnel, helping consumers make informed decisions, from what to have for lunch to where to go on vacation. Depending on the decision, sometimes you turn to your social media, and sometimes you turn to Google. So, as a brand marketer, you want to know what online channels you should be targeting in order to reach the perfect audience for your product.

To better understand the new social consumer, Beyond and M Booth conducted a study of 1,500U.S. consumers, asking about the two products and services they had most recently researched online and how they went about it. They were then categorized as either a high sharer or a low sharer, each utilizing various digital channels differently, depending on whether they are researching and interacting with high or low involvement products.

Of the 1,500 consumers polled, 53% use Facebook to interact with a brand, with 42% going so far as to write a post or comment about a brand, and 40% ‘liked’ a product. 33% wrote a product review, and 20% use Facebook to research a product at least once a week.

Products research or purchased were categorized as either high involvement or low involvement. High involvement products such as photography equipment, other electronics including computers, and vacations, were less frequently purchased. This due to them being more complex and expensive, requiring more time and effort in the research phase. Low involvement products, such as cosmetics, baby supplies, and food were bought more frequently with less thought and research effort, due to the lower cost.

High sharers tend to be the most valuable to brands as they recommend products three times more often and influence other’s buying decisions. They make up 20% of online consumers and tend to be younger, have stronger brand loyalty, own multiple internet devices, and research low involvement products.

Low sharers make up about 80% of online consumers and tend to be older, are more open to changing brands, care more about quality than brand image, are more likely to purchase researched products, and research high involvement products.

The three channels that influence the social consumer are Earned, Owned, and Search. Examples of Earned are rating and reviews sites, news articles, word of mouth, and blog posts. Owned channels are brand websites, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Search channels are paid search and organic search.

Channel influence on products is very similar for all three channels, with baby products the most influenced, with personal finance products the least influenced. Facebook has the most influence on baby brands, YouTube on music brands, and review sites on electronics.

After online interaction, 31% are prompted to purchase, 26% take no action, 20% are prompted to recommend, 9% are encouraged to visit, 8% have an increased awareness, and 3% had their product impression changed and were encouraged to contact.

All digital channels play a role in a brand’s marketing strategy; looking at the channel your consumer is most influence by will lead to an increase in your digital ROI. With Search acting as the gateway of influence on today’s consumer, creative digital content is essential within Earned and Owned media channels to boost a brand’s organic search relevancy. Identifying high sharers in the most effective digital location, and engaging them with sharable content, will help lead to a cycle of recommendation, loyalty, and purchase.



Sources: Lauren Drell, Mashable, and data from M Booth and Beyond

Using Google Analytics In Social Media

In a recent interview Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner did with Avinash Kaushik, the digital marketing evangelist for Google and author of Web Analytics 2.0., Avinash shared how the free enterprise-class tools available through Google Analytics affects businesses today. He explained how your social media activity influences the behavior of your business audience to help you improve your results.

Think about 3 buckets:

Acquisition – It provides details about where people are coming to your site from. Was it from SEO you’ve implemented, from your Twitter, etc.

Behavior on your site - Bounce rate, the percentage of people who somehow landed on your site, but went (clicked) no further. It’s pretty valuable information, as it can help you identify weaknesses at the floor level of your site. From seeing what pages they’re landing on and immediately leaving, it may suggest broken links or landing pages, or campaigns/content that may not be enticing enough to make them WANT to go further.

Conversion or outcome for you – This is where Google Analytics goes deeper. Did they land, click on an e-report to be sent to them, and thus become a lead? Did they leave a comment on your blog thus adding value to your site as well as to SEO and the conversation? You can measure the number of people who follow you on Twitter, who sign up for your RSS feed, who come back repeatedly, etc.

Google Analytics can also help you understand your social media results, particularly when used in your business branding and marketing. Not only do you want to know when your Tweets or Facebook posts, etc. cause activity and engagement, but most important, what was the value of that activity? Did that activity drive more website visitors, more website engagement, more prospects? Knowing these things, by Google Analytics measurement, quantifies your social media efforts. This enables you to compare the value of your social media efforts against that of other avenues, i.e. display ads, SEO, etc.

One of the things you can easily do in Google Analytics is to create and track what they refer to as advanced segments. This could be your Twitter segment, another for Facebook, another for YouTube, etc. It takes you literally about 3 seconds to create a segment, then once created, all the same stats and details you can find out with Google Analytics, are than drilled down to specific segments. You can than compare the value you’re getting from one segment to another, and make adjustments of time invested based on that. If you’re getting say 23% more comments on your Tweets than your are on your Facebook posts, might knowing that direct where you apply the larger percentage of your social media effort and time? Super valuable information!

In terms of which metrics of social media provide the greatest value to you, while it’s great to know how many Facebook followers you have, how many Tweets you’ve been mentioned in, etc, it’s of more value to you to move beyond those basic numbers. For example, with your Twitter segment, look at the number of re-Tweets. Think about it like this, each of your Tweets is like a drop in a lake. What matters more than the number of Tweets you’ve made, is the wave caused by that drop; is it a big wave or a small wave? If your Tweets provide value to your followers, they validate that by re-Tweeting, and now that value goes out to others who aren’t perhaps already following you or even know who you are. You’ve just been introduced to perhaps countless other prospects!

The follower re-Tweet percentage is also important to measure and look at. Is it just your Mom and Dad re-Tweeting your brilliance, or is it a growing number of followers that you have? If you analyze these metrics, it enables you better know who the people are who follow your Twitter account, what are their needs, what do they respond to?

Another important metric to look at is conversation rate; on Twitter this would specifically be the number of replies you sent each day, and the number of replies received each day. Basically, it’s measuring more one-on-one or one-on-few conversations. Social media is not a medium where simply shouting creates value. The real value comes when that “connection” is made by people with your brand. THAT is the real gift of social media.

To learn more about Google Analytics in social media, you can follow Avinash on Twitter, @avinash, or go to http://www.google.com/analytics.

Facebook Best Practices

We previously shared 5 of our 20 Facebook best practices and today we share the next 15 best practices.

#6: Put a fan page widget on your blog or website: You’d be amazed at how many people simply don’t know about your fan page. Putting it on your website (i.e., your home base) will get it in front of all of your website visitors. My favorite example of this is from Klout. It got me to Like them!

#7: Customize your fan page URL: Vanity URLs are a fantastic way to make your fan page memorable. Check this awesome fan page http://facebook.com/awesomefanpage. Vanity, baby!

#8: Put your fan page URL on your business cards: Combine offline and online by letting the people you meet IRL know about your fan page.

#9: Put a link on your personal Facebook profile: Put this under the “links” section. This is a “soft sell” of sorts, letting your friends passively know about your page. You might have forgotten that people actually check that part of your profile!

#10: Harness the power of your team: Have everyone in your organization put your fan page link on their personal profile.

#11: Ask fans to post a link: Ask all of your current fans to post a link to the fan page on their personal profile. As long as you don’t ask this often, I’ve found that people love to help out. Leverage the power of your existing audience and get results! For instance, at Monk Development, we simply asked everyone to post a link to our company fan page on the same day. We doubled our average daily Likes because of one simple step.

#12: Put a tag in your YouTube videos: If you make compelling videos as a part of your content marketing strategy, throw in a well-timed fan page link at the end of your YouTube videos. The Gregory Brothers, the geniuses behind “Auto-tune the News,” are some of the best social marketers around. They always include a link to their fan page (and other social networks) at the end of every video and make it a welcome addition to their content.

#13: Put your fan page URL on your Twitter profile background: Lots of tweeters still use the web-based version and your profile background is a prime piece of web real estate. Cross-advertise and use one social network to promote another! CenturyLink does a great job of this. If you go to their Twitter page, you can clearly see where their fan page is located. They don’t make you guess, which leads to conversions!

#14: QR codes for your page: I bought the furniture for our house mostly because the store used QR codes to get me to their fan page. Once I got to the fan page, I was welcomed with a custom landing page that welcomed me to the store. It wasn’t elaborate, but it was creative and it worked! They engaged me as a customer both online (QR code leading to fan page) and offline (sales agents in the store), making sure I knew I was welcome. Smart!

#15: Use your fan page: Use the “Tell Your Fans” feature. With the tools built in to the fan page, Facebook allows you to import a contact file or import your contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Good for when you’re just starting out and want to tell people you already know.

#16: Add a Like box: Place this in your blog/website sidebar. This is a given. A must. But when you do this, make sure you set the options to include face pile. That way, your Like box will show your readers how many of their friends like the page as well. Genius.

#17: Use targeted keywords in a Google AdWords: Use a keyword-based ad and direct people to your fan page. This is like Facebook ads on steroids. If you’ve never used AdWords before, it’s fairly straightforward.

#18: Redirect your webinar guests to your fan page: If you use GoToWebinar, you can choose to send registrants to a URL of your choosing after they sign up. This is where you let them know of the awesomeness that is your fan page.

#19: Put your fan page URL in your Keynote/PowerPoint slides: When I present, the last slide I show is my contact info, complete with our organization’s fan page. Most people are already on Facebook, so it’s a no-brainer to give them an easy way to connect with you.

#20: Last, and certainly least, invite all of your friends (if you must): This is at the end for a reason. Pester your friends only as the nuclear option. I’ve given you 19 other ways to let people know about your fan page. Give your friends a break!

Don’t let the list stop there. There are hundreds of different ways to let people know about what you and your online community are up to on Facebook. Why not get creative and start a list of your own? What are some of the most interesting ways you’ve seen people or businesses promote their fan page? Let us know; share what you’ve found!


Source: Social Media Examiner, Justin Wise

Facebook Best Practices

Welcome to our series on Facebook Best Practices. Today we share a little information about Facebook with you along with the first 5 of the 20 best practices we will share with you throughout this series - so be sure to check back!

If you build it, they will come? Perhaps in baseball, but not necessarily when it comes to people (i.e. potential customers) finding your Facebook page. Those potential consumers ARE using social media…. but it’s up to YOU to make sure they can find you. Your fan page can be one of your organization’s richest sources of interaction, R&D and lead generation…. as long as you’ve done a good job of making people aware of it!

First, go to facebook.com/username and secure a custom URL for your Facebook page. Then, put that URL everywhere it’s appropriate: your website; TV, radio and print ads; signs, banners, table tents and window clings, door flyers – all marketing pieces; and your email signature.

Don’t just tell people “Find us on Facebook!” If they conduct a search for your business on Facebook, they may find many similar pages that are not yours. Make it easy for people – direct them to your URL.

The numbers associated with expertise in integrating social media into your business marketing can be mind-blowing! And with social media continuing to grow, the numbers can only get better, as businesses better understand how to effectively engage people.

A report from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate reveal people feel more inclined to purchase from the brands they are fans of on Facebook. 51% of Facebook fans said they are more likely to purchase from at least a few brands they are fans of on Facebook. 60% said that being a Facebook fan of a brand would cause them to be more likely to recommend that brand to a friend.

Unless you have a built-in audience like the huge brands (think Nike, Coca-Cola), you’ll need to help drive traffic to your fan base. There are myriad creative ways to promote your Facebook page, one of the most complete lists below, put together by Justin Wise on Social Media Examiner:

#1: Put your fan page URL in your email signature: How many emails do you send per day? Now imagine each email you send is a chance for someone new to find out about your awesome fan page! This URL goes out on every email I send! Talk about free publicity!

#2: Write a blog post about your new fan page: Give your readers five compelling reasons why they should join your fan page. Don’t beg; just give reasons they’ll benefit.

#3: Tag other, well-trafficked fan pages in your updates: Their fans might see your page and you may get some cross-traffic.

#4: Ask your Twitter followers to join your fan page: Give some compelling reasons why your Twitter base should join your Facebook community. If Twitter is the new water cooler, think of your fan page as an invite to come in and chat. For example, tweet something like, “Wanting more conversation than 140 characters will allow? Join us on Facebook at http://fb.me/awesomefanpage.” A nice and simple ask that will get results.

#5: Invest in Facebook ads: They’re easier than you think and you can spend as little (or as much) as you’d like.

Source: Social Media Examiner, Justin Wise

Social Media's Impact On Business

If you’ve still any doubt social media is an indispensable tool for business, check out these staggering statistics of what social media campaigns accomplished for these businesses:

An Old Spice campaign resulted in a 60% increase in Facebook fans, with between 500,000 to 800,000 new fans in one month’s time. Twitter followers jumped an astounding 2,700%, and YouTube subscribers more than doubled to over 150,000.

Under Armor’s campaign to find their “Ultimate Intern” resulted in a 130% in Facebook page Like’s, a 25% increase in Facebook active users, and a 45% increase in Newsfeed impressions.

Coca-Cola got 86.5 million impressions for a Promoted Trend on Twitter. Yes, MILLION!

Evian’s video “Roller Skating Babies” received 65.5 million plays in two years.
20 million impressions came from Network Solutions “Go Granny” Super Bowl tweets.

McDonald’s showed a 33% increase in check-ins (Foursquare, Places, etc.) from a one day campaign randomly rewarding $5 and $10 gift cards for check-ins.

There were 184,000 players checking in during a scavenger game campaign at Buffalo Wild Wings.

In general, Foursquare had 381,576,305 check-ins in 2010 alone.

Are you beginning to get the picture? The numbers associated with expertise in integrating social media campaigns into your business marketing can be mind-blowing! And with social media continuing to grow, the numbers can only get better, as businesses better understand how to effectively engage people (I.e. = potential consumers). Those potential consumers ARE using social media…. Are YOU?

Source: Mashable's Todd Wasserman and Lauren Drell