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24 Professional Events & Organizations for Social Media Strategists. The Social Media Strategist Series is supported by StrongMail, which helps marketers forge meaningful, profitable and long-lasting connections with customers through e-mail marketing and social media. Learn more here. As social media takes on an increasingly important role in business, many events and groups are popping up to meet the growing demand for shared knowledge and best practices around the subject.

There are a ton of events out there that cater to digital professionals — in fact, we share a guide to the top 100+ upcoming social media and tech events each week. Here, though, you'll find a list of conferences, meetups and organizations perfect for social media marketers and strategists. Add your own favorites in the comments. Conferences There are many digital and social media conferences for those hoping to meet and learn from others in their industry.

Meetups Organizations Social Media Club: With 200+ chapters spanning six of the seven continents (What? Your Picks. How to Gain Competitive Insight With Social Media. Are you looking for that competitive edge? Want to know what your peers are up to? Using social media to research competitors can provide useful information for any business looking to . Learning about your competitors’ activities can give you insight into what works and what doesn’t. The beauty of social media is that there’s a ton of information about your competitors that is public. Competitor Research Through Twitter Twitter can be a great source of information, because you not only can view a user’s tweets (assuming they’re not private, which generally business Twitter accounts aren’t), but also a user’s followers and the conversation that’s being directed toward him or her. If you have a specific list of competitors that you would like to research, your best bet on finding their Twitter accounts is to visit their website and look for their social links (usually near a Twitter icon in the header, sidebar or footer of their site).

Have you ever wanted to ? 10 Interesting Social Media & Blogging Stats. Social Media Is Free: Social Media Marketing Is Not. I’ve heard this constantly from self-professed social media marketing “gurus”: social media is free! You should take advantage of it to promote your company! Why drop mail when you could market without spending a dime? It’s seductive thinking, of course. With budget scrutiny perpetually on the rise, it’s natural to want to curtail expenses, especially if there is no net effect on the returns you could generate.

The urge to fire your PR agency, stop dealing with direct response rates and just tweet like crazy can be difficult resist … but don’t do anything hasty. Many of the costs associated with social media marketing are not immediately evident. The primary issue is content: you need to be able to publish blog posts, tweets and status updates. In addition to content development, you need to think about content promotion – i.e., getting people know about and read your content. So, is social media marketing really free? 5 Key Tips for a Successful Social Media Content Strategy. Frank Marquardt is director of Content Strategy at The Barbarian Group, a digital services and creation company with an almost radical devotion to Internet culture and nice red Swedish Fish™. Good, smart, fun and relevant content should be at the core of any social media strategy.

Great content should reflect your brand and give people a reason to stay engaged. That’s why it’s critical to build a content strategy into your social media campaign. Without a framework for what you say and a plan for how and when you say it, you risk leaving your audiences, at best, confused. At worst, they’ll ignore you. Who wants that? These five content strategy techniques will build better relationships and earn your brand better results on the social web. 1. Everything you say on the social web should "sound" like your brand. Why are these little content snippets so successful?

2. Create a calendar that spells out what you’re going to say and when you’re going to say. Macy’s and Walmart didn’t. 3. 4. 5. How much does Social Media cost companies in 2011? | MackCollier.com. UPDATE: If you would like to view my Social Media Consulting Rate Sheet to see what I charge for my services, please click here. Click here to get the 2012 Price Update to this post. Last February I wrote a post about the prices companies could expect to pay for basic social media services. It ended up being the most viewed post here in 2010, by more than a 3 to 1 margin. And interestingly, it gets a TON of search traffic, terms like ‘social media cost’, ‘cost of a blog’, ‘social media fees’, etc.

That tells me that there’s still a lot of confusion and a lack of clarity about what prices companies should expect to pay for basic social media services. So I wanted to update that post for 2011, with a bit more information, and greater clarity around the numbers. As I mentioned last year, when you are trying to set your social media budget for a project, there are several questions you need to ask yourself, such as: What are your goals for using social media? Here’s the prices: Blog: Twitter: The 5 Critical Errors Most People Make When they Start Using Social Media for Business. Marketing Magic: How Kraft Built a Thriving Social Community Around Cream Cheese. Asking kitchen-savvy women to not only invent their own dishes, but also shoot, edit and upload videos to a contest website seems like a recipe for disaster.

But when Kraft invited women to do just that in its latest online promotional campaign for Philadelphia Cream Cheese, it got about 5,600 more responses than the 400 it set as its goal. With Paula Deen at its helm, what was intended to be a one-year campaign blossomed into a thriving social network of more than 30,000 women. "When it was all laid on the table, I couldn't believe the opportunity.

I had to pass on an 'attagirl' or a boost to more women out there," explained Paula Deen at a recent promotional luncheon. When someone seated at a nearby table reminded Deen that the campaign has also been successful in selling more cream cheese, she looked sarcastically surprised. The truth is that the The Real Women of Philadelphia helped sell quite a bit more cream cheese — 5% more, as of August. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. HOW TO: Get the Most From a Small Business Social Media Presence.

Scott Gerber is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, public speaker and author of Never Get a "Real" Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business and Not Go Broke. The content for this post was sourced from the Young Entrepreneur Council, a group of successful Gen Y business owners. You can submit your questions to this group on NeverGetaRealJob.com. Today's reality is that your business needs to be on social media, but the mere existence of your business on sites like Facebook and Twitter doesn't guarantee a single sale, or even a single referral.

In order for businesses to succeed in the social media space, they need to be properly educated on what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, business owners need to have realistic goals about what they'll get out of social media. When the right tools are used effectively with the right motives in mind, social media can have a huge impact on small business marketing and customer service efforts. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

8 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Measuring. Do you think social media measurement is only about return on investment (ROI)? Are you struggling to find measurements that are meaningful to your organization? Do you feel like you’re searching for a needle in a haystack of metrics? Here are 8 useful metrics that you may not be measuring, but should be. #1: Conversion Rates Everyone wants to measure the volume of leads generated to get to the bottom-line ROI of social media efforts. You’ll need to have a mechanism in place to know when a lead comes from social media. One of the most important steps in understanding where your lead came from is to know when someone clicks on a social media link and then converts. The number will likely be fairly low in the beginning but by looking at conversions divided by leads, you can get your conversion rate for social media leads.

. # 2: The Control Group Some of the greatest metrics I’ve brought forward in my company really didn’t look that impressive when I first got them. . #3: Growth Rate. B2B Social Media Resources. People ask me about business-to-business social media questions all the time. I usually have great answers, and then they ask me about case studies. At moments like that, I just dip into my collection of case studies on Delicious. Today, I went out and found a bunch more. Here are some posts that others have written that point to good studies and resources for B2B Social Media Marketing: 30 Awesome Social Media Resources 3 Can’t Ignore Case Studies 3 B2B Case Studies and Why They Work Peter Kim’s awesome wiki on social media marketing examples. Social Media saves Cisco $100,000+ UPS launches a b2b social media campaign Vital Stats for B2B Marketers Retail banking 20 Support Cases for Using Social Media One note about how B2B marketers get very little social engagement.

There Are More There are more resources. Just wanted to share some poking around that I’d done for you. Have any more to share? ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Genesis Framework Become a StudioPress Affiliate. How Social Media Marketers Can Convert Attention Into Action. Brian Solis is the author of Engage, and a leading authority in digital branding and marketing. Connect with him on Twitter or Facebook. According to a recent report, while upwards of 70% of businesses are said to operate under a formalized social media strategy, many plans don't include measurable goals. Gimmicks, viral videos, and creative campaigns aside, social media marketers must learn to introduce "clicks to action" and outcomes that steer consumer experiences toward desirable results.

Engagement through conversation is a start, but reaching people where their attention is focused and compelling them to take an action is powerful. Clearly defined objectives and milestones, combined with a little conversion science, will increase the value of engagement and drive desired outcomes. Conversion Science: Actions Speak Louder Than "Likes" Once attention is captivated, the real question is, what are you going to do with it? In order to convert attention into desirable outcomes, we must: Social Media Metrics. If you want good social media metrics to track, be sure to pick the right ones. A quick disclaimer: it depends what you’re hoping to accomplish as to which metrics you might want to track.

I’ll give you my take, and what we tend to work from at New Marketing Labs, and then you’re welcome to point out different opinions in the comments section. Social Media Metrics? First, which metrics from social media do you think are important to begin with? Does # of friends or followers matter? It’s a yes-and-no kind of answer, to be truthful. And that’s the first problem with social media metrics. The social media metric that I think does matter and that is difficult to fully qualify is sentiment: the positive or negative mentions of a brand, product, service, whatever. Ones I’m not so sure of: Comments – it’s great that people comment. Metrics I DO Like I like sales. I like leads. I like members. Those are the metrics I think have some value, at least from a business perspective. Thoughts? Why Building a Community is So Hard for Business Bloggers.

One of the challenges that business bloggers tend to have is with community building. Few comments, lack of social proof, and low traffic can be major morale busters. Business blogs start off on a high note, but over the months when little to no activity or traffic is realized, they get abandoned by their owners. I don't blame them - who wants to maintain a blog that's a virtual ghost town? Established Businesses The interesting thing about all of this is that businesses come with their own, perfectly tailored community: their clients and customers! If you've been running a business for some time, at least half of your blog should be dedicated toward cultivating relationships with existing customers. New Businesses New businesses are at a disadvantage to established businesses because they lack the pre-existing community of clients and customers.

Ideas for Building Community on Business Blogs Highlight customers in your posts. What other challenges do you run into with business blogging? Online Database of Social Media Research. How to Create Social Media Business Guidelines. Social media policies and guidelines provide your business a framework to carry out your social media strategy and implement your social media tactics. They can also have a direct impact on the success of your social media endeavors. In this article, I’ll introduce you to social media guidelines for all your employees and your social media management team, and for crisis management and specific platforms.

I’ll also take a look at important considerations for big and small businesses. Advantages of Social Media Guidelines Here are four major benefits: Provides a way to implement your social media strategy and improve your social media performance.Gives everyone the information they need to work well together.Makes it easier to build your social communities online.Makes it possible to respond to emergencies before they get out of hand. With the right strategy, social media guidelines can have a direct impact on your success. Models to Follow Social Media Guidelines for Employees. Seven Important Social Media Trends For The Next Year. Social media changes from month to month. Trends come and go quicker than the seasons change. The latest trendy site could be next year’s Myspace and the hottest new site probably hasn’t even been conceived yet or is at the couple of guys in a garage stage. Having said that there are some trends that I think will continue over the coming year and with that in mind I wanted to share them here.

Rather than focusing in on the finer detail I have compiled the list below in broader terms with all the main players represented. All in all it should be an exiting year ahead in social media and these should be seven of the main trends… Group Buying This really has been the huge power house of online commerce in the last year. Question And Answer Sites These sites are hardly new and have been around for years but a new range of social features and bigger audiences have seen existing sites and some innovative start ups make this an interesting space once again.

Mobile Facebook Credits Branded Content. Going Beyond Social Media Reach. We’re a little too focused on collecting humans like marbles. Our fans. Followers. Subscribers. Impressions. Once upon a time, numbers like gross circulation mattered a bit more, because the available channels and paths for information were somewhat limited. So by putting yourself visibly in one of them, chances were pretty good that you’d actually be seen, and command a fair bit of someone’s attention, at least for a few moments.

Now? Is that really the only way you want to define success? What That Number Does Tell You What the larger network size represents – has always represented – is potential. The number of your fans, followers, blog subscribers – they only ever represent the possible scope of your network. Not all of those people are paying attention at any given time, certainly not in today’s firehose of information. The balance for you is that of course, you want the greatest possible potential. This is really what we’re saying when we refer to quality over quantity.

Or 27buffer. 10 Emerging Social Platforms and How Businesses Can Use Them. How to Measure Social Media’s Impact on Customer Retention. How to tell if your Company is Advanced: 10 Criteria Of Social Business Maturity. HOW TO: Respond when Social Media Attacks Your Brand. Are You Using Social Media as Social Proof? How Big Brands Employ Social Media Marketing - An Andy Sernovitz Interview.

9 Ways to Sell Social Media to Executives. 7 Steps to Measuring Your Brand's Social Media Health. Gap Offers 25% Discount for Foursquare Checkins. Checkins + Group Buying = Location-Based Swarm Deals. How Facebook Changes Marketing And Sales - Forbes.com. Spying On Competition Using Social Media. Introducing Social Media Examiner TV.

Why Foursquare Drives Business: What You Need to Know. Top 16 Unusual Foursquare Badges. The Most Popular Brands on Foursquare. 12 Social Media Monitoring Tools Reviewed. Why You Need to Monitor and Measure Your Brand on Social Media. Get People to "Like" Your Facebook Page. 10 Tips for Corporate Blogging. Event Marketing With Social Media. 7 Social Marketing Strategy Mistakes That Cripple Your Reputation. The Real Life Social Network v2. When YOU Are the Brand. The Myth of Beautiful Website Design.

5 Things I Learned In My First (Almost) Two Years Of (Almost) Fu. 7 Ways Journalists Can Use Foursquare. Top 5 Social Media Myths Debunked. Social Media Stats | Get On The Map. 4 Ways Measure Social Media and Its Impact on Your Brand | Socia. How Real Estate Pros are Using Social Media for Real Results. Beyond the Checkin: Where Location-Based Social Networks Should.