5 Tricks for the Busy CEO Who Wants to be Active on Social Media. Three Ways To Ensure Your Social Media Efforts Create Profitable. Recently, I ranted about how blogging and tweeting are often incompatible with generating qualified leads or closed sales (" To Tweet or to March 11, 2010 Recently, I ranted about how blogging and tweeting are often incompatible with generating qualified leads or closed sales (“To Tweet or to Sell”).
But if you run a business, how do you know if your tweeting and blogging are making you money? Or simply enabling the endless chattering among masses who have no need of your services or product, nor means of paying you for anything? When thinking about how social media can lead to profitable growth to write this article, I first had to convince myself it can.
Frankly, I’m torn. So let me cover 3 ways social media can lead to profitable growth – and 3 ways I’m not so sure. Here are three ways social media can create profitable growth: If you can monetize your audience. Here are three ways social media can’t create profitable growth: If you can’t turn voyeurs into participants. HOW TO: Integrate Paid Search and Social Media for Better Market. Matt Lawson is director of marketing for Marin Software, provider of the leading enterprise-class paid search management application for advertisers and agencies. Paid search and social media are both extremely important marketing channels. But how can brands combine the two distinctly different tactics –- the bid-based, conversion-obsessed, ROI-driven world of paid search and the experimental, brand-building, hard-to-measure world of social –- to drive an overall increase in ROI?
Marketers large and small are grappling with the challenge of how to integrate their paid search advertising programs with social media programs on networks like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and viral video sites. Social and Search Should Work Together Marketers usually participate in social media to create an active dialogue with consumers around their products and services, with the main goal of building brand value, and a secondary goal of driving sales. Smart Strategies More business resources from Mashable: How 5 Brands Are Mastering the Game of Foursquare. With its game mechanics and spunky badges, Foursquare could easily be mistaken for a frivolous mobile application with little to no value for businesses. As the startup races to the million member milestone, however, nothing could be further from the truth.
We've already written about Foursquare's savvy relationships with major media and entertainment brands and even talked about how it's changing the world as we know it. In this post, we'll delve deeper into the big brands and businesses that are experimenting with the platform and finding success with location-sharing. For proof that Foursquare is a viable tool for businesses, take a gander at the City of Chicago and their efforts to make city exploration fun with Foursquare, the Wynn Las Vegas' unique approach to top notch service, Tasti D-Lite's efforts to redefine the customer loyalty program, Lucky Magazine's interest in taking their editorial content to the streets and Starbucks' desire to better understand their customers. 1. 2. Why Your Brand Needs to Be on Facebook Now. Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation’s top crisis communications firm.
He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence. With 450 million users globally (and millions more being added each week) Facebook is dominating the web in unparalleled ways. Yet, even as the social network has steadily grown over its short but remarkable history, many brands have remained on the sidelines of the social media revolution. Facebook was the most visited site on the web for the week ending on March 13, 2010, surpassing even Google in week-long stats for the first time in history, according to Hitwise. The shift in user habits and audience targeting is palpable and it provides marketers, brand managers, issue advocates, and political campaigns today with an age old choice: Adapt and change or face irrelevance and extinction.
9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing. Social networking has finally become something valuable for brick-and-mortar businesses. Smartphones and location-based social networks allow users to interact, share, meet up, and recommend places based on their physical coordinates. This real-world connection to social media can mean more foot traffic and profits for business owners. So-called "lo-so" networks like Foursquare, Loopt, and Gowalla enable any business with a physical location to not only communicate with customers online, but actually get more of them to walk in the door — and that's exciting.
The question any brick-and-mortar business owner should be asking him or herself is no longer "Should I use lo-so networks? " 1. First of all, you need to understand how the technology works. Item one on your to-do list should be to become familiar with the prevailing platforms. 2. Before you can optimize your business for lo-social networking, you need to step back and determine what you want to accomplish. 3. 4. 5. Raffles (e.g. 6. How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media for Real Results. The Real Results series is supported by Gist, an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people and companies. See how it works here.
Social media can be a scary prospect for small businesses; unlike traditional marketing methods, it puts part of the message in the hands of the customers. But while it's easy to be concerned that the message will go the wrong way, the benefits can outweigh the risks if you use the available services wisely. The most obvious benefits are increased customer loyalty and engagement. We spoke with small business owners and social media managers around the world who have successfully used social media to increase business performance, and we asked them for their stories and their tips.
It's About Relationships, Not Pitches Blatz Market & Liquor's Joe Woelfle employs a similar strategy. Social Media Exposure: Better Than Ads and Cheaper, Too. How to Extend Your Customer Experience Through Social Media - Pe. Web 2.0 Versus Service 1.0 - Tom Davenport - Harvard Business Re. By Tom Davenport | 9:13 AM April 2, 2010 I went to a CIMS (Center for Information Management Studies) conference at Babson last week on social media. It was interesting and the speakers were good: Nigel Fenwick of Forrester, Carl Frappaolo of Information Architected who was formerly at Delphi,and Kate Ehrlich of IBM Research.
There were some interesting concepts presented but only a few good examples. I believe this was not a reflection of the speakers but of the lack of real social social-media innovation at companies. And I must confess that even some of the “successful” examples got my dander up. To wit: There have been lots of stories about the Comcast Twitter initiative, which seems to have been not a planned corporate program but a bottom-up idea (from Frank Eliason) that the company embraced. Nigel Fenwick praised the “My Starbucks Idea” social-innovation site in his presentation. How to Use Google and Twitter to Find Your Customers | Designdam. The three most important elements when starting out with marketing on the internet is to 1) define success and 2) know your target audience 3) listen to your customers.
Once you form a foundation for your web strategy, the execution becomes easy. The goal is to constantly test and use different campaigns from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to email marketing in an attempt to achieve business objectives. I often hear business owners talk about wanting to increase sales and generate leads but fail to define what success look like to them. In order to define success, you must first realize your current state of business from an analytical and financial perspective. Do you have any existing data to help you take the pulse of the business? Without real knowledge of your true costs, you run into a potential misconception of what your real ROI is. Understand Your Costs and Metric Using Google and Twitter to Identify Your Customers Online Google Keyword Tool Google Insights for Search. 10 Essential Social Media Tools for B2B Marketers. This series is supported by the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, where you'll learn the ins-and-outs of social media as part of your overall B2B marketing mix.
Register today! Like anything else, social media marketing is easier, more efficient and more effective if the marketer has the right set of tools. While hundreds (if not thousands) of tools and services exist for social media marketing, many are still primarily aimed at either consumers or B2C marketers. Fear not B2B marketers — there are still plenty of great tools out there than can best address the unique needs of the B2B space. We've raided our own toolkits to come up with some of the best tools and services for B2B marketers that want to get the most out of social media. 1.
The mac daddy of web-based CRM products hasn't been afraid to embrace social media. One of the best applications for B2B marketers who use Salesforce.com is Salesforce for Twitter. 2. 3. 4. [Disclosure: Syncapse is a Mashable sponsor] 5. 6. 7. 8. truPULSE 9. 10. What Can Social Media Do to Improve Your Business. After my last post on “How to use Google and Twitter to Find your Customers,” I’m following up on how to abstract value to improve your ideas; whether it’s for your marketing research or product innovation, the intention for gathering these data should NEVER be for spamming but to help integrate your value proposition into what people are truly interested in.
If you can become part of what people are interested in, you will have a better chance of connecting. Therefore it’s best to utilize permission marketing when executing your communication strategy. Getting more data is great, but it’s not intended so you can just add more people to your weekly email blast. Making quantitative analysis can help you create interesting ideas that differentiate your brand and drive actions. So how can social media create opportunities for you? Understand The Social Network Ecosystem First, learn how each social network ecosystem works and the habits of the emerging “social consumers.”
What do you think? How to Use a Blog to Increase Organic Traffic. There are many great reasons for businesses to blog but one clearly stands out, increasing your keyword rankings and growing your organic search traffic . The number of terms that a website can rank for is directly related to the size of the site. More indexed pages means more opportunities for keywords. For most small and medium sized businesses, there is a limit to the number of pages that can fit onto site before it becomes bloated and hard to navigate. Once you've reached you're limit for services, products, case studies, etc, it's time to start getting serious about creating blog content. More often than not, the difference between a 50 page website and a 500+ page site is a blog.
The biggest objection I typically hear when I bring up the idea of blogging is, "what am I supposed to write about? " As an example, let's say you want to increase the amount of traffic coming to your site for searches related to the term "blog. " 1) Identify keywords (be realistic) Tech Tips For Teachers: Free, Easy and Useful Creation Tools - The Learning Network Blog. Heidi Schumann for The New York TimesIn California, high school interns try out digital “flexbooks” created by the CK-12 Foundation.Go to related article » You might be looking for ways to refresh or update your bag of tricks.
Or maybe you’re trying to meet new technology requirements, such as using interactive whiteboards. Or perhaps you’re just curious to find out how technology tools can enhance your teaching and your students’ experience and engagement in your courses. If you’ve hesitated to incorporate technology tools into your practice – due to either discomfort or limited time – we’re here to help. Ryan Goble, who often coaches teachers in what he calls the “mindful” use of technology, has written today’s guest post on user-friendly tools that enable the creation of student projects. All of the tools are free as of this writing. We hope you find these suggestions helpful. Tech Tips For Teachers: Free, Easy and Useful Creation Tools By RYAN R. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Intranet, Group Calendar, Small Business Organizer: Backpack. Current Backpack customers can sign in here.
Hello, We launched Backpack back in 2005 so people could “keep life’s loose ends together” in one place online. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have kept millions of loose ends safe in their online Backpacks. However, because we haven’t given Backpack much attention in the last few years, and as part of refocusing our efforts on a slimmer product line, we’ve decided to no longer offer Backpack to new customers. Existing customers will be able to continue using Backpack as they always have. Your account, your Backpack pages, and your data remains safe in Backpack. For those new customers who are interested in something like Backpack, we highly recommend checking out Basecamp.
Onwards, Jason Fried, Founder & CEO, Basecamp. RedLaser ― Impossibly accurate barcode scanning.