Social Business
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By Donna L. Hoffman and Marek Fodor As social media applications like Facebook (here, cofounder Mark Zuckerberg) have changed the ways consumers interact with brands, companies have struggled to keep up.Target, Dell, Burger King and more are trying to learn what’s effective. Image courtesy of Flickr user jolieodell . As managers become more comfortable with including blogs and social networks as part of their integrated marketing communications, they have naturally turned their attention to questions regarding the return on investment of social media.
Can You Measure the ROI of Your Social Media Marketing?
Business partner, Kent Gregoire shared a blog post with me that was written by Greg Alexander over at Sales Benchmark Index. By now, many companies understand the concept of creating content that is compelling to move opportunities from awareness, interest and desire into action that turns into a tangible result. The blog post focused on helping a client to evaluate over 100 pieces of content to try to determine what content was moving people through the sales funnel. Interestingly enough, the content that was having the greatest ROI was in the middle of the sales funnel.
How Social Fits the Sales Funnel | Social Selling University
How do big brands stand up to competitors? Well, the old adage applies: keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. Unmetric Inc., the Internet’s first social media benchmarking company tailored for Fortune 500 companies, debuts its Unmetric Score, a compilation of over 24 qualitative and quantitative metrics measuring online brand performance vis-à-vis competitors. Unmetric is also announcing it has raised $3.2 million in Series A financing led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Unmetric, Watches Your Competitors' Social Media Presence
Remember the early days of the Web, when publishing and managing content was a Wild West of HTML? Organizations soon went from asking, "What do we do with this thing?" to "What don't we do with this thing?" To maintain some semblance of control, management systems were developed and deployed. The same thing is happening now with social media.
Get Social: 11 Management Systems That Can Help - The BrainYard - InformationWeek
Over the past few years, I’ve tracked the emergence, rise, and growth of this new role within corporations. I see some interesting career opportunities for this powerful role within a corporation. First of all, about this role, while we’ve published a detailed research report on their demographics, psychographics, challenges and aspirations, this role is a major influencer within the corporation, and has a small but growing budget, typically stemming under the CMO or head of corporate communications functions. Without a doubt, this role is in high demand: few are qualified, those that are are easily found by recruiters and I’ve heard of some positions with a total comp beyond 200k+ in regulated financial services.
The Future Career of the Corporate Social Strategist « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing
It’s no surprise that business-to-business marketers and agencies are looking for leads online. A February 2012 survey of B2B marketing and agency professionals by BtoB Magazine found that 59% view lead generation as their greatest online marketing challenge. To meet that goal, marketers are exploring new channels in 2012, particularly social media—and for many, the approach is working.
B2B Marketers Optimistic About Social Media for Lead Generation - eMarketer
As LinkedIn continues to grow in popularity as a proven social media marketing platform for B2B companies, the LinkedIn company page offering continues to evolve as well with new features for marketers to fully leverage this tool. For example, in the last six months, the LinkedIn follow button was introduced as well as the ability for company pages to post status updates to then appear in their followers’ feeds. But one of the most underutilized features that companies continue to ignore or overlook, which isn’t new by any means, is the ability to build individual Products & Services Pages and also implement the Product and Service Spotlight feature. Here’s some step-by-step instructions to implement both individual Product & Services Pages and the Product and Service Spotlight, which is the first step to begin converting page visitors into leads and new customers.
Turn Your LinkedIn Company Page Into A Sales Magnet | Business 2 Community
The influence of social media on the conversion of sales is outstanding compared to traditional marketing. Being involved and creating a community using social media has never been as important as it currently is today. It is a proven science that a one-on-one interaction with customers creates a rapport between the consumer and the business. Building trust and loyalty converts into more sales PERIOD!
Social Media’s Influence on Sales | Business 2 Community
It will be the wrong audience for an interesting topic, but the cheesemakers didn’t pay $1,200 for a conference ticket to hear information about “Tarts”! A paying participant at a car dealer expo will want to hear about horsepower and handbrakes and will either leave the hall or fall asleep if the speakers start talking about knitting and slipper making. The art of successful communicating and engagement involves selecting the right audience and providing them with information and content that resonates with their needs and wants. Twitter is about “ Events ” which could be the next plane crashing into the Hudson river or letting your audience know that your latest blog post is published…that is an event!
How to Harness the Power of LinkedIn [Infographic] | Business 2 Community
6 Ways To Use Pinterest To Promote Your Business | Business 2 Community
The best way to think of Pinterest, if you’re not familiar with it, is as your personal or business bulletin board – it’s where you pin pictures of things you like: your style, your interests, your aspirations…anything you can represent with images from the internet. Pinterest also happens to be the hottest social media network, with growth in the past 6 months of over 4,000%. And people aren’t just taking a peek at the site and leaving; the average visit is more than an hour – Facebook is about 16 minutes, LinkedIn about the same. How Pinterest WorksThis is Kate. She’s a hairstylist, jewelry maker, and all-around crafter based in North Carolina. Kate started her blog ( thesmallthingsblog.com ) exactly one year ago.
Pinterest Drives Enormous Blog and Business Success | Business 2 Community
Is Facebook Advertising Too Cheap? - Forbes
What is great about Facebook for businesses may not be great for Facebook, the business. Who wins and who loses with the high-flying Facebook IPO I will leave to greater minds. But for businesses, anyway, getting in touch with the value of this firm is no mystery. One simply needs to do like I did: Become a client. Over the past several months, my digital content company has started running a series of advertisements on the service — you know, those small rectangular ads that run along the right side of many Facebook pages. My shop pays Mark Zuckerberg and company monthly fees to run these ads, and in return we get a report on impressions and click-through.Business 2 Community - Building Deeper Business Relationships Through Engaging Communities
Affinitive — San Francisco, CA About Affinitive Founded in 2002, Affinitive is an award winning (WOMMY, Forrester, SAMMY, Gartner) full service social marketing agency experienci...Michelle Obama’s first day on Twitter was the tweet heard 'round the world, with more than 60,000 followers signing up to follow her the morning she launched. Initial tweets from @MichelleObama noted that her staff would be doing the heavy lifting initially, but that every tweet from the First Lady herself would be signed “mo.” It was a nice touch of transparency, creating excitement without over-promising. Mrs. Obama’s fellow Twitter-newbie, Rupert Murdoch, however, is off to a rockier start , or so say numerous critics; Murdoch began his Twitter account to thunderously merciless reviews.
4 Strategic Requirements For Corporate Tweeting | Fast Company
Hundreds of millions of people interact on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace and LinkedIn every day. Like any other new technology, social media brings enormous opportunities and benefits. The ability to communicate and interact instantaneously on a global scale 24/7 enables businesses to reach their customers directly and individuals to voice opinions on any topic they see fit. Yet as the opportunity to tweet, message, share and “like” grows, so do the risks.