Is it safe? Where’s the ROI? Is it just a waste of time? Will social media really help to increase sales and grow our business? Will social media save our business?

The reason its understandable, is that most businesses, actually people, don’t have a clear understanding of what social media is and how it compares to the forms of advertising and marketing communications channels businesses have accepted as the de facto standard for where to spend the marketing budget.

Here’s a definition of social media marketing that I found to be very clarifying. It was created by David Meerman Scott:

You can buy attention (advertising)
You can beg for attention from the media (PR)
You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales)

Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an ebook, a Facebook page.

If you think this explanation makes sense, than it should be apparent that social media is much more than having a presence on Facebook or Twitter. It is even more than just participating. Social media marketing results requires a focused campaign efforts, where your brand becomes a central source for content that benefits both your business and the community you build around that content.

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Take it away Gary…

What do you think of Gary’s rant?

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Many businesses have embraced having a Facebook page or a Twitter presence as part of their unique value proposition. We have all seen this on TV, Print, Radio and of course the web sites we all visit.

COMPANY X Is Now On Twitter!

Become A FAN On our Facebook Page!

This is indeed, a positive step forward in reaching your audience where they are spending time. However,  leveraging social medial often results in sameness - Company Y has a Facbook Page, we should have one too. Instead of showcasing the real value of your offering, reaching the specific audiences that your business targets, engaging new prospects with an innovative social media campaign to stimulate conversation:  your business becomes just another page in the social media landscape. Yes, you may build followers, but so is your competition. And that’s the problem. If you are not using social media to differentiate your business, to share the unique value your business offers to your audience, then you become just another me to company that has a social media presence because that’s just what every business seems to be doing today.

Social media provides the opportunity for your business to precisely focus on your target audience and to demonstrate your points of unique value.

Here Are Five Action Items To Demonstrate Your Unique Value Through Social Media

1. Create a company blog the focuses on your target audiences – perhaps create two or more!

Your business needs a blog. I assume you know that by now, but what if you are not leveraging that blog to reach your audience? You need to be as specific as possible with your content. It will help with reaching your audience, but also with SEO and lead generation. If your business focuses on different industries, say healthcare and transportation – it may not be a great idea to have only one blog – as the audiences in these industries, may be very different. So, just as you may have vertical channel managers, it can make perfect sense to have a blog channel dedicated to your key verticals. Your blog(s) should serve as the hub of your social media activities, not Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. These are just channels, your blog is your social media home.  Integrate your blog into your website and focus on great content that will drive your social, seo and lead pipeline.

2. Have a specific objective.

Being there is not an objective.  I  often hear from clients that they need to have a Facebook page. But what they really need is a strategy to reach prospects through the channel that is Facebook or Twitter or ???.   The  suggestion I have is to  set your objective to drive new leads to your web site and/or your business.  Inbound marketing that leverages social media is how sales are started today.  When was the last time you took a sales call from a sales person?

3. Remember social media is for your business to connect with people.

Ask many social media gurus they will tell your social media is all about the people.  Not so, if you are in business.  Most businesses exist to make money. This money comes from relationships indeed. But if you are clear and transparent in you reasons for using social media (to increase your business)  you can be clear in your efforts to connect with your audience who wants to buy your product   You connect with people online the same way you do offline, you initiate conversation or your audience start the conversation  – but online you can efficiently reach more people over a much broader geographical area. Just like offline, people want to work with people that they know, trust and like. Social media provides you with the opportunity to grow your network exponentially, without having to leave the office.

4. Forget the rules – (sort of)

There is plenty advice out there on social media best practices and rules. The reality is,  the rules that apply are the very same rules that govern how you  communicate offline or through email. Don’t be annoying. Add value to someone’s day, life or business.  That’s really it!

5. Apply what you or your marketing team already knows about marketing

Social media is just another communication channel. The foundations of good marketing still applies in this space. If you conduct all marketing in house, give social media a try.  But really commit to it. Hiring a part time college student to create your social media strategy is a mistake. They can help you execute, but you probably won’t entrust an inexperienced marketer to run your TV ad campaign if that was the channel you were using. Why entrust inexperience to your social media channel?  If you use an ad agency, chat with them about your goals, if you want to talk to a team of folks who live and breathe social media and marketing, then contact MarketingOC

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At MarketingOC, we sing the very true mantra that to reach your prospects and reach your customers, you need to go where they are spending time. More often than not, whether you are marketing B2B or B2C – that means setting up a presence and running a campaign on Facebook. It just makes sense. Facebook is where more people are turning to connect with friends and businesses. So, of course, we encourage our clients to work with us to set up their Facebook page and to create a presence on the social network that everybody seems to love (and even if someone hates it, they still know that they need to have a presence so they can check on all their friends and favorite businesses!)

While it may make sense to participate on Facebook – run a Facebook marketing campaign or leverage Facebook to generate leads – it is absolutely does not make sense to ditch your web site as your campaign headquarters for reaching your prospects and customers. Leveraging your web site or blog as the hub of your social media is essential. With your blog as your hub, you control the look and feel, can see the analytics, can do as you please. That’s not true with Facebook. With Facebook, your business is somewhat at the whim of their decisions. Take the recent change in page width. This reduction from 720 to 520 pixels is a major change to the designs of many businesses welcome pages- and I am sure that this change will come as a great surprise to many businesses when they visit their Facebook page on August 23rd. See Patrick’s previous post.

So, do you your business a favor – set up a great blog, publish great content, distribute that content via Facebook and social media and use Facebook as a marketing channel, but not your social media marketing home. Better yet, contact MarketingOC – we will help you focus your social medial sales and marketing efforts.

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Currently Facebook welcome pages are 760 pixels wide. Starting on August 23rd they will be 520 pixels… That’s a lot of screen real estate you’re about to lose, and if you don’t redesign the page, most likely your fans will only see part of the page.

Don’t worry though – now’s as good a time as any to build a brand new page, or updated page. Contact Us for a FREE quote on updating your Facebook Page design, or designing a new page from scratch.

We’d be more than happy to help. View our Facebook page for an idea of the kind of site we can build for you.

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It’s not JUST….

To build your web site

To create your mobile marketing presence

To create your social media strategy

To better optimize your web site to improve your SEO rankings

To create custom Facebook, Twitter or YouTube channels

To produce an engaging video

To design your email marketing campaign….

Sure – it is these services that often leads clients to our agency, but the real reason we exist – and the real reason you need MarketingOC – is that you need to reach more targeted prospects, to drive more leads, to reach your audience where they are spending time, to fill your sales pipeline full of — well, sales opportunities. Marketing strategies and tactics that fuels sales - that’s what your ad agency or marketing partner needs to deliver to your business.

It all starts wtih understanding your business needs and equally important, the needs of your prospects and customers. Then it is about creating the campaign and executing that campaign through the the communication channels that are most effective in reaching your audience, and driving the sales you need. In other words, when we understand: what your selling, who you are selling to, why what you are selling is important to your buyers – then we can provide you with the right marketing tactics to engage your customers and increase sales.

Sales – that’s the real value of marketing – and the value that MarketingOC strives to provide our clients. So if you need sales, then you may just need MarketingOC!

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Your prospects do however, take the time on their mobile phones and on their desktops to search the web to conduct independent research, obtain information from their peers and review past purchase experiences from others via social media. The traditional methods of selling are quickly becoming obsolete — to be successful today’s sales professional need to engage in social selling: leveraging social media to both better listen and more effectively engage with prospects and customers.

Think your prospects aren’t using social media to learn about your business? Think again!

More and more prospects are relying on the content found in social media channels to educate themselves about a company’s brand, products and services. Just think about what happens if a prospect performs a search on Google for your business or product and service and your listing did not appear? Guess what….your prospect will look at your competitors who do appear! The same situation applies in social media. Social media plays an in?uential role in the B2B decision-making process. As a result, B2B company should use social media to monitor what existing customers and prospects are saying about their company, capture interest from prospects looking for their products and solutions, and coordinate the marketing and sales follow-ups to turn social media interactions into social media sales.

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Image by Cambodia4Kids.org

Social media is great, and as a social media consultant of course I’m going to say everybody should be utilizing it. But the question today is “Can failure to use social media hurt your company?”.

I submit that it can, I’m gonna share my top reasons and ways not embracing social media can ruin your company.

1. Competitive Edge. People, especially the younger audiences, and geeks of the world tend to support and uphold businesses that are what they consider ‘forward thinkers’. A forward thinking company to them is one that appears to listen to their concerns, molds

itself around their needs, and is up-to-speed with the latest technolegies – which includes: social media, geo-location, and mobile devices / applications.

By not embracing new technology, you appear to lack the edginess that your competitors have, and you are hurting your image with possible clients. Even business to business companies and government agencies have facebook pages.

2. Missing the Conversations that matter. In this world of connectivity, everyone is increasingly spending more and more time on the internet. Whether by phone, laptop, desktop, ipad, or even car computers, game consoles, etc… When a customer feels upset, the new trend isn’t to call customer service and wait forever on hold. A lot of people are shy or have social anxieties that make phone calls and confrontations not a pleasant prospect. These people turn to the web, and specifically social networks like facebook, twitter, local directories, and blogs.

One bad review, write-up, comment, or youtube video can get wide mass attention and easily ruin a company. By being involved in social media, learning how to track specific keywords for usage on twitter, facebook, etc – you can see when your business is talked about online. If it’s in a positive light, be sure to thank the person, and offer that if they ever have need of anything to be sure to contact you.

If on the other hand someone opens a halestorm of negativity, there are generally six steps to handling this:

1. Know it happened. This is to say, if you don’t have monitoring systems in place to track your brand, you’ll never know when someone talks negatively about your company.
2. Own it. Its your word against theirs, and maybe they were having a bad day when they posted it, but by owning upto your mistake, essentially letting the customer know that they are right (and the customer is always right, right?), you can diffuse the comment.
3. Apologize. Let the customer know that it isn’t the policy of your company to step over customers and that you take it personally that this happened at one of your stores.
4. Make Restitution. Offer something in return, some kind of good will offering that will make that customer’s issue solved. Even if you lose a deal of money on it, it can lead to some positive PR.
5. KEEP it PUBLIC. When addressing someone’s negative comments don’t do it in private, don’t do it blatantly as a ‘look at me’ stunt either, but you should keep it in the public eye so others know that if they have a problem that there are channels they can go through to get it resolved. The key here is to be as real and genuine as possible.
6. Don’t over-do-it. It’s easily to beg and plead for someone to give you another chance to make it upto them, but you do still need to come off as a respectable company in the end, and at the end of the day all you can do is offer to help, if they still choose to be irate, then that’s just their nature, move-on and know that you did your best, and people who surf in and see the conversation and follow-ups will see that you at least tried to make amends.

3. Losing out on quality leads. Lead companies, and direct marketers know for a fact that having a social media presence can dramatically increase the number of qualified leads that they gather on a daily basis. If your business depends on leads, then if you’re not tapping into social media you’re really losing out on a huge business builder. Facebook for instance has cheap ads that you can buy on the sidebar. These ads can be extremely heavily targeted by that user’s tastes, likes, profile, gender, age group, etc…

If you know your audience then utilizing facebooks PPC ads can definitely increase awareness about your company and get you a ton more leads.

4. Losing your brand altogether. You’ve worked hard to secure your trademarks and copyrights. Yet, on social networks its so easy for any Tom, Dick, or Harry to register an account and pretend to be an official profile for your company. They can then wreak massive damage to your brand. Many social networks now have options in place for businesses and celebrities to ‘verify’ themselves as the true entity in question.

There’s a cool tool called Knowem where you can check your brand against 350 different social networks. Using online tools like these there are many ways to track and see who’s pretending to be you or your company.

All in all there are many reasons that social media can make or break your business, the biggest reason of all is that it is the cheapest, most cost effective way to reach out to millions of people, grab their ‘trust’, and protect against bad PR and corporate identity theft.

As far as I can tell there is only one reason not to embrace social media: Fear of the unknown.

I’m willing to bet that in the 90′s you had the same trepidation over creating a web site, but in the end you caved in and hired a web designer, and it just became a ‘standard’ thing that every business did.

Social media optimization and marketing – is the new web site. It’s not so much about a single presence online, but managing multiple presences that best reflect your target demographic, specific outreach goals, and finding ‘influencers’ and ‘brand ambassadors’ who have wide networks to grow awareness of your company. By getting involved now, you stand a chance of beating your competition to this new frontier. Even if your competitors are already using social media, its a good bet that they’re still learning, and you can still move ahead of them, or at least catchup if you act now.

Not sure where to start you social media marketing strategy? We can certainly help you get started on the right path. As a bonus we not only focus on social media, but also local web marketing, and mobile marketing – three very HUGE trends right now. Click here to contact us now, or give us a call at:

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Let’s take a look at American Airlines well traveled web site: AA.com.

Here is how AA.com looks in a desktop web browser:

Here is how AA.com looks on an Iphone when viewed in Full HTML mode:

You can see there are a lot of options that are work perfectly fine for desktop viewing but not so great on a mobile phone.  You can accomplish most of the same tasks you can with the desktop version, except, for a user to navigate the site on their mobile phone, they will have to pinch, stretch and scroll around a lot. Not a real friendly experience. This is an example of  how your web site may appear in a mobile browser if it has not been optimized for mobile.

Here is the mobile web site for AA.com

A couple of things to point out here.

1. Typing aa.com into the Safari mobile browser takes you right into the mobile web site rather than the full web site. Mobile device detection is used – immediately recognizing that I was asking to view on AA.com on my Iphone, as a result, the mobile web site was presented (all without me having to request a specific URL on my own)

2. This mobile web site is not sexy. It is not beautiful. It is not stunning. It is however very useful. Very useful for accessing the exact information customers need while they are on the go.

The key take away is not that mobile web sites should be ugly or that they shouldn’t  contain brand elements because they can indeed represent your company and brand in a positive way – but the end goal is to ensure that your prospects and customers can interact with your web site while on the go – quickly and efficiently. In doing so, you will be providing a positive experience for your customers, that will ultimately benefit your company.

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You can become ‘Linked-in Famous’ because of what you share: The right answers, and lots of them.

The Answers section of Linked-in is an amazing resource for building connections, and getting your name our there in your field.

Here are some tips and tricks to getting the most out of Linked-in Answers.

1. Be a Linked-in Open Networker(LiON). Linked-in is about meeting other business people and sure some might be trying to sell you something, but a lot of time strategic partnerships can be formed where you might tell a customer about someone else’s services and they will refer their customers to you that have a need that they don’t fill.

Being an open networker basically means that you will give anyone a chance of connecting with you, if they prove to be spammers you can later on delete them. Be open to every connection, and you will expand your network and your business.

There’s a movement on Linked-in called ‘LiON’. It’s basically where you put ‘LiON’ in your description, so that people who see you answers, and activities on Linked-in will know that they can connect with you, and you will accept their connections and vice versa.

2. Stay on Topic. It’s important when using Linked-in answers, or any answers, or blog posts that you stay extremely focused on topics that are related to your industry. The more relevant it is the more likely people will start to notice you and will even recommend you for answers, give you the ‘best answer’ designation, and connect with you on linked-in.

These connections always have the opportunity of opening doors to future clients and customers and they also help to brand you as an expert in your field.

3. Use good formatting / grammar. Make sure to use a lot of white space if your Answer is rather long, it helps to break it up and make it easier to read. Also be sure to use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation – some people are very nit-picky on that and it can make you look a lot more professional.

Also be sure to include some links from time to time to resources people can use to find more information. Sometimes you can include your own links in these, but I would shy against doing that on a regular basis as it could be considered spam.

4. Get to the top if you can. If you want to build a lot of credibility fast then becoming the top Answer submitter for the week is a good way to do this. Generally it takes about 300-400 answers a week to get you to this top spot, but it can get you a lot of new connections, and will help to make people ‘recognize’ your name which goes a long ways towards self-branding.

Don’t have time for that? Then at least try for the top 10 spots, as these will still give you some extra exposure.

Sharing Time: What success have you had with Linked-in Answers with regards to marketing your business?

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