The controversial though common aphorism that “corporations are people” applies well to the social media landscape, where entrepreneurial individuals are branding themselves just as readily as a transnational company. Social media is at its heart a communal arrangement where online entities are judged more for their transparency than they are their content. This bodes well for companies who want to use the Internet to encounter the new frontier of marketing, which is social media optimization. Social media contains several unique qualities that make it a more robust marketing option than any preceding medium:

Branded content can be shared without violating any intellectual property law. In fact, it’s encouraged. Nothing is better for a company than for its online content to be shared across multiple sites and platforms. If you think about this, it’s far more bold quality than we may give it credit for. Previous mediums, such as television and newsprint, did not so easily facilitate the passing on of copyrighted material. Only the owner of the brand was expected to make such a move. With social media, companies can release their properties to the sky like pigeons.

Online reputations can be managed with greater precision. Reputation management is a major new online industry and social media is a huge component of it. Because social media is so interconnected with search engine optimization, companies can now defend and evolve their brands with near mathematical accuracy, controlling how their domains arise in search engine results and in what contexts they will be seen by the public.

Engagement is formed organically. Social media interaction is based on the principle of ‘opt-in.‘ That is, in order for Twitter or Pinterest users to see your tweets and pins they have to ‘follow you. In order for Facebook users to see your posts, they have to ‘like’ you. Some sites aggregate material, leaving open the possibility of seeing new material that you didn’t subscribe to (YouTube), but the general principle is that these sites create curated experiences, in which the users are willing participants. This is in stark contrast to television, in which viewers are the hapless recipients of ‘one-way’ transmissions.

These are a few of the unique qualities that social media possesses that makes it such a powerful marketing tool for both individuals and companies. Used correctly, nearly anyone can create a successful campaign that will generate brand loyalty for years to come.

When describing the difference between social media marketing and traditional techniques, experts will often focus on the interactive nature that the former offers. With social media, consumers can promote a brand by discussing it and by posting on a product page. Businesses and consumers can communicate back and forth as peers, even within the confines of the marketing process. In short, the one-way street of old has been replaced by a two-way thoroughfare – a broad connection between business and user that is strengthened by the traffic flowing in both directions.

Social media marketers understand this concept well. However, few know how to successfully implement it into a marketing model. A business may post something to Facebook or Twitter and ask for user comments, but this approach only forces two-way traffic. It doesn’t encourage it organically.

This distinction is an important one, as the main benefits of interactive social media marketing – an increase in exposure, consumer loyalty, and perceived credibility, among others – are best achieved when the consumer participates on his own initiative. This goes beyond simply answering questions. Rather, it requires a business (and a marketer) to approach social media with a far more comprehensive outlook.

Perhaps the best way to do this is by selling a community instead of selling a brand. Consumers are savvy enough to realize that your Facebook page is ultimately intended to boost exposure, sales, and profits, but they don’t want to see such capitalism blatantly forced upon them. They instead want to be won over in the same way as they would with any other Facebook group – with an appeal to community. Similarly, people follow a Twitter feed because they find it entertaining or because they seek insights into details of a person’s life. A marketer is best served to tackle these two objectives before explicitly promoting the brand. This insures that the two-way street is as vibrant as possible.

So how can community be promoted ahead of a brand? If you’re a marketer, think of yourself as a tourism agency. You’re trying to sell a given city or region, but instead of commoditizing the place you want to present it as an experience. You might connect the consumer to other people who have shared this experience, for example, or you may simply provide news on developments in the region. All the while you can still convey a sense of branding in every photograph or promotion. However, when offering travel promotions such as local credit cards with low rates or the best travel credit card, don’t forget that “community” always comes first.

This “travel bureau” mindset can then be expanded to other marketing ventures. While the way you create a social media community will certainly vary based on your industry and on your business, keeping the concept in mind is a worthwhile place to start. Ultimately, as marketers, we don’t want to merely widen the road of communication and add a second lane where one once stood. Instead we should do away with the old infrastructure and remake the system organically, so that communication can foster and two-way traffic can grow.

Via: Home Insurance Guide

There is so much ground to cover.

So I sat down and used my trusty copy of Camtasia to record just about everything I know in this 80 minutes of (obviously unscripted) tutorial on how to use Google+ for business, because there is so much to discuss.

Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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Image via Wikipedia

The best thing about social media marketing is that you don’t have to be the most popular, have the most followers, or be the most sophisticated, you just have to do a better job than all your direct competitors.

You don’t have to be the fastest, the biggest, or the strongest in order to win at social media, you just have to be faster than Mark. Who is Mark? Well, I am sure you’ve all heard the joke about outrunning a bear . . .

Steve and Mark are camping when a bear suddenly comes out and growls. Steve starts putting on his tennis shoes. Mark says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear!” Steve says, “I don’t have to outrun the bear–I just have to outrun you!” (via Boy’s Life)

In social media, you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun your competitors — your real competitors, not your aspirational competition.

The problem with social media is that it removes all barriers to entry — meaning anyone and everyone can enter a globally competitive marketplace of brands, celebrity, popularity, and ideas; a marketplace where the competition is absolute and there is a global best and worst.

There are top-100 lists on Technorati, there is Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop lists, there’s the Top Twitter list — dominated by top global celebrities, actors, musicians, and sports figures — and the top social media influencer lists, including the enigmatic Power150 list from AdAge. It is all so intimidating and hopeless, right?

Well, no. Ashton Kutcher is probably not your direct competition, nor is Charlie Sheen. If you’re not a public figure or a national brand, you need to give yourself a break and just focus on outrunning Mark — outrunning the folks to your left and to your right; the folks who are realistically eating your lunch or taking market share from your bottom line. I mean, even I am always fighting my desire to chase social media celebrity.

For example, I used to consider Chris Brogan a competitor, of sorts. Truthfully, Chris is a bear — an awesome bear, a generous bear, but a bear none-the-less. He has 205,232 followers on Twitter and a Klout score of 77. In comparison, I “only” have 47,000 followers on Twitter and a Klout score of 66; Chris has a couple books under his belt and always ends up on the top-ten of every and all social media, marketing, and even web celebrity lists.

As an aside, I do realize that 47,000 is a lot of followers and 66 is a pretty good Klout score — please bear with me because we’re all comparing ourselves to other folks who are prettier, richer, skinnier, taller, smarter, and stronger — just realize that I don’t consider 47k or 66 to be good scores just like Chris probably wants 500k followers and a Klout score above 80 — it’s just how we all feel, right? Not just you.

Chris and I are old friends but were I to judge my success or failure based on the strength, power, and awesomeness of a bear like Chris Brogan or Guy Kawasaki I would be constantly frustrated by my progress, in the same way that folks who look to my relative success on social media as intimidating — it is all relative and it is all worthwhile.

What’s even more worthwhile is to aspire to become friends with the bears. Though I have “only” 47,000 followers on Twitter, I do know enough very big social media grizzlies through all of my hard work, sharing, participating, being present, generous, and consistently there as part of the conversation, that I can get help if I need it from bears who are much bigger, much smarter, and more powerful than I am, be they individual influencer powerhouses like Gary Vaynerchuk or even influential brands.

Let me close by sharing that it is indeed worthwhile to build your numbers and your size as a social media influencer — I will not take that back — but you really don’t have to be a lot bigger — you don’t have to be the biggest; however, all the time, energy, and dedication that you spend on building your core friends, followers, and likers will never go to waste because these connections are valuable — especially if you spend time and energy required to build and strengthen these tacit relationships into proper friendships.

First spend all the time and energy required to become faster than Mark — to become faster than your competition — and then, when you’re the fastest, strongest, and most influential member of your real competition group, then start actively becoming friends with the bears.

Let me change the joke a little bit: Steve and Mark are camping when a bear suddenly comes out and growls. Steve just sits there. Mark says, “What are you doing? Aren’t you going to run?” Steve says, “I don’t have to run–the bear doesn’t want to eat me!”

Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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Be sure to register to attend Mike Moran’s next free webinar titled Global Search Marketing — it is on April 3rd at 11am Eastern. Mike Moran is actually the guy who wrote the book on search marketing so here’s the deets — but first, please register!

Lots of companies have products that can be sold outside their home country, but search marketing makes it easier than ever. Focus on what customers want, what content you need to persuade them, and how they can find it—those three keys will give you search marketing success in any country. If you’ve been unsure of whether you have what it takes to market globally, don’t miss this chance to find out.

In this Webinar, you’ll find out how to use social media to listen to your customers and gain insights into their interests.  Mike will show you how to segment and target your international markets by using different keywords for each country and each language.  He’ll discuss how to test to see if your marketing is working, and how to optimize your web site so that you can be found by customers worldwide.

In this free 30-minute Biznology® Webinar, Mike Moran explains how to listen to your international customers, determine their needs and choose keywords for each market segment.  He’ll show you how to work with translators and use proper coding so that your web site can be found by search engines globally.

Special sponsored presentation by Brick Marketing, Marketing Pilgrim, and Social Ally

Mike Moran is the Founder of the Biznology blog, a well-known expert in all things digital marketing, and Chief Strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. Mike is the co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., and the sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly. Mike is a veteran of IBM, managing groups in IBM.com for eight years, retiring from IBM in 2008 as a Distinguished Engineer.

Be sure to register now!

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Be sure to join Sally Falkow and me for a free webinar on March 29th entitled How to Map Your Brand’s Social Graph — please register now! Here are the details of the webinar:

Every brand is surrounded by the people they interact with every day: customers, prospects, analysts, the media, vendors, authorities and the community.

In the past marketers and PR people have been advised to do what is called an “environmental scan” to identify stakeholders and trends in the environment.

Now that your stakeholders are online that ‘scan’ has to include mapping the social graph of your brand: who is part of that social graph, where they are active, what they’re doing online, who they’re connecting to and having conversations with, and what they are saying about your brand.

Find out what the social graph consists of, how to map it, and why this is so important for your brand.

Presented by

Sally Falkow
CEO Social Ally

Chris Abraham
President, Social Ally

I would really love to see you all there!

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Companies, small businesses, and public figures will go to great lengths these days to boost their Twitter followers – a move that can help increase both an entity’s credibility and exposure. They post regular updates and connect their Twitter and Facebook accounts. They use Tweets to comment on news events, advertise a new product, upload a cool image, and everything in between. And they retain the services of professional social media consultants who have trained in online management and leadership courses.

There’s another tactic that Twitter marketers regularly employ: they offer rebates, discounts, or promotions of some sort that are only advertised through the Twitter feed. The hope, of course, is that consumers will seek to follow this feed so as to be appraised of the latest promotions.

Are you considering using promotions as part of your Twitter marketing strategy? If yes, such a strategy can certainly translate into a welcome boost in followers and exposure. But, in order to realize these results, it’s important that the strategy be conducted with the best marketing interests in mind. Here are a few tips:

-Make promotions timely. Most businesses will have publicly-viewable Twitter feeds that can be read by any user, even someone who is not a follower. A promotion, however, needs to specifically benefit followers – and thus encourage people to become followers – by conferring benefits to those people who read about a given promotion first. Specifically, a timely promotion (ex. available to the first 100 respondents) gives a strong advantage to followers and will encourage more people to get on board.

-Make promotions easy and Twitter-friendly. Some businesses will advertise a promotion on Twitter that then directs viewers to the company website if they want to learn more or cash in on their discount. This approach does not confer a substantial advantage to Twitter followers and doesn’t capitalize on the succinctness of the medium. Instead, a business should focus on making the promotion concise and explaining it in full in the Twitter post.

-Don’t overdo it. Offering Twitter promotions can be incredibly beneficial, but a company that makes too many promotional Tweets can dilute the uniqueness of each offer and risk making the feed seem more like advertising spam than a compilation of insight, interesting news, and helpful information. Consequently, every effort should be made to insure that the number of promotions do not become excessive.

These are just a few tips to keep in mind when using promotions as an approach to boost Twitter followers. Although the strategy can play an important role in a larger social media marketing strategy, it should not be overly used, integrated, or diluted in the process.

Late last year, when Facebook first began rolling out its Timeline redesign, users and commentators reacted with the usual mix of criticism and skepticism. They didn’t like that people could now easily view profiles years into the past. They questioned the privacy implications. They found the new design too unwieldy and overwhelming.

But, as with most other Facebook changes in the past, the criticism has largely died down and users have largely adapted. The Timeline looks different than Facebook’s old profile model, to be sure, but it ultimately does little to change the social media experience – at least as far as individual users are concerned.

Timeline’s business feature is a completely different matter altogether. Introduced in the past couple weeks, the Timeline redesign looks identical for businesses as it does for private users. But the feature provides companies with the ability to change their page from a forum into more of a brand advertisement. It allows – and forces – companies to further think of their chronology and tell a story, rather than simply living solidly in the present.

On that first point, company Facebook pages were now home to a news feed, a profile picture (usually a logo), and not much else. That has changed subtly yet profoundly with the introduction of the Timeline, as wall posts can now be managed so that highlighted ones can be starred for greater exposure. In addition to the profile picture, businesses now have a large cover photo against which to contrast their logo and upon which a strong brand message can be conveyed. The cover photo, ultimately, allows every business page to feel inherently unique.

Finally, companies can now turn their “About” section into more of a mission statement. The aggregate effect of all this is that a business Timeline page, while still containing the standard updates and pictures of social media, now provides many more tools for a company to advertise and to favorably present its brand through Facebook.

Businesses should make sure that this brand presentation contains a strong element of chronology. Before the Timeline upgrade, the most important elements of a Facebook page were found at the far top. These elements included the latest photos, videos, and wall posts, and their high degree of turnover insured that visitors – and page managers – could very much live in the present. What was posted a month ago no longer mattered. What the company did five years in the past made no difference whatsoever.

This has all changed with the Timeline introduction. Now, users can easily scroll through a company’s history and get a sense of its past, meaning that it is now important that a Facebook page can tell a cohesive story. For example, the New York Times’ Timeline includes newspaper articles going back to the paper’s founding in 1851. In doing so, the paper attains immediate respect and credibility among visitors to the page. Even a business without such a history can still create a story through Timeline that compels the consumer and creates an emotional attachment to the brand. This allows a business to position itself as a life coach rather than a one-time interaction.

For all these reasons the Facebook Timeline has changed the way that businesses conduct their social media. Is your business ready for the Timeline? Now is the time to figure that out.

We’ve all had it. Writer’s block. You need to write something and there’s nothing there. No idea. Nothing seems like the right approach.

Why does it happen? There are six reasons why you’ll have chronic writer’s block when it comes to producing content to feed your social media dragons: blog, Twitter and Facebook. Once you recognize some of these reasons within yourself, you can break out of writer’s block and let the world know what you have to say.

It needs to be perfect

No it doesn’t! Who told you that? It never needs to be perfect. In fact, if you’re being perfect you’re probably not only alienating your audience but you might actually earn yourself a wedgie for being too much of a nerd.

Besides, it’s not like your words will be etched in stone. Unlike traditional dead tree publishing, our social media output generally never makes it to paper. So don’t worry. When I wrote for the AdAge Digital Next blog, they used to publish my articles first and then do any detailed editing after it was already live.

I routinely do my best when it comes to organizing and editing my own work; however, I always go back and read my posts out loud after they’re live. It’s amazing how much better I am as an editor when I know that folks can already read my post.

The same thing goes with tweets and Facebook Page posts: Go ahead and bring stuff down if you have second thoughts. I am not saying that you should be careless. Social media is not a live press conference where you have to field hostile questions in real time. In social media, always breathe before you respond or hit the submit button.

That said, even if you regret a tweet or the quality of a post, there’s no rule against deleting or editing, there’s only a rule against denying that you deleted or edited. And don’t forget to use strike when you change your mind.

I have just too many ideas to harness!

The best thing about this problem is that you’re not lacking in passion, enthusiasm, or creativity. The best advice I can give you is to write down, as quick as you can, all of the ideas clogging your head into a list, count them, and then be glad that you have X number of blog, Twitter, and Facebook posts queued up well in advance.

Then, choose just one, and just start writing. No form, no objective. Just write on the topic. Try writing exactly the way you would talk about it. The most successful social media content feels less like writing and more like spoken word. If you have the time and inclination, you can chop up what you’ve written and then organize it later. My only suggestion is that you don’t bury the lead. I mean, let’s be honest. You’ll be lucky if your readers get past the first paragraph, the first sentence, or — well, just be sure you get the titles right.

On that note, try to keep your post focused. That’s why it is essential to break all those ideas into little pieces and just write enough to clearly and accurately reflect what you know about the subject. And, since you have so many ideas on your list, if you find that you’re just not into what you’re writing right now, then stop, put that copy away for later into your file drawer and start on another one.

You’re not wasting time, you’re just finding today’s groove. Keep all of your work, even the abandoned pieces — they’ll come in handy later. There’s no such thing as waste in social media.

What if I get myself fired?

This sort of fear generally stems from a very threatening social media policy document or a general lack of experience or a lack of confidence in representing the particular brand, company, product, or service. Generally, the only thing you can do is over-communicate. Nobody can read minds — at least as far as I know — and nobody should have to. Management needs to be very clear as to what is practically appropriate in terms of disclosure, transparency, content, tone, language, and general saltiness.

The best way to work on your confidence is by role playing or message modeling. Message modeling will allow you to write an assortment of blog posts, tweets, and Facebook Page “treatments” for you to run by your managers as a way of vetting what they’re comfortable with. It will have added benefits as well.

First, submitting proposed content and topics to them to review, moderate, and edit will bring them into the loop, include them, and then after a pretty short amount of time, they’ll probably eventually let you know when they feel comfortable with you tweeting, blogging, and Facebooking all on your lonesome.

You, too, will eventually lock into where the boundaries are, the sort of tone they expect, deep in your muscles, and you’ll have the added confidence to have explored your limits in a safe environment and you’ll have naturally integrated the tone and voice most appropriate for your job. No worries.

I hate writing

You really should not be on social media. Social media is all about communicating, mostly in text. This requires writing. If you have writer’s block because you hate writing, you should go up to your boss and let them know that. If you’re in communications and hate writing, you should probably become an accountant.

Or, suck it up, fake it with complete conviction, and hope to become a quick Senior VP and hire someone else to do all your writing for you. Or, find someone else in your office who gets all wiggly whenever anyone mentions Twitter, hashtag, share, tweet, or blog and delegate, punt, or turf the task to her. Or, you can hire me. I personally don’t think someone who believes social media is beneath them can ever succeed in social media.

Can’t happen in the kind of sustainable way required to win the ultra marathon known as social.

I don’t know how to write well enough

If you’re passionate enough to want to, that’s good enough for me; but please don’t do it live on behalf of your brand, your clients, your boss, or your company until you do because there’s nothing that folks in our space judge more harshly than poor grammar. “Really?” you ask, “I see terrible grammar left, right, and center, why don’t those people get called out?”

Well, there’s a difference between someone who knows the rules and breaks them and someone who doesn’t. Know the rules and then decide (dude, don’t break them — but that’s just me).

I am so done with this

It’s time to take a break from social media. All the best of us have taken a break. Honestly, you’re just burnt out. Even the most passionate and wiggly of us all can feel a deep sense of meaninglessness and regret: I think about the 52,515 tweets that make up my very own @chrisabraham Twitter experience and I fantasize about all the spy novels, the experimental odes to Thomas Pynchon, and the small books of acclaimed poetry I have squandered in service to @chrisabraham and this blog. And then I say, in my head so far, “I am so done with this.”

Don’t worry about it. Take some time off and see if your social media heart heals. If it does, welcome back! if it doesn’t, start telling everyone “I hate writing” and see if you can get that promotion to Senior VP and get some other sucker to write pithy corporate marketing copy in the form of editorial content.

Good luck, and I wish you luck and many column inches, 140 characters at a time.

Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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My long tail blogger outreach strategy is periodically challenged or criticized as being too aggressive.

The argument generally goes as follows: If you send thousands of email pitches to topically and demographically relevant bloggers and online influencers in one go, you’re spamming. The real way to do it right is to reach out blogger by blogger, with each pitch being lovingly and relevantly written in series over time after investing months of time, previous to actually initiating a pitch, becoming best friends.

In my opinion, it is virtually impossible to resource enough time, talent and treasure to engage meaningfully with enough people, enough influencers, enough bloggers, to result in the sort of impact required to move the needle with any level of immediacy or timeliness.

To activate every single potentially viable blog and blogger, it’s essential to create efficiencies of engagement, especially when your goal is to pitch further down the long tail of influentials than is practically possible by hand.

Identify accessible & relevant bloggers who are open to a pitch

So, what my version of long-tail blogger outreach does is identifies as many bloggers as possible who are accessible by email and who have a blog germane to the campaign at hand and sends them a quick pitch all at once to quickly discover who is truly interested posting about my client or learning more about what the campaign is about. All at once. 100% discovery, discernment, inquiry, engagement, and response, all within days of the launch of the campaign. With the ultimate goal of as many quality, thoughtful, and topical earned media mentions as possible.

Look for the cumulative power of the long tail

It reminds me of the promise quantum computing has for the world of encryption and code breaking. The best example I can think of that illustrates this is the code-breaking efficiencies of the quantum computer compared to the a brute force attack from a conventional computer.

While even the most advanced computing systems still take millions of years to crack military grade public-key encryption, the promise of the quantum computer is that it will crack even the most inscrutable private diplomatic cable instantaneously no matter the rock hardness of military-grade encryption used.

Why? Because while a conventional computer must iterate through every possible variation in series until it  hits upon the correct permutation, a quantum computer uses a theoretical concept called superposition to spawn every permutation of the private key simultaneously. The funny thing about quantum states is that all iterations, no matter how many required to break the sort of key modern spies use, are not separate or different, they’re all manifestations of one over millions of instances. When the correct password is discovered, all the failed instances fall away and only the successful instance remains.

So, let me break this down to a popular illustration: a Las Vegas hotel with thousands of rooms. One missing engagement ring. Traditional computers needs to check each room individually. A quantum search isn’t just hiring a thousand gamblers to each look in a room individually instantaneously, it’s much cooler than that. In this instance, this quantum bridegroom would create a thousand instances of himself, all him and not copies or clones, in a thousand rooms all at once. Cool, right? When our quantum bridegroom discovers the ring, in one of the thousand rooms, all other concurrent manifestations of him go poof and he stands in room number 1063, holding the ring.

In my experience, one of the reasons why folks are loathe to engage in blogger outreach is because it is a little like going door to door looking for the ring. Or, more aptly, going door to door selling Bibles, vacuums, or Girl Scout cookies. No matter how many salesmen (or Girl Scouts) you have knocking on doors, it’s nothing compared to creating a Girl Scout in quantum superposition, allowing her to sell Thin Mints to all possible houses in the entire neighborhood simultaneously by being in all possible states simultaneously, selling cookies to all the houses that want cookies while not selling cookies to all the carb-free households.

The quantum method of reaching out to bloggers

So, pitching all available bloggers simultaneously allows one to quickly — immediately — discern which bloggers are interesting in carrying the story and which aren’t, allowing my team to decommission all unsuccessful instances, releasing valuable resources, in favor of all instances that result in bona fide social media mentions.

This is not to say this sort of quantum blogger outreach is easy. While there are many efficiencies in this method, the huge number of bloggers one is able to simultaneously engage means that instead of reaching out to a couple-few A-list bloggers-a-day over the course of the year, you are likely to get thousands of responses from bloggers with hundreds of earned social media mentions, none of which can benefit from my mad quantum methods of engagement. Once the connection is made and the relationship is initiated, every next step of the way is completely conventional, completely in-series, person by person, blogger by blogger, conversion by conversion.

Reaching out en masse to thousands of bloggers simultaneously isn’t appropriate for all campaigns or all engagements — bespoke A-list outreach still has a real place in social media and blogger relations — but it can be an essential competitive advantage when launching a book or opening a new movie; activating advocates and allies on a political issue, or to push out information about an event or time-sensitive news. In these scenarios, one cannot invest months and months culling through a media list, failure-by-failure, hoping for success. One needs to quickly separate the chaff from the wheat and then lavish all the resources that would have been spent on all those failures on all that wheat, all those successes.

Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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Free advice is easy to find, quality free advice is a whole different story. 

On March 13th at 11:00 EST, Chris Abraham is going to be dishing out some quality free advice.

Chris, in conjunction with Mike Moran’s Biznology, will be hosting a free 30 minute webinar on how to set up and utilize Google+ for your business. Google+ is the latest social network to pop on the scene and brands are taking notice and starting to add the platform to their current social media marketing mix. In many ways Google+ still remains a bit of a mystery, the dark horse of social networking sites. Chris has set up a webinar to help answer some of the questions surrounding Google+ and how to use Google+ for your brand. The upcoming webinar will walk you through setting up a business profile and provide expert advice on populating your page, maximizing your SEO results, and utilizing Google+ for promoting your brand. After the presentation Chris will be fielding questions live from webinar participants.

Chris has been named by Forbes as one of the Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers, so I think it is safe to say you will be receiving sound advice in the Google+ arena.  It is not every day that you get to pick the brain of a Forbes lister for free, you know? Kidding, but in all seriousness, I’ve run through the presentation with Chris and it is definitely going be worth your 30 minutes. Besides the initial set up, he will dive into the metrics of how to cross pollinate with your other social media accounts and really help you understand how to maximize this platform.

Can we count you in?  You can follow this link to register for the webinar.

Grendle the puppet reviews “YES! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways To Be Persuasive” by Robert Cialdini.

The episode of “Atop The Fourth Wall” that Grendle is talking about is the Mr T #2 comic book review

Altogether a fun and informative read. Do me and Grendle a favor and leave a comment on the Youtube page for this video (http://youtu.be/4bAXImHkJRI), because puppets love comments!

Scott Van Camp of Access Intelligence popped me 35 identical emails to all of my various and sundry email addresses just moment ago to let me know that PR News is doing another PR and Communications Salary Survey.

These surveys make us PR agency owners nervous but what the heck — I am all about transparency!  So, be sure to take the survey before March 12 because the more and better data the have the more accurate and useful the results.

PR News today launched its second annual Salary Survey, which will gather data about the state of salaries, benefits and job satisfaction of PR professionals. The Salary Survey is open to communicators with all job titles in agency, corporate, nonprofit and government settings.

“Our most recent Salary Survey helped shed light on many key questions PR professionals have about jobs, salaries and benefits,” says Diane Schwartz, senior VP and publisher of PR News. “With this current study we’ll be able to do comparisons with the prior results that will uncover important employment trends that communicators will need to know.”

Specifically, such key topics as salary increase/decrease trends, bonuses and soft benefits like maternity leave, flex schedules and telecommuting are covered in the study. In addition, survey data are sliced by age, gender, job titles and geographical regions. Findings in the first Salary Survey were illuminating. For example, 30% of PR pros did not receive a salary increase in 2010, while 50% did not have a bonus plan at their organization.

The deadline for taking the PR News Salary Survey is Monday, March 12. Those who participate in the survey will receive a complimentary copy of the PR News Special Report: “SEO/SEM & Writing for the Web.”

The PR News family of products also includes the weekly PR News publication, the Digital PR Summit, the PR Measurement Conference, the Facebook Conference, PR Webinars and Workshops, PR Guidebooks, Platinum PR Awards, PR People Awards, CSR Awards, Nonprofit PR Awards, 15-to-Watch and more. Visit PR News online at www.prnewsonline.com.

In this video, I walk you through all the nooks and crannies of my favorite new social media sharing and amplification platform called GaggleAMP.

I share the GaggleAMP dashboard from my very own Marketing Conversation gaggle and also share the gaggles I am a member of, including SobelMedia’s, Shel Holtz‘s FIR, and the official GaggleAMP gaggle.

I do my best to share all the features from a Gaggle Manager and Administrator perspective — but I mainly just feature the ones that I use every day, to the chagrin of Glenn Gaudet who keeps on trying to get me to use all the features (oh well).

But even so, I spend a lot of time showing you around just about everywhere, so if you’re curious what GaggleAMP is about, please check it out.

And if you would like to join my Gaggle, please do: http://gaggleamp.com/4+Xsxoj

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• The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #639: February 20, 2012 (nevillehobson.com)
• Day 6: A Gaggle of Emotions (jackandjilly.org)
• Lessons from the Komen Controversy (socialmediatoday.com)
• Brian strikes back: No shortcut for the holy grail of PR (kristoferbjorkman.com)
• The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #636: January 30, 2012 (nevillehobson.com)
• The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #635: January 23, 2012 (nevillehobson.com)

In order to mine social media marketing gold, you really need to roll up your sleeves, put on a pair of sturdy work boots, get into that little elevator, and descend that deep shaft into the gold mine yourself, pick in hand, and get to work.

Message boards and forums are full of marketing gold, but if gold were that simple to collect, everyone would be loaded.

Instead of walking you through the boring pedantics required to be an effective message board marketer, I will instead share with you an exemplar using the author and journalist Paul M. Barrett, author of the new New York Times best-selling book about the cult and culture of the Glock handgun, Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun.

Long story short, I received a direct message via Twitter last November from @GlockTheBook asking me if I might be interested in receiving a copy of a forthcoming book about Glock, the gun. Out of nowhere. Obviously someone had done their homework, and I was identified as a gun owner and sports shooter. I jumped at the opportunity to receive an early copy of the book. The folks at Crown hooked me up with a copy for my Kindle, and I read it through and was wowed. I wrote an earned media review and quickly became part of the author’s street team.

Paul had an ambitious plan: divide and conquer the entire online Glockosphere. His marketing strategy was unique and bold, at least in comparison to other high-caste and high-pedigree writers I have met and consulted for. His marketing plan included not only the influential grass-tops but went for a deep-dive into the passionate world of the firearms, pistols, Glocks, and the Second Amendment grassroots – into the deepest reaches of the gold mine and into the lowly and often-ignored message boards and forums.

As it turned out, his lovely wife Julie Cohen was the reason why Paul reached out to me and to dozens of other gun buffs and communities all over the Internet throughout the course of his book promotion campaign. In fact, I recently discovered that it was Julie who discovered that I was a brand new gun owner who loved taking my Glocks to the range to make holes in paper and sent me the DM asking if I wanted to received an advance copy to review.

Whether Julie is Paul’s puppetmaster, guiding him into the nooks and crannies of Glock-related conversation online no matter where they happen, it was Paul who was willing to get in there, all fisticuffs, and open himself up to trolls and haters in the rarefied air of anonymous communities with the ultimate goal of making friends and selling books. And yet I hope Paul Barrett’s experience marketing online by virtually shaking hands and kissing babies was well worth his valuable time. Actually I know it was. A few weeks ago I got to meet Paul and Julie for coffee in person before he did a reading at Politics & Prose.

Message boards allow others to join the conversation — whenever

I will paraphrase Julie here when I say that no matter how prestigious a live book tour is and how personally fulfilling doing readings in bookstores always is for a writer, tours are insanely expensive, time-intensive, exhausting, and all too often completely ephemeral.

However, when you’re willing to add to this real-world dog and pony show the same kind and quality of community engagement online that you do during the book tour (all from the comfort of your home), then spending the time meeting people online, where they congregate anyway, is worthwhile.

Some of the benefits are simple: Message boards are a permanent record, so all the sharing that Paul did, all the questions he answered, and all the good will he fostered is there for the life of the board. Not only that, but because of the asynchronous nature of message boards, Paul needs to linger around each board for weeks to make sure he’s a responsive participant. It’s not as quick as just popping into a bookstore, spending a few hours reading and chatting, and then leaving.

Message boards aren’t real time. They required Paul to monitor responses and come back over the course of couple of days or a week. This allows more people to engage over time, allowing Paul the ability to really consider his responses or draft and revise his response before committing. It also allows members and participants to get over being star struck and get real.

It also needs to be said that, for every message board member who actively asks questions, makes accusations, or debates an issue, there are at least a hundred, maybe a thousand, non-participants who are every bit as committed to their message board community.

These “lurkers” were completely engaged when they saw Paul and “NYC Shoots” go at it in a heated debate on The High Road forum. By showing commitment to the community and a bit of bravery when challenged, Paul earned respect in the community, earning new fans and protectors as well as showing what he was made of in front of potentially 143,051 High Road registered members.

If bravery, boldness, and heroism under duress and challenge can’t sell books, I don’t know what can. If Paul M. Barrett, an assistant managing editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and author of American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion and The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America, still thinks it is essential to engage the lowly, antiquated message board and forum as part of his book publicity tour, what’s your excuse?

Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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For managers of websites, online businesses, and blogs, having an internet marketing strategy often means having the simple goal of bringing traffic to your site. Such tactics and platforms as SEO, social media, and embedded advertising are used to attract people’s attention and improve search result rankings – all with the ultimate goal of driving visitor traffic.

While traffic on its own can help a site boost its page rank and consequently bring in more traffic, the real purpose of bringing visitors to your site in the first place is to get them engaged and to sell them a product. For the blogger, this product may simply be the affiliate marketing ventures promoted on the page. For the business, of course, the product is the good or service that a given business actively sells. Using SEO to bring in traffic is a useless exercise if none of that traffic turns into customers and purchases.

On this note, the online business is best served to view its marketing strategy as a two-step customer creation approach: first, utilize techniques that can bring potential customers to the site, and second, turn those potential customers into legitimate and paying ones.

Accomplishing that second key step requires building a website conducive towards forging connections with first-time visitors. A visitor who forges a connection with a business is one who leaves an interaction with an emotional preference for that company’s product or service. Someone who arrives at the site and has no knowledge or opinion of the business can, when actively engaged, be turned quickly into a repeat and loyal customer.

Here are a few tips for making this happen:

Incorporate Live Chat

Consumers always want to know that there is a persona and a human touch behind every small business, company site, or corporate entity. One of the best ways to easily add a personal touch to your website is by incorporating a business live chat option. By just clicking on a box and typing in a query or a question, the visitor can expect a quick response during daytime hours. A software program such as Velaro live help can painlessly make live chat an integral feature of your business’ site. Doing so allows the first-time visitor the ability to ask questions, communicate with a real person, and hopefully forge a connection in the process.

Use Video

Studies have shown that visitors to a website are more intrigued – and more likely to hang around – when an interesting-looking video is prominently displayed in place of a similar piece of text. Video is also a great medium for creating connections on an individual level. How can a business do this? There are two main approaches that have proved most successful. The first, perfected by companies such as Zappos, involves making videos that relate everyday occurrences among employees and attempt to show that the business operates with a good dose of humor. The second, pioneering by businesses like Brooks Running, strives to highlight the emotional connection that people can feel with the company’s products. Both approaches are now being used in video posts across the internet.

Provide Stories

Many businesses see the inclusion of sections on their websites such as “Our History” and “Customer Testimonials” to be unnecessary and peripheral to the site’s main purpose. But these sections can go a long way towards telling a story – a story that could help a first-time visitor perceive your business as different from all the others out there. Between the humble origins described in your history and the rave testimonials that contextualize your product or service in a real-world situation, the stories provided on your site can go a long way towards creating an explicit identity that is clear to even the first-time visitor.

These are a few of the ways that a business website can attempt to quickly build an emotional connection with a first-time visitor. While it is important that your advertising efforts bring in those first-time visitors in the first place, don’t forget that your marketing job is not yet complete until the new visitors become repeat guests, who in turn, hopefully, will become loyal customers.

The problem with most social media marketing agencies is that we’re fickle.

We tend to keep rushing into the future, adopting anything and everything hot and new and overlooking the rest. In our constant hunger for the latest and greatest, we have mostly abandoned working class heroes like forums and message boards, preferring exciting new money to boring old money. But isn’t any kind of money good?

Unlike Friendster and MySpace, these message boards are generally privatel -held and heavily sponsored. They’re also pretty well monetized, from offering membership levels to running raffles; from placing in-line textual ads to being framed by banners. Additionally, most of the more popular forums have over 5,000 active users and have been online for well over half a decade. Since they’re not tied to Facebook or MySpace, they’re safe from the fickle tide of funding or popularity. These forums don’t care about what happens at Facebook, they only care about whether they can pay their escalating server and bandwidth fees.

What’s even better is that forum application developers such as vBulletin have hungrily adopted all the best parts of all the blogging platforms, publishing frameworks, social networking services, microblogging platforms, photo sharing sites, and social graphic services. It’s pretty amazing how comprehensive and mature these message board suites have become.

How do I know this? About a year ago I picked up a new hobby: shooting sports. I knew nothing about it but I knew where to go: forums and message boards.

There has been a real renaissance in both blogs and message boards because of social media and the ability to share, cross pollinate, and make easy reference to not only boards but to threads and replies. Most message boards have adopted all of the modern conveniences offered by blogs, including RSS feeds, email reminders, email updates, social media share buttons for Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and others.

Additionally, if you happen to visit a message board or forum using your iPhone or Android, you’re likely to receive a pop-up that lets you know that there’s an app made especially for your device that will allow you to easily and simply read, post, and share on that online community site.

Mobile devices today can not only read and post to message boards but also help you discover other boards and forums. Mobile has opened up ease-of-access via smart phones, Androids, iPhones, iPads, and tablets. Not only that but access via mobile devices strips ugly advertisements, garish color choices, and a plethora of in-line and banner ads.

And if you thought that blogs are like catnip to Google organic search then you need to explore the prevalence of message boards and forums in the top results of their respective topics. This is important for several important reasons: first, it seems to me that while message boards and forums are still powerful platforms for sharing, conspiring, debating, and alerting, forums have gone out of favor among the digerati.

Unfortunately, if you look at the sort of topics that have popular forums, they’re generally not at the social media cutting edge, they’re less meta — social media about social media about social media — and more practical: What caliber should I get in my first hunting rifle? What protein supplement should I buy for my CrossFit obsession?

Even though these may well be places where you can just pop in, look around, and find what you need without even registering, they can also be decades old, and all associated protocol and terms of engagement must apply. These are tight communities and if you don’t know much about virtual communities and message boards, they’re real families and the mothers and fathers of these communities are the owners, the uncles and aunties are the members with the high post counts. And, you really should take post count and join date very seriously, too, because message boards and forums are one of the few places in today’s anti-anonymity Internet that still encourages being who you are while also protecting your identity.

How message boards became a nightly ritual

My first return to message board was RimFire Central because my first pistol was a Ruger Mk III “678″ Target. At that time, I was maneuvering clumsily via their web interface. It felt antiquated and it was tough to sort out my latest posts or responses I needed to engage. Later, after getting my first Glock, I joined Glock Talk via my iPhone and it offered me the ability to download OutdoorHub, the sponsored app for GT. It opened everything up for me because it became as easy to track new content, unread posts and replies, and engage both via the boards or via personal message from one single place.

However, I soon wanted to read Rimfire Central the same way. And local shooting boards like Maryland Shooters Forum and VA Gun Owners Forum. I then discovered Tapatalk, an app for my iPhone that does cost $4.99 but is well worth it. I just checked and Tapatalk has an app for the iPad, Android, Blackberry and Chrome. The only thing it doesn’t have is iCloud support, which supposedly is in the works — so all the boards I am registered with on my iPhone don’t translate over to my iPad.

Then, after I got to know Tapatalk better, I started exploring their Network directory of cataloged forums available and discovered and joined other shooting sports communities, including The High Road Forum, Remington Owners Forum, Elsie Pea Forum, The Original CZ Forum, Defensive Carry Concealed Carry Forum. Now, over time, these communities have become a rightly rite, and I have accrued 431 posts on Glock Talk. And, to be honest, nobody has really paid any attention to me at all on Glock Talk until now and I am really hoping that I am able to earn some awe and fear by the time I make my 1,000th post.

In next week’s post I want to go into how to market to message boards. I have recently seen a maestro in action in the form of Paul M. Barrett, author of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, a new book that is categorized by Amazon as a Company Profile involving social U.S. history, and conventional weapons & warfare. When Paul started promoting online, he didn’t limit his online pre-sales time and energy to just blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. He recognized that the most passionate owners, collector, and proponents of the shooting sports spend a lot of their time learning, sharing, bragging, and teaching on online message boards and that he needed to engage these communities before his book went on sale to the public if he wanted to get the kind of buzz and word of mouth he needed to be able to reach the least obvious but most important brand ambassadors.

It was really a beautiful thing to see, honestly, especially after I spent years marketing on message boards and forums when I was an online analyst and project manager at New Media Strategies. Things have changed a lot since I was promoting brand online in message boards and the state of the art has evolved, become more savvy, but is very ripe and very transparent.

Man, I have a lot to share with you next week, I can’t wait!

Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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The basic rule of thumb is that any strong Internet marketing strategy is going to employ the efforts of professional search engine optimization consultants, or, at the very least, use SEO as the axis of all efforts. But as we enter a world where people are using different methods of finding online information besides via search engine, those new to the Internet marketing game can’t afford to make the mistake of thinking SEO is the end-all-be-all of getting online attention. In particular, personal assistant apps such as the iPhone’s Siri will pose unique challenges in the years ahead.

As more and more individuals use their mobile devices to conduct searches for businesses, and as more and more of these devices incorporate voice-recognizing personal assistant apps into the user experience, search engines will be used less and less. While not immediate and sure to take several years, the transition from text-based searches dominating the hunt for online information to AI-empowered means of finding such knowledge making up a massive portion of the pie is certain to happen within the next decade.

If you want to mix a progressive long-term marketing strategy in with the guidance of a professional SEO company, just consider the following likelihoods that are expected to come about once personal assistant apps such as Siri become mainstream:

Google is bypassed: As mainly stated previously, personal assistant apps will utilize non-SEO factors to decide “the closest mechanic” such as online reviews and GPS. Therefore, your attempts to secure the top spot for “Seattle auto mechanic” as a Google search won’t matter as much. When deciding where to focus the little you have to spend on marketing, knowing this inevitability is important.

PPC is pointless: With more and more people using hands-free forms of searching, less and less clicking will be conducted. Therefore pay-per-click campaigns, which have rarely seen success these days anyway, are going to become even harder to make a profit from. PPC is dead, don’t let any consultant tell you otherwise.

Local references will matter more: Because of the emphasis on geographical location during a personal assistant app search, companies will have to spend more effort at getting ranked on such sites and services as Foursquare and Facebook Places. Again, this will draw investment away from SEO, as well as the importance of the search engine itself.

All realms of social media will come into play: The thing about personal assistant apps is they won’t be able to do it alone – Android, Apple, and et cetera will be incorporating several third-parties into their personal assistant app searches, many of which will vary from app to app. Thus, it’s going to become crucial that companies get on board with every social media strata that will be used for such searches. Otherwise you could become invisible to a whole swath of consumers whose personal assistant apps won’t register you.

The search engine will remain a pillar of Internet marketing, but don’t mistaken it for the foundation of the future of being found online. The search is changing, specifically the searcher. This means big changes for SEO, and new ideas from Internet marketers.seo

I recently finished reading “Getting Past No” by William Ury and decided to create a video review about the book. Great book! Check out what I have to say in the video below:

Transcript:

Hi I’m HowToPhil and I’m going to be reviewing “Getting Past No” by William Ury.

William Ury is the director of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard University, so he knows negotiation.

This is a book about negotiating in difficult situations and with difficult people. In it he covers every element of negotiation in a difficult situation and still managing to come to an agreement.

It’s peppered with stories and anecdotal evidence and tips here and there as well.

I would suggest it as a great read.

On an informational level I’d give it 5 out of 5 stars. It’s full of information from a man who knows negotiation.

And on an entertainment level I would also give it 5 out of 5 stars. The stories are well written, he adds a nice warm voice to the subject and it’s hard to put down.

So again, I would suggest getting “Getting Past No” by William Ury. If you have any questions or comments, leave them in the comments section below. And I hope that you all have a nice day. Bye.

In an effort to make a lighter weight Social Media News Release Template I created the SNAP (Social Network Announcement Page) template:

Social Network Announcement Page (SNAP) was created by leveraging the Bootstrap from Twitter framework and my previous Clean And Simple Social Media News Release Template

You can download SNAP (Social Network Announcement Page) for free and modify it for your own needs. You’ll need a decent understanding of HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc, but it’s a good starting point.

You can also embed the entire SNAP into another website (currently only in 300×300 iframe) and the CSS takes care of making it look good. Take a look here:

<iframe style="width:300px;height:300px" src="http://smnr.howtophil.com/snap"><br /><a href="http://smnr.howtophil.com/snap"></a></iframe>

Feel free to let me know what you think and if you use it. Thanks.

If you want to succeed in running a kitchen for the homeless in Washington, DC, or have wildly successful social media marketing campaigns, it all comes down to one thing: do you respect and appreciate your guests?

Do you cut-corners and just serve slop or do you prepare organic, healthy, and delicious meals with an obsession for presentation and taste?

I volunteer as sous chef at a Washington, DC, homeless kitchen. They serve fresh, organic dinners to folks who really need a healthy meal. Miriam’s Kitchen treats everyone who dines there as respected and honored guests. I have learned a lot about how to be a much better social media marketer as a direct result of working both in the kitchen as a sous chef and also as dining room captain. Can someone who isn’t in love with the taste of food be a top chef? You know what they say, “never trust a skinny chef.”

Well, it seems to me that there are quite a few PR and marketing companies that aren’t in love with social media. Even worse, they have downright contempt for the honest denizens of social media. Can you truly be effecting in social media marketing, digital PR, and SEO if you’re not completely in love with it? Can one ever trust a skinny social media maven?

And even if you’re not in love with social media, can you be truly effective if you don’t taste what you make? If you’re too “busy” or too “above” rolling up your sleeves and getting into the kitchen, can you actually create social media campaigns that are fashionable, timely, au courant? Are you serving campaigns that nobody’s ordering — and would you even know?

Too often, for too many traditional agencies, social is just another channel, another product to sell in order to be integrated and full-service — there’s very little passion — or respect — for online community. Much of this is not intentional, it’s just that “full-service” agencies, and their practitioners, are oftentimes spread too thin over too many media and too broad mission.

It reminds me of a recent experience I had at Miriam’s: I prepared enough sauce to feed one-hundred-and-fifty homeless men and women and forgot to even taste it. Seriously. I was so busy chopping onions, peeling and crushing tomatoes; browning the onion and garlic; and adding oregano, basil, olive oil, salt, and pepper in the too short amount of time I had that I never dipped in a plastic tasting spoon to see if it all worked together.

I looked at my watch: I was on time! However, I looked over at John Murphy, head dinner chef at Miriam’s Kitchen, and my boss.

“How does it taste?” he asked. I looked at him dumbfounded.

“We can’t feed our guests with food that doesn’t taste good,” John continued while dipping a clean plastic tasting spoon into the sauce and tasting it, “that you wouldn’t eat and enjoy yourself — you need to always monitor the food you’re cooking by both taste and presentation.”

“I know we’re in a rush but you must put yourself out there in the dining room and you must make sure what you serve isn’t just nutritious, organic and fresh but also appealing to the eye and palate.”

In my mad rush to deliver, I completely forgot that the food I was preparing didn’t just have to get done but also needed to be delicious, compelling, appealing, and well-seasoned. And, so I tasted. It was bland.

I doctored it up and the results were delicious — and so was the presentation, with fresh basil and rosemary adding green to a sea of red when it was finally served to the kitchen’s guests. So, what happens if you’re not willing to be an active participant in the flavor of the meals you serve.

Corporate folks used to call it “eating your own dog food,” right?

What I see in the social media marketing and PR space, however, are lots of folks who are cooking and cooking and cooking without ever taking an interest in tasting. What I mean in this case is that there are too many social media marketers who have zero interest in social media, social networks, technology, or online community.

And, even if you do taste-as-you-go, how’s your palette? Maybe you’re serving fast food but you have a foodie palate — are you able to connect with your guests cook to their unique taste in food? Are you able to produce meals that appeal to your guests or do you feel contempt for their lack of sophistication, always trying to force tastes and textures that might, in fact, disgust them and drive them away, never to return.

How well do you know the palette of your market online? How much of a died-in-the-wool social media consumer are you yourself? How engaged are you on Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter, or Google+ yourself? — to say nothing of message boards, forums, or reddit.

You make think your know how to market to online denizens but just because you may understand how to market or promote using traditional tools to traditional markets doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to map those strategies directly to this new, vibrant, global online market — or, to map those recipes directly to your new restaurant.

Are you invested in social media? Are you a fanboy or fangirl of social networks? Do you spend too much time developing online relationships in online communities? Are you the first person rushing around to try to get an invite to Pinterest, for example? If not, do you really have the sort of passion and commitment to knowing your audience well enough to be able to cook for them?

Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on Marketing Conversation, but I return bearing a gift!

I was setting up a social media news release for HowToPhil and decided to try out Bootstrap from Twitter as a framework. After a few hours I constructed my SMNR and then also stripped out all the HowToPhil branding to make a template I could release to all of you:

Check out the HowToPhil SMNR

Download the Clean And Simple Social Media News/Press Release By HowToPhil

Take a look at what the Clean And Simple Social Media News/Press Release Template looks like before you modify it

You can quickly set up a social media news/press release using this template if you have a fairly decent understanding of HTML, CSS, javascript, etc.

The latest version will always be available on HowToPhil.com.

Let me know if you have questions or suggestions for making the template better. I’m also interested in links to sites that are using my template and just good old fashion compliments.

Sixty percent of Americans will judge your company based on your online presence, think about that for a moment. Though your website plays an important role in your online presence, there is more to it. People search for your brand and judge your company based on what comes up on search engines as well. Investing in online PR helps you manage your online presence and it isn’t something that solely belongs in the future. In fact, it is becoming a vital part of any marketing strategy in this day and age. Having a powerful online presence can put your brand leaps and bounds ahead of the competition with minimal effort on your behalf. Do you want to set your brand apart? Well you need to be tech savvy in our tech-savvy world.

Via PRMarketing.com

The status of marketing is at a crossroads right now, where the paradigms of the past are fading away concurrently to the birth of future ones, with little to no place for the present. Sound confusing? Well, it is. The rise of the online reputation managment company, for example, isn’t the only harbinger of the changing of the guards. As far as the value of the Internet in corporate branding, social media and several new technological phase-changes are sweeping in a new era of marketing strategies. Here are some of the tops examples:

Real time communication. Because it is now possible to undertake projects collaboratively and in real-time using a combination of cloud services and social media, marketers possess the ability to micro-manage their campaigns far more effectively. Real time social media interactions make it so that companies can now custom-tailor their marketing campaigns to meet the latest developments in the real world and mirror the latest online trends.

By integrating Google alerts with keywords you can even stay on top of the international dynamics of real-time marketing. The resistance to using social media in marketing is rooted in not understanding that the benefits of social media lie fundamentally in its real-time nature. Facebook Hangouts is just the beginning. Fusions of services like Skype, Google docs, and Twitter will make marketing an incredibly fluid process that requires sophisticated online skills and entirely new divisions.

Virtual reality communities. In addition to traditional advertising and newer strategies like inbound marketing, the future of online marketing will be heavily focused on virtual reality marketing that can target people spend much of their time as avatars. Digital TV, strengthened fiber optic networks, the bundling of cable, phone and Internet services and 4G networks, as well as the popularity of cutting edge gaming platforms like Wii and Kinect make it clear that in the future more and more people people will use the Internet for much of their recreational time. It’s also likely that more and more people will take part in communities like Second Life, which already has a burgeoning niche economy and online currency. The coming years should see a growing emphasis on marketing to virtual reality communities.

Smartphones everywhere. The incredible rise of the smartphone as a ubiquitous personal assistant puts it in the crosshairs of all marketers as the next great battlefield. Accompanying location-based social media sites like Foursquare and Gowalla will come a legion of marketing teams. They will look to utilize smartphone advertising in conjunction with advanced real-time communication, augmented reality browsers, and other coming developments. The public sphere will continue to be the hunting ground of marketers, but it will the public sphere 3.0, the one infused into our mobile devices.

These three examples—real time communication, virtual reality communities, and smartphones—underscore the rapid change in marketing strategies. As the commercial world sees physical space merges with cyber space, we can expect consumers to demand more of their Internet providers and more savviness from marketers.

It is an undeniable fact that everyone has started to take notice of the powerful impact that a well targeted blogger outreach campaign can have on a product.

PR shops tailored specifically at reaching bloggers are popping up all over the place, and why shouldn’t they? There are millions of bloggers and even more blog readers. It would be a tragedy to leave these influencers untapped.In my position at Abraham Harrison

I am fortunate enough to serve as a bit of a gate-keeper in regards to the various pitches that come in for Chris Abraham.

Since we are in the industry of blogger outreach, and have been for 5 years now, I find these pitches to be quite interesting (even if they aren’t necessarily pitches that are applicable to Chris).

I like to look at the layout of the pitch. Are they tracking the email? Do they include links? Where are they linking to? Is there a social media news release? How easy are they making it for bloggers to post about their product?

Now I have a confession to make. On occasion, I like to take this curiosity one step further (I view it as scoping out the competition) and well, I like to respond. But not with your typical responses of “Great, I’ll make sure Chris sees this!” or “Thank you, but no, this isn’t a fit”. I like to throw them curve balls.

Most recently Chris received a timely pitch for a Facebook app called The Mural of Love (here, I will even throw y’all a bone and provide the link he was sent http://apps.facebook.com/themural).

What caught my attention was this email was a follow up email to an earlier sent message that I had merely chosen to ignore. I admired their persistence, it is something we incorporate into our campaigns as well. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

So, I read the pitch and clicked the link.

Side note: to access the application I had to grant permission to my Facebook page, that is where I declined and lost interest altogether. I find whenever I do that, “I” end up posting on ex-boyfriend’s walls, or inviting my 75-year old Nana to play “Drug Wars” with me, completely without my knowledge or endorsement. Had I been provided with a Social Media News Release and more information before having to allow access perhaps I would have continued. I digress, back to the story.

Now, if any of you know anything about Chris you know this…While he may be a hopeless romantic/social media guru, the odds of him combining these two things and paying to send virtual teddy bears, flowers, and chocolates to his potential suitors’ Facebook pages are pretty slim. At his age, and this point in his seasoned love life, I truly hope he has advanced past this type of digital flirtation. For goodness sakes, he is a Forbes Top 50 Most Powerful Social Media Influencer, he can’t just be posting teddy bears all over the place!

Curiosity killed the cat and I had to email back. I said….

“Thank you, XXXXXX, but Chris is a middle aged bachelor so I am not sure that this app has much relevance to him.

I do admire your persistence, the brevity of your message model, and as a fellow practitioner I have some suggestions. I really think you all could benefit from incorporating social media news releases into your pitches.

When you are “cold emailing” and asking someone to click on a link and grant access to their Facebook wall more information prior to making that request would be beneficial. We do social media news releases for all of our clients. They not only make it easier for bloggers to post, but they also provide any and all information available for the blogger to research.

So they can rest assured that this is a legitimate pitch, offer, product, etc. I would love to hop on a call with you and/or your CEO and talk a little bit further about SMNR’s and how we might be able to help you offer them for your clients.”

What response do you think I got back?

………….radio silence……………

Which resulted in what? Me writing this post as a precautionary tale of how you need to have a contingency plan for all kinds of responses.

Bloggers are an eclectic, cheeky, and brutally honest bunch. You can’t just fire and forget because you don’t like the response you get back, or it is something out of the ordinary.

The out of the ordinary responses are the ones you have to be the most careful with!

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While neither marketing nor social media are sciences, one needs to use scientific principles to be most effective when it comes to both branding and prospecting online. It doesn’t take an Einstein to succeed in social media marketing, but to does take a scientist. Are you rigorously collecting metrics and data to see if what you’re doing is resulting in sales conversions or extending your brand or are you relying on things you’ve learned from The Secret? Is your social media marketing campaign relying too much on magical realism, the power of positive thinking, and general superstition?

Or, are you so confident in your social media marketing plan that you really don’t care what your experiment says? That no matter how little pick-up you get in the media or no matter how few followers you garner or how little engagement, it isn’t your fault but must be because the market’s not ready for you or because you knew that social media marketing wasn’t effective anyway.

Well, that’s just bad science. Don’t let your social media hypothesis dictate your conclusion

If you want to be an effective scientist, it is essential that you allow the results of your experiments — your observations — to speak for themselves. While having a hypothesis going into the lab is always part one, allowing the empirical data to realign or even contradict your initial predictions is essential. That said, it’s hard on the ego to see something fail. It’s even harder to take the data as it comes and turn it into something useful in the end. This is how innovation happens, of course; and this is how scientific breakthroughs happen, too: not incrementally but in finding order in the chaos of unpredicted results.

There is a lot of bad science in social media marketing. Even a long decade after the Cluetrain Manifesto brought us the 95 theses that taught us that markets are conversations and that brands don’t own their brands anymore — a hypothesis that has proven itself prophetic — there are still many brands that have adopted blogs and social networks simply as new broadcast channels and have simply used social media as a handy way of listening in on the rude thing that people are saying about them.

Science is about testing. Testing and retesting and being willing and able to cut loose any and all processes that prove ineffective and moving those resources into things that either work outright or show general promise. It is about not being attached to outcome. Finally, it is also about sticking to your guns and powering through on your commitment to seeing your experiments and your tests through. There are too many ghost towns littering social media that are the direct result of abandoned experiments, abandoned dreams — actually, more often, they succumbed to a crisis of faith.

The advertising industry has already adopted science and testing, but not because they wanted to. These were not men who had faith in science — they thought that advertising was an art. While early online marketing started to make advertising nervous, it wasn’t until Google launched AdWords that advertising began to evolve from art to science. The same thing is happening to direct marketing. From A/B testing to sophisticated engagement metrics, the science of advertising and marketing is becoming more de facto than fringe.

PR as the last bastion of magical thinking

PR is the last bastion of The Secret, the last bastion of superstition and magical thinking. The last business communication vocation that struggles against the harsh accountability of hard science, the cruel nakedness of quantitative metrics over the soft fuzzies of qualitative metrics.

Just because you’ve adopted social media doesn’t mean you’re modern. It is strangely possible to map your 19th century PR strategies onto a 21st century media platform without missing a beat. Take responsibility for your campaigns and do not let your hunches and experience dictate your successes and failures — let the data inform you and when it informs you that you’re just spinning your wheels, it is essential to do whatever it takes to adjust your campaign to maximize performance, amplify influence, and optimize for conversions.

Everything else is just doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, a sure sign of insanity — or so said none other than Albert Einstein.

Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

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Bloggers, site managers, and SEO specialists are always looking for new ways to boost traffic to their page and exposure for their business. They use social media platforms to market their website, they utilize backlinks and interactive features to maximize views and click-throughs, and they try to increase conversion rate with live chat software. Now, many of these people are looking to an old medium as the next frontier for online marketing and SEO: video.

By now, you’ve probably heard of the many benefits that video content can offer. For a marketer, it can drive traffic by diversifying your site’s content, its sophistication, and its likelihood of appearing towards the top of an organic Google search. On the SEO front, video allows for the incorporation of keywords and media libraries that can boost a site’s page rank. Video is also an appealing platform for advertisers (among whom embedded video ads are currently all the rage) and social media experts (who can more successfully integrate a site and a social media page through the use of video). There’s no question about it: video is all the rage these days, and people from all walks of internet life have been racing to get on board.

So for all these reasons, you may naturally be looking to start making video posts yourself. But there’s just one problem: you don’t know what content to put in these videos. You have an online business or blog upon which written content is not unfamiliar, but you have no idea how to translate that into video – and, moreover, how to make videos that will also engage the viewer and positively promote your business in the process.

On that note, here are a few of the most successful and proven approaches that you can take when it comes to video content:

-The Humorous Infomercial. This approach allows online businesses to contrast a serious written tone with a humorous video approach. Humor is a great way to interest and engage the viewer, after all, and the infomercial setting provides a great way to explicitly market a product or service without being forceful about it.

-The Corporate Culture. Some video marketers take a more relaxed and less scripted approaching, opting instead to showcase the business’ employers using the company’s products or services around the office. The shoe retailer Zappos has used this style with considerable success.

-The Informative One-On-One. Many videos will simply show the blogger, business owner, or site manager talking candidly into the camera. While these videos may not generate as much excitement as more humorous ones, they provide a great forum to address consumer issues and put a human face onto a virtual enterprise. Companies such as Google have made extensive use of this technique.

These are just a few of the main approaches taken towards video content. No matter what approach you choose, make sure that your video is clear, professional, and informative on some level. If done correctly, you will hopefully realize a traffic or SEO boost as a result.

…And he gets double credit for being 33, my favorite number. The man, the myth, the legend has done it again. Abraham Harrison President Chris Abraham made the cut this week as one of Forbes Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers. Way to go! He’s in great company alongside Chris Brogan, President of Human Works and Gary Vaynerchuk– wine and video king. The list was compiled using PeekYou’s social pull metrics, a handy tool measuring the number of people in your secondary networks. Check out the whole list and let us know who else you think you have made the cut.

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To follow up on my last post, Being pretty isn’t enough for social media success, I wanted to discuss what I like to call Social Media Isolationism or Social Media Agoraphobia. And there are two forms of this sort of isolationism: invitational and exclusionary. They both mean you don’t venture outside your own four social media walls; however, the first is welcoming and the other is dismissive.

The welcoming pineapple

Jay Gatsby was a welcoming pineapple. He desperately wanted to woo his beloved Daisy and opened his grand home hoping he just might, one night, find her at one of his lavish parties. Or, at the very least, create enough buzz so that his lost love might hear of him and ask about him.

Not always the direct result of a grand romantic gesture, the welcoming pineapple is often associated with the feeling that one is so appealing, so compelling a brand, product, or service that your friends and neighbors should very well come a-calling. You host awesome dinner parties, right? You have the biggest television, have your own pool and tennis court, and have several guest rooms. Why would you ever want to leave your own social media home?

Why wouldn’t everyone want to take advantage of your generosity and party favor to want to go anywhere else, to say nothing of staying home in their pallid, beige, one-bedroom apartments? This generosity often comes with the stink of superiority or ego that eventually turns people off.

And if the proffered goodies are so compelling as to compel, this commitment might very well be contingent only upon the bounty, the booty, the swag lavished. In other words, your friends are bought and paid for and are your friends forever (or until you run out of cookies and candies and a subscription to cable).

In terms of a country, this open-border country would be glad to allow anyone in but since this country is obviously so awesome, offering everything and anything you could very well ever want in the first place, people just visit, nobody really ever leaves and a majority don’t even possess a passport.

Good fences make good neighbors

There are other social media isolationists who treat their following like a gardener maintains a Bonsai tree: letting it grow then pruning it back. Limiting its natural growth patterns with the goal of cultivating something elegant, controllable, exceptional, and beautiful — and planned. The operative word here is control.

There is a strong desire among the good fences variety of social media isolationists to want to maintain a semblance of control over brand perception, brand response, and brand buzz. This social media isolationist would surely turn off (or moderate) comments if at all possible.

This form of social media agoraphobic never lowers himself to engaging with riffraff and never suffers fools gladly. In many cases, he blocks competitors, rarely follows anyone back, and limits real engagement to the worthy and the notable. Only A-listers need apply.

This is the sort of social media expert who most likely has a pristine living room with white couches and chairs neatly enshrined in a clear vinyl cover. This is the sort of person who collects beautiful heritage silver and china, never to see the copious staining gravies and beet juice of a holiday dinner.

It doesn’t matter that social media is, by its very nature, chaotic, organic, anonymous, spontaneous, unpredictable, and crazy; it means nothing that the life of something beautiful can readily be strangled out of it when the collar’s too tight; and it means nothing that your detailed business plan and marketing strategy may be too macro, too myopic — that what you’ve made exclusively for one use may well be adopted “off prescription” for something completely different and more profitable — something this sort of isolationist would very well never be able to see.

And, if he could, he wouldn’t want it that way because that’s not the right way and it shouldn’t be done this way. Social media’s just not cricket.

In terms of a country, this walled-up land would be glad to exclude everyone; but, more realistically, it’s willing to limit visas and green cards to only the pedigreed: money, power, influence, esteem, connections, or education. Full funding for controlled borders and everyone had better carry their papers with them. I mean, why allow anyone in, since this country is obviously so awesome.

A majority possess passports; however, why leave? Too much chaos, uncertainty, and people who don’t look like the sort of people they’re used to.

Social media globalists unite

Neither the welcoming pineapple nor the good fences are effective in social media marketing because there are innately no borders in the Internet. Yes, maybe there is are language and cultural barriers, but these are as meaningless as the lines that separate nation states.

The Internet has rendered the world flat. Facebook is expected to reach a billion members in April.

And that’s to say nothing of the bloggers, the tweeters, the pinsters, the borders, the messengers, the redditers, the diggers, the flickrers, the tumblrs, the googlers, and, yes, even the spacers — they’re global, they curious, they’re ambitious, and they have as much right to your attention as anyone else.

Whether you’re an exclusionary or inclusive isolationist, you’re still unwilling to leave your social media homeland. You’re unwilling to go out there and meet your future real best friends. Instead, you either having to buy them or remain too afraid and afeard to make friends at all–or at least the wrong type of friends.

To be sure, you’ll never know where your next windfall will come from. You also don’t know who that fairy godmother is or what she looks like. It’s essential to get out there and spend some of your time and energy going exploring, finding new lands and new faces, and expanding your natural core, your natural base.

While there may well be zero barriers to you because the Internet has flattened the business world for you, there are also zero barriers between you and your best future customers! So, go git ‘em Tiger!

Via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology

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