Posts Tagged ‘social media’
The Nifty 50 Top Women of Twitter for 2011
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011Few phenomena have ever spread as far and grown as rapidly as social media; obviously, this has tapped into something essential to our nature. What is it? The answer may come from the email marketing field. According to a recent study by email service provider Aweber, four simple words virtually guaranteed to get an email opened are: “You are not alone.”
That is what has driven social media adoption. From freedom seekers living under oppressive regimes connecting with each other and with people around the world who support them, to individuals with uncommon viewpoints or highly specialized professional interests connected with the like-minded anywhere on the globe, social media is about not being alone. It’s a way to find and form relationships with others who share our particular interests and passions, whether down the street or on other continents; interesting people with whom there has been no practical way to engage before.
Talking recently with Cheryl Burgess (@ckburgess)—partner and CMO at Blue Focus Marketing, a B2B social branding consultancy firm in Bridgewater, New Jersey; 2011 & 2010 winner of the Twitter Shorty Awards in Marketing; and author of the Blue Focus Marketing Blog—we were both struck by how many of the same people we know through social media (and we both learned about some interesting new people to follow as well). Many of these were other B2B marketers, but others were social media experts, journalists, PR professionals, or just plain fascinating personalities.
Cheryl and I thought it would be a great idea to collaborate on this special social media project—and so the process began for creating the 2011 #Nifty50 List of Top Twitter Women. We decided to recognize and share the names of some of these noteworthy individuals with our respective readers and followers, starting today with 50 remarkable women (just in time for Mother’s Day, as we’re pretty certain that every woman on this list either is a mom, has a mom, knows someone who’s a mom, or some combination thereof).
One source of inspiration was Twitter’s Top 75 Badass Women by Diana Adams (@adamsconsulting) and Amy D. Howell (@HowellMarketing), a list on which Cheryl was honored. Though it’s a remarkable list, to keep ours distinct we haven’t duplicated any of Diana and Amy’s picks.
Next month, we are following up with our list of 50 men, just in time for Father’s Day. This list will be posted on Cheryl Burgess’ Blue Focus Marketing Blog. Whatever your role in social media, we hope you find this list valuable in expanding your knowledge and your network.
Jennifer Aaker
@aaker
Jennifer is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School or Business, and author of The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change
Diana Adams
@adamsconsulting
Diana is a USC grad now based in Atlanta. She heads up Adams Consulting Group, a technical services firm specializing in Apple Macintosh desktops, servers and laptops. Diana writes for BitRebels.com and InkRebels.com, and as noted above, her post on Twitter’s Top 75 Badass Women was one source of inspiration for this #Nifty50 list. She’s smart, personable, sometimes controversial and never dull.
Alicia Arenas
@AliciaSanera
Hailing from San Antonio, Alicia is founder and CEO of Sanera, a professional development and training firm for sales and business leaders. She describes herself as a “small business coach, speaker, corporate trainer, blogger, singer, lover of life, dreams, family and God.” Alicia is a warm and outgoing social media pro and creator of March Marketing Madness.
Allison Mooney
@allimooney
Allison lives in the New York City area and works with the Marketing team at Google to explore the changing face of media, mobile and consumer behavior, drive new thinking internally, and communicate Google’s visionary concepts to wider audiences.
Ambal Balakrishnan
@Ambal
Ambal is co-founder of ClickDocuments, based in Silicon Valley. She’s an entrepreneur, marketer, blogger, and alum of Wharton and Purdue. Her Connect the Docs blog—frequently featured on the B2B Marketing Zone—is a platform for her own thought leadership content as well as frequently solicited insights from other B2B bloggers.
Amber Buhl
@amberbuhl
Director of Sales for @klout. Though fairly new to Twitter, Amber is active and highly engaging, and her following is likely to grow quickly. A USC grad, Amber’s past includes stints at Hulu, Yahoo!, and the E! Entertainment Network.
Amy Nelson
@AmyPioneerPress
Amy serves as social media editor for the St. Paul Pioneer Press as well as the Features/Travel editor for the newspaper. She’s an informative and prolific Twitterer, and active in Twin Cities social media.
Ardath Albee
@ardath421
A B2B marketer, strategist, writer and Author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. Friend, mentor, and source of inspiration. Also an expatriate Minnesotan now living in southern California (we miss her, but can’t blame her).
Angie Schottmuller
@aschottmuller
Interactive Minnesotan skilled in web strategy, conversion rate optimization (CRO), e-commerce, SEO, social media, QR codes (she knows a lot about QR codes), design, UX, analytics and inbound marketing. Angie is also a Search Engine Watch columnist and speaks at national events including SMX, SES, and OMS.
Becky Denniston
@Becalynd
Expert Community Manager with the Focus Expert Network, a network of thousands of leading business and technology experts who answer questions and post thought leadership content. Becky is also an MBA Candidate at San Francisco State University with a strong appetite for Social Media and Marketing.
Jenara Nerenberg
@bopsource
Jenara is an Asia-based filmmaker, organic farmer, and freelance journalist for Fast Company magazine and CNNGo, as well as a Harvard and Berkeley grad. She’s interviewed the famous and not-so-famous from high fashion superstars to up-and-coming designers to UN leaders, literary giants, cashmere producers, and royal mistresses, and her work has also appeared in TIME, BlackBook Magazine, and NextBillion.
Maria Popova
@brainpicker
Brooklyn-based Maria calls herself an “interestingness curator and semi-secret geek obsessed with design, storytelling and TED.” She’s also the editor of Brain Pickings and writes regularly for Wired UK magazine, The Atlantic and Design Observer.
Connie Bensen
@cbensen
Connie is the Community Strategist for the Alterian (formerly Techrigy) SM2 social media monitoring platform. She’s been named by Forbes.com as one of 20 top Women Social Media & Marketing Bloggers. Connie recently migrated from the frozen tundra of northern Minnesota to much balmier climate of Minneapolis.
Deirdre Breakenridge
@dbreakenridge
Diedre is the president of Mango! Marketing, author of PR 2.0: New Media, New Tools, New Audiences
Deborah Weinstein
@DebWeinstein
Deb is a journalist-turned-PR pro. She’s president of Strategic Objectives, an award-winning PR agency in Toronto. And she’s energetic and inspirational on Twitter.
Eileen O’Brien
@EileenOBrien
Eileen has more than 14 years of digital healthcare marketing experience. She is an opinion leader on social media, and has been invited to speak at industry conferences and quoted in publications. As @eileenobrien she moderates the #SocPharm tweetchat on Wednesdays at 8 pm EST which discusses pharma marketing and social media.
Ekaterina Walter
@Ekaterina
Oregon-based Ekaterina is a corporate social media strategist as well as a “speaker, connector (and) passionate marketer.” She’s also a frequent guest-poster who’s written bookmarkable pieces like 9 Ways to Sell Social Media to the Boss.
Ellen Hoenig Carlson
@Ellenhoenig
Based in New Jersey, Ellen is focused on simplifying consumer and healthcare marketing for “elegant solutions in a complex world.” Though she writes mainly on pharma-related subjects, her blog topics also include branding, family, fundraising, innovation, leadership, and Twitter.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen writes for Fast Company magazine and helps run the 30 Second MBA site.
Elise Segar
@Esegar
Connecticut-based Elise is active in social media, an enterprise technology sales and business development pro who is passionate about inside sales and sales strategy. She’s a fellow member of the #Lebronians team “drafted” by Robert Rose in FollowFriday & Who’s The Lebron In Your Strategy – Maybe It’s You.
Gail Nelson
@gail_nelson
CMO with Siegel + Gale, a brand strategy, customer experience and design consulting agency in New York.
Gini Dietrich
@ginidietrich
CEO of Chicago PR agency Arment Dietrich, author of spinsucks.com, Vistage member, author, speaker, communicator and writer of amazingly entertaining and insightful rants like Get Rich Quick! Lose Weight Tomorrow!.
Gretchen Rubin
@gretchenrubin
Based in New York City, Gretchen is the best-selling author of The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
Heidi Cohen
@heidicohen
Heidi is a fascinating marketer who shares practical advice about marketing and life from New York, NY.
Jill Konrath
@jillkonrath
Minnesota-based keynote speaker, sales trainer, motivator, creator of fresh strategies for selling to crazy-busy people; author of SNAP Selling (#1 Amazon sales book) and Selling to Big Companies
Judy Grundstrom
@JudyGrundstrom
Minnesota social media rock star, Business Development Director at Pixel Farm Digital, founder of the annual Twin Cities Top 10 Titans in Social Media awards, talk show regular on myTalk 107.1, and never boring.
Karen Emanuelson
@KarenEman
Karen heads Reciprocate LLC, a small business marketing consultancy in Minneapolis. She’s an expert in social media marketing (particularly LinkedIn optimization), a small business advocate, trainer, speaker and coach. She’s active in local community and business organizations as well as social media.
Katie Rosman
@katierosman
Katie reports on technology and pop-culture for one of the world’s greatest newspapers—the Wall Street Journal—and is the author of If You Knew Suzy: A Mother, a Daughter, a Reporter’s Notebook
Eve Mayer Orsburn
@LinkedInQueen
Eve is the author of Social Media for the CEO: The Why and ROI of Social Media for the CEO of Today and Tomorrow
Lisa Petrilli
@LisaPetrilli
Based in Chicago, Lisa is CEO of C-Level Strategies Inc, CEO Connection Co-Chair, Leadership & Executive Marketing Consultant, and #LeadershipChat co-Founder. Like Elise Segar and Cheryl Burgess, Lisa is a star of the #Lebronians team.
Liz Strauss
@LizStrauss
Liz is the founder of SOBCon, a brand strategist and leadership trainer based in Chicago. She’s also an insightful, prolific and generous social media presence.
Lorna Li
@lornali
Officially, an expert in inbound marketing, online visibility and personal branding, via social media, SEO and SEM. Also big on green business marketing. Unofficially – friendly, smart, and writer of many highly bookmarkable blog posts.
Lucretia M. Pruitt
@LucretiaPruitt
Living in and tweeting from beautiful Denver, Lucretia refers to herself as a “random muse, speaker, ex-CIS Professor, social media devotee, geek, mom, wife, & insomniac.” Lucretia is a highly engaging and sophisticated observer of technology developments.
Lisa Grimm
@lulugrimm
Digital PR Specialist for the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, Lisa describes herself as “a gal constantly awed by the intricacies of human behavior. Love my family, peeps, dogs, film, food and learning.”
Mari Smith
@MariSmith
Mari (like Ferrari) describes herself as a “passionate leader of social media, relationship marketing and Facebook mastery,” but most of us know her as the ultimate guru-ess of Facebook marketing and co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day
Missy Berggren
@MarketingMama
A phenomenally busy yet amazingly prolific blogger, Missy is a marketing pro at healthcare network Allina, co-founder of the Minnesota Blogger Conference, and is also active social media as the MarketingMama.
Martine Hunter
@martinehunter
Idea generator, b2b marketing professional, creative director, process engineer and writer at MLT Creative in Atlanta, as well as a mother, friend, sister, daughter, diabetic, crocheter and jazz fan. She’s also really nice.
Sally Church
@MaverickNY
Sally is a scientist with Icarus Consultants in New Jersey, a pharmaceutical / biotechnology-focused marketing strategy firm. She blogs about marketing strategy, market research, science, oncology, hematology and immunology.
Michelle Tripp
@michelletripp
Working and tweeting from New York, Michelle is a creative director, brand strategist, and author of The BrandForward Blog. She spends her time exploring the future of advertising, social media, and emerging technologies and just being pretty cool.
Jennifer Preston
@NYT_JenPreston
A staff writer for the New York Times, Jennifer writes about the use of technology and social media in politics, government, and real life.
Susan Kang Nam
@PinkOliveFamily
Splitting her time between New York, Andover (MA) and elsewhere, the dynamic Susan Kang Nam is founder of Cebisu Research Inc., a member of Andover’s Harvard Club, founder of Boston-based career club Salty Legs, “an entrepreneur, former recruiter and non-profit advocate who grew up in Asia (Korea, Japan) and US (Hawaii, California, New Jersey, NYC) and since 1994…using the world wide web exploring different platforms to engage in various of conversations”—and a classical pianist.
Laura Fitton
@Pistachio
Prolific Twitterer, Bostonite, CEO and founder of the oneforty social business software hub, as well as co-author of Twitter For Dummies
Rebel Brown
@rebelbrown
Rebel has been a marketing and business consulting for more than 20 years, is a popular speaker and author of Defy Gravity. She’s also a self-described “spiritual seeker, horse crazy, ski freak, and animal lovin’ nature gal.”
Rebecca Corliss
@repcor
Based in Boston, Rebecca is a singing Inbound Marketer with all-in-one marketing software platform developer HubSpot. She’s also a founder of a cappella group Common Sound. And yes, she is a rock star.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
@RosabethKanter
Harvard Business School Professor, author of SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good
Stacey Acevero
@sacevero
A social media communications manager for PR/social media monitoring provider Vocus in Washington DC, Stacey runs the popular monthly #prwebchat on Twitter. She is a former model, auxiliary member in the U.S. Air Force, and a self-proclaimed “SEO nerd” who loves NASCAR, steak and rock n’ roll. Definitely one of the most awesome and unique bios in social media.
Anita Campbell
@smallbiztrends
CEO of Small Business Trends, an online small biz community reaching over 250,000 each month. Anita tweets from Cleveland, Ohio, the hometown of rock n’ roll.
Liana ‘Li’ Evans
@storyspinner
Liana describes herself as “an online marketing geek girl who loves all things social media.” She’s a top expert in social media and SEO, and the author of Social Media Marketing.
Wendy Blackburn
@WendyBlackburn
Wendy is a blogger and digital marketer focused on the pharmaceutical industry. She’s an executive vice president at at Intouch Solutions, a marketing agency serving the pharmaceutical, animal health, medical device, and similarly regulated industries.
Wendy Marx
@wendymarx
Based in Trumbull, CT, Wendy is an award-winning PR and marketing communications executive who helps B2B companies become well-known brands, and a truly engaging social media personality.
There you have it, the Nifty 50 Women of Twitter for this year. To keep it to 50, we had to leave off some deserving names—it was a tough call. Maybe next year…
Watch next month (close to Father’s Day) for the Nifty 50 Men of Twitter for 2011.
The Powerful Effects of Social Media in Egypt
Thursday, March 10th, 2011Guest post by Thomas Morrison.
Social media is no longer simply about allowing your friends to see what you are thinking or for posting photos of your family vacation to Aruba. Social media has quickly become the most influential factors in grassroots socio-political organization. The January 25 revolution in Egypt gained a major foothold as a result of social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. Individuals have used social media to increase government transparency and mobilize like-minded individuals.
On January 25 2011 after a successful revolution had occurred in Tunisia, many Egyptians took to the streets protesting government corruption, unemployment, poverty as well as the country’s 30 – year autocratic rule by former President Hosni Mubarak. Protesters used social media like Facebook and Twitter to show outsiders exactly what was happening on the ground, plan and arrange protests and the governmental and military response to the protesters. After the second day of mass protest in Egypt, and after Associated Press filmed an Egyptian activist and protester being gunned down, the Internet, texts messages and PDA access to the Internet was shut down by Egyptian government.
The government’s effort to seriously reduce communication within Egypt was unsuccessful as a series of transnational human rights activists, bloggers, translators and social media organizations dedicated to free speech used many different mediums to stay in touch. Egyptians used chat rooms, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to relay messages from protesters, journalists and human rights activists inside Egypt. All of whom had intentions of assisting activists inside Egypt to further political organization and social mobilization while also allowing the rest of the world to witness minute by minute news on just exactly what was going on inside of the country.
Two of the most valuable aspects of social media are its ability to make social organization easier and more effective. The social media used by Egyptian protesters not only allowed individuals who shared common political ideas come together, but also provided a medium to plan concrete action. Secondly, social media increases government transparency and accountability. No longer can the global audience be kept in the dark about what is going on in another country. There are too many interconnected individuals using social media creating a transnational network armed with information.
On February 9th former President Bill Clinton spoke at New York University. The president was speaking on the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the 1995 Bosnia, Herzegovina and Serbia genocide and war. President Clinton compared the use of constant news media in the case of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Genocide with the role of social media in aiding communication during the recent revolution in Egypt. While the former president said the constant news coverage during the Bosnia-Herzegovina Genocide is nothing close to the effect of social media used in Egypt, both captured global attention at different points in time as a result of the desire for information. Clinton reflected back on the type and quality of technology available when he was president in 1995 saying, “There were just 50 Internet sites and the average cell phone weighed 5 pounds”. Alongside personal counselor Doug Band, Clinton heads up the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI). Mr. Douglas Band also oversees plenty of foreign operations at the Clinton Global Initiative.
While the Bosnia Herzegovina genocide and the recent revolution in Egypt are to completely separate events with not much similarity in politics or history, the human desire for information is very much the same. At many points in history individuals have combined ingenuity, passion and technology so as to link themselves with people and societies far from themselves.
Thomas Morrison is a co-edior of Everything Left and writes on a variety of current topics. You can find him on Twitter at @twmorrison75.
Social Media is Simpler Than You Think
Monday, March 29th, 2010With the tidal wave of how-to articles, jargon and self-proclaimed “social media experts” hitting the online world, it’s easy for marketers and business executives to view social media as something akin to the unexplored regions of the earth as presented on medieval maps—”here be dragons.” Potentially fascinating, but dangerous, mysterious and scary.
Social Media Demystified
In reality, social media marketing is simpler than you’ve probably been led to believe. At its core, social media is not about doing new things, but about doing things you’ve always done as a business person differently. Specifically, social media marketing involves five common, very traditional business activities. It provides a rich new toolset and set of techniques for carrying out these processes, but the processes themselves are familiar: listening, networking, interacting, information sharing, and promoting.
Social Media Listening
Think about “listening” in the broadest sense of the term, encompassing all of the things you do to keep abreast of what’s happening in your industry and your market. What are your competitors up to? What are the trends? What new products and services might help you operate your business more effectively and efficiently? What’s happening with prices? And most importantly: are your customers talking about you? And if so, what are they saying?
Business people have always had to do this, and have used a variety of tools: trade publications, direct conversations with vendors and customers, analyst reports, seminars and other events, trade associations newsletters and other sources. Social media doesn’t change the fact that you do this, but it does do two key things: it makes it easier for people to talk about your business, and it gives you new tools for listening to your market.
Social media reduces the friction of customer communications. Writing and mailing a letter to a company to complain about or praise their products or services is a lot of work. But expressing your opinion on Yelp, epinions, Twitter, Facebook or any social site is easy and takes only a few minutes—and your words reach a far larger audience.
Tools for social media monitoring (listening) range from free (Google Alerts, SM2 Freemium) to low-cost (uberVU) to sophisticated (Vocus, Cision). The brilliant Dan Schawbel of Mashable has written more about free social media monitoring tools and tools worth paying for.
Networking
From the dawn of commerce, business people have always used networking to meet new people and establish new relationships with suppliers, potential partners, industry experts, and most importantly sales prospects. Historically, most of this activity was done face-to-face, at trade shows, conferences, seminars and other industry events.
Physical networking at such events is still important. But social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo and tools like Twitter enable you to put this activity on steroids, building online relationships not only with people you’ve physically met but also with smart, interesting people literally across the globe who you’d unlikely ever meet in other contexts. The etiquette is similar (introduce yourself, ask questions, have something interesting to say, don’t immediately go into “hard sell” mode) but the tools are far more powerful and far-reaching than traditional networking.
Interacting
Interacting is simply the conversations that typically follow networking—following up, gathering more information, and asking and answering questions. Again, this is a traditional business activity that’s commonly been done by phone and for most of the last 20 years also via email. For confidential or highly specific communications, these mediums are still ideal.
But again, social media enables you to take interactions to an entirely new level. What about answering common customer or prospect questions? Social media makes it easy to answer such questions online not only for a specific prospect, or even all the prospects you’re aware of, but also for potential prospects not even yet on your radar. Your answer is not only available immediately to a larger group of people, but indexed and globally searchable (so you better have good answers!).
Social networking sites are among the key tools for social interaction, but such conversations can happen almost anywhere on the social web where people are talking about your brand, asking questions about products or services, or simply discussing what’s happening in your industry, including review sites, blogs, wikis and forums.
Information Sharing
Before the internet, sharing an interesting industry news article, how-to guide, coverage of a company or your own thought-leadership content was a tedious task involving copying and then physically mailing or faxing a document to selected recipients. Email made the process much easier, but distribution was still limited to known contacts.
As with listening and responding, social media has dramatically reduced the friction of such information sharing and dramatically expanded the audience. One can now post a link to and short description of interesting information to a LinkedIn group, Facebook page or Twitter stream in seconds and reach an audience of hundreds or thousands of interested individuals. Blog posts, news articles, product reviews, reports, images, videos, customer interviews, presentations and other information can be distributed to large groups with a few mouse clicks. And again, distribution isn’t limited to those you know, but also includes interested parties you’re not yet aware of—this enables prospective buyers to find you, exactly when they are looking for what you have to offer, instead of you having to use expensive, interruptive marketing techniques in the hope of hitting the right buyer at the right time.
Promoting
In terms of advertising, social media is much like other, more traditional online mediums. It’s as easy to place an ad on Facebook as on an industry publication website.
But the power of social media lies in its interactivity, in participation. In this respect, companies need to handle direct promotion carefully. While direct promotion through social media can work well for certain types of businesses (e.g. a restaurant owner tweeting about today’s lunch specials, or a retailer offering special discounts available only to fans on Facebook), it’s a delicate balance for most companies. Particularly in the b2b world, indirect promotion works best. That is, rather than trying use social media to tell people how wonderful your products and services are, it’s much more effective to demonstrate your knowledge by answering questions, sharing interesting and pertinent information, and highlighting third-party endorsements in the form of favorable reviews, blog coverage or customer comments.
Participation in social media is no longer optional for most companies. Customers, pundits and others are already talking about your industry and quite likely your company on these sites. Ignoring such conversations amounts to tacitly endorsing whatever is being said about your firm, your people, and your products or services. Understanding that social media doesn’t involve doing entirely new things as much as doing things you’ve always done, but in new and more powerful ways, should take some of the mystery and fear out of social media engagement.
How to Use Article Marketing as Part of Your Social Media Strategy
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010Guest post by Beth Hrusch
As you may know by now, article marketing is an effective way to gain credibility and establish yourself as an expert in your field. By writing articles about topics of interest to your readers, and distributing them on article directories, you can give your content the kind of exposure that would be hard to get anywhere else. But, what many people don’t realize is that article marketing isn’t just for directories anymore.
Social media has become an effective vehicle for content distribution, and articles are no exception. According to the Small Business Success Index, sponsored by Network Solutions (2010), one in five small businesses are now actively using social media. About 75% of those surveyed have a company page on a social networking site. What makes social media so effective for marketing purposes? The simple answer is that it gives your content massive exposure across a wide range of platforms.
Articles can easily be distributed using social media news and bookmarking sites, for example. Each of these sites has strengths and weaknesses, and some will suit certain goals better than others. Here are 5 of the most popular:
1. Facebook- With over 250 million members, it’s got tremendous reach. Generate interest with fans and friends by talking about topics related to your industry then link to your articles on your fan page. Ping articles and blogs automatically, so your groups can see your latest posts.
2. Twitter- Similar to Facebook, Twitter allows you to market your articles automatically and in real time. As a micro-blogging service, it allows businesses to communicate and share the latest information with customers, and link to articles and other content using a url shortener.
3. LinkedIn- For professional networking, setting up a profile in LinkedIn allows you to share your expertise with others in your group. Market your articles by sending them to your account or have them pulled from another social media account, to show up under your updates.
4. Digg- A really popular news/bookmarking site that can bring your articles massive exposure. Submitting your article to Digg takes interested readers directly to your article and your site, where they can also browse archived articles and check you out.
5. YouTube- What do videos have to do with article marketing? Both are content, just in different formats. Turn your articles into videos, using your text as a script. This can be done inexpensively, so almost any budget can handle it. YouTube is the 4th most popular website in the world, and videos consistently rank high in the search engines, so the potential to go viral is huge.
There are many more social media sites that lend themselves to article marketing. Check out the handy chart put together by the folks at Seomoz.com for more tips on how to use each site to market your business.
Article marketing has the power to establish you as an authority and give interested consumers a way to access your business through links to your site. Social media supercharges your articles by giving them wide and deep distribution throughout the web. Together, they help you reach a large, targeted audience without the need for an expensive marketing campaign. Be sure, though, that you research the social media sites- how they work and what their terms of service are. Some will work better for you than others.
Also, remember that article marketing is only effective if you commit to creating and distributing fresh content every week or so. Maintain both aspects of your marketing strategy and you’ll see results.
Beth Hrusch is Senior Editor at Interact Media, a content marketing software company.
Social Media Marketing Tips from the Experts: Rick Burnes
Monday, January 25th, 2010Late last year, I sat in on a couple of social media marketing webinars from two of the best: Rick Burnes, Marketing Manager at HubSpot, and Chris Abraham of Abraham Harrison, along with Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus. Here are some of the key takeaways on using social media effectively. This post will review recommendations from Rick Burnes, while a follow-up post will present ideas from Chris and Sally.
According to Rick, inbound marketing is a magnet, attracting new business to your enterprise. Outbound marketing is a sledgehammer, barraging prospects with advertising hoping they will form a positive association with your brand in exchange for interrupting what you are reading, watching or listening to. Outbound marketing can work, as it has in the past for big companies like McDonalds and P&G, but it’s very expensive (and intrusive). Contrast those brands with companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, which have achieved success with very little advertising but great products and a broad online presence.
Rick divided inbound marketing into two areas, “attract” and “convert.” His formulas for these are:
Helpful web content + blogging tools +SEO +social media = attraction.
Well-designed landing pages + email newsletters/marketing + calls to action = conversion.
The cost of inbound marketing (PPC, SEO, email, blogs, social media) is significantly less than the cost of traditional outbound marketing. Publications (online and offline) have traditionally sold advertising space. But sites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg are essentially “social search engines” that enable prospective customers to find content recommended by their friends and peers, which is both much more powerful than advertising and much lower cost (at least direct cost, though creating great content does require resources). Rick noted at that time that 15% of HubSpot’s website traffic was driven by social media.
For those new to social media, Rick recommended staring by signing up on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, then working these online venues like a “cocktail party.” Find interesting conversions and join in, socially—being helpful, but not with a hard sell approach. Meet people, build relationships, ask and answer questions, build trust, and build a reputation for being knowledgeable and helpful. To start, listen. Then listen some more. Build some relationships. Then share content; this is what drives people back to your site and/or blog and generates referral traffic.
Tools: search for your company name, competitors and industry terms on Twitter to discover who’s talking and what’s being said. Google Blog search and Technorati are helpful blog search tools, and Google Reader is great for listening. Use keyword search on TwitterGrader and tools like MrTweet to find interesting Twitterers to follow. Revver was recommended for video sharing.
Develop a reputation by participating in Q&A though Facebook discussions, Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Q&A and group discussions.
Social media sharing is not like advertising—it spreads across your social network and their followers. You probably already share great content, but when was the last time you “shared” an advertisement with anyone? Content that is not frequently shared includes product information, free trials and software documentation. Content that is shared includes new data and reports, amusing videos and useful blog posts.
For social media marketing, your blog is “ground zero.” This should be the focal point of social media efforts, but additional avenues for sharing great content include podcasts, videos, photos, presentations, eBooks and even social news releases. This is “marketing by publishing” rather than advertising. The type of content you develop and share should be what’s important to your audience, not just information about your products or services.
Conversion is the process of turning visitors into opportunities, opportunities into leads, and leads into customers. It’s accomplished by including calls to action everywhere (on your blog, at the end of videos, in news releases, etc.) with links to landing pages. An effective landing page has limited navigation; an incentive for response (e.g. a white paper, report or webinar registration); and a contact form, kept “above the fold” and as short as possible. In order to generate quality leads, it’s imperative to know your audience and write for them.
Success can be measured using tools like TwitterGrader, Facebook Grader and tracking referral sources through web analytics software such as Google Analytics. Succeeding in business with social media requires a constant stream of new content, which is why blogging and other forms of content creation are critical. Content can come from anywhere; for example, when answering a complex question from a colleague or customer, consider turning that answer into a blog post. Marketers need to look for opportunities to create content everywhere, developing a “content mindset.”
Advertising is high cost but requires a relatively low time commitment. Social media marketing is the opposite; there are few direct costs, but the time requirement is substantial.
Finally, social media marketing can be applied to virtually any industry; it’s a matter of searching to find out where your customers, prospects and industry influencers are congregating, then joining the conversation.
FTC Disclosure Notice: I have absolutely no financial relationship with HubSpot whatsoever, and have not been compensated for this post in any way—other than hopefully a few retweets.
