Posts by :
- Search engines, the main one being Google
- Google Blog Search
- Technorati advanced search
- WordPress.com search
- Micro-blogging applications such as Posterous & Tumblr search
- FriendFeed advanced search
- Delicious search
- SocialMention.com
- Social Media Firehose (Yahoo Pipes)
- Spy.appspot.com
- Announce the new menu or drink specials of the day
- Promote a happy-hour event or special restaurant event
- Start a promotion called Twitter Tuesday (or tweet ups)
- Solicit ideas for new menu items or specials of the day on Twitter.
- Offer a special prize for people who follow you on Twitter by a specific time and date, to be entered to win a free bottle of wine or gift certificate.
- The story of the DQ brand is told through the eyes of their employees
- Dairy Queen’s Chief Brand Officer actively contributes to the blog
- They reached out to 250 bloggers with a creative contest
- Blog officially launched in Febuaray 2009
- Blog has had more than 50,000 visitors since it launched
- Blog has more than 560 comments since it launched
- Fan Page at the time of this writing this has 158,707
- 62% of their fans are female
- 54% of their fans are ages 18-44
- Reputation monitoring
- Customer service
- Platform for promotion for all things Dairy Queen
- Identifying and rewarding brand endorsers and evangelists
- Re-tweeting Dairy Queen follower’s tweets
- Follows back Dairy Queen customers on Twitter
- Dairy Queen Twitter account has 1,657 followers at the time of writing this.
- Google Maps
- Google Docs
- Google Reader
- Google App
- Tweetie
- Evernote
- RTM
- Informant
- Quickoffice
- NY Times
- NPR Addict
- Fluent News
- Dictionary
- Wikipanion
- Urbanspoon
- Last.fm
- AOL Radio
- TED
- YouTube
- Shazam
- AutoStich
- Pixelpipe
- Picoli
- Lifecasting
- Arcade Bowl
- Flick Fishing
- iFighter
- iShoot
- Slugger
- Search engines, the main one being Google. RSS for web search results is coming soon.
- Google Blog Search. RSS for search queries is available.
- Technorati advanced search. RSS for search queries is available.
- WordPress.com search. (precautionary measure) RSS for search queries is available.
- Micro-blogging applications such as Twitter search & Tumblr search. RSS for queries.
- FriendFeed advanced search. RSS for search queries is available. look on browser bar.
- Delicious search. RSS for search queries is available
- SocialMention.com. RSS for search queries is available
- Social Media Firehose. (Yahoo Pipes) RSS for search queries is available.
- Spy.appspot.com. RSS for search queries is available.
- Alan Wolk
- Olivier Blanchard
- Matt Dickman
- Francois Gossieaux
- Beth Harte
- Lois Kelly
- Christina “CK” Kerley
- Jennifer Laycock
- Amber Naslund
- Connie Reece
- Mike Wagner
- Capture users email addresses (if system is not in place). Implement an opt-in mailing list solution. Do I really need to further expand on the benefits of this?
- Make your most prominent content offerings visible on the front page. Do not bury it in sub-directories of parent links and drop down menus. Give your core offerings high visibility at the front door.
- Create a sitemap for your content. If I’m lost on your site, throw me a lifeline.
- This particular company has done quite a few blog acquisitions, in addition has thousands of site members who publish blogs on the site. Arriving at the site, the distinction between expert, and user generated content was hard to distinguish. With some minor graphical enhancements, that problem is easy solved. Think about how you can incorporate expert layers into your product marketing. Think about the ways you can build and achieve brand credibility. Ask experts to contribute blog posts, video posts, anything that sheds light positively on your product and brand. This might cost you a few bucks, but always make sure your motives are transparent.
- Solicit site feedback. Create a site usability survey. Improving site features and functionality comes down to data. Create a customer feedback survey, nothing too lengthy. Let the users of the site speak to you in their own words. Ask them direct questions, what they would like to see more of, less of, and so on. Reward them for participating in the survey, as this will also be used to get them to participate. By participating they could be entered in a drawing to win free shirts, hats, you get the picture.
- Create a mobile version of your site, if one is not in place. There are 405 million mobile internet users worldwide, according to Internet research firm eMarketer, and within four years this number is expected to double.
- Establishing a Twitter account is a necessity, and should be a priority. For this particular company I advised them to create one main Twitter account for <insert site name here>, and then gradually experiment with the in-house blogs. The main <insert site name here> Twitter account will be the megaphone for the entire site, so multiple accounts may not be necessary. Create Twitter accounts for the leading branded blogs on the site. Let the in-house bloggers post on them. They will broadcast on these accounts, staff will need to have minimal involvement, except monitoring the accounts from time to time. Let the bloggers create and bring their own followers to the site.
- Use Twitter for brand monitoring.Twitter needs to be paid special attention to. Consumers are voicing their frustrations in growing numbers on Twitter, and businesses are listening. If something is being mentioned on Twitter, it should be relativity easy to track it down using a basic Twitter search. You can also narrow your results down further using search operators or advanced search. Twitter search pages also gives you an RSS feed for the search term results. You can add the RSS feeds to your watch lists in Google Reader.
- Establish a Facebook account only for <insert site name here>. Create a Facebook group for <insert site name here>. Updating will require minimal staff involvement, with the exception of the group. RSS and social content aggregators I.E FriendFeed, Twitter updates etc will update the Facebook profile automatically. Staff can go in from time to time to react to comments, post new links, etc. At the very least this account is to be used for an outpost, any added efforts is certainly a plus.
- Establish a MySpace account and set up the profile with all the relevant news and links pointing back to <insert site name here>. Blog posts and featured content should be imported and posted often. Encourage following on the all the social networking accounts. Remember both of these sites are in international markets, are you targeting them?
- Establish a YouTube channel and other video platforms. This is core if you are creating original video. While we don’t want to drive too much traffic away from <insert site name here>, these sites serve a few purposes, one is brand exposure, the second is for SEO. User generated content and the sites that display it tend to rank higher in search engines. The same is true for social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter etc. These are authoritative links, accounts and links from these sites are weighted much higher and as a result rank higher in search.
- Give people the tools to extend your brand outwards across all the social networks. Consider developing widgets, Facebook applications, Mashups, API’s. How many people are using iGoogle nowadays? You get the picture.
- Promote the social networking site accounts with badges/buttons (nice eye candy on <insert site name here>). Encourage following and follow everyone back.
- Give your users the ability to import RSS, flickr feeds, amazon wish lists, Twitter statuses, bookmarks and so forth. This of course depends on your product. This particular company has an extensive amount of user generated content, such as user created blogs, video, and pictures. What I wanted to see was more of alifestreaming element for their users.
- As I mentioned this company has a tremendous amount of user generated blog content. I advised them to create a step by step primer for creating blog posts. In additon to steps for promoting the blogs. The more we can arm the users with information and tools for promotion, the more traffic it will drive back to <insert site name here> in the long term. A weekly series could be implemented by an expert for blogging tips. Since blog content plays a big role on the site, we are empowering the users to become in effect citizen journalists. As long as we teach them and provide the tools, the platform will always be <insert site name here>.
- Empower, and encourage the users to use and link to the content they created on <insert site name here>, on their other social networking sites. Widgets play a big part of this as well. We need to teach the users what RSS is, and how it will benefit their blog promotion.
- 10 Pointers for Generating Traffic to Your Blog
- Social Media Marketing – Who, What, When, Where, Why and How?
- WebNotes Makes Annotating the Web Easy
- SEO is still relevant, I touch on 15 tips for improving search engine visibility.
- We all love Twitter, here are 15 tools to add to your Twitter toolbox.
- My observations on FriendFeed list organization, 60 days in.
- Daniel Pritchett, reveals the 15 secrets of FriendFeed’s power users.
- Louis asks, if anybody cares about non-blog commenting anymore?
- Corvida Raven is wondering if social media is keeping you out of touch with reality?
- Rob Diana explains that Web apps need to keep it simple for success.
- Louis informs us that SocialToo launches social surveys for polling via Twitter.
Spotify: A Game Changer For On Demand Music
August 25th, 2009
If you live in Europe, you have surely heard of or already use Spotify, the on demand streaming music service. Spotify, a company formed and based in Sweden has taken Europe by storm, and will definitely do the same thing once it comes to the United States. With $250 million to date in venture capital funding, this company is going to make a lot of noise, and with good reason. It’s a one of kind type service that has little competition, and everything going for it. The backing of the majority of the big record labels also helps.
Spotify is a lightweight desktop client that gives you access to millions of artists and their songs. It’s as simple as searching for your song and playing the track. The library of audio is quite impressive. On most searches I find almost every track and or album ever made. The sound quality and clarity is on par with just about any CD. Songs que up almost instantly, no lag or delay.
This in no way, shape or form compares to Last.fm. This puts Last.fm to shame and has completely replaced last.fm for me. Last.fm is not an on-demand music service, it’s more of a radio station where if you are lucky and cycle through 500 songs, the song you are looking for might play.
I love all genres of music and one of my favorite bands is Steely Dan. I was pleasantly surprised when I found 455 tracks listed, pretty much every song the band has ever recorded and then some.
Being a big electronica fan, the first name that I searched for was DJ Tiesto. No surprise there, 347 track listings found. I found the majority of the Tiesto songs I was looking for, however there were a few I did not find, but the rest made up for it.
Armin Van Buuren, another favorite of mine has a whopping 727 track listings. I also found 553 track listings for Paul Van Dyk. Did I already mention how solid and impressive Spotify’s song libraries are?
The nuts and bolts:
Spotify is not available in the United States, yet. Thanks to a special friend I was fortunate enough to get a press version for testing. Sorry I have no invites to hand out, you’ll just have to take my word on how great the service is, or read Louis Gray’s recent review of the service.
Spotify has two service offerings, a freemium version which displays ads in between songs and a premium ad free version which comes at a cost of 10 British pounds a month. There is also an all day 24 hour pass available for one British pound. I’m curious to see what the premium version will cost in US Dollars. Is this a service I would pay for? Absolutely!
Why Spotify will be a game changer:
Spotify’s library of songs is close to four million. The desktop application is fast, responsive and as with iTunes it gives you all the pertinent track and artist info. You can easily create and manage play lists. There is a social component that will allow you to share your favorite songs out to Facebook or Delicious. The streaming rate is approximately 160kbp, premium subscribers get a bit rate of 320kbp.
It’s on-demand only:
If a song is in the Spotify library, you can easily play it as many times as you like. You can not download the track, nor buy it (at least in the press version I tested). There is a purchase now link when right clicking over a song, it’s my understanding this feature only works in a few European countries. Once Spotify comes to the United States, it’s probably safe to say you will be able to purchase songs on the service via iTunes. It’s only a matter of time before these two companies break bread and some type of licensing deal is put in place. Spotify also has an iPhone application,waiting for Apple’s approval, though the chances of Apple approving it are slim at best. If a song is not in the Spotify library then you are out of luck, but in my testing, and only with big name bands, I found that they all had songs on the service. The music on Spotify is fully legal and licensed before it makes it to the service, so you can imagine when I searched for The Beatles I found no track listings, as with iTunes. The Beatles catalog of music is off limits for the time being due to licensing issues.
It’s not often a quality product like this comes along, but when it does, it’s like a speeding train that no one will be able to catch, that’s Spotify. The service is hands down the best on demand streaming music service on the internet. That’s all folks, over and out.
How Restaurants Can Use Social Media
August 24th, 2009
Various trades and industries are using social media for marketing, creating brand awareness, reputation monitoring and consumer engagement. The restaurant industry is no different. By definition restaurants are very social offline, but what about online? This got me thinking about how restaurants can utilize social media platforms for marketing, brand monitoring and beyond. In talking with a potential client, who is a major player in the restaurant industry, I outlined the following initiatives and talked about how they can and should be using social media.
Chances are that if you are a restaurant, especially a well known, recognized one, people are talking about you online. Make no mistake that there is chatter happening. The question is what type of chatter is it? Good, bad or in between, and how do you plan on dealing with it?
Note: Although this post is about how restaurants can use social media, the tactics and strategies I outline can be used for any industry.
Look and listen first: who is talking about you and what is being said?
Talk is happening everywhere, forums, blogs, comments, review sites, Twitter and so forth. Starting with the basics, Google Alerts should be setup to track any keyword/brand mentions.
The next step is monitoring Twitter. Twitter is the real time watering hole for all types of chatter. It is often the first place that a rant or rave will be mentioned, and from there it can quickly go viral in no time. Once something starts to spread on Twitter, it’s often hard to do the right damage control. It’s imperative that Twitter is monitored heavily and should be priority number one for brand monitoring.
Automation is key, let the tools do the work. Set it and forget it.
Search Twitter for your brand’s relevant keywords and set up RSS feeds to track them in Google Reader. You should also utilize Tweet Beep, a free service that will automatically email you hourly updates when a specific keyword or URL is mentioned on Twitter. This is a tool I heavily rely on for brand monitoring, it works extremely well and allows me to bypass going to Twitter’s website to search.
Conversations are everywhere, that’s where BackType fits into the mix. BackType is a free service that indexes millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media platforms. You can search the BackType website or set up email alerts, it’s not real time but it’s close enough.
These are at the very least the minimum amount of tools you should be using. There are plenty of other tools out there, but they all pretty much do the same thing. My personal preference is using Google Reader or NetVibes as my social media dashboard. The other route is paying for a reputation monitoring service. One that I use and highly recommended is Filtrbox.com. The service monitors a wide scope of the social media sphere, and sends me daily email reports with mentions of the brands that I’m tracking. They are reasonably priced compared to their competitors as well.
Additional platforms and services to be monitoring:
The services I mentioned above cover most of the social media landscape, but not everything. It’s also a good idea from time to time to scan the services mentioned below. The last three on the list monitor pretty much the same social media platforms. They are popular, their user interfaces are different, and they are definitely worth a notable mention.
Now that you have looked and listened, it’s time to learn:
So what about all this Twitter chatter?
People who are talking about you on Twitter or any social media network are mainly two things, existing customers or potential customers. Follow back everyone who talks about your brand in a positive manner. After all, these are brand evangelists, it’s word of mouth marketing, and it’s not costing you a dime. Reciprocation shows that you as a brand have taken interest in your customer. Be responsive to this and when applicable engage them in a conversation, or at the very least send them a quick thank you note. You should also identify and develop relationships with your loyal brand endorsers because these people are essentially an extension of your online marketing dept. In addition to engaging these people, reward them with a gift card to your restaurant. Tokens of appreciation go far and are always remembered. If you think they are talking now, just wait until that gift card arrives in the mail. The positive stuff is pretty much a no brainer, but always remember social media is all about the conversations, unfiltered at that. Responding to negative chatter is equally important as well, use these social media tools wisely to handle crisis situations, and avoid a PR nightmare. In the online environment, word spreads at an alarming high frequency, and once it does, there will be very little that you can do no matter how much you try to correct the situation.
Twitter for the most part is a customer service tool as I outlined in the previous paragraph, but it can also be used for marketing.
Brand your restaurant’s menu and marketing material with your Twitter account url. Take it a step further and have your Twitter url printed on customer receipts. If you are a QSR (Quick service restaurant) brand your social profiles at your POP (Point of Purchase).
Start a company blog:
A blog can be used for the same things as Twitter, only in much greater detail. Twitter has limitations where as a blog has none. Pictures and videos are just two examples. Use your restaurant blog to showcase customer testimonials, pictures from a specific event, menu items, food & drink recipes, employee bios and over all anything and everything that relates to your restaurant. The possibilities are endless on what you can use your blog for. A suggestion I give to clients in the industry is to start a weekly “Ask the expert” series on your blog. If my restaurant was a Sushi restaurant, I would encourage my customers to ask a Sushi related question and let our star Sushi chef answer them on the blog. The other purpose of a company blog is to generate new content, content that will get indexed in search engines and give potential new customers a way to find you on the web. Every blog post is a gateway into your website, so be sure to optimize your content with the correct keyword branding, post titles, tags and so on. Encourage your patrons to subscribe to your RSS feed and to share your blog’s content. Install ShareThis so that your patrons have an easy way of distributing your blog content.
Reviews, Reviews, Reviews!
Chances are your restaurant is already on review sites like Urbanspoon and Yelp. If it’s not, be sure to encourage your customers to post a fair review. Ask your brand endorsers on Twitter to leave a review, as well as customers in your restaurant. Remember nowadays everyone is a food critic. These online review sites are a big source of customer information and they are global reaching. There will be negative reviews, not everyone can be pleased, no matter the caliber of service you provide. If there is a negative review left, try to reach out to that customer and correct the situation if possible. The goal with a negative review or reviews is to get them buried on page 10. The only thing you can do for this is to provide good service atmosphere and food in the hopes of getting good reviews in front of it. Your brand endorsers will always leave a great review, encourage all of them to visit these sites and post a review as often as possible.
Food is visual, visual, visual!
Your restaurant should have a YouTube channel and photo sharing channel, ideally on a site like Flickr. These social media platforms have two important things, search, and passionate communities. You can use video to showcase restaurant events, provide a visual of your existing menu or new menu items. Do a biweekly show on some of the menu items you serve in the restaurant. Showcase your kitchen talent and break open the kitchen doors. The possibilities are endless, use your imagination. These videos can be embedded on your blog and shared throughout the social media landscape. The same goes for photos. Take pictures of your guests, let them share their experiences with images on your blog. Take pictures of your menu items, signature drinks, kitchen staff, and everything that represents your restaurant.
Embrace and prepare for mobile, it’s here and it’s not going anywhere:
With the advent of the iPhone and the mobile digital revolution, it’s essential that you pay attention to this. Starting with your website, make sure its optimized for mobile devices. We talked about review sites earlier, well guess what, they have iPhone applications, and they are very popular at that. That’s why it’s essential that your restaurant be on these sites. The bigger picture depending on the type of restaurant you operate would be to develop an iPhone application, one where people can easily view your menu options, contact information, and more specifically to place orders. Just look at how much success Pizza Hut is having with their newly released iPhone application, with over 100,000 downloads in the first month. The bottom line is embrace mobile every which way possible.
Get as much data as possible from your customers:
Online this mainly refers to email addresses. Your website should be collecting people’s email addresses. Encourage your existing customers and potential customers to sign up to be notified about any upcoming events at the restaurant. Send out a monthly newsletter informing customers about what’s happening at the restaurant, new menu items, special events, new store openings and so forth. Reward people for subscribing to the newsletter with a gift card or free glass of wine when they come in. Include quality information in your newsletter such as the recipe ingredients of an upcoming or existing menu item, maybe accompany that with a link to an online video or photographs of the dish. I have only touched upon the surface here, but I’m sure you get the picture by now.
In closing:
I could go on and on with this post but I will stop here. Restaurants have an advantage over a lot of other industries that use social media. Why you may ask? Social media is about story telling and visuals. Food is very visual, both physically and emotionally. Food evokes conversations, experiences, memories, and stories that people share. This is what social media is all about.
Dairy Queen is Now Officially on FriendFeed. Ice Cream Time!
August 3rd, 2009
In my last post, I hinted that Dairy Queen would be joining FriendFeed. Dairy Queen recognizes how to leverage social media, they also realize that it’s about going where your customers are and establishing a presence. Dairy Queen engages their customers and fans through their blog, their Facebook page, Twitter account and now finally on FriendFeed.
How will Dairy Queen be using FriendFeed?
Dairy Queen currently uses FriendFeed for brand monitoring, something every brand already should be doing. The offical Dairy Queen room will be used to aggregate Dairy Queens blog posts, tweets, pictures and videos. Dairy Queen encourages conversations about anything and everything DQ related. Jamie Guse, Dairy Queen’s Web Site Manager will be involved with monitoring the room and answering any DQ related questions. Dairy Queen is truly excited to be joining and particpating with the FriendFeed community. To celebrate this and the long, hot days of summer, Dairy Queen is giving away free ice cream to the FriendFeed community throughout the month of August.
DairyQueen is giving away 100 $5.00 gift cards to the FriendFeed community. Free ice cream! It just doesn’t get better than that.
Here’s the scoop:
Week one starting August 3 to August 10:
1) Subscribe to the Dairy Queen FriendFeed room.
2) Follow Dairy Queen on Twitter.
3) Make a post in the Dairy Queen FriendFeed room, 100 words or less on why you deserve free ice cream. The top 25 most compelling posts will win a $5.00 gift card redeemable at any Dairy Queen location.
Week two starting August 11 to August 17:
1) Subscribe to the Dairy Queen FriendFeed room.
2) Follow Dairy Queen on Twitter.
3) Help Dairy Queen by raising awareness about Miracle Treat Day. Tweet the following message starting August 10: ” Support Children’s Miracle Network on Aug 13th by stopping by a local Dairy Queen and buying a blizzard http://bit.ly/1cGPL0 #DQFF “
4) The top 25 people with the most re-tweets will win a $5.00 gift card redeemable at any Dairy Queen location.
Week three starting August 18 to August 24:
1) Subscribe to the Dairy Queen FriendFeed room.
2) Follow Dairy Queen on Twitter.
3) Take a picture of yourself or with others at a local Dairy Queen and post it to the Dairy Queen FriendFeed room.
4) The first 25 pictures posted will win a $5.00 gift card redeemable at any Dairy Queen location.
Week four starting August 25 to August 31:
1) Subscribe to the Dairy Queen FriendFeed room.
2) Follow Dairy Queen on Twitter.
3) To be announced on FriendFeed.
Please note:
Winners will be selected at the end of each week. Gift cards will be mailed the first week of September. Winners will be announced on the Dairy Queen blog and the Dairy Queen FriendFeed room. Winners will be contacted via direct message on FriendFeed. Please make sure you are following DairyQueen and myself on FriendFeed. If you are not following DairyQueen or myself, we have no way of contacting you for your mailing address.
Social Media Case Study: Dairy Queen
July 21st, 2009
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It’s no surprise that in this digital age corporations are actively engaging their customer base through social media. I can list hundreds of companies who successfully quote on quote “get it“. I thought I would focus on one, Dairy Queen.
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Dairy Queen, for those of you who are not familiar with the brand, is an ice cream company at heart. They have been around since 1940, and have established themselves as the leader in the soft serve and fast food restaurant industry. Fast forward 70 years, 5,600 + domestic store locations, and internationally are in more than 20 countries, the brand is a well recognized icon all over the globe. Dairy Queen by nature is a very social brand. Like many other major corporations they rely on and still use traditional media for advertising. In 2008 that all changed. They embarked in the world of social media and never looked back, thanks to my predecessor, Adam Singer, former Director of Digital Strategy at Pierson Grant PR, where I currently work. Adam was the catalyst and driving force behind Dairy Queen’s involvement in social media. I’m simply running with the torch that Adam lit.
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While I can’t speak for other companies, I can speak for Dairy Queen. Everyone in their corporation starting from their CEO, John Gainor, down to their Chief Brand Officer, Michael Keller, understand the impact of social media and truly embrace it. Their motives are pure and transparent and they are truly excited to be engaging their potential and existing customer base and beyond in this medium. They understand the implications of social media and how it affects their brand, that speaks volumes in and of itself.
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How is Dairy Queen using social media?
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1) Dairy Queen Blog:
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Dairy Queen launched the Official Dairy Queen Blog in February 2009. They realized it was a great way to humanize their brand and connect with their customers. The blog is written by Dairy Queen employees. The goal of their blog is to ignite conversation and have fun with a brand that has been around for more than 70 years. The blog is used for anything and everything DQ related which includes: stories, news, products, events, promotions and advertising in the community, and around the world. It’s important to note that their blog is NOT used as a mechanism to post press releases. All to often corporations start up a blog solely to post and re-post press releases. Blogs are not a PR robot. DQ has clearly demonstrated a successful formula for their corporate blog.
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Key takeaway:
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Fun facts:
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2) Podcasting:
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Dairy Queen’s Chief Brand Officer is a very articulate speaker. He is a powerful, brand story teller, so what better way to convey that than through a podcast. Vocals as well as visuals often can convey a story better than text. Listen to Michael Keller share his insights about the Dairy Queen brand in the digital space and you will see what I mean.
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3) Facebook:
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Dairy Queen launched the Official Dairy Queen Facebook Fan Page in May 2008. Dairy Queen realized that establishing a Facebook Fan Page was not an option, but a necessity. Facebook is an essential platform for Dairy Queen consumer engagement and also serves as a content aggregator for all things Dairy Queen. In just over one year, Dairy Queen fans responded to the tune of 100,000 + fans. The Fan Page continues to grow at more than several hundred new fans a day.
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Fun facts:
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4) Twitter:
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Dairy Queen launched the official Dairy Queen Twitter account in February of 2009. This was an obstacle at first because a name squatter was using the Dairy Queen name. It took a few months of contacting Twitter through the appropriate channels for Dairy Queen to get the name back. Success came in late May when the name was given back to the Dairy Queen corporation. The Dairy Queen Twitter account is run by Jamie Guse, Web Site Manager for Dairy Queen’s digital assets.
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How is Dairy Queen using Twitter?
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Fun fact:
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5) Embracing Mobile:
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Dairy Queen is well aware of the growing and emerging mobile market. They know their customers are increasingly on the go, therfore using a mobile device to locate a Dairy Queen store is quite beneficial. Realizing this, they created a DQ store locater application for iPhone & iPod users soon to be avaible in the iTunes app store.
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6) What else is on the horizion for Dairy Queen in social media?
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FriendFeed is next on deck. FriendFeed is more then just a powerful social media content aggregator. It’s a passionate community of users who conversate around the content. FriendFeeders are also Dairy Queen customers, so it’s only fitting that Dairy Queen joins the conversation.
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Being a diligent Digital Strategist, I would never reveal my full deck of cards. Did you think I would? Dairy Queen has quite a few interesting initiatives coming to the horizon in the digital space. I’m positive you will be hearing about a few of them later this year, and coming first quarter of 2010.
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I hope you enjoyed a glimpse into the social media world of Dairy Queen. They are just one corporation of many who understand how to leverage social media and understand how it impacts their brand. They got off to a late start with social media, but that’s irrelevant, what’s relevant is that they recognized it, embraced it, understand it and use it.
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(Disclaimer: DQ is a current client of the firm I work for. I advise DQ on Digital Strategies)
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Free at Last… Thank You iPhone!
July 11th, 2009
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My mobile device for the past two years was an HTC Kaiser running on Windows Mobile. When I purchased that smartphone back in late 2007, the first generation iPhone had been on the market for just a few months. Having heard the horror stories about the first generation iPhones running on the edge network, coupled with the lack of a physical keyboard, I decided not to purchase one. I sat idle for two years locked into a two year contract with a sub par phone, while everyone around me had the “cool” phone. It’s been on my radar ever since I watched my friend Louis Gray win an iPhone 3G, and religiously praise how it was such a game changer, after that, I knew I wanted one.
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I have always been a loyal MS brand enthusiast, and saw no reason to switch, even with my mobile device. Windows is a great PC OS, but a terrible OS for a smartphone. I would not even know where to begin and where to end on this subject, so there is no need to go on about that. I’m finally liberated, goodbye and good riddens Windows Mobile once and for all, you will not be missed.
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The anticipation builds: Countdown to June 19
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Finally on June 8, Apple announced and unveiled at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference the new iPhone 3GS. It was to hit the stores on June 19, I was filled with anxiety and anticipation, the months of waiting turned into days, the countdown begun. For the next 10 days all I thought about was the iPhone. Friday, June 19 rolls around and I was at work, expecting a sell out in every AT&T store, I frantically started calling stores to see if they have any in stock, I knew by the time I left work, which was at 3:30, that I would be out of luck. I called two local stores in my area, they both tell me they have 15 32gig models in stock and they had no idea if they would sell out. I asked them to hold one for me over the phone with a credit card, and they refused. I left work like a bat out of hell and made it to the store at about 4PM. I arrived at the store and it was busy but not packed, I waited about 30 mins and left with a 32gig black iPhone 3GS. FREE AT LAST!
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Three weeks in and not a single complaint:
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Having the iPhone for three weeks now, I have gotten accustomed to it. I don’t have any complaints thus far. I can’t compare it to the iPhone 3G because I never owned it. The battery life is fair, and I can get through an entire day on a full charge. The phone is lightweight, sleek and looks like a piece of art. It just works, and it works extremely well. While others complain about the AT&T network, I rave about it. In my neck of the woods, West Palm Beach, FL there is sufficient 3G network coverage and cell towers. I always have five bars on the phone, and have yet to experience any dropped calls, compared to my previous HTC phone, which almost always never had five bars, and would constantly suffer from dropped calls depending on which side of the house I was in. I have yet to travel out of state with it, so my opinion of the AT&T network might change based on the horror stories I have heard, but its been good to me thus far.
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Protecting my investment:
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Having shelled out $300.00 dollars for this phone, the last thing I want to do is damage it. I’m not one to ever not have a case for my phone. While I love admiring the beauty of this phone, and it looks best in its natural state, I will not take any chances. I want to keep this phone as close to new and pristine as possible. I’m not one to carry my phone in my pocket, as I have always been a belt clip carrier. Having bought and tried out two cases, I was still not happy. Both of these cases were made of cheap plastic and rubber and just didn’t cut it. Finally I found the armor I was looking for, the OtterBox Defender. It’s basically a bullet proof vest for your iPhone with 3 layers of solid protection, though a little costly at $49.95, it’s well worth it and its gotten my seal of approval hands down. This case is a tank, and if your going into battle you want this thing on your side.
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Did he just call the phone an investment?
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To some a phone is a phone. It’s an investment to me because it’s a productivity tool, second to my laptop. The phone is just an added feature of this powerful pocket pc, and the one feature I use the least. The main reason I bought the iPhone is to have a synced mobile office with me at all times. Windows Mobile achieved only half of what the iPhone achieves, and I was never a BlackBerry fan. The solution was simple. The only thing that I hesitated about was the lack of a physical keyboard. Two weeks in and I have grown to love the on-screen keyboard, sure it takes some time getting used to, but with daily usage you’ll overcome the lack of a hard keys in no time, I did. I actually enjoy using the on screen keyboard and have trained my self to become rather quick with it. I wouldn’t use it to type excessively long emails or blog posts, but for short bursts of text, it works just fine and gets the job done with relative ease. The iPhone for me is an extension of my computer, but I never would consider it a replacement.
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How I have been using my iPhone:
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1) Email is first and foremost of most importance. My iPhone is configured for work and personal email accounts. It handles this task perfectly, the mail application is fast, and handles sending and receiving very efficiently. I can very easily reply to an email no matter where I am, and I don’t need to be dependent on being near a computer. The iPhone mail app is almost comparable and just as good as the mobile based version of Gmail. That is something I would use regularly on my old Windows Mobile phone, as the Win Mobile application for email was beyond horrible.
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2) Internet would rank second on the list. I have never really had a great experience with mobile browsing until I got the iPhone. My gateway to the web was Internet Explorer Mobile, and then finally Skyfire. The iPhone paired with the Safari browser is what mobile browsing should be, far more superior than the others I mentioned. Who knew the mobile web was this good?
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3) Contacts and Calendar management is another essential function that I use quite frequently. The contact management system for the iPhone is simple and gets the job done. The ability to sync with my Gmail contacts is an added plus. I also rely heavily on Google Calendar, which syncs perfectly on the Iphone using an application called Informant.
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4) Project management is something I use on my phone daily. I use a few apps for this, Evernote is constantly being used for quick thoughts. Informant is used most often for to-do lists and daily tasks, it’s the work horse on my phone because I plan everything on Google Calendar, and as I had mentioned it syncs perfectly with my Google Calendar.
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5) GPS courtesy of Google Maps is another necessity, I’m glad it’s a core feature built into the phone. There is now no need to buy a separate GPS unit for my car, the maps application works flawless. The iPhones location-aware features integrates with applications pinpointing your location. If I’m looking for a restaurant, gas station, or nearby bank, the phone already knows where I am and it suggest locations in my proximity. This is game changing in so many aspects, its unbelievable.
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6) Photos and more specifically video is a crucial capability. The iPhone takes decent pictures, the camera has been upgraded compared to its predecessor, and also has auto focus. I have been impressed with the camera. For a camera phone, it gets the job done, but is in no way a replacement for a digital camera. The ability to shoot and edit video is the real winner here. The quality of the video recording is very good, again for a phone it’s pretty impressive, add in the ability to send the videos directly to YouTube and you have a winner. With my previous smartphones they all had cameras, but I never used it or felt the urge to. The iPhone actually encourages me to use the camera/video every chance I get. I no longer carry a digital camera with me, I may sacrifice in picture quality, but the convenience factor of having these abilities on my smartphone prevails.
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7) Google, Google, and Google. I use the Google app as my gateway to all things Google. Gmail and Google Calendar is the only thing I don’t use Google’s mobile site for. Google Reader and Google Docs gets a lot of mileage on my phone. It would be nice if we could edit Google Doc files on the iPhone. On a daily basis I get excel and word documents emailed to me. Being able to make quick edits on the go is essential. The solution for that is a paid app I use called Quick Office.
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8 ) Streaming audio and podcasts has become something I use on a regular basis. I have always been a fan of NPR news, so I was delighted to see an NPR news app in the iTunes app store, which BTW is free. Combine that with the Last.fm and AOL radio application, I have a constant source of audio. While at lunch or dinner I’ll often stream audio using these apps in the background. Then there is iTunes, I have never thought or used my smartphone as a walkman, but I do now. I’ll admit I usually would download music off torrent sites, I now find myself buying music off iTunes. The convenience factor wins me over, though I have yet to buy full albums off iTunes, that I still use torrent sites for. Apple has the science of milking you for money at every corner down to a fine art.
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9) The vibrant application ecosystem is what truly makes the iPhone a winner. There is an app for just about everything and anything, it’s application nauseum. It’s also what makes the iPhone a lot of fun, and an extremely powerful communications tool. I find myself like many of you constantly looking for and trying out the latest applications. It’s an addiction that I constantly must feed, sort of a like drug addict who needs his next fix.
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10) Perhaps the best time waster is the games. I have 6 games on my iPhone and for the time being that’s enough. I have never been a big gamer, but that also changed with the iPhone. I now find myself spending at least an hour a night fixated on Slugger or iShoot.
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My essential applications:
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All things Google:
Social Media:
Productivity:
News:
Reference:
Streaming audio/video:
Tools:
Photography:
Games:
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If you are looking for a smartphone that does just about everything other than cook you breakfast, the iPhone is undoubtedly the way to go. Nothing on the market even comes close to it. Most of you already have the 3G iPhones and maybe the “newness” enamor has worn off, but for me, being a first time iPhone owner, I’m still in shock and awe at this remarkable piece of technology. I have never been an Apple fan boi, but I certainly have become one now. The line is drawn with the iPhone though, as I’ll alway be a windows user when it comes to my desktop computing 
Catalogs.com Shares Their Insight On Search Engine Optimization
June 15th, 2009
Catalogs.com, the premium domain, and leading Internet source for mail-order and online catalogs has been successfully operating for more than a decade. Having learned quite a few things along the way, they realized early on through trial and error that optimizing for search is a crucial and key element for organic traffic generation.
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I sat down for a Q&A session with Leslie Linevsky, who is the founding partner of Catalogs.com, along with Matt Craine, who is the Information Services Director and in charge of their SEO. I wanted to find how they got started, and any insights, tips, or tricks they could share on search engine marketing and optimization.
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1) What prompted you to start catalogs.com?
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Leslie: Recognizing the untapped potential of aggregating and indexing a wide array of catalogs that shoppers might not know about or have access to, we developed an ingenious way for internet shoppers to select and receive catalogs of their choice all in one place. Allowing catalogs to be conveniently delivered to consumer homes at no additional cost while giving consumers the opportunity to shop online from “well known” as well as “niche” catalog companies is how Catalogs.com makes its mark.
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2) Have you always owned the domain catalogs.com, or did you acquire it?
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Leslie: We acquired the domain name only.
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3) With the ever growing “green” conscious consumer, how if any is this affecting the Catalog industry?
Leslie: It’s a GREAT TIME for Catalogs.com because we provide only qualified leads from consumers who have specifically requested the Merchants Catalogs.com. As our mission statement says: Part of Catalogs.com’s mission is all about helping people find the goods and services they need
- By request ONLY.
- The overwhelming majority of catalogs consumers receive were never requested.
- Unlike receiving random catalogs just because you are on some mailing list…
- Get only the catalogs you request
- Catalog shopping (and internet catalog shopping) can and should be one of the most environmentally green ways to shop. After all, it eliminates trips to the store – and that saves time, trees, money and reduces the amount of gasoline we burn.
- It’s funny but this has been our goal from day one.
4) Where do you see Catalogs.com in 5 years?
Leslie: It’s difficult to say, because our growth percentage has been double digit, in terms of traffic and revenue. I can only hope that we continue doing everything right to sustain our growth.
5) How much organic search engine traffic does catalogs.com receive monthly?
Matt: Between 600,000 and 700,000 unique per month.
6) What are some of your best practices for optimizing search?
Matt: Well written unique copy on every page of the site. Researched and unique key-phrases in the Title Tag, and the Meta Description of every page. Proper use of the H1 tag and proper internal linking of pages. Thematically related pages and groups of pages interlinked. Incoming link building is very important as well.
7) What advice would you give people who are just starting to learn SEO?
Matt: Don’t over think it. There is tons of information out there on the web about the basic, and best practices in SEO that every site should be doing. Start there. Proper tagging, keyword copy, and good interlinking – will get a badly optimized site a huge reward. After getting your foundation in place, you can then start to worry about higher end fine tuning – and of course, nothing beats links in.
8 ) What SEO tools do you regularly use? What if any tools should people avoid, and why?
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Matt: Google tools (analytics, webmaster tools, adwords keyword tool) have become probably my most important. Studying your sites performance in analytics and webmaster tools and then making adjustments is key. We use the adwords keyword tool for research these days as opposed to Wordtracker ,or Trellian. I found them to be inconsistent and unreliable – plus they don’t report on a very large sample of user data as opposed to Google. I also use many of the tools found at seobook.com including Rank Checker and their Competitive Research tools.
9) What areas of SEO do you most enjoy? What is the most difficult aspect of SEO?
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Matt: Crafting a perfect TITLE tag that optimizes the key phrase for that page perfectly, and also satisfied the client with their business objective is always fun. The most difficult is steering clients and internal resources towards the long term goal, when they know just enough SEO to be dangerous.
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10) What are the most important on-page elements for search engine performance and how would they rank it in order of importance? E.G. Is it Title tag first? Description tag? Headers? Text?
Matt:
1) Title tag
2) H1 tag
3) Copy and keyword density
4) Meta Description (disputed, but I have evidence it has helped us)
(Disclaimer: Catalogs.com is a client of Pierson Grant PR, the firm that I work for.)
Internet Marketing: Don’t Skimp On The Basics
May 25th, 2009
It’s the year 2009 and maybe you are a late comer to the Internet. You have an existing business but you have finally been persuaded to start an Internet marketing initiative. You might be a local small business or you might be a national brand, whatever the case may be you know, you need to establish a presence on the Internet. It’s no longer an optional decision, it’s a mandatory. After all, your competitors are way ahead of you, your customers are on the Internet, and in todays economic climate, it makes sense to look at alternate marketing solutions.
Starting with the basics first: your website
Assuming you own your business domain name and have a reliable web host,the next step is web design. You probably already have a website. It’s more than likely a static brochure that’s years old. What worked years ago is ancient today. Invest the money and have your website professionally designed. Your website is not a set it and forget it strategy, don’t let it become a dinosaur from 1999. You may know a little html and probably have played with Front Page, this does not qualify you as a graphic designer. Establish a clear road map of what your website will be, then let the pros do the work. When I see an ancient website I walk away, but when I see a modern website, it catches my attention, and personally I’m more in tuned to stay on the website. Your customers are no different. An old, outdated website is a reflection of your business, that’s not the image you want to be portraying. The web gives you an advantage, a well designed site can make you appear larger than you may in fact be, it can make even the smallest of small business’ be as grand and large as a major corporation. There are many key components that go into designing a website, site navigation, layout, content, usability and so forth. A good designer knows this, so it’s crucial to work with them every step of the way on these details. Clutter is a turn off, if you must put a lot of information on your website, do it an organized way, a CMS system might be the route you take.You get the point. Just as in real life image is everything. You never get a second chance to make a first impression on the web, WOW them the first time and win their business.
If you build it they will come:
That is if you were lucky enough to secure a premium .com domain that has plenty of type in traffic. If you have the budget, domain name acquisition is always a good strategy, but a very costly one at that. Chances are you don’t have $20,000 and up to wash away on a good domain name. Where is all this leading to? One word, search.
If you are not listed in the search engines, you might as well not even be in business online. The last study I read, was that 90% of all people looking for information or services use search engines, and when I say search, I’m mainly referring to Google. You should focus on all the search engines, but the main emphasis is on Google, for the simple fact that is sends the most traffic bar none compared to Yahoo or MSN. If you’re a national brand with deep pockets, the logical choice is to hire a reputable company or individual who specializes in search engine optimization. If this is done right, it’s money well invested. The smaller businesses are often pinching pennies and can’t afford to outsource their search engine initiatives. That’s fine but it will require more time and patience. My word of advice is this, learn, learn and learn as much as you can about optimizing for search engines, read, read and read more. There are a hundreds of websites and blogs dedicated to SEO. The information is free, and of course there are plenty of books on the subject matter too. Before you go broke wasting your entire budget on a PPC, do some research and use the tools that are ready available to help guide you in making sound logical decisions.
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Start small with everything you do, if you take the PPC route don’t go for the big target keywords, you will end up going broke in no time with little to show for it. Focus on the long tail keywords, don’t always go for the obvious. The companies with the deep pockets will win in that game hands down. As you gain more experience and see an increase in sales, you can start to compete on that scale at a slow measured pace, but never from the get go. PPC is a great way to get some traffic circulating, but remember it comes with a price. The focus of your search initiatives needs to be on organic traffic generation for the long term. Always remember domain authority is a big deal with the search engines, starting out you have none. You need to build it with inbound links, fresh content and constant tweaking. For anyone who is seriously looking to get involved with SEO, set up a Google Reader account and subscribe to as many search engine strategy blogs as possible, read the feeds every day and start implementing what you have learned. It’s trial and error just like everything else, but in time you will see the rewards, and then you will not have to rely solely on PPC.
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What about email marketing?
Don’t rule out email marketing. Ideally you want to market to your existing customer base assuming you already have newsletter in place, at the very least you need to be capturing email addressees on your site. Customers or potential customers who have expressed interest in your product can be golden lead sources. Learn how to market to them via newsletters always with usefulness and incentives, it could be a coupon code for their next purchase for instance. You can also buy lead lists for targeted industries. You will also need a solid mailing solution to handle the mailings, ISP white listing, filtering of lists and so on. There are quite a few affordable solutions that offer this that won’t break the bank. Don’t waste your time with free self hosted mailing scripts, all this will do is generate a ton of spam complaints, and most likely will have your web host coming down on you, or worse you risk getting your hosting suspended. Let the third party vendor handle of this. Gather as much data as possible about the people visiting your website and use it to your advantage, otherwise you are just flying blind.
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Affiliate programs still work and they work well:
If you’re running any type of e-commerce website you should be looking at an affiliate program to help sell your product. Let other people sell your product for you, it’s as simple as that. Of course there are plenty of things to factor in with this, such as conversions, cost, break even points. You need to decide what payout structures will work in order to stay profitable. Your product, its market and the pricing point will help you determine this. Typically the payout structures will work in a per lead, per sale, per click, or rev sharing model. Use a third party vendor for this. There are plenty of companies in business for this, a quick Google search is all the research you need. These companies usually handle all the risk, the link tracking and payouts. Your job is mainly creating the graphics, landing pages and all promotional material for the affiliates. Most of these companies have a pool of websites that can promote your product. Spend the time and fine tune your product offering, conversions and marketing goals. Once you arm yourself with an affiliate program, you can then seek out the relevant websites in your niche to promote your product. Look at what your competitors are doing and try to do it better than them. There is no need to re-invent the wheel, just fine tune it.
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Okay, but what about social media?
My ideal marketing mix for any online business would first and foremost be a search engine strategy, second I would incorporate a social media marketing campaign. Should you use social media for marketing? Absolutely! Point blank, if your customers are using it you need to be as well. Social media should not and will not be the magic bullet, it’s simply another channel or layer of marketing. Social media is about conversations and how it relates to your brand or products. The cost barrier is relatively low, and it’s a well known secret social media will greatly improve your search engine rankings. If your customers are using social media, find out where and actively establish a presence where they are. Invest the time, contribute and participate in any way that will be add value to the communities. Join the conversation, create the conversation but never try to control it. Make your content shareable, start a blog and create useful content about your product, or your areas of expertise. Be open and transparent with your motives, and never treat social media like an email marketing campaign. Social media is a two way form of communication, never one way.The foundation and core of what social media is, consists of the five C’s. Conversation, community, commenting, collaboration and contribution. These are the five fundamentals that companies and marketers must understand to be able to successfully market on the social web.
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There are plenty of other things I left out, but in the scheme of things are not as important as the ones I touched upon today. Marketing on the Internet is not hard, it takes time to create and find that perfect formula that will work for you. Search engines are still king, they have been since the mid 90′s and will continue to be for quite some time to come. Focus the majority of your time and efforts on search, everything else is important but should be secondary.
Social Media Outposts – Guest Post on Louisgray.com
May 7th, 2009Think of outposts as a sort of toll booth. This is the analogy I’m making here. It’s pretty much the same in real life. On the Internet there are many toll booths for many destinations. You need to own and operate that toll booth, instead of your competitors.
Head over to Louisgray.com to read part one & part two.
My State of Social Media
March 27th, 2009
It seems that for many, this thing or shall I say buzzword we call social media has become strictly a numbers game. He who has the most followers wins. We are seeing this time and time again, on Twitter, Facebook and so forth. It’s at a point where it’s out of control, I feel. The true value of social media or conversational media has been lost for some, including myself.
The power of one-on-one relationships has been lost:
It’s been lost due to the popularity game of who can acquire the most followers on any given network. Take Twitter for instance, while it’s clearly gone mainstream, it’s also the number one haven for drive by spammers. The service is riddled with marketers attempting to make a quick buck. When I mean marketers, I don’t mean responsible corporations who are using Twitter for customer outreach.
I’m a list builder, look at me!
Then you have the mass list builder crowd. These people follow anyone and everyone just to build a massive following. These people make no attempt to have a conversation or get to know the people they are following. They simply create lists. I don’t see the purpose of this. What’s the point of saying I have 10,000 followers on Twitter? In the real world it means absolutely nothing, these are not bragging rights to be proud of. Again, I’m strictly referring to the list builder crowd, not anyone else.
Now that you have established that list of 10,000 followers, what are you going to do with it?
Spam me with links to clickbank sites? Tell me how much money I can make unlocking the power of Google for $89.95? Or better yet, advise me on how to get 1 million new twitter followers in 30 days for $65.00? I guess I will be rolling in the cash soon. Seriously who falls for this crap? I know there is a sucker born every minute, but come on, even in this day in age people are smarter then that. I’ll tweet this crap every day and hope someone bites, I guess this is the mentality these spammers and list builders have.
The more popular social media becomes, the less it will become social:
The core of what I believe, is social media is built on meaningful realtionships. Following people you know or are attempting to take an interest in, personal or professional. This is what Facebook was once for, correct?
While I’m certainly not here to tell you how to use social media, there were simple guidelines set in place at some point in time. Of course they were not etched in stone, but they existed. One of the great things about social media, is everyone uses it differently, but in the end, it achieves one common goal, communication.
Getting back to Facebook, this was the one social network that was pure at one point. It was the place that separated personal from professional at some point in time. It was either or, not both. If I want to connect with old school friends or family in other parts of the country, Facebook was the logical mechanism for this. Today it’s a different story, for the most part it’s become like Twitter, a popularity contest. He who adds the most strangers to his list wins! Let’s think about the ramifications for a second, especially on a network such as Facebook. Do you want complete strangers knowing intimate details of your life? Of course not. While it all depends on what you share into the system, the privacy and safety issues will start to become a big deal, it’s already happening and it’s going to get ten times worse in the oncoming years.
I admit I was late on the Facebook train. Being involved with social media and writing about it, it made sense for me to establish a presence on that network. I would be foolish if I did not. Don’t get me wrong, you always need to be where the conversation is taking place. Facebook for me is only an outpost, it’s a point of presence where people can find me, my website and if need be contact me, that’s all. I don’t use Facebook to connect with old friends, because i’m in touch with my old friends already, and my primary contact is on the telephone or email. Most of my network of friends rarely if ever use Facebook. I have a total of two family members who live in other states that are on Facebook, occasionally they will contact me there, but other than that i’m not big on Facebook.
When I started blogging, I started establishing one on one relationships with friends and followers, most of these people have added me on Facebook, and for the most part I reciprocate back. I have had conversations with a majority of these people. They are subscribers of my blog and or follow my work, they are not total strangers, if that makes any sense. There has been some meaningful conversation at some point in time. If you are asking whether I am worried about these people seeing my content on Facebook? Not at all, because I do not share intimate personal content into the system in the first place. Occasionally I post some pictures of my daughter or update my status, but primarily using Facebook as an outpost, I don’t worry about privacy issues, because for me there are none.
Getting back to Twitter:
I have been on Twitter for just about a year now. In the beginning when I followed a handful of people and vice versa, the experience for me was satisfying. Because then, Twitter was not as mainstream as it is now. The spammers and list builders were not privy to Twitter then. Within a year, that quickly changed. Twitter, just as Facebook, is now an outpost for me. I use Twitter to update my status occasionally, communicate with a handful of colleagues primarily thorough DM and media snacking for news. Twitter is a great tool for discovery, I use Twitter a lot in the background nowadays mostly for search.
Being a blogger, I would be foolish not to have a presence on the network, just as I do with Facebook. I practice what I preach, but it does not consume me. Sure you see a follow me on Twitter button on the sidebar of this blog. It’s for anyone who wants to follow my blog and if need be communicate with me. Don’t expect me to be on Twitter 24/7, because i’m not. When I am on Twitter, I do not use it to spam my latest blog post, which I will do from time to time, but to share information that is newsworthy to me and possibly you. When I find great blogs or great postings I will Twitter them, this is what social media is about. I might be bored on occasion and Tweet the weather is great today, but for me it’s primarily all business. That’s how I use Twitter.
If you want to Tweet all day about every time you eat a meal or have a bowel movement, feel free to do so. Just don’t expect me to react to it
And then there was FriendFeed:
Right around the same time I starting using Twitter, FriendFeed came onto the scene. It’s at this time when Twitter suffered major downtime almost daily. I started to devote all my time to FriendFeed and never looked back. FriendFeed changed the game for me. Not only was the service stable, but it was a different beast then any other social network and still is. At its core it was intended to be a social content aggregater, but has and is quickly evolving into a social network. One that is innovative, responsive to their user base, and in a lot of aspects is still pure. It’s pure from the spam, downtime and social media meltdown these other services are suffering from. It’s not as mainstream as Twitter and Facebook, yet.
For almost a year, I was a hardcore FriendFeeder. A good part of my social graph traces back to this site. I use to live on the site 24/7. While i’m still active on FriendFeed nowadays, i’m not the power user I once was. For me priorities in life have changed. Starting a new job and having a baby all contribute to me being less active on the site. I will always be a loyal user of the site and still aggregate my social activities on the site. I just lost my power user status. But in the end, being a power user leads to what I talked about, the end of meaningful relationships. The Dunbar theory is correct, once your social circle goes above 100-150, it’s extremely hard to maintain, follow, and react to every conversation around you. It’s simply impossible. On FriendFeed, it’s a lot easier because we can use lists to limit the noise to signal ratio, and it helps tremendously. Same as with Twitter, we can use tools such as Tweetdeck to group our social circles in categories.
Lists are now the tool of the choice for fake following:
I thought when I set up my handy list system for FriendFeed it would help me. Yes I can follow my close friends and their activities, which is what I do. But the rest of the lists I have set up, I find myself rarely checking anymore. I tried to devote time to them, but it basically amounts to fake following. Keeping track of over 1200 people on FriendFeed is a time consuming effort and one that I do not have time for. My main list gets the most attention, because it’s my core social graph, and the list is only comprised of 100 + people. It’s manageable, but the other lists with several hundred people are not.
It’s now one list and one list only:
The old system I was using was comprised of tiered lists, based on a few criteria. The criteria was based on the users activity level, what they shared and so forth. I had five tiers set up on top of my main social media list. So every time someone followed me, I had to put them into a holding tank which was tier-D, then keep an eye on them and gradually move them into tier-C and so on. This went to crap in no time soon, and amounted to fake following the majority of people. Sure some people follow me because they like the content I share into the system or they read my blog, for whatever reason they decided to follow me, and i’m cool with that. Being a blogger, I expect that, it’s only natural.
My solution was to eliminate all my lists, except my core social graph. Now everyone is dumped into the home feed. Everyone has a fair chance now, it’s up to me to check the home feed for a sampling of the masses who are following me. I no longer need to judge people based on criteria. Sure I may scan through ten pages on the home feed, but if you are active on the system, I will see it. Who am I to judge? If we establish some type of relationship, I can always move that individual into my core social graph list, if not, no harm is done.
My mentality has been and always will be: if you follow me, I will follow back:
I won’t lie, in the early days it was a nice feeling to see all these notification emails of new followers on the various social networks, it was a sort of high. Being someone who writes about social media, it goes with the turf and rightfully so. It’s my mentality of if you follow me, I will follow back, that is partly to blame. I’m not saying or telling you not to follow me, if you have an interest in me or my work, by all means follow me. What I am saying though is it’s gotten a lot harder to devote time to everyone, compared to a small group of people.
Sure I don’t have to follow you back, and a lot of people live by this rule, I do not. If you took an interest to follow me on any social networking site, I will follow you back, with the exception of blatant spammers. This is how I diversify my social graph and learn new things. You may not have anything in common with me, but maybe one day you will, that’s fine as well. When you want to take that next step to engage me in a conversation, you know where i’m at and I welcome it, time permitting of course. This is why I follow almost everyone who follows me on Twitter and FriendFeed, I love to media snack, a coin termed by Robert Scoble.
Just remember one thing:
If you follow me and I follow back, do not get mad if there is no interaction from me. You have chosen to follow me for whatever reason, if you are expecting a conversation then take the next step to create one. Otherwise, you are just a follower/fan, and that’s fine with me. It’s not logical at this point to personally engage every follower. I simply can not and will not. While I use a social media dashboard to track things, I occasionally miss things. You can always DM me or better yet, use the contact form on this blog to reach me. Email is something I check daily, Twitter is not.
With all shiny new toys and tools, it’s email that still works the best for me:
Sure I have a presence on the majority of the popular networks, but it does not mean i’m on them 24/7. The fact of the matter is i’m not, and even If I was, I still would not be able to keep track of everything that interests me, a conversation, tweet, or FriendFeed comment and so forth. RSS for the most part takes care of that, but it’s not perfect.
Maybe i’m old fashioned in this social media age, but email is still the fastest and most reliable way to contact me. Nothing is going to change that anytime soon, if probably ever. So if you really need to contact me for whatever reason, email me. You can send me a tweet, and the majority of the time I’ll see it, that is when i’m on Twitter or using search which is not every day. With email there is no excuse.
In the end:
The social media landscape is changing at a consistent fast pace. I’m not here to tell you how to use social media, that’s largely dependent on your objectives, weather it’s for personal, professional or for both. I’m just wondering in the big scheme of things if social media has lost its enamor for most. Because the picture i’m seeing is completely different than the picture I saw just a year ago. Social media is still in its infancy, but it’s hard to get a good picture of where it’s really going from this stage. Once the spammers and list builders discover that they are wasting their time, and once the corporations fully stake their claim, what are we going to be left with? I’m optimistic and yet a little disheartened about the current state of social media that we are in.
ABC: Always Be Closing
February 23rd, 2009
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If you have ever seen the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, you will know it’s about sales. The movie was filmed and takes place in 1992, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn NY, the place I was born and raised. The movie depicts four struggling salesmen and how they became desperate when the corporate office sends a representative, played by Alec Baldwin, to motivate them by announcing that in one week, all except the top two salesmen will be fired. In the movie, as with all sales jobs, it comes down to leads. Without leads you’re nothing, you might as well find another career path. If you have watched the movie before, you will see that the salesmen constantly complain about their leads. Their leads are stale, recycled and consist of “deadbeats with no money”.
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Are you a go-getter or a clock watcher?
My primary background is in Internet marketing, but I have a few years of real world experience working a 9-5 sales job. The sales positions I have worked were strictly cold calling based, the toughest of them all. This was not a position where I already had an existing pipeline of customers who I could nurture and grow. This was the type of position where if you did not produce, you did not eat. Sure there was a base salary, that’s laughable though as anyone in sales will tell you. It’s meant as security for if you had a bad day. For most people, it would barely pay their monthly living expenses. In most companies, if you don’t produce long enough, your career usually ends with a termination, and rightfully so. If you can’t earn for a company, why should they continue to pay you?
Bad days happen, as we are all humans and not robots. Bad weeks is a stint, and a bad month, well there should not be a bad month. Unless you’re selling peanut butter that is. I accept the fact that yes we are in a recession and consumer spending is at an all time low, but guess what, consumers and businesses are still buying. It’s the go-getters who are adapting with the times and changing their tactics. It’s the go-getters who are the people who never have a bad month. Are you a go-getter?
It’s the clock watchers who accept failure and never learn from it. It’s the clock watchers who never get ahead. It’s the clock watchers who barely meet their monthly quota. It’s the clock watchers who constantly complain about their leads. It’s the clock watchers with the old school sales mentality. It’s the clock watchers who are comfortable with just barely skating by. It’s the clock watchers who bitch and moan. It’s the clock watchers that have the fear of the unknown, i.e. technology. Are you a clock watcher?
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Telephone sales is comparable to a movie, you must act a role:
As with the movie back in 1992, all sales was done on the phone and face to face, the luxuries of lead generation via the Internet was non-existent. The same applied for me when I did cold calling sales. My job was selling product placement on cable TV shows. I worked for a production company who had a series of low budget TV shows they produced. You would have never heard of these shows, as they ran primarily on networks noone has ever heard of or barely watched. These shows aired when most people were sleeping. Picture trying to pitch that over the phone, it’s not an easy sell.
Like an actor, I assumed a completely different last name, as my last name was not good for sales. It often led to much confusion with the folks on the other end trying to pronounce it. I for the most part assumed a new identity. When I picked up the phone and got a hold of the decision makers, I became an actor and a good one at that. I acted confident, knew what I was talking about, had an answer and counter answer for every question thrown at me. I convinced the person on the other end of the phone, that they needed our services more than we needed their money. I expressed that my time was limited, and that if they passed up on the opportunities I was offering, that I had another 10 companies that would say yes in a heartbeat, their competitors. Now I never did anything dishonest, but I did what was in my realm to get the sale. I was a go-getter.
I quickly learned the fundamentals of telephone sales:
A: Attention
I: Interest
D: Decsion
A: Action
The same fundamentals hold true for the web. The exception is it’s your website doing the selling. Voice contact is secondary if need be.
Leads were non-existent. I was told to generate my own.
This particular company supplied you with no leads. It gets worse, there were no computers at the job either. All we had was a cubicle, telephone and notepad. Talk about bare-bones. That should have been the writing on the wall for me at that point. I was forced to be a go-getter if I wanted to make some serious cash, that meant closing 1-2 sales a day, or 4-5 sales a week. The product I was pitching was a 2-3 minute advertising slot, costing anywhere from $5,000 – $7,500 dollars. These type of buys are done through ad agencies, director of marketing, mid level executives and so forth. Just getting through to these people is a task in of itself. The biggest struggle would be getting past the gatekeepers first, that was not hard with a good pitch. After all, I was a television set designer for a major television show, and I wanted to feature their products on TV. That hook worked 95% of the time, albeit it was a bunch of crock, but it was my act.
I generated my own leads, the Internet was a small part of it. This was in 2004, when social media was in its infancy. I relied on search engines a lot for lead research. But my success came from offline lead generation back then.
For instance we had a show about men’s products. These products ranged from electric shavers to golf clubs to power tools. My focus, the majority of the time was on the tool niche. I bought every tool magazine that was published at the time, from woodworking to power tools. I picked products from the magazine, that were interesting, new and unique and pitched them. I searched Google for tool websites, tool manufacturers, and anything remotely related to tools. I obtained tool trade show directories, I had lists among lists of thousands of companies that produced tools. I called each and every one of them. Guess what, I did very little research into the companies I was calling beforehand. The mindset was for them to sell me on their prodcut. It was a blind call 75% of the time. Sure I had a lot of misses, but with persistence I killed the tool niche. I generated a tremendous amount of sales. I was focused, persistent and wanted to make money. I was not there to watch the clock, I was not happy with the base salary, and I very often did not have a bad week. I was a go-getter.
Years later I was still singing the same tune.
I also worked for a communications company in their hosting division as technical administrator. My role there was primarily supporting a sales force of 50 sales reps in assisting them with generating new business. This was a company who supplied you with leads, their existing customer base, and people who have used one of their products before. This was basically giving the sales teams found money. Sure a lot of the leads were stale and recycled, some you could not close, but none the less, it was a goldmine that was handed to sales reps. All these sales reps had to do was pick up the phone and pitch. You had a few go-getters who exceeded their monthly quota month after month, but sadly the rest of the sales force were clock watchers. When gold was given to them, they would still complain about the leads, there was always an excuse on why they could not make a sale. Cold calling was encouraged, no one did it. The ones that attempted to do it complained. This to me was not a sales force, but rather an order taking force. Inbound calls would come into the company with customers already looking to purchase a product, all these reps did was run their credit card through and take credit for the sale. Inbound calls were split between 50 sales reps, so it was not all found money. The call volume was relatively small.
When they complained:
I asked a simple question, what are you doing to generate new leads? Are you do anything at all?
After all this was an Internet company. Every sales rep had a computer in front of them. Instead of using the most powerful tool available to them, the Internet for lead generation and research, they surfed Ebay.
I would always say to complainers, there are tons of start-ups out there who need servers, why not go after them? I would throw idea after idea out there to them and all I would hear is a complaint about it. They wanted the free money, it made me quite sick after a while hearing that. It was nothing but negativity.
The go-getters were different:
These were the sales reps who did think out of the box. These were the earners for the company. These were the people always on the phone while the others were surfing Ebay waiting for the phone to ring. Unlike the clock watchers who were hoping for that one big sale, these guys always had something in the pipeline working. They did not sit idle waiting for that one big sale which might be nothing more than a promise that may or may never come.
These guys built a solid pipeline of business. They asked for referrals, they used Google all day long for lead generation. Most of all they nurtured their existing customers, constantly calling them to make sure things were running smooth. They answered customer emails in a timely fashion, no matter if the customer was angry or not. They went above the call of duty day in and day out and were rewarded handsomely with a constant stream of business. They never had bad months, and in the event that they did, they could always rely on their pipeline to carry them through.
They were honest and most importantly had good work ethics and morals. More importantly they never oversold a product, that’s key. The go-getters realize early on to start small. In time their customers need’s change, and as the customer grows in size, so does the account. Most importantly they were always closing!
Sales is not about:
It’s not about a one time wham bam thank you mam sale. It’s not about overselling, read above. It’s certainly not about customer avoidance either, meaning you take the credit card once and never speak to them again. The customer should never be passed on from person to person. Not answering a customer’s email or phone call is avoidance, no matter how pissed off they may be. If you oversold them, apologize, do whatever it takes to make them happy and if necessary win back their business. In a downturn economy, it’s now more vital than ever to build a pipeline of business, repeat business that is. If you have no desire of being a go-getter, when it comes to sales, then maybe you are in the wrong career.
Marketing On The Social Web: A Few Key Ingredients
February 3rd, 2009
Marketing successfully on the social web, can be compared to cooking your favorite dish. If the ingredients are just not right, or are missing, you are left with a sub-par product. It’s imperative that you get the dish correct. Lack of a little salt and pepper can make or break a dish. The same can be said for social marketing, to be effective with your campaign, you can not leave out any of the key ingredients, because if you do, you’re left with a sub-par marketing campaign. Sub-par is just not acceptable on the social web. After all, marketing is selling. If you’re not doing it effectively, you can certainly bet the next person is, your competitor.
I recently wrote a good primer called 40 key elements to getting started in social media. It’s mainly for beginners, but the majority of the elements, ingredients applies to marketers as well. That should be a good starting point for anyone just getting involved with social media, and marketing on the social web.
When I got involved with Internet marketing back in 1997, the game was completely different. There were primarily three forms of marketing back then. The first was marketing for search or what’s commonly called SEO nowadays. We optimized our own sites with the guidelines that still hold true to this day. You can read about a few of them on a post I wrote called 15 tips on improving search engine visibility. Of course PPC campaigns was around then, and was very profitable and cheaper than it is today. There was less competition jockeying for keywords and the big name in town for search was Overture. This is before Yahoo bought them out, and way before the days of Google.
The second form of marketing was email. Today it’s commonly called spam. These were the days before opt-in existed. These were also the days where you could do a mailing to a million people and average close to 100 sales. Those days are long long gone. These were the early days of the web, keep in mind it was truly the wild wild west. Thankfully a decade later, the web matured and for the most part cleaned itself up. The third form of marketing was the traditional media buys of banner advertisements. It was all about CPM back then, a model I never liked and still don’t.
That was then. Today is a completely different ball game for marketing:
While the same avenues for marketing still exist. Today the social web needs to be factored in along with the traditional mechanisms for marketing. The traditional marketing methods of one-way, one-sided communication simply do not work when applied to social media. Social media is all about two-way communication.
What social media is:
The foundation and core of what social media is, consists of the five C’s. Conversation, community, commenting, collaboration and contribution. These are the five fundamentals that companies and marketers must understand to be able to successfully market on the social web.
What social media is not:
Social media marketing is not about spamming. It is not about list building with the intent to spam them with your wares. It’s not about one-way communication.
Social media is not Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Social media is about the conversations that are taking place on these platforms, some may be about your brand some may not.
Social media is not about the tools. The tools are only facilitators of the message.
Starting with the basics first, a blog:
Establish your identity and presence. This starts with a blog. The Twitter and social networking accounts come second. Your blog is your home base. You might already have a website established as your home base, this is fine, but you need to attach a blog onto it. Your blog is your voice, your website is not. The website is your secure point of sale for your product. Your blog is not used to spam your product, but to promote it. Create newsworthy, thoughtful, intelligent content that has immediate usefulness. Offer tips, tricks and informational content relating to your product and or industries. Your blog affords you the opportunity to become an expert and authority for your related product field, use it wisely. You know your product best, be passionate about it and let people know . Blogging is an open tw0-way forum of communication, encourage commenting as often as possible. Your blog is a tool for getting the message out there, in time others will pick up the message and spread it.
Be creative, add product videos, tutorials, and other forms of user/customer generated content. Answer customer questions and feedback directly and openly using your blog. Your blog is about promoting your product, finding the necessary hooks should be easy. By doing this you’re also establishing a footprint with the search engines. Blogs are an excellent source for search engine traffic. Be consistent with your blogging, optimize each and every blog post correctly, and you will start seeing the benefits from search engine referrals. Remember Google does not discriminate, on the same hand you need to tell Google you exist, and that your blog is an authority on a subject matter. Telling Google you exist is the easy part. The authority part comes from inbound links, quality at that.
Change your blog permalink structure immediately:
By default, WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them. This will severely limit the amount of traffic you will see from search engines. Make sure any content you publish on the web has the keywords of the subject or story headline formatted in the permalink/web URL. As an example, look at the url of the last post I published, it was called “Netvibes: The New Social Media Dashboard. ” The permalink for that post is, michaelfruchter.com/blog/2009/01/netvibes-the-new-social-media-dashboard/. Your permalink structure should look like this at the very least. You can also take it a step further and completely eliminate the month and year from the url structure. The point is keyword placement, every thing you publish needs to have the relevant keywords in the URL. This will make you or break you in terms of search engine relevance and rankings.
Go where the conversations are taking place:
Your customers are on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and so forth. Establish identities on these networks, groups, and most importantly a following. Simply creating an account on these networks with little or no interaction is pointless. If you are going to use these tools as a one-way form of communication, then you will accomplish nothing. That equates basically to spamming, and you will be ignored rather quickly. Gain insight into the communities of interest and actively participate in them.
Venture into new territories:
News flash, the social web is not just Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. If you plan on successfully marketing, you need to constantly be expanding your horizons. There are tons of other opportunities you need to be looking at and establish a presence on. The first that comes to my mind is Ning. Ning is very niche and targeted as it allows users to create their own social websites and social networks. This is not an opportunity to spam, but rather an opportunity to join the conversation, participate and add value to it. The marketing part comes later, only after you have earned the trust and respect of the community, never beforehand. Ning is also a place to create and form a community around your product, that is if one does not exist already. There are also alternatives to Youtube and Digg, see what I mean? Never limit yourself, that’s foolish.
Create, build and maintain a following:
People who express interest about your product are either friends, followers or fans. It’s vital that you friend these people and follow them back on all the social networks you are on, and will be participating in. Friending anyone and everyone is list building, this is meaningless. Only friend and follow the people back who are conversating about your brand. Anyone who has even the slightest interest in your brand, follow back. You need to be receptive with people who are trying to engage you positively. Without a following you don’t exist, it’s that simple. Remember social marketing is basically word of mouth marketing, these are the mouths that will be spreading the word. These are the people who will be Twittering your content, Digging your content, sharing your content and so forth. I can’t stress enough how important it is to have meaningful relationships with these people. They are for the most part loyal brand endorsers. You need to be as loyal to them as they are to you. This is done by engaging and replying to them in conversations, wherever they may be taking place, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Blogs etc. Send them free stuff every once in a while, people love the free perks. You get the picture.
Forget email marketing. Your fans and friends are your opt-in marketing list.
I won’t say email marketing is completely useless, but this is not 1997, 98, or 99 anymore either. You should definitely set up an opt-in email list for customers or potential customers who legitimately want to be notified of product updates. Do not rely solely on email marketing or email list buying, it’s a waste of time in todays Web 2.0 era. On the social web your followers and friends are your opt-in email list. Lets face it, email marketing ends up as spam, either the user who opted-in marks it for spam, or spam filters marks it as spam. There is also a cost involved with sending emails. The costs are for the list leads, sending the emails, and the cost involved with possibly getting shut down for a brief period of time by your web hosting company. How much does it cost to send updates to your followers on Twitter, Facebook and so forth? That’s right, you guessed it, nada, nothing, zero. Your followers don’t have the option of marking your messages as spam. Sure they can ignore it or unfollow you, but that’s about it. If they are following you, it’s for a reason. You will always have their attention for the most part. Do people forward email marketing messages to other friends and family? Highly unlikely. Now can we say the same thing about Twitter, one word, retweet. You get the picture now?
Content is king, be creative with content creation and promotion:
Create content that matches the channels you are trying to market to. Social media content is primarily user generated content. Your marketing content and strategies should focus on a mix of professional and user/customer generated content. Visual sells, visual is also what goes viral. Create content that will get people talking, sharing, digging, stumbling and forwarding emails. Your content should be remarkable, unique, and newsworthy. Simple static content was good in the Web 1.0 era, but not the Web 2.0 era. Take a look around on Digg, Reddit, and Youtube, pay attention to what’s hot and what’s not. These are good indicators to follow. Your existing customers are a good source for user generated content. There are so many directions you can run with by using your customer base. Encourage and give people the tools to promote your content as well. The tools exist and they are free.
Target, readjust and maintain your branded campaign pages:
Take a look at your profile and landing pages and adjust them accordingly to the communities you are targeting. Maintain these pages as often as possible with content updates. All to often, companies have abandoned their branded campaign pages, that were part of a larger marketing campaign often setup by PR firms. Most of these pages signed up thousands of friends, fans and followers. When the campaign ended, these pages became ghosts. Thousands of friends and followers are left in limbo. You see this time and time again on every social networking site on the net. Every follower and friend is a value target, each and every single one of them, treat them as such.
Track everything:
Measure everything when possible. Anayltics is key for measuring and tracking visitor information. Use tracking URLs in your marketing campaigns and social profiles. Guessing simply does not cut it. A smart marketer is an informed one.
Create a social media dashboard:
Tracking website anayltics is easy. You also need to track and monitor what is being said online about your brand. Twitter mentions, blog posts, comments, and so forth. Create a central hub to monitor all this activity. You have two options, use a company such as Radian6 or Filtrbox, or create your own monitoring dashboard as I have outlined in this post using Netvibes. Your dashboard should also integrate your website anayltics, tracking url statistics, follower counts, bookmarks, video plays etc.
There are obviously a few more ingredients to throw into the pot. This post just touched upon a few of the essentials. You can read more of my thoughts and insight for marketing on the social web for 2009, in this eBook, that I recently collaborated on with 11 other marketing professionals.
Image by Chotda under Creative Commons License.
Netvibes: The New Social Media Dashboard
January 28th, 2009
If you’re a corporation or marketer who uses social media for marketing purposes, you need to be able to listen and monitor your surroundings for conversation about your brand. A lot of companies are using dashboards just for this reason. A dashboard is basically your central hub for conversation discovery, aggregation, tracking and archiving. It’s comprised of multiple data sources such as Twitter mentions, blog searches, web searches and so forth. There are companies that will do this for you, of course for a fee. If your budget allows for it, it’s an option worth looking into. Netvibes is a great brand monitoring alternative and it’s free.
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So what exactly is Netvibes?
Those of us who have been around awhile know what it is, but if you’re new to the web you might not be using it, much less heard of it. Netvibes is an Ajax-based, personalized start page much like Pageflakes, My Yahoo, or iGoogle. The first thing you will want to do is register for an account if you have not already done so.
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Configure your dashboard tabs:
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As you can see from the screen shot above, I have four tabs configured in no particular order. The most important aspect of my social media dashboard is the “Listening Post”. For testing purposes, I added the additional tabs with corresponding RSS feeds. I’m a die-hard Google Reader user, as I use it for reading all of my RSS feeds. For me, it’s not crucial to have my RSS feeds on my dashboard, but I thought it would be a nice additional element. I believe a complete dashboard should be used for monitoring, not only your brand, but for your competitors as well. Thanks in part to RSS, and a variety of widgets, this is easily done using netvibes. If you’re not a big Google Reader fan and love RSS, I would highly recommend adding RSS feeds to your netvibes account. You have the option of reading the feed content on the actual website, or within netvibes. It’s a full blown and very impressive RSS reader. You can also highly customize your content modules by resizing them and placing them anywhere on your page.
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What makes this work is RSS and widgets:
The power behind this is RSS. The majority of services that you will be monitoring all offer RSS feeds for your desired search queries. The widgets are an additional bonus. There are some nice hacks you can create with widgets that simply can’t be done with RSS.
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On your netvibes page, at the very top, on the left hand side, you will see an “Add content” icon. This brings up the content module. You have a few options here. All you should be concerned about at this point is the “Add a feed” option. Start inputting the RSS feeds you want to monitor. Create a new tab and label it competitors. Input your competitors RSS feeds in that tab. The next tab you want to create and the most important one of all is the listening post tab.
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What should we be monitoring?
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Do not use all of these service together. This will lead to mass duplication issues.
The services I listed, offer you a variety of monitoring options depending on your needs. If you notice the last three I listed, numbers eight, nine and ten are social content aggregators. They aggregate data from multiple sources including Twitter, FriendFeed and so forth. You can use any one of the three to achieve the same outcomes. It’s never a good idea to keep all of your eggs in one basket, that is why I listed three of them. Also, results might vary slightly from each service. Personally I prefer always going to the source and cutting out the middle man. If I’m strictly looking for Twitter mentions, I would set up a RSS search query directly from Twitter search. Take note of number nine, the Social Media Firehose. It’s a Yahoo Pipe that searches an impressive forty services for brand monitoring. Services I left out are covered in this pipe such as Backtype, Digg, Flickr, Youtube, etc. You can clone this pipe and configure it to your needs, or create a brand new pipe altogether.
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Customize your dashboard. Make it efficient and visually appealing:
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While there is no right or wrong way to organize your grid. Find a solution and tweak it. I prefer more boxes on my dashboard, and always go with four. You can change this anytime, the point is make it efficient. Clutter should not exist at all. Create new tabs/pages for the additional stuff. There is a decent variety of themes and wallpapers to choose from. You can also customize it further by using your own graphics and color selections for the background.
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Integrate widgets into your dashboard:
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There are close to a few thousand widgets that you can choose from. Check out the “Essential widgets” option for a good selection of the crucial ones, such as a Calendar, Link module Webnote and HTML modules. Also, any of the communications modules, such as Google Talk, Gmail, Google Maps. There is also social networking widgets for Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. Be sure to check out the netvibes ecosystem, it’s their universal directory of widgets.
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Create your listening post:
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Now comes the best part, tweaking your listening post. As you can see from the testing dashboard I set up in the above image, mine is relatively easy and simple. It’s been configured to monitor any instance of the word Fruchter. I have RSS feeds for Twitter, Social Mention, Google Blog Search, Technorati, Spy, and YackTrack plugged in. I also have RSS feeds plugged in for Flickr image search, and YouTube.
What my social media dashboard is missing, is Google Analytics. I would have liked a way to view my traffic stats in the dashboard. The widget I found for this was broken at the time of testing. I’m sure there is another hack around this though.
You will notice a module called ” FiltrFeed”, that’s an RSS feed from Filtrbox. Filtrbox is a media monitoring service. They have free and paid plans for brand monitoring. It’s a service I have been using for a few months now, and I’m very impressed with it. I profiled them back in September on a post called 10 tools for listening in social media. They reached out to me on Twitter, and gave me the tip about using the RSS feed for the filters I have setup there. I was unaware they offered this feature, as I get daily briefing emails for the content filters I have set up. As a result, I never venture off into the control panel area. I will be doing a nice review of their service in the oncoming days. Stay tuned for that, and be sure to check out their service.
Download The Free eBook: Marketing In 2009
January 17th, 2009
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Valeria Maltoni, from the conversationagent.com, recently asked me to participate in adding some thoughts for marketing in the social web for 2009. Along with me, there are 11 other brilliant thinkers who contributed to the project. It’s truly a great collaboration of some of the sharpest marketing professionals, who are involved with social media. Everyone involved added a unique perspective and guidance on where they thought the direction of social marketing is heading in for 2009.
More than predictions, which is hard to do, the group focused on direction. This eBook is the result of our collective energy and execution experience. For a bite-size preview, head over to the conversationagent.com and read the post or download it here.
The full list of contributors are:
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40 Key Elements to Getting Started In Social Media
January 6th, 2009Well folks it’s a new year and I wanted to kick it off properly. I put my heart and soul into this post, and I hope you get some value out of it. Below is an excerpt, please head over to louisgray.com to view the post in its full entirety.
Getting started with social media, whether for personal or professional use, requires learning the basic fundamentals. Social media is more than just creating a blog or Twitter account. The tools are great and give us big advantages, but they are simply extensions of how we engage and participate in social media, they are not the answers. The social in social media is all about the human element. This post touches upon 40 key elements to aid your success.
Continue reading, 40 Key Elements to Getting Started In Social Media.
I spend a lot of time blogging at louisgray. You can keep track of my latest posts by bookmarking this link. Stay tuned for next months list of, 10 people to follow on FriendFeed for the month of January. It will be published tomorrow at louisgray.com
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Five Reasons Why Businesses Should Use Social Media Marketing
December 28th, 2008Adam Singer, from thefuturebuzz.com recently wrote a brilliant post that touched upon 5 reasons why you should learn about social media. He also tagged me for my thoughts on the subject, so in good spirit, I thought I would do a post on 5 reasons why businesses should learn and use social media for marketing. This is also a follow up for a post I did last week titled, social media marketing – who, what, when, where, why and how?
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1) The cost for entry is minimal.
At the very least, for the price of hosting and setting up a blog, you can begin to engage in social media marketing. You can spend dollars on buying banner advertisements, keyword placement on search engines and so forth. The cost barrier for entry is relatively low, compare that to the costly old-school, and increasingly ineffective ways of marketing such as print, TV, radio and so forth. Don’t get me wrong, blogging is just one aspect of your marketing strategy, but the essential tools you will also use such as Twitter, Facebook, and social bookmarking, for example, for the most part cost nothing to use. Your cost is time, time spent establishing and engaging your brand’s presence online. If you decided to retain a PR agency, or social media consultant, you obviously will incur higher costs. Doing it in-house, if you can, is the way to go. Specifically, if you are a small business and don’t have a large advertising budget. With the economy in it’s current state, even the larger corporations are feeling the brunt and they are slashing their advertising budgets in half, some are totally eliminating them all together and looking for more effective means of advertising. You can bet a lot of them are using their in-house staff to accomplish this.
2) Your current and potential customers are using it.
We are not living back in the 1996-1997 era, where the Internet to most people was AOL, and the way we accessed it was through 56K modems or lower. Fast forward ten going on eleven years, things have changed dramatically. It’s now not an option to be online, it’s a necessity. We are living in a connected digital state of mind, we are connected at all times thanks, to broadband. With that being said, people, your customer’s purchasing decisions are being influenced by social media, i.e blogs. Before making a purchasing decision, consumers nowadays are smartly using the Internet to find, compare, and research before ultimately spending their money. Have you looked around? There is a reason why your competitors, especially the ones in the know, are already using social media. There is no reason why you shouldn’t be as well.
3) Brand monitoring, listen, learn and react.
If your customers are online you can bet they are talking, positively or negatively. Social media is largely word of mouth marketing. Positive chatter can be used to your advantage and should be taken advantage of when possible. You should put forth the effort to respond to this chatter with gratitude. It never hurts to reward positive feedback, as it could only be beneficial to your brand. This can be done in a multitude of simple and effective ways. Negative chatter on the hand, can be detrimental and needs to be paid close attention to. On average, dissatisfied customers will tell somewhere between 13 and 20 other people how dissatisfied they were, and that’s offline we are talking about. Now could you imagine online? Learn how to use the tools to your advantage, and most importantly listen and react accordingly.
4) Compete on an even playing field.
Before the advent of social media, you needed Madison Ave dollars to compete with the big boys. Social media affords you the opportunity to compete on an even, level playing field. By using an effective social media and SEO strategy, you can achieve the same reach and success your competitors have no matter their size or bankroll. Social media actually gives you a leg up on your competition, if you are determined, motivated and willing to put the time into it.
5) Traditional websites are a thing of the past and just wont cut it anymore.
Do you have a killer four or five letter keyword dot com domain with plenty of type in traffic? Maybe so if you were lucky enough to buy it back in the early to mid 90′s. If you don’t, you will need other ways of generating traffic, and on the cheap. You could always spend advertising dollars on costly PPC campaigns. That’s one way of generating quality, targeted traffic, and by all means can be very effective. If you are on a budget or for that matter have no budget, social media marketing combined with organic SEO efforts is your only answer. Blogging, social networking sites, and Twitter are much more effective in getting the word out there and driving traffic as compared to a static stand alone html website. The ” if you build it they will come” mentality does not work on the Internet. You need as many hooks as possible to lure customers in. Remember this a tremendous ocean that you are fishing in. Social media marketing should be used in addition to your traditional website.
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Social Media, Learn to Crawl Before you Walk
December 17th, 2008
Social Media like anything else requires commitment, time and patience. You must first pay your dues, learn and contribute, in order to get achievable results from it, of course all this depends on your objectives for using social media. If you’re new to this and going to be using it for any financial gain, either for yourself or a product your hawking, then read on. If you think creating accounts on every social networking site, and installing Twitter is the winning formula, you are wrong. The tools are only the facilitators of the message, as I have said countless times before. We must first learn to crawl before we can walk, so lets crawl, shall we..
Contribute:
Remember in order to get you must first give. Contribute as often and as much as you can. Contributing can be writing resourceful and useful blog posts, sharing and promoting other’s work. Do not hesitate to help people if they need assistance.
Comment:
Leave thoughtful and constructive comments as much as possible on other blogs. Don’t stop there, post comments on Facebook walls, FriendFeed, and Twitter. This promotes good practices in social media, and it also gives you an opportunity for exposure and link placement. This can lead into new networking opportunities and potential new friendships.
Conversation:
Find and participate in where the conversation is taking place. If you are using social media for marketing, this is very important. Find out where your current & potential customers are, and engage them. Establish a presence and contribute to the conversation, do not overpower and definitely do not spam, otherwise you will be shown the door rather quickly, and be exposed for a marketer, not a member of the community. We are giving and not getting at first, until we have earned the right to do so.
Community:
Just as in life we build a circle of friends based on our interests. Community is what social media is all about. Without the community, its just media, not social. Find the relevant communities and actively participate in them. Don’t expect to be accepted and welcomed right away, again this is earned.
Be proactive as much as possible:
Acting before a situation becomes a source of confrontation or crisis. That’s the definition of proactive. If friends solicit for help via Twitter or email, respond back in a timely fashion. If friends send you a gentle nudge, respond back. If friends need an extra Digg vote, don’t hesitate to help. When it becomes your time and a potential situation arises, you would hope that your network is there to catch you before you fall. Do onto others as you would want others to do onto you.
Share:
Remember one of the first things you learned as a kid? Play nice and share with your neighbors. Social media is all about getting the message out there. we do this in a variety of ways, one of which is sharing. Shine the spotlight onto others, if you expect the spotlight to be shined onto you. Sharing and self promotion is always a two-way street.
Do not promote yourself:
If you have a product to sell or are offering a service, keep those initiatives away from the communities, at least in the very beginning. If you jump into a community and your only goal is to hawk your wares, you will be seen as a marketer and not a contributor. I’m not saying it’s never okay to occasionally promote yourself, but there is a time and place. Again the right is earned, not given.
Build relationships:
Do not friend as many people as possible. All this builds is a list… Do build meaningful relationships with people. People you have taken a genuine interest in. It’s not about how many people you follow, but who you follow instead.
Image by Dyamasaki under Creative Commons License
Thoughts to Consider for Better Online Marketing
December 15th, 2008I recently gave a consultation to a potential client regarding their social media strategies. This company, who shall remain nameless, is already a large, respected, and dominate leader in their space. They have been online just short of a year, made many acquisitions, and they have an active userbase, and community that continues to grow. Some of the problems they are suffering from, as most sites of their size and caliber, is content, too much of it. Content is king, no disputing that, but when you are producing the sheer amount of it that this company is, it can lead to confusion for the consumer. We talked about better ways to prioritize their content, and organize it in such a way so that it was not an overwhelming experience for their users. We also spoke about their current social media initiatives, what they are doing right, wrong, and not doing at all. Lastly, I touched on user retention, ways to improve site usability and expanded on different avenues for monetizing. These are the different variables that I look at and factor in when working with a client to help achieve their desired goals and results. Marketing is just one variable , but the second being the consumer interaction with the website. What happens when a potential customer lands on your site needs to be looked at very carefully. How long they stay on your site, how well they are able to navigate the site, not find or find the relevant content/products, interact, and when required too, make purchases.
This post reflects on some of my observations and suggestions to the client. I touch upon a multitude of areas. I have also added additional thoughts and pointers, some may be relevant to you, some may not. I hope you will pull away something from this and perhaps use it and learn from it.
Collect current and potential users email addresses:
Break down the walls:
Provide a map:
Focus on the expert layer:
Don’t guess, just ask:
Optimize for Mobile:
Create outposts. Go where the existing and potential customer base is and establish a presence.
User generated content:
That’s it for this one. You can keep up with some of my more current posts on louisgray.com at the links below.
(Weekly Recap) – Social Media, FriendFeed & Twitter
December 6th, 2008Another week has ended, and it’s a new month. So it’s time to get caught up if you haven’t been here in a while.
This is the weekly recap of posts I have written. Please visit the hyperlinks to read the posts in their full entirety.
1) I shine the spotlight on 10 FriendFeed members to follow for the month of December.
2) Google Friend Connect publicly launched. This post is a brief tutorial on the features and the implementation of Friend Connect.
3) I touch upon 15 useful Google App Engine Applications.
4) I talk a little about content syndication, and how far we’ve come.
5) This post touches on 25 different uses for FriendFeed.
6) I expand on the importance of how sharing and self promotion is always a two-way street.
That’s enough of about me. Here are a few more solid posts that I really enjoyed, from louisgray.com and across the web.
1) Louis gives us an excellent review of PeopleBrowsr, a new visual social media dashboard.
2) Jesse Stay (Exclusive) interviews the woman behind @BritneySpears on Twitter.
3) Rob Diana talks a little about how blogging’s future is both consolidating and expanding.
4) Adam Singer gives us 5 Reasons why you should learn about social media.
5) Kyle Lacy does a great video post on word of mouth marketing, then and now.
6) GrowMap proposes a new top ten FriendFeed friends challenge.
7) Eric Berlin advises to follow these 10 people on FriendFeed, and increase your social media powers.
8 ) Chris Brogan does an excellent video post on the importance of play and work.
9) Jason Falls talks about 10 promotional mistakes that new bloggers tend to make.
(Weekly Recap) – Twitter Tools, SEO and FriendFeed.
November 22nd, 2008Louis Gray handed me the keys to his blog last week, so I have been having a little fun over there lately.
This is the weekly recap of posts I have written . Please visit the hyperlinks to read the posts in their full entirety.
Why stop there? Here are a few more solid posts that I really enjoyed.
Recent happenings
November 13th, 2008I wanted to let all of my friends and readers of this blog to know what’s been happening lately. I apologize about the lack of updates. I have been spending a majority of my time offline taking care of some family related issues.
I have been blogging on other sites. Most recently Louis Gray handed me the keys to his blog. If you have not been to Louisgray.com to read them, follow the two links below.
I also wrote a post for Mashable.com in mid October, titled “What Happens to Our Social Profiles After We Die?.”
I hope you enjoy these posts. I hope to resume with updates on this blog next week.
Thanks,
Mike
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