Being a firm believer in the role of content in social media, I took Altimeters’ hourglass and mapped out what content would look like against the Social [...]]]> In a recent post Altimeter, the social media strategy folks, posted a great graphic on the Social Media Hour Glass. It documents the buying cycle through social media interaction.

Being a firm believer in the role of content in social media, I took Altimeters’ hourglass and mapped out what content would look like against the Social Media Hourglass.

This model only looks at the role of content while fully aware of the place all the other on and off-line marketing has on happy customer and a sale.

Rinse & Repeat

Awareness- Advocacy & friends can play a big part in creating awareness of your products and services. For large companies with a  monstrous base, advocacy plays an important part in managing social media, but it also plays a part in companies of all size.

Consideration – Once aware, you relay on your website, customer reviews, social content, blogs, and other content to further more a customer toward your product.

The most interested customers will want as much detail as they can get, so landing pages, videos and other more detailed content becomes more important.

Intent – Once close to a decision, customers need supporting information on purchase specifics; when will my product arrive, is shipping really free, will your support team be available 24/7,  what are your terms?

Support – After the purchase your support content needs to be consistent with pre-purchase and be available across multiple platforms.

Loyalty – Building loyalty through email, rewards programs, recognition requires content geared toward the budding Advocate.

Advocacy – Advocates need more information and content to share than the average fan. In order to help you grow and support your social base this group needs specific and detailed content not available to your average customer

In the end your advocates support your awareness and the cycle starts all over again.

What is your social content strategy?

I like the NetElixer Calendar. Below I’ve added [...]]]> We’re almost in October and the leaves in the Northeast are already starting to change. That means the holiday season is upon us. My friends at NetElixer, one of my favorite Paid Search partners, sent out this great email with a 9 week holiday planning calendar in it. 

I like the NetElixer Calendar. Below I’ve added chart covering the key items you should consider for your holiday digital marketing plans

Have you built your holiday calendar yet?

Love him or hate him President Obama was the first US politician to use Social Media to rip the roof off of online fundraising. So much so that even many republican candidates are taking pages out of his 2008 playbook. It appears that the folks at Obama’s HQ are at the cutting [...]]]>

Image via Wikipedia

Love him or hate him President Obama was the first US politician to use Social Media to rip the roof off of online fundraising. So much so that even many republican candidates are taking pages out of his 2008 playbook. It appears that the folks at Obama’s HQ are at the cutting edge again. This time by making a game out of fundraising.

Gamification has been growing in the digital media space for the past few years so it makes sense that it would make its way to politics. Here’s a look at the Obama camps page for fundraisers.

Fully equipped with a leaderboard and prizes. No iPad’s here, just a call from the president himself or the vice president, which might be the perfect prize given the target audience.

With a very [...]]]> From late 2007 to 2010 I started and ran The Speaker Company, a new brand for the Denon & Marantz group of home audio products. The challenge was to build a brand as quickly as possible for this direct to consumer company, in a coporate structure that was primarily a two-tier sales organization.

With a very small marketing budget and few resources, we set about to get brand recognization and sales in a crowded field, consumer audio speakers, during the begining of the recession.

Many companies face the same problems with new brands whether inside a larger company or a under-funded start-up.

Below is an outline of the approach we took to build a solid brand presence for The Speaker Company.

1. Start with Adwords - It’s quick, easy to budget, easy to measure. We used a modest budget to kick-start sales.
2. Content creation - This is the hub of most on and off line success, no matter what problem your company solves. People want an answer to a problem. Supply it. We hired a great writer, supplied the voice we wanted, and made our case.
3. Share your answers to the problems in as many places as possible. Yes Facebook and Twitter, but more importantly in appropriate forums. Be part of discussions. We spent many hours in forums and other industry related sites.
4. Identify and engage with key influential people; bloggers and forum experts. Give product/service away for review purposes. This works wonders but don’t expect it to happen overnight. Most people are cautious of new brands. We had dozens of reviews in influential forums and quickly gained recognition from key blogs and forum posters.
5. Continue to develop “creative & sharable” content to help boost SEO. Continue this on an ongoing basis. Start a blog that addresses not only your product/service, but other issues related to your customers lifestyle and problem set. Post at least twice a week or more. We also hired a social/SEO company to help us develop relevant content that greatly boosted SEO. (in 8 months we ranked for 100′s of top level keywords)
6. Affiliate Marketing - If appropriate for your product or service, launch an affiliate program, it’s a cost per sale model, is highly measurable and does wonders for branding for a very low cost. This eventually made up 20% of our sales.
7. Customer Service -Last but not least give “off the charts” customer service. Keep customers insanely happy, especially the ones that complain, they will tell their friends.

There of course is more to it than what I outlined above, and there are many deeper details to each of the bullet points. But overall this was it. In the end the company built a reputation for building and selling quality speakers at half the price. After 2 and a half years, The Speaker Company was closed for reasons unrelated to sales or brand awareness, but the success we had lived on for Boston Acoustics which garnered a 21% boost in organic traffic with the 301 redirect transfers we put in place.  

Want to find out more on how to build your brand online? Visit the contact page and click on the call me button.

To say that consumers are bombarded with input [...]]]> This was a question asked by my 10 year old daughter this summer while swimming in our pool. Believe it or not this prompted a two week long conversation among folks who were at our house that weekend. (there are also 37M results when you search for this)

To say that consumers are bombarded with input on a daily basis is an understatement. To stand out amidst the noise is difficult and challenging. Even business consumers want to be entertained when reading about your product or service. So what can you do to get above the noise, get noticed, and start conversations?

4 ways to keep your content and message interesting during the upcoming holiday season.

1. Bold images or Daring headlines – Support plain headlines with bold images and plain images with daring headlines. Everyone knows you have seconds to catch someones attention.
2. Address your market with a sense of humor – We live in tough times and people need to laugh. I recently wrote a blog post for an enterprise messaging company in which we portrayed a real customer success story in a humorous and overly dramatic fashion. The client and the readers loved it.
3. Steal from today’s headlines – “Congress Actually Did Something, Celebrate with Us”. By capitalizing on what’s fresh in peoples minds you increase your chances of engaging with them. Be careful not to pick a side but support the conversation!
4. A Better Social Media Strategy – Build a Social Media strategy that meets the bigger picture of your customers lives. Don’t just address your product or service. Create conversations that are topical, controversial and worthy of being shared.

As for the headline question of this article, we finally came to a conclusion.

Product Development and Social Media

Corporations have spent a great deal of [...]]]> Much attention is paid to Facebook and Twitter as a communications method with external customers. Rightly so, since between them they have quite a few subscribers. Often missing from the conversation is how social media tools can help companies develop better prodcuts and improve internal communications.

Product Development and Social Media

Corporations have spent a great deal of the past century creating products that meet a criteria that fits the companies business model. Beyond that companies spend millions of dollars in customer research and feedback. What’s still mostly missing is the use of crowdsourcing for product development. Bringing customers in to be part of the product development cycle by capturing, conversing and sharing their ideas to help build better products and services.  Sure, many companies have customer advisery panels, but social media gives you the opportunity to create a larger and more diverse set of resources to the mix.

Although this scares the daylights out of most companies for a number of reasons, those who miss out on this may miss out on game changing advances.

Social Media and Internal Communications

In a large enterprise many organizations exist in a vacuum, duplicating efforts and going outside the enterprise for services that are available in-house. Using an internal social platform to share ideas, information on projects and day to day activities and discovery can save you millions of dollars in prodcutivity.

A new book on these subjects, The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees, is due out in October. Check it out here.

Also see
What’s Your Social Strategy in HBR

Related articles

• How Companies Can Use Social Media to Improve Internal Communication, Collaboration and Compensation (1ntheknow.wordpress.com)

Holistic Digital Marketing & eCommerce

Like you, your customer is multi-dimensional. Customers have different interests and reasons for buying and remaining loyal to a brand or website. Knowing those interests is key to successfully marketing and selling to your customer.

Make an [...]]]> Are you marketing to your entire customer or just to the part that wants your specific product?

Holistic Digital Marketing & eCommerce

Like you, your customer is multi-dimensional. Customers have different interests and reasons for buying and remaining loyal to a brand or website. Knowing those interests is key to successfully marketing and selling to your customer.

Make an effort to understand what really moves your customer, especially in relation to your products. Without this knowledge you’re running a one-dimensional marketing campaign and eCommerce business. Armed with this information you can build our your marketing and content directions in a way that is meaningful for your customers.

Specific Action Plans

Start with a  MindMap – Start with your product at the center. Here is an example:

• Related Products
• Events
• Emotional Triggers & Health
• Trends

Let’s take the home entertainment  electronics industry as an example:

Related Product (depending on your main product)

• Gaming
• Audio
• Video
• Connectors
• Seating
• Wall treatments
• Content (movies and music)
• Snacks

Events

• This week in Movie, Music history
• Technology history
• Current Events

Emotional Triggers & Health

• Holidays
• Seasonal
• Photography, Video
• Family time
• Vision & Hearing information

Trends & Technology

• New technology – educational
• Future technology
• Related technologies

Content

• Latest Movies, Music & Games
• Can tie into Emotional, Technology & History

Can you can see the possibilities? You also need to do things like surveys and carefully watch your analytics to see where your specific customer base is most interested. Between their on-site reactions and analytics will tell you want percentage you should feature AC/DC or Pink in your music mentions.

Email & Social Media (including your blogs)

Now that you’ve got the information you want, it’s time to integrate this into your marketing message and web properties. Write blog posts and social media content based around your discoveries. Mix informational items in with your emails. Now it’s time to start looking at your results.

• Monitor your analytics for trends and interests
• Read comments on blogs and social media outlets
• Look at survey results
• Look at which content types create the most conversions
• Add information to your product descriptions that reflect your customers total needs

This information will give you more information about your customers that you can use to further target your them with more detailed content. Engaging customers in a broader segment of their life makes your a valuable partner, not just a vendor trying to sell them something. It’s really simple, customers that are more engaged with your brand or site are more likely to stay customers then those who are not.

Additional Benefits

• Possible Higher Email Open Rate
• More Social Engagement and Sharing

Related Articles

Mind Maps from Website Magazine

Gratification is the new rage, or will soon be. According to Gartner Group, by 2015, 70% of all the Global 2000will be actively using gamification in their business and 50% of their innovation process will be gamified.

Current Examples

Most of us have heard of or tried foursquare, the location based check-in [...]]]>

Image via Wikipedia

Gratification is the new rage, or will soon be. According to Gartner Group, by 2015, 70% of all the Global 2000will be actively using gamification in their business and 50% of their innovation process will be gamified.

Current Examples

Most of us have heard of or tried foursquare, the location based check-in service that makes a game out of checking in to different location. You collect badges and can become Mayor a location which might afford you special offers or awards. Some even classify Facebook and Twitter as a game where you’re collecting friends. Online collection games, search games an other types have been around as long as the internet. Other famous games include Farmville, which uses virtual currency as a motivator.

In addition to collecting badges you can get achievement awards, virtual or real currency and bragging rights to being at the top of a leader board.

Tapping Human Emotion

Games tap human emotion, reinforce desired activities and get people to do things they otherwise might find boring. Being the mayor of your Starbucks or at the top of a leader board gives a sense of accomplishment. This is nothing new. I found that if I timed my daughters 40 yard dashes and chart them, she becomes much more engaged in beating her previous times. Take this same effect and make it social and people will compete with each other for little other than bits on a screen.

Testing the Theory

Anyone wishing to try this without spending a bundle can go to Punchtab and use their gaming engine and see how it works. Let me know what you think. It’s really more of a social media play with a leaderboard but still pretty cool.

Give it a try and tell me if your company is planning to launch any games.

Related articles

• Gamification: Is everything a game? (econsultancy.com)
• With Playboy as proof, Bunchball says gamification works (venturebeat.com)
• By 2015, 50 percent of companies will embrace gamification, Gartner says (venturebeat.com)
• Event Rollup: Gamification At Altimeter Roundtable ” Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social … (seome.me)

So you’ve got a blog or website that allows users to post reviews or comments for your posts or products, good for you. Engaging your site visitors is critical in creating increased visitor loyalty and trust. The additional content is also great for better SEO.

Taming the Spam Beast

As anyone who has ever [...]]]>

Image via Wikipedia

So you’ve got a blog or website that allows users to post reviews or comments for your posts or products, good for you. Engaging your site visitors is critical in creating increased visitor loyalty and trust. The additional content is also great for better SEO.

Taming the Spam Beast

As anyone who has ever had to deal with comments or reviews knows, dealing with spam can be a full time job. So much so that programs have become popular that allow you to either log in with another ID, like facebook, twitter or linkedIN accounts, or use a third party service that manages commenting across multiple sites like disqus or js-kit.

The advantage of both of these methods is they validate the site visitor and help reduce spam.

Pros and Cons of External Logins and Community Platforms

Pros

• Easy for site visitors to logon
• Reduced spamming with some
• Sometimes visitors are already logged in making it easy to post

Cons

• You may loose control of your visitor database
• If the service goes down, see Twitters uptime reports, you may loose the ability for visitors to log in
• Javascript based systems like disqus and JS-kit cannot be easily scanned by Google so you may get no SEO benefit
• Facebooks comments box has a similar problem as it is loaded in an iFrame, and cannot be crawled (without some programing tricks)

This last con is a significant enough problem for the javascript based programs to not use them on a heavily community based site. As of this writing we are using disqus on nickvalente.com.

Best Bet for Comments

What will work best of you depends on what you’re trying to get from the comments on your site. Using the out of the box comment system in WordPress ,Blogger or your CMS should work fine for most folks who have a thriving monitored community. If however you have low traffic or don’t actively participate in your sites community, consider one of these solutions.

What do you think?

Related articles

• Disqus now enables tagging in comments (techattitude.com)
• Make Facebook Comments Box Indexable by Search Engines (seomoz.org)