Taking Your Startup Back to the Business Basics

Mentoring startups has a lot of benefits: It gives something back to the community and helps other entrepreneurs avoid some of the mistakes that you’ve already made. And it’s also a lot of fun to meet entrepreneurs who are so passionate about their business. Sometimes, though, that passion can make it hard for startups to focus on the business basics, like pricing, market research and finding your niche.

I have had the opportunity to mentor quite a few startup companies in the St. Louis region over the past several years, and it is also satisfying to see the widening of the entrepreneurial community in St. Louis. We just had a business plan competition (the Arch Grants) which gave away grants of $50k to 15 different startups, a few of whom are in the process of moving into town (as part of the deal to take the dough). This is just one of numerous ways startups can raise funds here, as Jay DeLong shows in this video.

The common theme that I keep coming back to is that taking care of the basics of business isn’t always easy. What do I mean by basics? Things like pricing, understanding your market, and making sure that your niche is as narrow as possible. Let me give you a few examples.

Not a Charity
One services firm I know was charging too little. In fact, after getting some mentoring, the company doubled its rates! Figuring out what you charge isn’t easy: I wrestle with this all the time, particularly in today’s down economy. My own rates have fluctuated over the 20 years that I have been in business, and today I still marvel at firms that want me to do work for them at bargain-basement rates or, better yet, for free for “the exposure.” If I wanted exposure, I would go hiking in the mountains. I keep telling folks that I am not a charitable organization; I work for a living, and so should you.

Yes, there are times when I will work for free, but only under very structured and controlled circumstances. For example, I will speak at local community-based organizations’ conferences. A speaker friend I know books up to one pro bono event each month and puts it on her calendar. I like that method; you treat these freebies with the same value as paying gigs. She makes her money selling her books and consulting services from these events.

Sure, setting the right price is more art than science, but you do have to spend some time looking at your competitors and understanding that there is an implicit value in your rate. If you undercharge, you will be undervalued.

If you need help with your pricing, spend time doing testing; see what you can get at different prices from different clients. While this isn’t very scientific, it should give you an idea of how high your should (usually) raise your rates.

Finding Your Niche
Do you really have the right niche for your product or services? One software firm I work with has a very narrow niche for its product, and has done well continuing to focus on what people in that niche need.

But what happens if your niche is evolving? You have to evolve with it.

Typically, startups want to continually find a narrower niche, so they can become the dominant player in that niche. Many new ventures make the mistake of going too wide rather than deep; then you are in different markets with limited resources for each.

The term du jour is “pivot” (which used to mean solving a set of linear equations back when I was in grad school), describing the idea of refocusing your startup business as conditions change and you track your progress. Pivoting gives the impression that your original idea wasn’t sound. Instead, I like to suggest constantly refining your offerings.

Finally, once you establish the right price and the right niche, you need to find the right market for your goods and services. Another firm I know was focused on college-age young adults. When it developed a second service, it designed the new offering around this audience as well. College kids are customers who the company knows and understand. The idea is to leverage their existing expertise, not to try to be all things to all ages.

That kind of focus on business basics is a valuable lesson for any startup.

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(Source: readwriteweb.com)

The Five Reasons Why Most Facebook Brand Pages Aren’t True Communities

What are the defining characteristics of a community? It’s a topic I’ve been pondering more and more lately. Is it about geography, common interests, socio-economic similarities, or similar viewpoints?

The list goes on and on.

To get to this point, it becomes necessary to define what a community is. According to dictionary.com, a community is a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived itself as distinct insome respect from the larger society within which it exists.

As community managers, it’s our job to manage a brand’s online (and offline) presence. It’s a daunting task that requires us to assume a leadership role, channel the company’s voice, create buzz and drive engagement on and offline to achieve specific goals/outcomes. It’s fairly natural to assume that as the leader, you are building and growing a “community.” After all, there’s X amount of likers, followers, subscribers, doers’, doubters, troublemakers and everything in between, who are communicating in the group. However with most brand pages, this environment is actually fostering a false sense of community.

1. Fans and likers usually don’t just like a page based on common interests (or other community defining characteristics)

Most Facebook fans didn’t decide to “like” a brand’s page because they wanted to be part of an online community. In fact, the two most common reasons to like a brand are if you are a current customer or to receive discounts and/or freebies, according to a study by research firm, Chadwick Martin Bailey. The next most popular reasons are to show support for a brand, to learn more information and to get exclusive content. Couple that with the fact, that more than 75% of Facebook users who like a brand, like fewer than 10 brands total, and you wind up with stiff competition for eyeballs and page “likes.”

2. The vast majority of fans don’t participate on Facebook pages.

One of the biggest misunderstandings about Facebook is the assumption that once a person “likes” your page, they are going to keep coming back for more. A “like” on a page doesn’t guarantee that they will ever come back to that page and participate or even read any updates. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. According to an AdAge article, only one percent of fans on the biggest brand pages actually engage with the brand at all.

3. It’s a one-sided conversation

Going right alongside that, the few fans that stay actively involved on the page often don’t feel inclined to post updates or comment. Most of them are just casual observers or lurkers. This leads to a one-sided conversation led by the brand, or frankly no conversation at all. 82% of brand pages are updated less than five times a month, according to a recent study by Recommend.ly.

4. Numbers still matter.

Many brands are still very interested in the numbers game. No matter how many times a community manager, specialist or strategist vouches for quality over quantity, there’s always going to be push back to expand the messaging to a larger audience. Brands will often do whatever it takes to get more. Many of these tactics are counterintuitive to the core community-building strategies.

5. Gimmicks, expensive apps and games drive a lot of the action

So, how do brands up their numbers? Often times, they create gimmicks, such as games, contests, other fancy Facebook apps and pump hefty media budgets into Facebook ads/sponsored story campaigns. Some of these apps are quite effective. Yet, all they are doing is creating a false sense of community to help a brand spread their message further.
All of these are marketing tactics that are “forced upon” anyone, who expresses interest in the brand. It’s not a natural progression in a community sense. In a true community, members stumble into the group and then start talking with one another, usually naturally and without any real incentives.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing that brands are more likely to market instead of build community on Facebook. When done right, marketing on Facebook can be quite effective. That’s evident from Fortune 50 companies all the way down to mom and pop shops. After all, it’s all about creating an overall marketing strategy that understands your core business goals, and then using the most effective channels and tactics to achieve them. Facebook is one of the popular channels to spread awareness, get people talking about you and your products, increase conversions, drive offline actions (like event attendance) and even increase sales. However, if you’re trying to build a community around your brand through Facebook, it might be time to reconsider those strategies.

Is your brand page a community or a one-sided marketing channel?

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(Source: convinceandconvert.com)

Google, Big Data & What it Means for SEO

In Google’s recent earnings call, the question was posed, “If you think of the future of Internet search 3 or 4 years out, how important will the social signal be and how important (will) personalization be?”

CEO Larry Page responded by explaining how he might search for one of his friends who had a common name.

“For the first time, the search box isn’t really searching a string…it’s actually searching for that person that I know,” Page said. “Having real feedback from users…is very useful for search…we have a lot of those signals already, but we can always use more…we can always use better relevance and we can always use more data to generate that.”

Page’s response reveals two insights into how Google is thinking about big data:

Page’s anecdote is a direct reference to Google’s increasing focus on enhancing the search experience by leveraging semantic content.
It provides insight into how Google values the social web: as data – a means to an end; not as an end in and of itself.
What Does Big Data Mean Anyway?

Generally speaking, big data refers to the processing and analysis of large data sets to support better real world decision-making. Here is what makes big data both timely and unique:

Increased data generated by individuals via social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Migration of data from local storage to the cloud, where it can be more easily shared and analyzed in aggregate.
A growing acceptance of openness and transparency, resulting in increased access to institutional and organizational data.
Increased potential for analyzing distinct data, resulting from the growing adoption of data standards.
Increased access to infrastructure needed to process large datasets.
Why Does Big Data Matter for SEO?

Big data has always been relevant to search marketers because Google is the original big data company. They have become the institution they are today by analyzing enormous sets of data, making automated inferences, and providing intelligence back to consumers. By studying Google’s methodology and applying their findings, search professionals have been intimately involved with big data for quite some time.

Google is a big data company. The future of search is going to be informed by the field of big data. This is important to understand.

Framed in this context, what can search professionals expect?

The Continued Evolution of Content Into Data

Content is published information. For a search engine to make sense of content, a lot of work has to be done. Data, on the other hand, makes analysis easier for search engines and brings them one step closer to an eventual answer.

Already, Google has begun using semantic information to analyze content and structure search results through rich snippets.

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(Source: searchenginewatch.com)

Social Media Marketing: Strategy to Commerce

For companies trying to make sense of social media and online marketing, it’s important to take a step back from all the “TwitFaceBlogTubeIn” mania for a second and look at the nature of how these things are going to work for the overall business.

There are many questions that need answers: ”Should we develop a strategy first before engaging?”, ”Should we experiment and develop a strategy as we go?”, “Will it ever be OK to ask customers if they want to buy directly within social channels or will we always have to tiptoe around the subject?”

Here are a few considerations to help answer those questions and establish the framework for a sustainable and successful social media marketing program.

Social Media Strategy: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Having some idea of what measurable goals and business outcomes you’re after is essential for planning resources and forecasting outcomes. This is true with any kind of marketing and is certainly the case with social media.

I polled a number of industry smarties on social media strategy vs. tactics and while there was some distance between the approach Guy Kawasaki preferred and that of people like Chris Brogan, the consensus was that developing an approach is essential for planning, implementation, accountability and measurement of success.

The formation of a social media strategy is a ripe opportunity for creativity and certainly shouldn’t get in the way of getting started. Gaining consensus about social strategy within a corporation could easily create a bottleneck. A strategy that calls for experimentation with iterative improvement in the context of overall goals, approach, tactics, audience and an effort to measure success is more likely to be implemented and gain support.

Social Media Marketing Tactics: The best mix of tactics needs to tie into the plan for reaching business goals. Whether it’s “Better engage with our customers” to “Filling the top of the sales funnel”, an understanding of audience preferences and behaviors will lead to the right tactical mix.

A lot of companies take the path of least resistance and go for what I like to call, “The Social 5-Pack” of: Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, YouTube and LinkedIn without thinking through tactics. For example, one common question often I hear is, “Is a LinkedIn group a better use of time and resources or a Facebook Fan Page?”

What the marketer might want to ask is, “Where do social networking vs. blogging vs. microcontent vs. media sharing fit in the context of our social media goals?” Then do the research and implement a listening program to discover which social networks, media sharing sites or blogging communities the target audience is present and participating in. That homework will answer the question about Facebook vs. LinkedIn and any other social communities where customers spend time.

Social Media Process: “Companies who start with implementation are at risk”, is a great quote from Jeremiah Owyang in his recent post, “A Pragmatic Approach to Social Business“. There he lists a checklist of 8 steps that form a process for approaching social media. Jumping into tactics can send a company in a very unproductive direction. Working through a strategy, tactics and developing processes leads to efficiencies, scalability and social engagement that is true to the business goals.

We’ve published a social media checklist that can serve as a prompt for companies to gather the information necessary to make smarter decisions about how their organizations can incorporate social media in their marketing and communications mix.

Process with social media marketing is important for a variety of reasons ranging from quality assurance to accountability. How can an organization scale its social media efforts without some kind of processes in place? Redundant processes can often be automated by software. Processes also outlive internal social media subject matter experts who move on to other opportunities.

From a personal process perspective, take a look at Tac Anderson’s daily routine as a social media strategist, which he calls a “workout”. In addition to planned activities and tactics, there’s room for putting out fires or handing spontaneous situations. In the end, a routine or process helps keep social media marketing tactics on track over time.

Social Commerce: Social Media that Leads to Sales: Question - What’s the ROI of Social Media? Answer – What’s the ROI of having a phone system in your office? That phone systems facilitates communications for a wide variety of reasons that are important to the functioning of the business from product/service inquiries to hiring new employees to customer service.

Social media in a business sense, is technology that facilitates communications, sharing and connecting brands with customers. For the most part, people buy from those they like and social media helps build, maintain and improve those relationships.

So how does social media influence or result in sales? A helpful post on BarnRaisers summarizes several studies that show exactly that. Click on the link to see the post (How Social Media Drives Sales Relationships). I’ll also summarize them here:

Facebook - “The top reasons people press the “Like” button on Facebook is to have a sales relationship with a brand - either to receive promotions & coupons (40%), get updates on upcoming sales (30%) and show their support for companies (39%).” – ExactTarget 2010.

Twitter - “For over 40% of the time people are on Twitter, we spend it learning about products and services, listening to what others have to say and giving opinions. That explains why over 20% of the time we’re on Twitter, we’re ready and willing to buy directly off Twitter.” – Edison Research 2010.

Social Networks – “For every hour we spend on online, we spend the most amount of time on social networks, almost 15 minutes of every hour. Roughly half of the time (approx 6+ mins), we are seeking out products and services and looking to have a sales relationship with brands.” Nielsen 2010.

As more brands include commercial offers in the social experience they provide for customers, those customers will become increasingly comfortable with the notion of social commerce. At the same time, more social features are being added to ecommerce websites. In the way that blogs and Twitter accounts are expected features of brand websites, so will social commerce functionality.

Building a flexible strategy that considers business goals and the people to engage will help marketers identify the best mix of tactics for their social media marketing program. Developing processes from a corporate and an individual standpoint will help sustain, not stifle, social engagement activities in the long run. Start by building community and relationships. Listen, respond and create value. Monitor and analyze for opportunities to implement social commerce features, but don’t rush it.

How have you incorporated social media into your business processes? What are you doing to create more sustainable social participation within your organization?

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(Source: toprankblog.com)

Google News Gets Deeper Ties to Google+

Google News has a new look, and it’s not just cosmetic. Besides adding larger thumbnail photos that dynamically expand when users click on topics, the news-aggregating service now has stronger ties to Google+.

In a blog post about the change, Google says “Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we’re starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the realtime coverage pages.” The feature brings Google+ conversations from your circles, journalists and other “notables” right to the Google News homepage. It can also be turned off if you just want to see headlines.

Google News also now has buttons for users to get “realtime” coverage on a topic. If you’ve ever clicked through on a Google News topic in the past, you may have been frustrated by the seemingly random selection and organization of the stories presented.

“Realtime” presents the topic stories in a more organized way. Once you click on it, you’ll see news articles about the story at the top, listed more or less chronologically. Below that, in-depth articles, opinion pieces and “highly cited” posts are presented under their own headings.

Finally, every topic now gets a similar treatment on the main Google News page, with a top story, more headlines, in-depth/highly cited articles, and a large thumbnail. For topics other than the first one, however, the user must click a button to expand the topic to see anything other than the top story.

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(Source: Mashable)

10 Ways a Start-Up Can Use Social Media to Market Itself

1. Craft a brand position rooted in a customer benefit.

An awful lot of young companies do a good job of describing a product’s features rather than synthesizing them into a single benefit. A simple handle, either expressing what a brand stands for or declaring its point of difference, will serve you well in everything from appearing in search results to being remembered.

2. Take your message and content to your consumer. Engineer your presence.

You may want a website where you fill orders, capture data, or simply demonstrate your product, but you shouldn’t assume your customer will instantly come to you. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube are all basically free tools. You need to go where your consumer lives online. If your customers, prospects, and influencers are there, you should be there: listening, engaging, sharing, and helping them.

3. Find inventive ways to create or gather content.

For starters, make your website into a blog. Fresh content, the ability to post comments, and pages that get linked to will add to your online visibility. No doubt it’s challenging and time consuming to generate enough content to populate your network and blog, but there are smart ways to go about it.

First, whatever you’re doing, write about it. Report on your progress. Second, come up with a daily question you’d want someone to ask and respond to it in a blog post or video. Third, save time by collecting content from others. Place your product or service, even in beta form, in front of people willing to blog, make videos, and tell stories about it. Aggregate this content to your blog or video channel. Fourth, conduct polls or ask questions about a related topic and turn these results into future posts as well as “news” you can release to both bloggers and press.

4. Get on Twitter and use it actively.

It takes time to build a large Twitter following, but it’s a quick way to connect with industry influencers, bloggers, and press that might matter to you.

No matter what you sell, someone on Twitter is having a conversation about it. It’s your chance to listen, respond, and engage with potential enthusiasts. More importantly, on Twitter there’s a willingness to help each other that you just won’t find anywhere else. Perhaps it’s because re-tweeting information is virtually effortless, or that people practically vie to share new finds, or that users feel a sense of obligation to those who follow and promote them, but for whatever reason, you’re likely to find people who are willing to help promote your brand on Twitter, presuming you learn Twitter protocols and give more than you take.

5. Connect your customers and prospects to each other.

One of the best things you can do as a young company is to foster word-of-mouth conversations among your earliest customers. Whether you do it on Facebook or on your own site, it’s important to invite your customers to talk to each other and share ideas. Allow them to guide one another on how they use your product or service. Not only will you have the opportunity to learn what people like and don’t like about your product, you may end up with a bunch of people you can ask to help you.

6. Develop relationships with the right bloggers.

Every start-up in the world wants that article in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. But the fact is, the right bloggers might be more influential for a number of reasons. They have loyal readers. Their references or links to your site will drive up your search rankings. And these days, it’s more likely that ideas will bubble up from the blogosphere to the mainstream press than vice versa.

7. Start Crowdsourcing.

There is no shortage of services - companies like crowdSpring (design) or Tongal (video) — to help you source affordable content from designers, videographers, writers, and others. But there’s an even better reason to crowdsource. You allow your customers to participate in the creation of your brand. If you want a great example, take a look at how HBO seeded True Blood. Instead of advertising, HBO shipped samples of synthetic blood to popular videographers and bloggers, who, of course, couldn’t resist making videos or posting pieces about the mysterious liquid. You may not have anything as cool as fake blood, but you can still learn to think this way.

8. Read Brian Halligan’s Inbound Marketing Book.

Even if you have a product with enough mainstream appeal to justify paid advertising, consumers today spend more time searching than watching. You want to be found. Inbound Marketing covers all of the basics you’ll need to know to make your content Google friendly.

9. Give stuff away for free.

Take a look at what HubSpot does: free tools (Twitter Grader and Website Grader); free webinars (Science of Social Media, 7 Simple Ways to Get Leads from LinkedIn); free eBooks (The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing, An Introductory Guide to Building Landing Pages). If you sell food, give away recipes. If you’ve invented a sleep monitor, offer free tips on better sleeping. Free content generates awareness, builds loyalty, creates newsworthy topics, and spreads word-of-mouth. Remember, in this day and age, what a brand does is far more important than what a brand says.

10. Make the time, build in the role, or hire the right partner.

As folks like Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk have proven, you can do all this yourself if you have the right time, energy and commitment. If you can’t muster that, give this role to one of your first hires. If you’re less than comfortable identifying that person within your own company, (hint: it’s not an intern or a kid right out of school; Digital Natives may know all the technology, but they often lack the strategic chops and the ability to create truly compelling content) retain the services of a public relations agency with real experience in social influence. Make sure that if you go this route, you ask for case studies as evidence that the PR team assigned to your business actually practices what it preaches.

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(Source: blog.hubspot.com)

Yahoo! Sees Small Business Dashboarding Need

Leave it to one of the web’s mainstays to truly being to solve the digital marketing dashboard problem! Yahoo! (of all companies) unveiled a sweet small business dashboard product today. It’s Yahoo! Small Business Marketing Dashboard pulls together web analytics, Pay-Per-Click and other paid search advertising, e-commerce, social media monitoring, directory listings and more into a single reporting home.

Long the lament of the online digital marketer and lip-service goal of every social media monitoring and management solution out there, the unified dashboard has been a pipe dream for many a digital marketer for years. Some platforms offer a glimpse at what one could be. Few have pulled one together that is definitively good. Yahoo! has made a better-than-most effort here.

Yes, it’s geared toward small businesses. But this platform is powerful enough and built do pull disparate sets of data together into one place. Certainly, if you’re a Yahoo! Small Business customer, you’re going to love it. But even if you’re not, you may want to check this platform out. Don’t fall out of your chair on this one, either: The core product is free.

Not that it doesn’t have its limitations. The social media monitoring component (which they call reputation management) is very light and only offers you views of the last two mentions without upgrading to a paid version of the solution. I worry about it’s integrity in terms of providing you with enough and accurate data … it’s too simple in its set up to indicate that it’s good enough compared to many social media monitoring solutions. Still, with the upgrade (which starts at $9.99 per month), you can get access to similar data for competitors, too.

Even with the free version, you get access to directory listings and monitoring, email and SEO campaign monitoring, and all in an interface and tool designed for the business owner, not the marketing or tech geek.

The bottom line is that Yahoo! has tapped into a market need here. Yes, it’s focused on the small businesses, but even the large, enterprise companies I’ve spoken to recently are still frustrated with having to pull disparate reports together manually. No one seems to be solving this problem for much of anyone. And then Yahoo! comes along and does it.
Who’d a thunk it. Good on ya, Yahoo!

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(Source: socialmediaexplorer.com)

Social Media Marketing Beginner’s Guide

Quick!

What is the hottest social media tool to emerge on the scene this year? It’s ‘Twitter’, and you may get hooked too…
I recently came back from a fully packed conference on social media marketing, the Danny Sullivan SMX show in Long Beach, CA, and all-the-rage was Twitter, a micro-blogging platform that many at first (typically) considered a ‘joke’ or maybe just a temporary fad. They (we) were all wrong, but most agreed that using any tool or technique without a reasonable strategy was a missed opportunity.

But, let’s not be too quick – learn how to research & leverage the social media space with planning and execution along the way.

I’ll show you that micro blogging and the other tools and platforms in this short SMM guide are things you might consider for your important social media marketing.

Furthermore, SMM can provide quality traffic, you can minimize the often laborious time by a little planning and it is possible to market into B2B marketplaces. It’s not just for kids anymore.

What is it?

“Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks”. Social Media is a shorter top level term that describes the space overall, and covers the activities around social interaction, content, videos, images and audio exposure.

Where to start?

Many of us are so excited about the technology and web (hence my somewhat trite opening), that we forget key pieces to success: definition of business goals, objectives and overall process for execution. The old “fail to plan, plan to fail” comes to mind. While you need to create the roadmap for your online business – you must certainly decide on what goals and resulting metrics you want to attain.

Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:

Website traffic and user behavior (external and internal tracking)
Conversion and sales tracking
Page views, ad exposure
Growing brand awareness (a softer value, takes longer to build)
Creating a positive brand association and keeping it there (see also reputation management)
Business development and a broader customer reach

How can you create and convert all this activity with social media?

Since the social web allows you to interact with others, create and promote content that can get links and viral attraction, you can – with the right strategy – reach key influencers using this medium. We all know what blogs alone can do, and they are pretty search engine friendly out of the box.

Social media expansion is important because this provides foundations for broader / faster mindshare, along with supporting your search engine marketing objectives. You *can* convert traffic if you target appropriately (research needed), and do not spam. Read each point below to get a deeper understanding.

Tip #1 – Assistance:
Limit talking about yourself, at least initially – provide ways to help others instead. This is probably the most important tip in the social media workplace. Say you are building your new del.icio.us profile, make sure to bookmark other useful resources and sprinkle yourself lightly. It’s about “them”, not “you”. Don’t forget this important rule!

Tip #2 – Process:
Don’t become a “me too” – establish a process and goals for how to get there. I recommend reading 5 pillars for one, and much like SEO programs that have a process (keyword research, competitive review, content analysis, etc), build out a similar map. Too many companies dive in too fast, with no real plan and they are simply peeing in the pool, and no good results come from that.

Tip #3 – Contribute:
Be the one to create (quality) content. While community is Queen in Social Media, quality content is still King, and always will be. Studies show that people are reading much online, but a much smaller group is contributing content. This can mean good opportunities for you.

Tip #4 – Connect:
Reach out to the influencers in your niche, be polite, honest, sincere, and you’d be amazed what brand advocates can do for you.

Tip #5 – Position:
Position yourself in front of consumers’ passions. It can and will create a powerful outcome for your brand.

Tip #6 – Blog:
Make sure you have setup a blog. These numbers are not to be overlooked. I think Technorati is tracking over 110 million blogs now, and growing at a furious pace, even excluding splogs (spam blogs).

Tip #7 – Links:
Don’t be afraid to link out to other blogs and websites in general. Links are what search engines and users make good use of – and search engines would not survive without them. Give others the love too.

Tip #8 – Videos:
Video consumption is growing fast. Create a “how to…” or “top tips…” videos and submit to YouTube. It has wide reach, and you could have millions of people see it. For even wider distribution, you should try tubemogul.com or vidmetrix.com, tools to help automate. In generating all content, make sure to keep #1 rule in check. It’s fine to brand with a URL at the end of the video, but no direct selling. Humor, controversy and weird stuff works very well, keep that in mind – don’t be afraid to test.

Tip #9 – Technorati:
You said you have a blog, right? Claim your blog at Technorati. This will ensure you are indexed in their search engines for blogs and updates are broadcast across the network, along with your own blog network updates. This happens behind the scenes from automatic “pings”.

Tip #10 – Analytics:
Open an account from list below, use your brand name as identifier. This will establish your brand or company name, and not let anybody else assume or steal your personality so easily. Then, work with one or two from the list below to start, and don’t go too fast. Look at your web analytics and track referring domains and review traffic movements daily, weekly.

Tip #11 – Feeds/Research:
Subscribe to feeds, and use iGoogle, My Yahoo Web or other favorite RSS readers. Watch for changes (use Google.com/alerts also), and be the first to comment and engage in your topic. First commenters often get more visibility and traction.

Tip #12 – MicroCommunities:
Locate and join microcommunities – they are social communities that are relevant to your business. Some examples are education.com, nowpublic.com, travbuddy.com, gardenweb.com, shoetube.com, yelp.com and care2.com (non profits). It is much easier to have your voice heard in these and similar markets, than trying a post to Digg that may go nowhere. Those are the perfect places for the “big fish in a small pond” rule. Create highly relevant and linkworthy content, research what others are writing about, and connect with the top players and influencers.

Tip #13 – Submit:
Review the resources below, and consider building out profiles over time. If you submit content, make sure it’s useful, unique and that the title of your post stands out. Pick one or two resources to start, and don’t overextend yourself. Some of the top social marketers in the industry spend 10-12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. This is a lot of manual (social) labor, but you don’t have to go at it that hard. Make sure to ask friends to vote or comment on your postings, befriend others, but no spam. Make intelligent posts and do not have your company employees post from the same location (IP Address). The submission(s) will most likely be rejected, and worst case, your account blocked or suspended.

Tip #14 – Hosting:
Have a good hosting provider. If traffic spikes come, and your server instrastructure cannot handle it, you are toast. You don’t want a Digg server melt-down (fun pic). Here’s a first hand story and how to deal with it.

Tip #15 – Monitoring:
If you want to save time monitoring across many resources within the social networks, try the new Yahoo Pipes, it’s a social monitoring desktop in a browser.

Tip #16 – Advertising:
If you are an advertiser, you might want to check out socialspark.com and socialmedia.com – they both are showing promise from what I can see.

Your Top Social Media Starter Resources (not necessarily in order of importance):
Twitter *See more below – specific for twitter
Facebook (download toolbar)
YouTube (toolbar exists, but have not tried)
Del.icio.us (download toolbar)
StumbleUpon (download toolbar)
LinkedIn (tip: use the Q/A section to gain readership and clients)
Flickr
Digg
Reddit
Technorati
Secondlife (3D)
Meneame (spanish, translate title and synopsis before posting)
Newsvine
Tip: Subscribe (RSS) to Techcrunch!

Socialkik.com the cheapest and most effective source for Social Media Marketing. Click on the following links for your marketing needs:
Buy Facebook fans, Buy Twitter followers, Buy Youtube subscribers and views, Buy Google +1 votes.

(Source: marketingpilgrim.com)

How to Use Social Media to Generate Leads Exclusively for Large Enterprises

Most firms have a wrong perception about their online presence as they consider the Web not that much essential for their operations and Public relations. The fact is that an online presence for large enterprises is as important as a physical presence; the reality is that an increasing number of companies are opting Social media portals such as Facebook and twitter to engage with their old customers and to find out more opportunities to generate leads for their business.

According to a Social media survey from Business.com, almost 81 percent of B2B firms had a presence on Social networking sites and almost 75% were on Twitter, these statistics were higher in comparison with B2C firms which showcased that only 63 % were on Social networks while 43 % were found on twitter.

New challenges are brought on marketers after the opt of Social media by these large enterprises; these large companies were really quick on the opt of social media as they saw the opportunity to diversify their marketing efforts to reach millions of people in an expanding global market using carefully engineered social media marketing campaigns.

Social Media for large enterprises being relatively new brings challenges for marketers; an interesting fact is that almost all managers spend about 2 hours/day online to find information and 50% of the information is not what they were looking for!

The change has already been brought about with the success stories of Dell, HP and Cisco known to most of the people in the industry. It’s not about Social Media tools that bring you the success, but your objectives. Once, objectives are clear, the choice of tools get much easier! It’s, however, most important to listen to the conversations in relevant communities before defining objectives.

How to generate leads through Social media:

Pre plan before going Live; Give a good reason why your target audience should contact you, Differentiate your product/service to make you stand out. Be sure that your website is fully functional and you’ve devised the procedure to measure ROI for your efforts.
Syndicate Content according to customers: your content ought to be customer centered, engaging and urging calls to action. Do not just focus on textual content; Consider Videos marketing over Youtube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and other platforms, presentations on Slideshare, infographics etc.
Close in On Influencers of the Industry: Save time by leveraging industry influencers on Social media as it will take your time in building up a community and gaining trust. Leveraging will give you maximum results in minimum time. According to the Social Media report 2011 45% of marketers that have invested 12 months or less in social media marketing have reported new partnerships. You may want to check Audi sales Q7 TDI through Guy Kawasaki, Cisco’s SocialMiner and Capital One’s Launch via Zynga Games.
Get observed by Social Media Giants: Different major blogs, including TechCrunch and Mashable, have always encouraged the sharing of news, innovative creations and stories of successes and failures of different enterprises. But the only ways they can be talked about are by networking and approaching the editors of those blogs, or creating news.
Participate in Social Media Events: Be aware of the latest social media happenings like events and gatherings, go for webinars. Being in such events provides a gateway to strategic partnerships.
Build Affiliates through Social Media: Effort on your affiliate marketing plan instead of gathering twitter followers and facebook fans. Promote your affiliate campaigns by both paid and free options, and don’t forget to subscribe for emails.
And at the end, do keep a benchmark for measuring ROI effectively!
Social Media Tools for Large Enterprises to Generate Business Leads:

Focusing on creating social profiles doesn’t work on its own. But creating awareness and spreading information about your products/services and answering queries about them on places that are most visited online places have to be coupled with that. This purpose can be served through the introduction of content in your marketing plan.Wikipedia, Hubpages, Step by Step and EzineArticles can be the best platforms to answer questions of your target audience.

Socialkik.com the cheapest and most effective source for Social Media Marketing. Click on the following links for your marketing needs:
Buy Facebook fans, Buy Twitter followers, Buy Youtube subscribers and views, Buy Google +1 votes.

(Source: noobpreneur.com)

7 Ways To Create Display Ads That Get Noticed

TOPICS: Display, Advertising, Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Strategy
TAGS: Advertising Creativity, Advertising Message, Banner Advertising, Brand Advertising, Display Ad Campaigns
PUBLICATION: iMediaConnection.com
DATE: August 25, 2011

Unexpected joy while browsing

One of the hardest things about brand advertising is that you cannot make up for lack of creativity with high media volume. Advertisers have to constantly compete for users’ attention and make sure their ads stands out from the mediocre “just OK” standard banners that users face every day.

But some ads do stand out. They make you laugh, play, enjoy — and most importantly, remember the advertising message. This article features online creatives that fall into this bucket.

What is common to all of these ads is that they seek to deliver an experience rather than just an image featuring a brand. They typically have a striking visual, in many cases taking advantage of a large portion of the screen. They will surprise you and find a way to keep you engaged, make you laugh, and keep you stimulated. These advertisers succeed by creating a holistic advertising experience that is neatly tucked into an ad.

Here are seven ways that advertisers managed to get users excited and gave them a few moments of unexpected joy while browsing.

Use video in non-traditional ways

Combining video into a banner has consistently proven to be one of the best ways to increase effectiveness. MediaMind’s benchmarks show that video has a positive effect on nearly every metric. It increases dwell rates by 30 percent and nearly doubles dwell time. Furthermore, it doubles click-through rates and increases conversion rates.

The use of video does more than just draw a user in for more interaction and engagement. Video can also improve brand perception by telling a compelling narrative and spreading the story of the brand. To be effective, videos don’t necessarily have to be long, nor do they have to be confined into the traditional trailer.

For example, the below ad for the movie Unstoppable uses fewer than five seconds of video to grab the user’s attention and convey what the movie is about. A train rips through the entire homepage from left to right and summarizes the gist of what happens in the movie for an hour and a half.

Invite people to play

Playing is one of the most powerful ways to retain a message. Kindergarten teachers know this and do it every day. So why not advertisers? Games have an advantage over other ads since users must actively engage with the brand for an extended period and give their full attention in hopes of winning or getting a high score.

One of my favorite in-banner games is Nestle’s Chocapic. This is a virtual reality game that allows you to drive a bike by moving your head. The webcam on the computer identifies the movements of the player and steers the bike left and right. It’s easy to play for hours. This is a similar concept employed for the bigger-format augmented reality game (disclosure: a MediaMind-enabled project) that Chocapic launched last year.

Get users involved in what they want to see

TV ads are very different from online ads. TV is a lean-back experience, in which users passively watch whatever is on the screen. Online is a more lean-forward experience, in which people sit with their computers on their laps or at their desks and interact with content. Therefore, when video is delivered online, it is a different experience than TV, and users should be encouraged to interact and engage with it.

The interactive trailer for Avatar (image below) took interactivity to the next level. The trailer starts with the beautiful vistas of the planet Pandora. As the trailer plays, users can click on it and explore the fauna of the planet, the weapons shown in the movie, and many other features. Each time you click on an item in the trailer, it stops and a window opens with the option for the user to explore further. Once the user clicks on the banner and is taken to Avatar’s minisite, the user can create a full avatar in his or her image.

This ad promotes the DVD for Avatar and targets users who are already Avatar enthusiasts. It is a great way to draw in users by providing more information and more value. Avatar’s creative team went far beyond just putting a trailer in a banner.

Remember that sex sells

Delivering a sense of a fashion brand or the scent of a perfume both offline and online is challenging. In magazines, advertisers use powerful images that convey the essence of the perfume, such as freshness, a seaside breeze, or love and passion. Magazine advertisers have another advantage since they can append a sample of the scent to get users to try it on the spot.

Italian fashion house Diesel took these powerful magazine images and transformed them online. In one of the most sensual ads seen online, Diesel uses a homepage takeover to convey the essence of its new perfume: “Fuel for Life.”

At the beginning, a wallpaper ad covers the homepage, and a mid-page unit (MPU) appears in the middle. But once you click on the banner, a full-page homepage takeover opens up, showing a 15-second clip. The clip features a beautiful man and woman playing around with a bottle of perfume. The entire clip is full of sex appeal and suggestive poses that leave little room for imagination.

Diesel has taken some risk due to the highly seductive nature of this ad. Nevertheless, this ad is targeted at the Diesel audience and caters to an image that its young audience looks for and expects from the brand. Young and fashion conscious, the intended audience already likes the Diesel brand, and it can appreciate this ad and image that the brand is trying to sell.

Break the silos between online and offline

Who said that online and offline advertising should be siloed? Now advertisers can link the physical world and the virtual world using the mobile phone. That is what Tesco, one of the largest global retailers, did when it wanted to expand its brand in South Korea.

Market research has shown that South Koreans work very long hours and have no time to go grocery shopping. Tesco’s Korean subsidiary Home Plus put up billboards in subway stations with its range of products, accompanied by QR codes. This created virtual supermarkets within the subway stations where users could stroll between these virtual shelves and shop by scanning the QR codes with their phone and use a special mobile app.

Once someone filled his or her mobile shopping cart, the person checked out online and the groceries were delivered right to that person’s door. This campaign alone lifted sales by 133 percent and allowed Tesco in South Korea to become No. 1 in the category. It might sound too good to be true so check out the video to see for yourself.

Make your ads visible

Have you ever noticed where your eyes focus when a page loads? Probably on the top of the page, which appears to be the perfect place to locate a banner. The advantage of the pushdown banner is that it moves the content down, giving more space to the advertisers’ message. Performance data shows that pushdown banners tend to receive ample attention from users. With a dwell rate of 7.7 percent, nearly eight of every 100 impressions will receive an engagement lasting more than one second.

Adidas did a particularly good job with its pushdown banner. When the page loads, the banner expands and the ad presents three football players. This immediately grabs the users’ attention. The ad asks users if they would like to win two game tickets to support Spain in-person. Then users click on the blinking words and enter their names, which will appear on the player’s shirt. Users can choose one or more players, turn on their webcams, and become part of the ad and appear inside the game. This ad also combines social features, in which users can record themselves, replay, and share on Facebook.

Literal out-of-the-box thinking

Since users are already used to the location of the MPU in relation to the publisher’s content, advertisers are presented with the challenge of breaking the standard mold and delivering a message outside the typical banner that grabs immediate attention.

To advertise the new Eee Slate, Asus and Microsoft decided to get the message across that their product was no ordinary PC. They achieved this by developing two synchronized banners that literally involved out-of-the-box thinking. On the top banner, a young girl reaches out to the MPU in the middle of the page and grabs what looks like an ordinary PC and turns it into a tablet. In a very subtle way, the ad surprises the user and breaks the mold of the regular banner ad. Furthermore, the ad challenges the perception that a PC and a tablet should be two different products.

In online rich media, it’s all about the experience. Advertisers who make the effort and let users engage with the brand through games, interactions, and glaring images are going to get attention. These are the kind of ads that are worth users’ time.

As the online world becomes more crowded, brand advertisers need to think about new ways to break through the clutter. Rich media provides a flexible canvas on which to express exciting advertising ideas and get users to engage. Brand advertisers that manage to get users truly immersed in the ad can get their messages across far more powerfully than via any other medium.

Ariel Geifman is principal research analyst at MediaMind.

On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.

(Source: cmo.com)