Archive for the ‘Social Bookmarking’ Category
5 Reasons Why Your Company Should Be Blogging
August 19th, 2010 | 
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Well, here we are in August, 2010 and location-based social networks are all the rage. Everyone’s talking about Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and now, Facebook Places. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn are all considered mainstream and imperative in terms of marketing.
However, it is obvious that many, if not most, businesses have yet to venture into the simplest and arguably the most effective type of social marketing…blogging.
Blogging is nothing new. Blogs date back to 1997, took off in 1999 and were considered mainstream by 2004.
It’s 2010 and your company hasn’t started blogging. Why is that? Are you afraid of what someone might post on your blog? Here’s the deal…people are going to talk about your company, whether it’s on your blog or in the grocery store. Perhaps you don’t see the importance and you’re not completely sold on blogging for business.
A recent study by eMarketer shows a strong increase in companies entering the blogosphere. Their study predicts that 43% of companies will be blogging by 2012.
Here’s a short list of 5 reasons why your company should be actively blogging:
1 - Blogging gives you the opportunity to establish yourself as the expert in your industry or field. Are you a local fitness center or gym? Your blog should contain posts and information on why someone should join your fitness center, as opposed to your competition. You never want to downgrade your competition on your blog. Rather, focus on what your fitness center has to offer and emphasize all the positive attributes of your facility and staff.
2 – Blogging gives your current and potential customers a platform to ask questions and communicate with your business. This adds credibility and can increase customer loyalty. Monitoring your blog closely, answering questions and replying to comments will promote trust and transparency.
3 – Search engines love fresh content. If you don’t add new content to your website on a regular basis the search engines have nothing new to crawl and distribute. Integrating a blog into your site makes it easy to post fresh information on a regular basis for the search engines to find.
4 – A blog is another chance to issue a press release, announce an event, launch a new product or make an important announcement. Blogging is marketing. What are you marketing? Your business!
5 – Your blog serves as what I call your “content distribution source.” With every blog post you publish, you can take that article, create profiles on dozens of other social platforms and post. Not only will this generate more traffic to your blog and website, but you’re also creating links, which will aid in search engine optimization.
Maximizing your blogging efforts will take time, but it’s worth it. Post often, include important keywords for your business/industry and engage with your audience. In my opinion, this should be the first step in creating a powerful social media presence and personality for your company or business.
To learn how we can help, CONTACT US!
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Are you putting all your eggs in one basket?
By: Scott Dickson
When asked if they’re utilizing the power of social media and relationship marketing, many business-owners and CMO’s will reply, “Of course! We have an awesome Facebook page and we’re getting started on Twitter.”
Well, that’s great. But, setting up a Facebook page and linking your posts to a Twitter profile doesn’t mean you’re “on Twitter.” It means you’re doing it wrong.
In my opinion, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket by relying too heavily on Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a huge piece of the puzzle. But, if you’re not executing effectively AND not implementing other social media platforms, you’re missing opportunities to engage your potential audience.
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine on the planet. If you do a search for your company, will it appear in the search results? Better yet, if you own a restaurant in Charlotte, do you have a video tagged appropriately that shows up in a YouTube search for “restaurants in Charlotte”?
If you’re business to business, you must be on LinkedIn, right? Are you a wedding photographer with pictures saturated and tagged on Flickr? If you’re a movie theater you must be using Foursquare to reward your mayor and other customers checking in. And how about Twitter? Are you engaged? Do you really know what it means to be engaged on Twitter, or are you just pushing out content?
Are you utilizing the power of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Propeller, Stumbleupon, etc.? Have you claimed your blog at Technorati? Do you even have a blog? Is your website set up to convert visitors into potential customers?
Is your head spinning?
Chances are pretty good you’ve watched this video ad nauseum. But, it does drive home the point that there are other platforms to pay attention to.
So, yes…Facebook is gigantic and amazing. You’d be crazy not to work very hard to have a commanding presence there. However, you shouldn’t stop at Facebook.
Take the time and do the research on the other opportunities…or, you can always just contact me!
A shameless plug, no doubt. But, hey…it is my blog.
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The Amazing Possibilities of Social Search
At the intersection of Social Networking and Search is an exciting frontier that is just beginning to be realized. Through more efficient analysis and subsequent comprehension of the relationships between information we will gain a greater understanding of the world around us and interact with it. The implications for both publishers and marketers will be powerful.
The concept of Social Search intuitively makes intuitive sense. We know a lot of people and know that some of them have specific knowledge and wisdom that is useful to us. However, locating the person in our networks with the specific intelligence to aid us in a specific task can be difficult.
In the digital world, the problem has been extended to more types of information including documents, graphics, audio and video. The more skillfully we are able to navigate through complex webs of data and concepts the greater value we can derive from the networks that we create.
Our Vast Networks
On LinkedIn we can all see our own network statistics. I have a few hundred contacts. However, my 2nd degree contacts (friends of my friends) number over 100,000. Amazingly, my 3rd degree contacts (the friends of my friend’s friends) number in the millions- as large as some countries – all of whom are just two introductions away from me.
Theoretically, my network on LinkedIn contains almost anything I would like to know, from where to get a good latte in Budapest to what are the latest developments in cancer research. The concept predates the internet, as people who want to search for information often intend to “ask around,” but online it has been expanded to an astounding degree. Everything we want to know is at our fingertips – if we can find it.
Yet, with so much information so close, how do we navigate and find what we need in our networks when we need it?? How can we benefit from information contained in our own private information treasure trove? As Duncan Watts wrote, “Searchability is, therefore, a generic property of social networks.”
The 8 Social Media Sites You Need to Know About
The Internet Marketing Center Team
Today we’re going to tell you about 8 free sites that’ll help you explode your traffic…
AND get a better search engine ranking…
AND build a name for yourself as an expert in your field…
AND maintain better customer relations…
AND get new ideas for growing your business!
The sites we’re talking about are the ‘Net’s most popular social media sites. They’re online gathering places where people meet to share information and build relationships with each other. They’re also great places to meet potential customers and business partners.
… Plus, you can also build up a huge network of loyal customers who will do a lot of your advertising for you simply by raving about your product to all their friends and family. (And as you probably know, word-of-mouth advertising from a trusted source is the most effective kind of advertising you can get.)
And if some of these loyal customers start linking to your site from their sites, that can help you get a serious boost in the search engine rankings.
Here are the top 8 social media sites you need to know about: >
- Facebook: The world’s biggest social networking site. Members go to find other people who share the same interests or activities. You can build your own online profile and share different types of information with each other, such as pictures, videos, blog entries, links to other sites, and music clips.
A good marketing strategy is to create a Facebook “Fan Page” for your business and encourage your customers to join. Then you can easily alert them whenever you have updates to share about your business.
- Twitter: A “micro-blogging” social network site. Members send each other short text-based posts of up to 140 characters. When you find members whose “tweets” you like, you can subscribe to their feed and be updated whenever they send a new message.
Yahoo's Delicious adds a little Twitter
Delicious, the social-bookmarking service owned by Yahoo, has unveiled home page changes that are intended to do a better job of showcasing links that are currently popular. Although Delicious isn’t sharing the exact details of its algorithm, it apparently includes using the number of Twitter messages related to a given item.
Writing on the Delicious blog, Vik Singh, an architect at Yahoo, writes that “For this new Fresh homepage, our system displays recently bookmarked links and tweeted messages focused mostly on technology, web, politics, and media. Underneath the hood, Fresh factors several features into the ranking like related bookmark and tweet counts, “eats our own dogfood” by leveraging BOSS to filter for high quality results, as well as stitches tweets to related articles even if the tweets do not provide matching URLs.”
The issue that Delicious is trying to address here is that the existing “Popular Bookmarks” tab (which will continue to be available) tends to point to what Singh describes as “authoritative resources rather than fresh news.” This is because, although Delicious is often described as a social-bookmarking service, in fact, many use it primarily as a way to store bookmarks online solely for their own purposes. And, in fact, Delicious even introduced private tags in 2007 that made it possible to save bookmarks without sharing.
Traditional Marketing Budgets Lose to Interactive
Source: Center for Media Research
Online display advertising, which currently stands at $7.83 billion, will rise by 17% annually, ending up at $16.9 billion in 2014. Search marketing, which currently accounts for $15.39 billion in spending, will jump by 15%, to $31.59 billion, and e-mail, now at $1.25 billion, will increase 11%, to 2.08 billion.
Shar VanBoskirk, Forrester analyst, says “Email marketing is having a banner year as marketers:
- Grow their lists with the promise of ‘green marketing’
- Turn on more and smarter programs to boost sluggish sales
- Shift money to email from direct mail
- Improve email effectiveness by linking it to other channels like search or user-generated ratings and reviews.”
And, while social and mobile media expand, a corollary report from Forrester shows marketing officers reporting that budgets for traditional media, such as television, print, radio or magazines, along with staff and training spending and branding and advertising expenditures had been cut by two-thirds from last year’s levels, and more than half of their direct mail budget was gone.
Budget reductions from the 2008 level include:
- 29% reduction in marketing technology
- 27% in online advertising
- 22% in Web site development budgets were reduced
- 21% reduction in loyalty program spending
- 11% reduction in E-mail marketing
- 7% in social media spending from the 2008 level
Among CMOs facing lower budgets:
- 19% said they cut branding and advertising because “I can’t track its results”
- 26% said the same about their TV, print, radio or magazine expenditures
- 19% reduced their direct mail spending because it delivers the lowest ROI
On the other hand, 47% of CMOs whose budgets have been cut are increasing their spending on social media, while another 44% are increasing spending on Web site development. 40% will spend more on online advertising, and nearly that amount will increase financial resources in e-mail, considering these functions critical to their businesses, or needed to maintain competitive advantages.
In a glimpse into how marketing is viewed throughout a number of organizations, just over half of the CMOs see it as a revenue enhancer that needs to be supported. But 41% indicated marketing efforts are under increasing scrutiny from all levels of the company, and 18% are working in firms where marketing is seen as a cost center that needs to be cut.
To read more about the interactive budgets, visit Direct here, and for more on the continuing Forrester report on marketing budget reductions, please go here.
