Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

By: Scott Dickson

While the internet changed the way consumers shop for products, social media is also having a profound effect on the way consumers research and plan purchases. 

Wesbites like InsiderPages.com, Epinions.com and Yelp.com give people access to consumer reviews, which empowers them with information they need before they decide to go to a restaurant, for instance. 

But, with social media…people can have actual discussions online before they purchase. 

Case in point…below is a brief conversation on Facebook where someone is interested in potentially switching from cable to DirecTV. This is an actual thread pulled straight from Facebook. The names have been changed to protect the innocent… 

JOE: TWC wants mo’ money but since the converter box came in the door our cable has been icky. May look into #DirectTV.
Mon at 8:40pm • Comment •LikeUnlike • View Feedback (11) Hide Feedback (11)

Diane
I’m feeling the same way
Mon at 9:02pm

Sam 
Don’t do Dish Network. We did that and it never worked in the rain.
Mon at 9:26pm • Delete

Mary
I love DirecTV … we got it this summer after TWC made me mad one too many times. Before you sign up, let me or someone else with DirecTV know — they have a promotion right now where both people get $10 off a month for 10 months if you give them my (or someone else’s) account number when signing up. The DVR functionality alone was worth it — and we pay a lot less each month and will even after it goes up after the first year.
Mon at 10:56pm

Jane
We are considering moving away from TWC. This input from others is helpful.
Tue at 8:17am

Sam
How does DirecTV work during wind, rain and storms? Does it stay on? I know folks who have had issues with it.
Tue at 8:42am • Delete

Danny
Heavy rain and forget it, no tv. Still, I really like the info button – esp for movies – tells the actors, director, yr made, and synopsis.
Tue at 9:07am

Danny
Joe, I can give you a $100 coupon, if you want to go w/ Directv
Tue at 9:08am

Chris
DirecTV is good — we’ve had it for a few months now. It’s only had brief blips of non-service in bad rain/storms. (knock wood!) Plus I really like their customer service.
Tue at 9:16am

Matt
We switched last month and love it so far. No major problems so far even in the rain. Wife doesn’t love the dish in the back yard, but it’s not that bad.
Tue at 10:48am

Mary
Even with a really heavy storm a couple months ago, we had no blips or loss of TV, which used to happen at the drop of a hat with TWC!
Tue at 11:59am

Sam
wow…i’m sold…..joe – directv owes you!
Tue at 12:53pm • Delete

So, here’s the takeaway…

If you’re a business owner and you haven’t gotten started with social media marketing, then it’s time to take the plunge. Scared of opening yourself up online? Scared some people may talk about you? Well, guess what…they’re talking about you anyway…whether it’s on Facebook or in the grocery store.

Why not take the new media seriously and learn how to monitor your reputation and use these tools to your advantage? Not to mention it will change your entire perception of how you should be marketing your business.

To learn more, CONTACT US.

Visit: DicksonInteractive.com

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By: Scott Dickson

OK…admit it. One of your Facebook friends posts entirely too many times each day and you’ve made the difficult decision to either hide that person’s updates…or de-friend them completely.

Hopefully you just chose to hide them. I will confess…I have done this.

As marketers, that tells us that our “fans” and “members” don’t want to be bombarded every day with 4 or 5 posts and updates from us on Facebook. They want relevant, important and useful information that they can use and pass on to their friends…maybe once a day…depending on the size of your community. 

However, on Twitter…things are different. Twitter is a micro-blog with short, quick bursts of information. Users are accustomed to getting “tweets” from the people they’re following several times a day…if not more.

So, here’s my perspective. As a business or organization, if you link Twitter to Facebook…meaning everything you post on Twitter automatically shows up on Facebook…you could be causing people to “un-fan” your page or leave your group. Remember, your goal is for people within your communities to take your posts and share them with others.

Twitter and Facebook are two separate and very different experiences. While Facebook is a more of a personal engagement, Twitter is more business-like and wide open. You should treat them as such and limit your posts on Facebook, but increase your frequency on Twitter. I hope that makes sense.

Other social media experts (hint: there is no such thing) might disagree with me on this and that’s fine. I’m merely sharing my perspective based on experiences I’ve had developing communities for my clients.

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Visit: DicksonInteractive.com

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By: Scott Dickson
www.DicksonInteractive.com

According to a recent media study conducted by the Council for Research Excellence, advertisers need to keep traditional media in their marketing mix…for now.

While it’s true, there is phenomenal growth online with the explosion of Social Media…overall reach is still dominated by broadcast television with radio coming in second. The most notable development in this research is that the web has surpassed newspapers and magazines as the third best way to reach the masses with your message.

The study produced numbers based on the following key “advertising-based” media platforms:

• Television had the highest reach & daily usage among users (95.3%)
• Broadcast radio (77.3%)
• Web/Internet [excluding use of email] (63.7%)
• Newspapers (34.6%)
• Magazines (26.5%)

The print medium is dying. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It’s not going to die today, but it’s hard to believe that it will be around in its current form ten years from now. Real growth amongst these platforms is only happening on the internet and the difference here is with engagement.

Think of engagement this way. Can you email a TV spot to a friend? No, but you can send a YouTube video link to your buddy via email or share it through Facebook and other forms of Social Media.

Did the newspaper ask your permission to send you that load of inserts in the Sunday paper? (Tell the truth…do you really look at every one of those?) No, they didn’t ask. But if you follow the independent, local furniture store on Twitter…you’ve given them permission to communicate with you.

Therefore, as an advertiser, the audience on your blog, fans of your Facebook page and followers on Twitter are incredibly valuable to you.  They want your marketing message. Don’t just spam them with discounts, etc. Engage them socially.

So, yes….traditional media still has the reach. Keep it in your mix. But, spend the time and make the effort to build a loyal audience online. The landscape will continue to change. Everybody’s getting in the boat. Don’t get left on the beach.

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Visit: DicksonInteractive.com

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By: Scott Dickson

The art of the “re-tweet” is a great discussion that could go on for hours.

One big issue that can be addressed quickly is, “How can I get my message re-tweeted in order for more people to see it?”

I enjoy re-tweeting things that are funny and interesting (you should too…hint!). So naturally, you’ll see me re-tweet posts by people like @chrisbrogan, @randyinman, @mashable, @reallifesarah, @guykawasaki, @andybeal and @hubspot, amongst others.

Here’s the thing…if I have to edit or abbreviate your tweet, I’m probably not going to re-tweet it and neither will others.

Time after time I see users post something that’s really funny or interesting and when I hit the RT button it ends up being 200+ characters…pretty frustrating to people who like to re-tweet. Remember, you only have 140 characters.

So, if you can condense your message, you’re much more likely to have it re-tweeted by your followers. Make it easy for them!

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Good luck out there!

Visit: DicksonInteractive.com

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Source: 10e20.com
by Rebecca Kelley

When I spoke about Facebook marketing strategies at SMX East, someone asked the panel of speakers this question: “If you had to do only one to help your business, would you start a blog or focus on social networking?” The answer, I feel, is not necessarily a black or white issue. Obviously, if you can handle running a blog and social networking, the easy answer is “both,” but there are situations where one is more suitable than the other.

Why You Should Blog

Adding a blog to your site can be beneficial to your business in a multitude of ways, a few of which I’ll highlight below:

• It builds unique content. By posting new entries on a regular basis (daily, weekly, etc), you’re creating new, unique content for your site. You’ll get more pages indexed, meaning popular posts can pull in some good search traffic and other posts can rank for long tail search terms.
• It’s a great launchpad for linkbait and viral content. If you’re developing linkbait or viral content for your site, a blog is a great, easy way for you to launch the content. Deploying a piece of content via an active blog makes it seem less orchestrated/intentional than if you were to set up a separate page just for a list.
• It’s a good brand builder. Giving your company a voice via the blog can make your business stand out among the competition. If you provide really helpful information and stand out as an industry leader, your blog will become a valuable resource. Also, establishing a personality on the blog will create emotional ties to the reader and you can develop positive relationships with your audience (which can lead to sales!). You can also use the blog to address any reputation management issues and share company news with the public.

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Source: Media Post

by Erik Sass

A new survey on media usage from the Opinion Research Corporation confirms what newspaper publishers have long feared: Americans are abandoning print daily newspapers for information in favor of online news.

The OPC also found a slightly smaller decrease in the number of people turning to TV news. However, there were also some unexpected gains for traditional media, including a greater reliance on radio for news and information.

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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 2^nd degree contacts (friends of my friends) number over 100,000. Amazingly, my 3^rd 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.”

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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.

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Source: http://www.10e20.com/blog

by Rebecca Kelley

Today I saw this piece on Mashable about how resistance to social media is beginning to fade. The article mentions that while 59% of marketers use social media in some capacity and the figure will jump to 82% next year, some companies are still resistant to social media marketing.

Mashable’s article features a chart that lists the biggest deterrents to social media. They are (in descending order):

“We don’t know enough about social media to know where to begin.”
“There’s no established way to measure the effectiveness of social media.”
“There’s no funding for social media in our budget.”
“We don’t have the time to invest in social media right now.”
“Social media isn’t a proven, tested strategy.”
“We’re hindered by legal constraints/corporate policies.”
“It’s not a good use of employee time.”

In my opinion, reasons 2-7 directly correlate with Reason #1, which can be boiled down to a lack of social media education. Social media marketing is fairly new, although it ties the basic principles of marketing into a new medium/environment. Many companies are likely intimidated or confused by social media marketing — they have a lot of questions about it and don’t want to devote time or marketing dollars on something they’re unfamiliar with. The problem is that social media is only going to get bigger and more common, so sooner or later companies are going to have to have some awareness of it…and the sooner, the better, because by the time your competitors catch on and join the social media marketing club, you should have already established yourself as being fairly social media-savvy, forcing them to play catch up.

A lot of our work with clients involves educating them about the value of social media marketing as well as the ins and outs of various social media platforms. We’ve written lots of introductory guides for our clients about Twitter, Facebook, social news sites, blogging, social networking, and more. The absolute first line of offense for us is education, because when a company is uneducated about something, they don’t think they need it, they don’t think it’s worth their time, they think it’s a fad and a waste of money, they believe misconceptions they hear, you name it, they’ve got an excuse as to why they’re not adopting a tactic that can prove to be extremely valuable to them.

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