Social Media Marketing needs to be part of an overall marketing strategy and frankly it’s plan is different for every business. However, to ignore SMM would be a fool hardy decision. Most marketing plans today should include a well thought out Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan, a very detailed keyword rich Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign married with a Social Media Marketing (SMM) initiative. If your business includes off-line strategies then they need to support and involve all these methods.
The following post is Mitch Joel, well I let it speak for itself….
In this interview, Mitch Joel shares some of the big ideas behind his new book, “Six Pixels of Separation”:
Digital channels shift the marketing focal point. Social media and other digital platforms now enable brands to focus on who, rather than how many people, they can put a message in front of.
Think “with” not “instead of.” Companies should not halt what they are currently doing and shift all attention to the digital world; it’s all about effectively integrating those social media channels with what you already have in place.
Don’t underestimate the “power of lazy.” We still live in a world where many people prefer to consume, rather than create, digital information.
On the role of real-time search results in the search engine industry, Google has long realized that it falls short in terms of real-time search and has been busy! In recent months Google was working on a secret project: a complete renovation of the architecture in Google’s web search.
If you want to watch the videos:
…. and
Google Caffeine: Under the Cover
Google spokesperson Matt Cutts explains that Google Caffeine changes “under the cover” event. On Google’s user interface will change nothing. Caffeine Google’s search results are largely similar. The big difference is that new content much faster will appear in the top 10 Google Caffeine. This will ultimately lead to faster, more accurate and complete information in Google’s search results.
Real-time search
“Google is certainly faster Caffeine. New content will be indexed twice as fast. Google is rolling out some new adjustments to their sandbox. Performance, speed, reliability, accuracy, Relevancy and other parameters are some features that are being improved.
Here are some questions and answers, discussed on Matt Cutts Blog:
Q: How do I check out the Caffeine update?
A: If you search on URL you can get a preview of how the search results will change over the next few weeks and months.
Q: It doesn’t look any different to me?
A: The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.
Q: Is this Caffeine Update because of Company X or Y is doing Z?
A: Nope. I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months. I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve.
Q: How do I give Google feedback?
A: If you want to give us feedback on how the search results are different, look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link and type your feedback in the text box. Make sure to include the word caffeine somewhere in the feedback.
Conclusion #1
Business owners need to heavily promote & manage social sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook,Linkedin, and others. It also means photo sharing sites such as Picasa Web Albums & Flicker are important. It also means means blogs & local search sites such as yelp and citysearch are important….
Bottom Line folks Social Media is here to stay and your business needs to be in front of people looking for you…..
Conclusion #2
Business owners need Quality Content. Why? When you are signed into your Google account (many business owners are always signed in) Google is showing results from Social Circles in the result! How crazy is that. That means if we get all of our clients to follow us on Twitter, or all interested business owners to connect with us on Linkedin, or people follow us on YouTube.com.
THIS MEANS WHEN WE PUBLISH NEW CONTENT THEY SEE THAT CONTENT IN THE SEARCH RESULTS.
What a great way to target your target market. Google is practically telling everyone with this new addition that CONTENT is the new LINK VALUE online!
The first thing I did today when waking was to run down to get some coffee. I needed caffeine in a bad way. You see, I was challenged to answer a question, can you quantify a ROI with Social Media Marketing? I already knew the answer however let me bore you a bit of what I found when searching for this topic. Google, Yahoo and Bing each had over 14 million results for “Social Media Marketing ROI’’s”. So I set out on a mission to read them all……just kidding, I barely got off the first page when it struck me.
I couldn’t help but think, “my audience is Small Businesses and if I am going to be true to this I need to be painfully blunt.” Of all the posts I read on this seemingly elusive question; “Can you put a ROI on Social Media Marketing” all and I do mean all were over intellectual attempts at trying to impress others that they have the answer. Some well meaning, others a blatant marketing campaign. Here are some of the babble.
“an overarching truth about business: The best marketing strategies, those that yield long-term value, are based not on trends, anecdotal evidence, or past “success stories” but on new scientific methods and metrics explicitly developed for analyzing often-imprecise data.”
HUH?
“The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.”
Really now!
“No marketing program has value that can be measured separately or independently. The value of marketing derives from its ability to help the organization implement its strategy … Marketing programs seldom have a direct impact on financial outcomes such as increased revenues, lowered costs, and higher profits. (Rather,) Marketing affects financial outcomes through chains of cause-and-effect relationships.”
… No impact? Ouch!
At the risk of insulting some of my colleagues I am going to stop there. The point I want to emphasize here is this; small businesses are concerned with one thing, can we make money? We can all agree ROI is hard to measure or because it is too time consuming, many small businesses shy away from social media. I myself own a small business and I am largely concerned with my bottom line. How we get to a good bottom line is with constant Plan, Do, and Review with marketing as a whole.
Ultimately, the key question to ask when measuring engagement is, Are we getting what we want out of the conversation? When you ask businesses why they are participating in social media, what do they say? Most, “to make money,” If they say, “to grow our business,” they’re just saying, “to make money,” in a nicer way. If they say, “to participate in the conversation,” which is the more appropriate reason to be involved in the social web.
In it’s simplest term let me tell you the why you need to be engaged in this type of marketing, however, Social Media on it’s own is not the end all be all. A well executed Online Presence for a business should include a well designed and thought out Web Site/Blog, Search Engine optimized pages, as well as a well researched Pay Per Click program. On top of this should be the inclusion to the 30-40 Social Media sites which will in turn earn you back links to your site.
You may be wondering, “you didn’t answer the original question”, and your right. Let me answer it this way. Did you ask the Yellow Page sales person for the return on investment? Did you ask the Value Coupon rep for that same answer? Even still there is an answer, yes in your business it can be tracked and quantified with some very simple techniques like simply interacting with your costumers. I’ll conclude with this, the Internet is the place where your potential customers are looking for your products and services and you do need to be there. Be there in a way that shows how great of a business you are.
Lastly, I hope I didn’t over simplify this issue, please comments and questions to l.mcleod@bulbwired.com, we love the interaction.
Prior to leaving Forrester to join Altimeter Group, Jeremiah Owyang, along with Josh Bernoff, Cynthia N. Pflaum, and Emily Bowen, published a report that attempted to bring the future of the Social Web into focus. If we viewed the content of his research as a social object, the conversations that would transpire could in fact expedite the development and implementation of the most valuable predictions and observations contained within.
The first part of the report observes the state of the Social Web and summarizes its direction:
Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.
In the report, Forrester documents the evolution and direction of the Social Web in several distinct stages:
1. The era of social relations – Starting with AOL and others in the mid-1990s, this era witnessed the connection of people through simple profiles and friending features that served as the foundation for online conversations through connections.
2. The era of social functionality – Evolving from friending to platforms that supported social interaction through applications and infrastructure, facilitating communities through relationships locked within the confines of a particular network.
As I’ve said before, social networks are jockeying to become our individual online OS – a Social OS essentially. Facebook released its Facebook Connect infrastructure to allow us to traverse the social web with our Facebook identity and relationships in tow, bridging our updates back to the Facebook News Feed to share with our social graph. This is a monumental furtherance as it starts to demonstrate the power of an interconnected activity and profile stream and network that makes the Social Web a much smaller place.
However, what we really need is a “Facebook Connect” within every site, not confined to or benefiting any one network. This will create the segue-way to the era of social colonization as predicted by Forrester.
This need is of particular, perhaps even consequential, interest to brands as they will spend an insurmountable amount of time, resources, and money trying to engage in noteworthy conversions across multiple networks of interest.
3. The era of social colonization – Deemed as the next stage of social evolution, which will emerge as soon as this year, tools such as OpenID and Facebook connect will enable individuals to freely journey from network to network. Forrester believes that we will be able to do so with our social graph in tact, but I believe that the initial phase of social colonization will make a general identity portable between networks. The portability of corresponding data, social objects, and friendships we maintain in each network becomes the Holy Grail.
For consumers, surfing the Web is no longer a lonely experience. Forrester foresees the release of new browsers and frictionless, uncomplicated technologies that allow people to truly surf the Web with friends or see what they’re doing in real-time.
Like we’re already witnessing or hearing (depending on your status on the invitation list), Google Wave represents the ability to centralize and aggregate user activities and collaboration across the Web and across multiple platforms.
Forrester also observes that this era of colonization will leverage the recommendations of peers within the communities where individuals are active. Brands can capitalize on this behavior by instilling and engendering advocacy through direct engagement, blogger relations in the magic middle, and also via sponsored conversations.
This will serve as the bridge to social context.
4. The era of social context – Starting in 2010, social networks and sites will recognize the preferences of users, but more significantly, they will also recognize personal identities and relationships to customize the experience based on preference and behavior.
While this technology already powers, at varying levels, dedicated networks such as Trusted Opinion and Yelp, this functionality will be inherent to future networks using technology similar to Baynote to leverage the Wisdom of the Crowds as it inspires the personalization of content for each individual. Baynotes believes that the Web, and sites in particular, can learn from collective intelligence to improve the experience based on the behavior of crowds over individuals.
In the near future, much of the content will be automated, but will still rely on the explicit express of individuals to improve the experience. As Forrester notes, “Portable IDs mean you’ll be able to flip a switch to tell Nike you’re a woman who runs 12 miles a week and immediately see the shoes that are best for you — along with input from experiences of your running buddies.”
I believe that the combination of semantic and collective intelligence systems will improve the content and overall interaction within sites and social networks over time.
5. The era of social commerce – In 2011 – 2012, social networks will eclipse corporate Web sites and CRM systems. Forrester believes that communities will become a driving force for innovation and as such, companies will be forced to formally cater to communities, signifying the trading of power towards connected customers.
The Dawn of SRM
While Forrester predicts the era of Social Commerce, the future of the social Web as I see it, starts to embrace a corporate philosophy and supporting infrastructure that migrates away from CRM and even sCRM to one of Social Relationship Management or SRM. This will usher in the fifth era as observed by Forrester. And, SRM is also acutely cognizant of and in harmony with VRM (Vendor Relationship Management). Championed by Doc Searls, Chris Carfi, among others, VRM is the opposite of CRM, capsizing the concept of talking at or marketing to customers and shifting the balance of power in relationships from vendors to consumers. As such, systems are created to empower consumer participation and sentiment and improve products and services with every engagement.
While some believe that relationships aren’t technically manageable, in the world of business and a vibrant and influential social Web, it is not a question. And for all intents and purposes, they’re still personable.
The Social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority amongst stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels.
Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognizes wherever and however it takes shape.
SRM is a doctrine aligned with a humanized business strategy and supporting technology infrastructure and platform. SRM recognizes that all people, no matter what system they use, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence mapped to specific department representatives within the organization using various lenses for which to identify individuals where and how they interact.
From Adoption to Sophistication, No Social Network is an Island
Forrester recognizes that the past five years of Social Media evolution have focused on growth and adoption, but anticipates that the next stage of advancement is dedicated to improving social functionality. I would also add personalization and portability. The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands to deliver a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience. As I see it, we will start to see a the social web not as a collection of distributed islands, but as one greater collective better known as a human network – a contextual and relationship-based network that consists of like-minded individuals no matter where their profile resides.
In the near-term, the future of the Social Web starts with our online identity.
Whereas in Social Media, content is still king, in the business of social networking, data is its currency. I believe that everything starts with empowering the individual with the ability to host one secure profile/identify online that would serve existing and emerging social networks across the Web. OpenID, for example, provides central and protect login credentials for users, connecting identities to other third-part networks including Google, PayPal, AOL, MySpace, among others. Perhaps the future lies with making data mobile while still providing value to the economics of social networks. DataPortability.org is working with some of the most renowned networks to enable users to bring their identity, friends, conversations, files and histories with them, without having to manually add them to each new service. Each of the services we choose to use can draw on this information relevant to the context within each network. As our experiences and connections accumulate and change corresponding data, this information will update on other sites and services if permitted, without having to revisit others to re-enter or re-create it.
The future of the Social Web must begin with data portability to accelerate proliferation throughout Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation adoption system. The lack of it might serve as either the “chasm” that hinders mainstream adoption or the monopolization of user data by a few dominant players.
Last year’s weak holiday results provide e-tailers with a relatively low hurdle to meet, or exceed, past performance. Doing more than just beating last year’ s performance will be hard, especially in a year of restrained shopping, when consumers are looking franticly for “free shipping and handling” offers, sales, and coupons to keep their holiday spending costs down. One strategy marketers are using to support their merchandising efforts is social shopping, because it can have a powerful impact for a relatively low cost. It should be noted that social networks influenced 37 percent of shoppers in 2009, up from 24 percent in 2008, according to e-tailing group research.
As a form of marketing interaction, social shopping continues to evolve. Social shopping has expanded from dedicated social shopping sites like Kaboodle, StyleHive, and ThisNext (where less than 10 percent of U.S. online retailers have a presence) to broader social media sites, like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter (where consumers’ various networks connect). Savvy marketers are just following their prospects and customers based on eMarketer’s April 2009 assessment of the social networking sites used by U.S. online retailers; roughly three in five U.S. online retailers have a presence on Facebook.
Seven Ways to Exploit Social Shopping
Marketers must understand that customers use social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to communicate with and gather information from their friends and colleagues. As a result, your presence on these sites must be integrated into the multi-directional communication when consumers want to interact with your firm. Here are seven ways to maximize social shopping results:
Build relationships with prospects and customers. Enable consumers to reconnect with you later in the purchase process by providing a variety of options including Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, e-mail, and chat.
Add social tools that encourage your content to travel, so as to cost effectively extend relationships and attract new prospects. Provide consumers with tools such as social booking for the major sites your target audience uses, as well as e-mail and IM where appropriate.
Make your message consistent across platforms. This is particularly important for building your brand. In the process, ensure that it’s integrated with the rest of your marketing, both online and off, at every touch point.
Listen to and participate in the conversation. Unlike other media environments, you can’t deliver your message on your timing. While marketers worry about negative feedback, negative comments occur roughly half as often as positive ones, according to Anderson Analytics’ “Social Network Service A&U Profiler” research. Respond to negative comments to show that you’re listening to and care about your customers.
Ensure your Web site efficiently closes sales. Regardless of how well-received your offering is on social networks, your Web site must be able to process the sale quickly. While this sounds obvious, last year, a surprising percentage of sales were lost due to e-tailer inefficiencies. Also, consider allowing sales to be closed offline via phone or retail.
Maintain your competitive positioning. It’s critical to be present in media environments where your direct and indirect competitors are, to ensure that you’re part of the purchase discussion and decision.
Make attractive offers to social shoppers. Since social shopping often translates to efficient transmission of buying information for customers, offer these prospects attractive promotions where you can leverage the strength of your customers’ networks to cost-efficiently distribute them.
Measuring Social Shopping’s Impact
The inability to effectively measure the impact of social media on branding and sales can hinder its use as a marketing strategy in some organizations. Some online retailers find it difficult to move beyond the direct response mentality of tracking advertising effectiveness only through improved response and sales. Still, it’s important not to wait to implement a social shopping strategy because you don’t have the appropriate metrics. Here are some metrics to monitor to help assess the effectiveness of your social shopping tactics.
Track your traffic — particularly your upstream traffic — from the sites that visitors use before coming to your Web site. Are social media sites accounting for more of this traffic than they have in prior periods? Does the traffic from social media sites have any special characteristics that set it apart and can play a role in your marketing? Is this traffic directly translating into sales? Also, monitor your downstream traffic that shows where visitors go after they leave your Web site. Do many of them visit social media sites? If so, which sites? Are there any special trends?
Monitor the conversation to assess brand mentions. Analyze whether the mentions are positive or negative. Are these comments building a positive image of your firm? Make sure that someone is present on each of the major social media sites to respond to direct queries and negative comments.
Assess your competition to determine how they’re using social shopping and the size of their presence on major social media sites. Where possible, estimate the size and impact of their efforts. Consider how their brand is being perceived versus yours, and why.
Given the recent growth of social media sites, marketers must engage with prospects and customers in the place where they’re spending their time, if they want to become part of the purchase decision process. As social media sites evolve, more tools will be developed to facilitate sales, and along with them, better tools to more directly track those sales.
Meet Heidi at Search Engine Strategies, Chicago, Dec. 7-9, 2009. She’s participating on the panel, “Social Media Marketing Checklist.”
How does real time web benefit your small business? As most know about bulbwired.com, we are committed to helping small business and we do that mostly through Social Media Integration. Bing is MSN’s search and decide engine and in in experiment with Twitter to bring value to real time search. And of course you didn’t think Google was going to miss the party did you.
Where we see it benefiting you business is; if your name/brand is in a conversation of Twitter, Facebook and/or all of the other Social Media outlets that are all tied together, you can then me search-able. All this creates “link juice” better known as back-links. If you don’t know what all this means trust that we do and can bring it all together for your business.
The following 2 excepts are posts on the issue, reported from the Bing blog and Goggle blog; enjoy and ask questions.
One of the most interesting things going on today on the Internet is the notion of the real time web. The idea of accessing data in real time has been an elusive goal in the world of search. Web indexes in search engines update at pretty amazing rates, given what it takes to crawl the entire web and index it for searching, but getting that to “real time” has been challenging.
The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this opportunity. Twitter is producing millions of tweets every minute on every subject you can imagine. The power of those tweets as a form of data that can be surfaced in search is enormous. Innovative services like Twitter give us access to public opinion and thoughts in a way that has not before been possible. From important social and political issues to keeping friends up to date on the minute-by-minute of our daily lives, the web is getting more and more real time.
“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort; you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”
Google isnt the only search engine to get its hands on this valuable data, Bing was also included in the agreement and have been quick to act with Bing Twitter Search already available for US searchers. So if you’re based in the US, feel free to take Bing Twitter Search for a test drive here.
If all this is a blur and you are trying to figure out what it all means to my Small Business and you find yourself asking “Can this type of media marketing bring me an ROI? Consider 2 things;
1) To begin with, simply being on the net is not enough, you need to drive traffic to your
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information, But more importantly, that type of exposure seldom offers you the credibility, validation or build brand trust as being featured as a top level search result will. The most effective approach is a strategic online marketing mix. You can reach your target market and gain validation and credibility through effective online PR, and then utilize the this to leverage your message. That is the marketing strategy that you now need in order to build your business, land more customers and make more money.
2) Come and see our weekly webinar and we’ll lay it all out for you in layman’s terms and show you our commitment to helping drive more business to you!
If it feels like your online business is lagging in last year’s dust, keep in mind that it’s normal to fall behind in the race. With all this talk about Facebook, Twitter and the plethora of other Social Media Marketing tools it sure is easy to be confused if not down right overwhelmed. However, it’s absolutely possible and critical to pick up the pace of your marketing strategies and increase your chances of of bringing in new business with Internet Marketing.
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How social networks benefit your web presence.
Why blogging and micro blogging is important.
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To go forward in your marketing efforts it’s not a bad idea to look behind you. What I mean by this is; what old school method no longer work in your business. Yellow page ads, print coupons, billboards, classified ads and the many other traditional means to reach your prospects are being used little to none. PERIOD! Just last week I had a backed up toilet, you all know how irritating that can be. Without even a thought I went directly to my PC and brought up Yahoo, yes I still use that for search, and I typed in “Portland, OR plumbers”. I got what I needed, it really is as simple as that folks, your prospects are no longer looking for your product or service in the “old school” ways.
Before I get into some suggestions and some things to not do let me first say this. Get professional help in this area. Think of it this way; if you were a Real Estate agent back in the pre-Internet era you wouldn’t tell the local newspaper that you can run your own classified ads, “no thanks, I have a printing press right here and can print and distribute my own ads” or you wouldn’t tell the billboard company, ” I can put that billboard over the highway myself.” So be realistic, you shouldn’t be up a 2am trying to figure out what mySQL is or html, css or where and what do I say or do in my ads. Enough said!
But where do you begin and how will you know what to do? The key to Internet marketing and the path to web success in 2010 and beyond is anticipating customer needs and making every second count for your business on a daily basis.
Here are some suggestions of what companies, large and small, should look out for now and going forward in 2010:
Blogs Will Expand in Importance and Distribution
This year will be all about how a company fights its way through a bad economy. What better way to reach your target audience than provide quality content that is easily accessible and leaves a reader wanting more. Blogs create a community within your field of interest and work to spread your brand. Don’t blog to advertise, blog to help customers by providing informative material. Remember this; Social Media is conversational.
Does Mobile Marketing (SMS) have any potential for my business?
Whether consumers will respond and communicate to businesses via cell phone is worth experimenting with since a large percentage of companies used text and multimedia messaging last year. It’s an effort towards new ways of reaching loyal consumers and potential customers.With the load of apps for smart phones, Google’s new phone certainly makes this method appealing to a small business to reach customers looking for products and services through mobile search. Text SMS Marketing is one of many options that could be right for your business or at least a beneficial look at what your competitors may be using.
Don’t Underestimate the Power of Social Media
This is worth repeating, Don’t underestimate the power of social media! More than ever, Internet-users find it convenient and amusing to maintain social networks and professional relationships through sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and FriendFeed. If your online business does not have an account with all, if not one, of these sites, then now is the time to make one. It’s a great way to establish new connections and provide links to your site to help reach your target audience and increase sales.
Be Open to Modification
The spirit of being an Entrepreneur is all about taking chances, predictions and implementation to improve current conditions. This kind of growth requires change. The cyber industry is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace, so your marketing strategies and web tools should evolve too. No of our daily mantras at bulbwired.com is; Plan, Do, and Review.
KYSS Chaos Goodbye
Keep Your Strategies Simple And Gain More Time To Enjoy Your Riches In Niches! You’ve likely heard of simplifying your life. From bookshelves to daytime talk shows, simplicity is a hot topic. When it comes to your business, pairing down and doing less isn’t usually the prescribed strategy for success, but it’s certainly essential to staying satisfied in your niche.
As a Entrepreneur, you lead a busy life. Backbreaking labor isn’t always enough to outdo competitors. To-do lists stack against you. Your foundation remains uncertain, squabbling over big ticket items to bail you out of a down economy. Sadly, good intentions don’t always yield top results.
To ensure lasting business success, you must embrace niche simplicity. What is niche simplicity? In essence, by doing less each day, you accomplish more. How is that possible? When you select strategies that meet multiple business needs and achieve exponential growth. That’s what niche simplicity is all about. Think of it as de-cluttering your business deals.
Niche simplicity isn’t just good practice. It’s a smart solution that lets you…
* Closely examine what works and what doesn’t.
* Identify key strategies that grow your business.
* Let go of all good intentions that aren’t working.
Niche simplicity gives you time to develop smarter strategies for success. By releasing bad-result recipes that take time away from strategies for riches in niches, you gain more energy to grow your business. Instead of doing anything and everything, you can do one or two things really well.
Just as smaller markets lead to BIG results, doing less can achieve more.
Ready? Let’s simplify. Take a deep breath. Exhale. Do this slowly a few times, and with each exhale, let go of those to-dos and don’ts. Release any preconceived notions of what you must do by tomorrow. Relax, it’s simple. Once you’re calm and cool, let’s look at how we can corral some strategies for success and-dare we say-under-do the competition. Are you ready to simplify? Here are three suggestions.
Writing fever leads to expert fervor.
By writing a tip, trick or article. Publish your good advice. This gets your name out there, educates your niche and generates media curiosity. Do this at least weekly , and you’re much closer to building your brand, boosting your credibility and being noticed by media. Your fervor becomes their fodder.
Exercises regularly to build media muscle.
Want to build media muscle, but don’t have the strength to carry on with everyone? In your boilerplate message, include your social media links that help keep you on all the time. By regularly checking-in through your social media profiles, you quickly become a media magnet, attracting the attention you can’t afford to lose.
Spread your expertise through education.
Often it’s who you know that helps you succeed, but, more times than not, it’s what you know that accelerates your expert status. To remain in pole position as the quintessential go-to guru in your niche, share your knowledge. Seek out other experts that support you and team-up to teach your niche.
Instead of looking at these strategies for success as different tools to transform your business, think about how you can do one or two of them well to achieve lasting results. By pairing strategies together, you’re building a different kind of daily formula that is… well… simplified.
You can achieve more with less.
You can serve your niche better without hundreds of half-done projects. And you can out last your competitors by doing less, and doing that more effectively and efficiently than they do.
Keep your strategies simple, and you just might get rich in your niche. One thing I would like to share with you in closing is; in the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, and I am paraphrasing here, ask yourself this one question, “What is the one thing that you can do better than any other company?” This one question was the genesis of the bulbwired.com story. Find one thing and do it greatly!
I’ll admit it. I’m hooked on Facebook. I somehow missed out the whole MySpace craze (thankfully, visiting a MySpace page now just makes my eyes hurt) – but Facebook has me hook, line and sinker.
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Why blogging and micro blogging is important.
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Over on the Inman Blog, I wrote a post recently about real estate marketing through social media – where I implied that you should be thinking about marketing your listings in the places where your target markets are these days. Believe me, that’s rarely in the classifieds sections of your local newspapers anymore.
Now, industry social networks like ActiveRain are great for connecting with your peers; but let’s face it, Consumers aren’t hanging out there. If you’re looking for buyers and sellers, in this day and age you need to be a little more creative.
The news that Facebook may launch Local Classifieds got me thinking on how you can take this idea and use social networks like Facebook to really power your business.
Here’s how:
1. Encourage past clients and new clients to ‘friend’ you or ‘add’ you to their networks. Include links to your profile in your marketing materials, business cards etc. Build out a brand new online “sphere”.
2. Creating Groups – This is the most obvious way to use the site. Create a “Portland Homebuyers” group for example and help first time buyers with their questions. Leverage your expertise to become the expert in the group.
3. Creating a unique Group is also a great way to keep in touch with business networking contacts you meet – maybe it’s at a local Chamber of Commerce meeting or even a Real Estate Connect conference. You can engage in post conference discussions, share information in a neutral open forum that doesn’t demand the intimacy of an email or telephone contact.
4. Shares – You could use Facebook to market properties to a select group or share properties with your friends . A handy bookmarklet lets you add external links to your Shares. You could add a link to a property from your own site, even a vFlyer page or Sellsius listing etc.
Think about it, you could have an exclusive Group of Realtors in your market, maybe its even inside a single branch office, and you could share great listings with each other even before they hit the MLS.
5. If you’re a blogger, add your RSS feed to your profile. Facebook lets you add a Blog feed to your Notes. You could find new readers and even drive traffic back to your blog by sharing your posts with your network.
I think that maximizing your exposure on social networks like Facebook are going to be increasingly important to small businesses – especially in industries that are already so network-dependent like real estate. Unfortunately, due to the fleeting nature of these sites, the trick is going to be to stay on top on where everyone is. The real danger is arriving too late and finding your audience has already moved on.
Twitter is a relatively new web 2.0 site that is beginning to gather a lot of popularity. That implies that a lot of people have heard of it but it is also rather common to run into individuals who haven’t learned of it.. yet. Twitter.com is this social site that promotes users to post frequently about what they are currently doing.
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Why blogging and micro blogging is important.
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Lots of individuals are using it to better their selling reach, by being an involved twitterer they gain followers who are interested in what they got going on. This implies individuals being exposed to their updates on a regular basis. For example, if you have hundreds of followers in Twitter and you decide to post an affiliate link, that means that hundreds of people have immediately been exposed to your offer. In this article I will discuss ways to maximise Twitter for your selling, and also a big mistake to be aware of.
In order to have a fan base per say of followers in Twitter you must be able to keep their involvement in you and what you are doing now. “What are you doing?” is the whole foundation of what Twitter is about in the first place. Make sure to post daily if not several times throughout the day updates about what you are doing. The magical thing behind this is that many of your contacts will be able to feel like they know you so much better, will trust you more, and feel much more comfortable about working with you. On the other hand, when you follow others you can learn about them and their possible needs.
The big fault to watch out for is only posting affiliate links or offers on your Twitter page. This looks like Spam and many individuals will see you as just abusing Twitter for your own personal gather. Think of it this way, if you would not want to invite your friends or family to keep up with you via Twitter then you are going about it all incorrect. As with anything you send out or provide, ninety percent should be content and ten percent (at most) advertising. So this concept is quite simple… constantly post throughout the day what you are doing.. it is usually very simple and only takes a few seconds to post! Secondly, if you write articles or provide content online, provide a link for those in your Twitter posts. You may post many things within one day, but the last thing you post for the day is usually the most crucial because it will be there the longest. This implies that your last post for the day should very well contain a link that you want your followers to see before your start Twittering again the next day!
Another part of Twitter is contributing. As with any social site it should be a give and take relationship. Notice that give comes first… the more you give the more individuals will want to work with you and the more attention you will receive. Make sure to read and follow other users in Twitter. If you read something interesting or helpful then make sure to reply and say so, or even put a link for it on your Twitter so that you are directing others to more quality content. This can also be as simple as connecting with other users, if they know you are reading their Twitter page they will be much more likely to check out what you have going on too.
To get started in Twitter you should first invite contacts who aren’t using Twitter and also find contacts who are already using Twitter so that you can start following them and also start getting individuals to follow you. Twitter has a nice invite and find feature that makes this incredibly easy. To grow your reach even more you can start following individuals who follow or are followed by the people who follow you.. or that you follow. You might need to read that sentence again.. but basically you can find other users to connect with that are already connected to other users.
Now for a big tip. If you really want to maximise the potential with Twitter, you should make sure to take advantage of any plug-ins or sites that support Twitter. Here are 3, but I’m sure there will be many more in the future if not already. Squidoo allows you to input your Twitter account info into your Squidoo account and then it can automatically post updates to your Twitter account when you create or update Squidoo lenses. Facebook has an application called Twitter, it automatically updates your Facebook status when you make a Twitter post. The other tool is a free WordPress plug-in called TweetMyBlog that allows you to create a two-way connection from your blogs to Twitter. TweetMyBlog allows you to use a widget on your Wordpress blogs that will display your current Twitter feed.. that way all visitors to your blog can look at the widget and see a running feed of your latest Twitter posts. If they click on that they will be brought to your Twitter page. In addition, when you make a new post to your blog, TweetMyBlog will automatically make a post to your Twitter page with a link to your latest blog post. Imagine the extra exposure you can receive by using these tools that help people see more of what you are doing.
A Case Study
Bin Ends located in Braintree, Massachusetts is a discount online wine and spirits retailer who has started to stream live online videos of wine tastings with pros that consumers can view via the Twitter social network
To watch a live tasting all you need to is create a profile on Twitter, then receive notifications of upcoming events via the social network. The wine tastings also are promoted on the retailer’s web site and through social networking site Facebook.
When the wine tastings are happening, you can log into Twitter to view the broadcast of a panel discussing selected wines. Viewers can ask questions or offer comments online during the live broadcasts. The tastings are promoted at least two weeks in advance so that consumers also can order featured wines from Binendswine.com and taste along with the experts, Bin Ends says.
The first online tasting, held last week, drew 200 viewers from around the globe. About 10% of them ordered the promoted wines in advance from the company’s web site, according to a company spokesman. Shoppers who live in states that don’t permit direct shipment of alcohol to consumers can use the site’s “virtual sommelier,” which directs them to in-state retail locations where they can purchase the wine. That way no one has to miss out on a tasting, the spokesman says.
This is a great example of a small company using social networking to expand their market reach. Instead of just targeting wine drinkers in the greater Boston area, Bin Ends is able to reach potential wine buyers worldwide. They joined Facebook and Twitter and then thought outside the box on how to stand out in these social networks. A virtual taste test is very creative and I am sure that the 200 viewers was several times more than what they would have expected for an in-store event.
Lastly, have fun! Twitter is a social site… so interact and enjoy!
Marketing & Social Networks Webinar (What You Need to Know)
What social media networks can do for your business
How social networks benefit your web presence.
Why blogging and micro blogging is important.
Learn how Bulbwired can help grow your business using social media networks
Register for our weekly Webinar and learn more about this new area of marketing.
How to Add Social Media to Your Press Release Strategy
Before the web came along, small businesses often had very little control over the publicity they could generate in the press, even when sending out press releases. They had to submit their news to a traditional press distribution or media wire service, which was often expensive and provided no guarantee that their news would ever be mentioned anywhere in a newspaper, magazine, or other publication. Reporters and editors were completely in charge of which press releases were deemed newsworthy enough to be published, and the rest were basically ignored.
Things improved greatly for small businesses with the development of online press outlets that allowed submissions from all types of companies, large and small. One main benefit of these sites was that even if your news wasn’t “picked up” by a major news outlet or site, at least it generated some new, high-quality inbound links back to your business web site, providing you with some additional exposure online and helping improve your search engine rankings.
Now with the explosive growth of social networking sites, small businesses have another great opportunity to gain extra publicity and online exposure by incorporating social media into their corporate press release strategy.
When thinking about a press release strategy for your small business, consider creating a comprehensive plan that includes your web site, online media outlets, and social media sites. For example:
Web Site:
* Be sure to have a “Press Room” or “In the News” section on your business web site. Include the latest press releases for your company, and also provide a link to a press release archive for older news releases.
* If you are a Chamber member, always submit your release to your local Chamber of Commerce. These organizations love to promote news from their members, and Chamber publications are typically well-read by the membership and others in the community.
* Submit your press releases to any other organizations or professional groups to which you belong, or to other sites in your industry that accept news releases about your type of business.
Online Media Outlets:
* There are hundreds (or probably thousands) of web sites that are news-related or niche sites that publish news from press releases submitted to them. Many are free or very low cost, and will accept press releases from all types of businesses. Just do a Google search to find the online press release sites that fit your budget and your industry.
* Optimize your press release for the keywords that you also target on your web site. Use keywords in the title and subtitles of your release, as well as through out the body of the press release.
* Always provide links from your press release back to your web site. Better yet, provide links to specifically optimized landing pages that target the keywords or the subject of your press release (e.g., a new product announcement).
Social Media Sites:
* Include links from your press release to your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This helps drive traffic to your social media sites, and may provide the spark needed for your release to go “viral”.
* Use Twitter to announce your press release, and link back to your web site’s Press Room or the landing page for the release.
* Put your optimized press release on your Facebook page, preferably in a custom tab where your optimized release can help boost your site in the search engine rankings (regular “wall” posts don’t help your rankings)
* If your social marketing profiles have been set up correctly, the press release can be published automatically to all your social media and bookmarking sites with one single action on your part (such as a blog post).
Press releases are an excellent way to publicize your company, build inbound links to your web site, improve search engine rankings, and promote news or events going on in your company. Because of the web, small businesses now have more access than ever before to get their news (and links) in front a huge audience without the approval of traditional news reporters and editors.
By adding social media to your press release strategy, you can create a comprehensive plan that not only takes advantage of your web site and online media outlets, but also uses social media sites to distribute your news further on the web, help keep it visible longer, and ultimately extend the reach and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Mitch Joel’s big ideas behind “Six Pixels of Separation”
The Future of the Social Web
Seven Ways To Tap Social Shopping
