Posts Tagged ‘social media’
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
As we’ve already covered, social media marketing is all about connecting with your audience, as opposed to selling products. Think of it as a conversation. The more web presence your brand or business has, the more avenues you have towards conversing with potential customers. Brand awareness, customer service, and engaging with your customers should be your primary focus, but how can you turn that into sales?
Vanity Address
Once you’ve created your Facebook page, you can apply a vanity address that reflects your business name. Use this vanity URL when linking your Facebook page on your blog and/or website. This ensures that your social media marketing campaign is established and credible.
Join the Conversation
Add status updates that provide useful links and content related to your business. Social media marketing is about engaging with your market niche and talking to them on their level, like friends. One of the best places to network in a real world environment is through parties, and social events. Not everything should be about business and finding people through parties establishes your trust as a friend first and business second. Think of Facebook as an online party. You can’t build trust by being aggressive on selling. Talk to your potential customers as friends and the sales will come naturally.
Fan Pages, Group Pages and Events
Part of your social media marketing campaign can include the creation of fan pages, group pages or events. This is another tool to build community around your business and connect with your audience. Create an event page when marketing an upcoming event and use fan pages or group pages to keep people updated on your business.
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are a cheaper alternative to marketing your business. What’s smart about social media marketing through Facebook is that you can use profile information to your advantage by using keywords, age brackets, etc. to market to specific audiences. Through the very nature of Facebook pages, businesses can use target marketing to successfully advertise to specific users.
With these general tips, you can start to build your Facebook web presence in no time. If you decide setting up a Facebook page is too hard to maintain, or would like assistance with your social media marketing, we can gladly help. Are you ready to join the conversation?
Tags: "social networking", facebook, Facebook page, social media, social media campaign, social media marketing
Posted in social media general, social media sites | 2 Comments »
Monday, August 17th, 2009
We see SEO and SEM firms, social media marketing firms, firms that specialize in link building, firms that specialize in article syndication, and many other subsets of Internet marketing. To business customers who don’t know a lot about marketing on the Internet, this can lead to confusion and a real difficulty finding the right service provider.
To make matters even more complicating, every SEO firm has a different approach. This was bound to happen. There is so much new technology on the Web that naturally some firms are going to emphasize certain strategies over others. I use the SEO and social media marketing strategies that I’ve developed over the years and found most effective.
Some of these strategies include:
- Creating profiles on the 10 major social media sites
- Regularly using four or five social bookmarking sites
- Investigating niche social media sites
- Cultivating community on social media sites
To keep up with the new technologies, a social media expert is constantly trying out new tools, exploring new platforms, and also utilizing older networks they’ve learned how to mine for traffic. We are looking for what works the best in terms of viral marketing and exposure for a site.
Social media marketing is organic; it evolves over time. To give you an example, I have been submitting posts to StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site, for about two years. Only recently, however, have I begun to reap the benefits of my submissions. Now, when I submit a post to StumbleUpon, I am almost guaranteed to get traffic—and lots of it. For a couple days last week, I was receiving over 1,500 unique visitors to my site per day.
So how did I do it? Patience and dedication. You learn the best places to submit links for your specific content. You learn how to make viral content. You learn how to properly “tag” your submissions with labels that people can easily find. You also learn the importance of community cultivation. This means communicating with people on social media sites about their projects as well as yours, and sharing similar interests with them.
“Sharing” is the keyword in social media. Collectively, we act as filters. We direct people to the best content; the content that will interest them. We help each other find things.
Identify the niches on the Internet where your business topics are discussed. You can find these niches by running a keyword search on any social media site. Create a profile or many profiles, and start to engage people in your area of interest. Join groups, add comments, and write reviews of other people’s links and blog posts.
Your social media campaign will not happen over night. That is the truth. The good news is that once social media begins to work for you and your business, traffic will exceed your expectations. These services have been created to produce viral effects. Your submissions are at the whims of large numbers of people. You need to assimilate yourself into the social media environment before you can direct traffic to your sites, and promote your own content.
Learn how to create a social media Squidoo lens for your business
Tags: niche social media, social media, social media marketing, StumbleUpon
Posted in social media general | 3 Comments »
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Information may be free these days, but two important resources are dwindling fast: time and attention.
Herbert Simon, an American economist and psychologist, first articulated the concept of the “attention economy” in 1971. He wrote: “Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it”.
Definitions and theories about the attention economy have evolved since then, and today the concept is continually talked about in business, PR, and social media websites and magazines.
How should a business strategically position itself in the attention economy? Let us look at two key distinctions of this concept. The first distinction is based on choice. According to ReadWriteWeb, a popular web technology site, the consumer can choose where their attention is “spent”. The second distinction is relevancy. The information must be relevant to the consumer’s interests, or he/she will go elsewhere.
 - Source: ReadWriteWeb
The attention economy is niche-based, concentrated on personalized news, information, and goods or services. Businesses that closely monitor online statistics, regularly modify ad campaigns based on those statistics, and participate in the active cultivation of a community around their sites, will already have some key insights into what people are paying attention to. A business has to ask itself, “What makes people stick around?” These insights will serve as the foundation for the best public relations and marketing strategies. In other words, listen to your consumers. Listen hard!
The battle to secure the most online attention is only bound to get more competitive. As Jon Fine from BusinessWeek writes, “the monetization of attention—audience–is harder online.”
1. Provide a satisfying experience for consumers. Without a satisfying experience, consumers will not return to your site. Offer recommendations, special offers, and networking opportunities. (1)
2. Free content is expected, so have lots of it. Think of your business as a personalized media outlet—videos, blog posts, press releases, articles, news updates, tweets, etc. Your marketing efforts are a blend of free information and products/services, and possibly even free “tools” or applications.
3. Protect consumer information. You don’t want to end up with people bad-mouthing your business practices on Twitter or any other social media network. Be sure to maintain the privacy of your consumers. (2)
4. Create a filter that has value. Digital culture expert, Kevin Kelly, writes: “When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable.” Your business can act as filter for consumers and other businesses. Select the most important issues to review and analyze. People on the web need you to filter information for them; they need you to tell them, “This is important.”
5. Avoid practices that even resemble spamming. With millions of spammers bombarding us every day, you want to eschew “information pollution” as a business. Your reputation depends on it.
6. Social networking is key. Networking is becoming the single most important factor in business. Our network of relationships is now determining whether or not we get business deals, clients, or employees. The social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter offer a way to develop a wide range of diverse contacts for your business.
7. Measure online attention to your sites. Follow statistics closely and adapt your marketing strategies based on your findings. Attention strategies must be constantly updated to adapt to user flows and click-through ratios.
8. Build a social community around your business. You’re going to need a community of followers and fans to energize the base of your business. Followers and fans of your products create the ongoing attention you’ll need to survive and ultimately prosper.
9. Manage your friends and fans. The more acquaintances you have on Facebook and Twitter, the more people you have to manage. This produces a drain on your ability to do other things.
10. Focus on relationships. Relationships come before sales; relationships matter in the attention economy.
To read a related post on the changing landscape of Public Relations click here.
Tags: attention economy, Herbert Simon, pr, ReadWriteWeb, social media
Posted in attention economy | 3 Comments »
Sunday, July 12th, 2009
The changing role of public relations is in the news again with an outstanding article in The New York Times Sunday Business Section for Sunday July, 5, 2009. “Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley,” talks about the impact of social media and social networking in public relations and how these new business practices are actually shaping the success or failure of start up companies in Silicon Valley. You don’t have to be a start up in Silicon Valley to know that the same truths hold for elsewhere in the world of public relations. Newspapers and magazines used to be the gatekeepers of publicity for companies, but now social media and social networking is changing all of that.
We created PR-echnology to harness the power of social media for small businesses. We are steeped in ideas, practices, and experience that leads to the most important thing about the new PR: community cultivation. In this blog post, I’ll review The New York Times article and another exemplary article by Brian Solis, the Principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley. Solis was interviewed for The New York Times article and he responds to it on his blog by clearly stating what he believes is the essential character of the new PR.
First, some highlights from “Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley”:
This is the new world of promoting start-ups in Silicon Valley, where the lines between journalists and everyone else are blurring and the number of followers a pundit has on Twitter is sometimes viewed as more important than old metrics like the circulation of a newspaper.
In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial.
Despite all these new channels, Ms. Burke says it’s still essential to know which mainstream publications to approach.
The Times article excels in bringing attention to three new changes in public relations. (1) The people with the most influence are not always who you would expect. A journalist and a popular blogger may now be on the same footing when it comes to publicity. (2) Social networking is essential to the new PR. A web of connections to influential people in diverse areas and niches often serves as a greater advantage than knowing a couple reporters or news agencies. (3) Power users on social media platforms such as Twitter must be reckoned with and utilized.
It’s important not to get so excited about the new PR that we forget the old one. Mainstream publications still play a role, but that role is becoming more limited and less of a monopoly.
Brain Solis, who was interviewed for the Times article, revealed on his popular blog, P.R 2.0, that he felt the article missed the point. He praised the article for featuring PR professionals “who are helping to usher in a new breed of corporate communications,” but underscores that “PR is undergoing a much more significant renaissance that receives almost zero attention in this article.”
Solis has a nuanced understanding of the impact of social media on public relations. He actually looks at PR from the point of view of a technology analyst. His response to the Times article illustrates this fact. He believes the new PR aims to equalize the spikes and valleys (of media/consumer attention) which occur as a result of traditional publicity strategies. The problem with traditional PR, Solis argues, is the focus on news and events. This leads to a spike in attention, and then a drop off. Solis sees the role of the new PR, or PR 2.0, as equalizing the distance between the spikes and valleys, while at the same time building “communities of power users who will extend the story across multiple networks”.
 It’s the difference between a campaign mindset and one of community cultivation. The single most distinguishing factor of the new PR is not technology, as one would assume, but people. Solis writes, “This is about putting the public back in Public Relations, nothing less, nothing more.” Therefore, community cultivation is seen as the most effective public relations strategy with the best long term results. By cultivating a community around a product, brand, or website, you avoid the pattern of spike and valley with news and events. Essentially, the conversation never ends and the public relations strategy is ongoing.
Solis writes:
Every launch or news strategy should be supported by an ongoing program of community building and influencer engagement from the a-list all the way to the Magic Middle (the group of people who reach and impact peers of potential and existing customers and decision makers through blogs, twitter and other social networks).
With this new insight into public relations, we can move forward with PR and marketing strategies that tap into the social web and use it to form long-lasting bonds with consumers. PR-echnology is at the cusp of these changes, bringing our clients into direct contact with the communities that support them.
Tags: "PR 2.0", "social networking", public relations, social media
Posted in PR 2.0 | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
Social media come in all shapes and sizes. When it comes to link-building, however, we give priority to the social media that delivers the most traffic. Let’s go over the two most important factors that influence search results: (1.) links to your site from high-ranking pages (2.) creative content.
Squidoo is a social media platform that allows you to create a hub page around a given topic. That topic can be your favorite artist, books you’ve read, or your business. People have created Squidoo lenses (another name for Squidoo pages) on nearly every conceivable topic. The Squidoo site generates a lot of traffic from the web and is constantly referenced as one of the best ways to build links back to your website.
So what is a Squidoo Lens? A Squidoo lens is a webpage built with modules. These modules enable you to integrate Flickr photos, a blog feed, text, video, and many other features.
As with all social media, you will have to register to the site first. After you register, you’ll be able to make your first lens. If this is your first time making a Squidoo lens, we recommend you try the Magic Builder, which is basically a wizard that helps create the page for you.
- Have a concept behind your lens. The concept I chose for the Tempo Creative Squidoo lens was to aggregate all of Tempo’s companies onto one page, provide information and links to each company, and include the company blogs. This is a good strategy if your web business has a parent company and several smaller ones.
- Choose your url wisely; it will appear after http://squidoo.com/yourname. You can put a keyword in place of “your name” or simply use your business name. For example, the Squidoo lens for Tempo Creative, Inc. is http://squidoo.com/tempocreative
- Choose a title for your Squidoo Lens. When choosing a title, pick something that will grab people’s attention and also give a good description of what the page is about. The title for the Tempo Creative lens is, “Fun, Creative Web Company: Tempo Creative”.
- Pick a category. The category for your Squidoo lens will determine the page style and the modules, but you can always add and delete modules later. You can also change your category later if you want. For Tempo Creative, I used the category “business” because the lens is about Tempo Creative, Inc.
- Add content to your lens. Remember the second most important factor I mentioned is creative content. So be unique in terms of text. Make sure the information is relevant, useful to large groups of people, and humorous or interesting. When creating content for a “business” Squidoo lens, you may have less creative freedom but you can still organize your content in an interesting way.
- Add images to your content. Everyone likes pictures. When you choose images for your Squidoo lens, be creative. Don’t pick stock images that everyone has seen; do a little searching for eye-popping images. For the Tempo Creative lens, I decided to use caricatures of the people who work at Tempo. There’s a different caricature for each company owned by Tempo.
- Use the feed modules. If your company has a feed, use it! By integrating a feed into a Squidoo lens, you give the page currency. This is more effective than a static page for directing traffic back to your blog. For the Tempo Creative lens, I integrated two different blog feeds.
- Don’t include modules that have no purpose. Always keep in mind with social media, you don’t want to clutter the page. So only include modules that support your content and help to streamline the information.
- Add links to your text content. The clear advantage to building a Squidoo lens is the “do-follow” links. “Do-follow” links are the links you put into your Squidoo lens which direct traffic back to your site. In contrast to “no-follow” links, “do-follow” links improve your site’s Page Rank with Google. To add links to your text content, simply use the html for links: <a href=”http://tempocreative.com”>Visit our site!</a>
All in all, if you are looking to build links to your website, a Squidoo page is the way to go. It’s easy, highly searchable, and and effective way to increase Page Rank and traffic.
If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested in “How do I create a Facebook Page?”
Tags: "squidoo lens", "tempo creative", social media, squidoo
Posted in social media general | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
In my first post, “Social Media Means Connecting with Your Customers,” I talked about the importance of “getting involved” and “engagement” with your customer base. This involvement is essentially creative marketing. You’re going to have to come up with new, creative ways to engage your audience; and the ingenuity of these ideas will determine the success of your campaign. Remember, your job is (A) to show involvement yourself and (B) get your customers involved. There are hundreds of strategies to engage your customer base from YouTube videos, to contests, to polls, to giveaways. But you want to create a social media campaign that reflects your company’s image and also draws in large numbers of targeted customers. One of the big questions you want to ask yourself before launching a social media campaign is, “Do I want to direct people to a corporate website or a hub page, such as a Facebook fan page?”
Mashable journalist, Adam Ostrow, writes:
You’re probably already noticing it – business cards containing Twitter usernames as opposed to domain names, bands promoting their MySpace profile instead of their own website, and even ad campaigns directing people to participate in a social media rather than visit a branded website.
In the article, “Is Social Media Making Corporate Websites Irrelevant?” Ostrow examines the social media campaign by Vitamin Water which centers around a fan page on Facebook and the poll question: “Which athlete is the NBA’s top player: Kobe Bryant or LeBron James?”
Vitamin Water ultimately made the decision that sending people to its Facebook Fan Page was smarter for business than sending them to the corporate website. Why? Ostrow gives some answers.
- Facebook has 200 million active members and is the largest social media platform.
- The page has social media features, such as a poll and built-in wall posting, which increases participation and involvement.
- The “fan” system of Facebook is viral. Once your friends become fans, their friends become fans, and so on.
- After the poll about the NBA’s top player is over, the page will still have all of those fans and the company can continue to engage with them.
9 Easy Steps to Creating a Facebook Page
- To create a Facebook page for your business, go to this url.
- Next you have to decide which category is best for your business. Take some time with this. Always keep in mind your target audience.
- Now put in your business or product name and click “Create Page”.
- Enter a short description of your business or website address. Use keywords that a large audience can identify with. Upload your logo or a representative image for your business.
- Click on your business name in the top left corner and then click “publish this page”.
- From your new profile page, click “Add to my products”. Now you are the first “fan” of your business.
- Once you’ve become a “fan” of your business, your friends on Facebook will also see a message in their home page.
- You can also suggest your page to friends under the image/logo on your page.
- You can also promote your Facebook page with an Ad under the image/logo on your page.
If you decide that creating a Facebook page is too much trouble or too hard to maintain, we will gladly set one up for you. Just ask.
Tags: business social media, creative marketing, facebook, Facebook page, social media, Vitamin Water
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Don’t worry if you feel like you’re arriving late to the social media revolution. The new social technologies are here to stay, and they’re only growing bigger and more important in today’s business world. Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Scribd, Delicious . . . how do you keep up with them all?
Traditionally, businesses relied on interruptions and disruptions through radio advertising and television. There was a whole lot of static between institutions and the customers they served. Most of the time, customers didn’t feel connected at all.
The new social media platforms effectively remove these barriers. Now it is up to businesses to embrace and leverage communication with customers, and to establish connections with the consumer base.
Our suggestion to small and large businesses is get involved. Use the experience and the knowledge you have as a CEO, entrepreneur, or salesperson and share that knowledge with the world through a Wordpress blog.
While a company website definitely serves a purpose, a blog can actually bring you targeted traffic. This is because blogs are dynamic while websites are static. If your company is feeding new content into a Wordpress blog once or twice a week, then your customers will know you’re reaching out to them and communicating. They will know there is somebody–a person–who wishes to communicate and share knowledge on a consistent basis.
The second reason why a blog is absolutely essential to your business: user-generated content produces more traffic than non-user generated content. The commenting feature on blogs allows people to interact with you and the information you deliver to the public. Now consumers can ask questions and add their insight to the discussion.
Lastly, blog content frequently appears in search results. Here at PR-echnology we use keywords in our blogs and these keywords are designed to match search results in Google. That way, when somebody is searching for “public relations and technology,” our blog will appear.
Don’t be discouraged by the hundreds of social networks and new social technologies out there. Start out with the basics: create a Wordpress Blog. Remember, social technology is communication; and that’s what will improve your sales and reputation.
Tags: communication, new social technologies, public relations, public relations and technology, social media, social media marketing, social technology, Wordpress blog
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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