Social Media: Number One Tool for Lead Generation

We can all agree that social media is here to stay (at least for now)…but do we know why? Research indicates that many professionals implement social media to increase lead generation. In a new social media study, eMarketer stated:

“According to virtual events provider Unisfair, social media is the top emerging channel for lead gen among technology marketers surveyed in May 2010.”

The definition of lead generation alone is argument enough for using social media. Social media can and does make finding new customers so much easier…and fun. Not only can you find potential business demographically but you can base it off interest. This information will save you time, energy and money. A strong social media plan can introduce to potential customers that up until now you didn’t even realized existed.

This ever evolving concept of social media can have powerful effects for you (or your company). Are you familiar with Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? Hopefully, the answer is yes. These are all social media channels that are at the forefront for the lead generation. These channels give you valuable information for finding your brands lead generation. Most places, events people are going online and social media in all it’s many forms grants you exclusive access to it all. What is imporant to potentially new customers? What interests do they have? Do you have offer something that they could benefit from? Socail media has the power to answer these questions and more without ever having to leave your desk.

This may seem like shameless marketing tactic but it’s not about attacking potential leads with information..it’s about spending your time and energy on someone who would be interested in what you have to offer.  Social media has literally created a bridge between the product and its consumers. Before it was a guessing game in determining future leads now we can eliminate most of that.  So, it makes sense that social media has become a new wave for the future. You can connect with customers in a whole new way, monitor brand awareness, form relationships and find new customers. What’s not love?

10 Ways to Build and Focus on Passionate Content

I was reading a post by Jay Baer titled the 14 Things I Think I Think About Social Media (Great title huh?) and one of the fourteen points hit me pretty hard.

“Social media is fueled by passion, and too many companies try to take elements of their company that aren’t passion-worthy, and attempt to build a social media program around it.”

How do you go about defining passion-worthy elements within your company? What does it mean to have passion filled content to share across the expanse of the Internet and the tools afforded through social media?

I don’t know if companies knowingly choose elements that “aren’t passion-worthy”… maybe they have no idea? They have been rooted for years in this centralized brand strategy… rooted in the belief that they (in the ivory towers) understand what makes their product or service passionate.

How do you go about creating passionate content or choosing “passion-worthy” elements within your company?

10 Ways to Build and Focus on Passionate Content

1. Tell the story of founding the company or your first week at the company. What sites and sounds did you experience? What made you love what you did that first 72 hours?

2. Tell the story of a client. Who is your best client? Who makes the world go round for your company? We all have them. Tell THEIR sorry… now THAT is passionate content.

3. Better yet.. get your client to tell the story for you! Ask your best client to write a guest post. They are the passionate user.

4. Include your own opinions and arguments about popular trends. Great writing moves people and inspires them.

5. Ask your employees what makes them passionate. Does it have to do with the overall company product or service? Heavens no! Your employees are as much of the brand as your overpriced logo on the side of your overpriced building.

6. Remember… your customers and employees are the most important part of your passion worthy content. Let them tell the story for you.

7. Great user/customer experience creates passion-worthy content. What does it feel like when an individual walks into your store? What is the experience when someone clicks through your website?

8. Check out the 4 cornerstones to creating great content from Rand (SEOmoz).

9. Keep tabs on your blog content creation guidelines. How are you creating your blog content? How are you systematically telling your story?

10. Leave no question behind your motives.  Create transparent content that elicits a response. If you have multiple writers in your company… be very sure you have a system and policy in place to allow them to write authentically.

Are Traditional Coupons Dead?

Consumers are getting more and more technologically savvy. Threatening the practice of getting and using coupons in the traditional way.  According DMNEWS Newspaper subscriptions have declined by 9% in the past year, which means that consumers must be getting their coupons through other sources.  We are not only getting our news from other sources, but are we, as consumers taking advantage of online coupons and deals?

The obvious answer is yes, of course. All traditional channels for information are in question. Marketers understand that consumers are doing a majority of their shopping online. Therefore, marketing efforts are pointing toward online users.

This got me questioning the value of print media in today’s world. If we as culture no longer go to traditional sources for coupons, news, weather etc then what is the future for those traditional forms? Newspaper subscription has gone down, which is ultimately a sign of a shifting trend.

So, are the use traditional coupons near extinction? Let’s say that for now, no. Eventually, I’d say yes. As the the Baby Boomer generation moves along with the Millennial generation in going online the traditional sources are going by the wayside. Coupon cutting and clipping are relevant in an uncertain economy but it’s much better done online. Many companies are also delivering coupons straight to the consumers phones via e-mail, text, social media and other smart phone applications. Like every change big or small the shift from print to digital won’t be a quick process. Who knows, maybe we’ll all miss lazy Sunday afternoons with a pair of scissors and a newspaper and resist another modern change.

5 Ways to Use Twitter to Develop Personally and Professionally

Today’s guest post is by Dana Nelson. Dana Owns @Danmnelson where she helps connect people to build community.

1. Monitor

Monitor your name,  brand, company, competitors and industry. Watch for your favorite trade topics. Follow interesting people and thought leaders within your company and industry.

Watch for topics about which you are passionate, such as your favorite charities,  hobbies, sports teams, actors or role models.

2. Listen

Listen to people, whether it is your 80 year old neighbor or Cisco’s CTO.  That tweet came from a PERSON. Would you ignore your neighbor if she were there in person?  Would you disregard the advice of @Padmasree  if she were sitting across your desk?
Over time, when you listen to people, you get to know and help them, and they you. THIS builds trust and relationship.

3. Engage

Talk to them – That tweet came from a real person.
Don’t be afraid to tweet people. As a newbie, I tweeted @zappos . He tweeted back! I about fell on the floor!   Research showed that he not only answers his tweets, but ALL Zappoes employees must answer the phones and take customer service calls. (He gets it!)
Comment on a picture, disagree politely, ask a question, but ENGAGE PEOPLE!

@sradick said,  “I can teach you how to tweet. I can’t teach you basic communication skills.” Twitter is no different than any other conversation.  Keep that in mind as you interact.

4. Support

Share your knowledge. Many people say they can’t blog, because they don’t have much to say. These people talk for hours IF asked about the right topic. Most people are passionate about, skilled or expert in something and could advise on that topic if asked. This is Twitter.  Share your expertise in a tweet.
Reach out.  These are REAL people. Emotionally support those in your Twitter circle, as you would  co-workers sitting next to you.  Show you care.

5. Prospect

Get a job. Tweet to show prospective employers who you are.  Show your subject matter expertise.  Show your caring  compassion, and your teamwork.   Show your passion and engagement.  (Employers will look anyway, so make it good!)
Find employees with Twitter. See how often and on what topics prospects are tweeting, check their twitpics and with whom they tweet regularly.  A tweeting brand advocate can be a valuable asset. (Once hired, they will hopefully become your brand advocate.) HELP someone else. If you know someone is looking for a job, RT it! If you know someone seeking a new employee RT it! Both sides will be grateful.

Build the community! Is there a local event that supports one of your causes or involves the whole community?  Tweet about it!  Is a charity new to twitter? #FF them.  People will be grateful.  If you do these things,  prospects will find YOU!  By supporting and engaging the people in your Twitterville community, you will have plenty of business and personal “prospects.”

How to Deal with the Changes on Facebook

Are we in for more then we bargained for when it comes to Facebook? The social network site orginally intended for college students has evolved to become a way of connecting with anyone and everyone. Its wonderful to connect with new and old friends but are we being taken advantage of?  Facebook has launched some new features that should have us all a little concerned. These new features, however impressive, are bordering the line of excessive and invasive.

For one, there is now a way to “like” a website without actually logging in to your Facebook account. This feature will let any website you visit display a simple “like” button that be posted on your Facebook wall to show all your Facebook friends that you liked that story. Then in turn will show you  in the same box how many of your friends also liked that story. Now, this doesn’t necessarily seem so bad. Right? You decide. Do you think it’s odd that sites will be able to do this with out you having to log in with a user name and password? You also don’t even have to click any Facebook Connect buttons in order for this to happen. Literally, all that is required is that you have signed in to Facebook at some point in time before visiting the site.

Another feature to question is instant personalization. This feature allows sites to  show you personalized content based on the details of your profile on Facebook. Okay, again not so bad, yet. These sites will be able to read and interpret your profile without asking for your permission. The scariest part about this nicely named feature is that you opt-in by default. This means that if you DON’T want to have your profile read and have services customized for you without your permission, you have to specifically turn this off.

How can you avoid these new features? Well, there is the obvious, which consquently is very hard to do, delete your account. You can deactivate your account by going to your settings and clicking down at the bottom  “deactivate.” Here’s where they get you. By deactivating your account you are simply hiding it. Facebook explains all of this on its help pages. If you want to actually delete your account, there is information on the help page as well. Facebook makes it awfully difficult to leave.

For all you who don’t want to cancel your account. There are some things you can do to prevent these features from affecting you.

Turn off instant personlization by going to your privacy settings, applications and websites then click instant personalization and edit this setting. Doing this will prevent Facebook from sharing your information to sites to customize content based on your profile.

So, far there are only three sites who are able to utilize the instant personalization.These sites are Pandora, Yelp and Doc.com. If you want to make sure that these applications are blocked so that no information is to be shared by either you or you friends (who can share your information with sites) then you have to individually block each and every one of those applications. For now just those three sites.

Finally, don’t click the “like” button or any word resembling this word on websites. This will enable sites to send updates to your news feed or share information to your friends.

Lesson learned here is to explore your privacy settings and understand what Facebook is “allowed” to do based on its terms. Be in control of your information.

Information regarding this article and other helpful ways to control your account click on this link:http://gigaom.com/2010/04/22/your-moms-guide-to-those-facebook-changes-and-how-to-block-them/

The Beauty of Purpose Driven Marketing for Business

I have never been a huge fan of the book Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. For the readers who are fans… I apologize… I hope this does not ruin our “friendship.”

This post is not about hating on the famous book by Pastor Warren but is only the connection point between a thought I had this morning. I was scanning the book titles on my shelf at the office and happened over Purpose Driven Life. The thought of having a “purpose driven life” slapped me… straight in the mouth.

Of course… being fully surrounded by business and marketing on a daily basis… I connected it to marketing and corporate communications.

How can you lead a purpose driven marketing initiative? How do train your corporate culture to drive towards a goal with purpose?

Is it an awesome… kick butt mission statement? Not really.

Is it creating training and communication modules to help employees communicate with each other? 50/50

Purpose driven marketing is a two-fold process.

1. Your purpose should be defined (much like your mission statement) as the reason you are in business. What need are you fulfilling?)

2. Driving that purpose should be the stories told by the people being fulfilled by your purpose…. the clients.

Only when you have clients and positive contacts sharing your message will you understand the full extent of purpose driven marketing.

Announcing New Social Media Seminars for April in Indianapolis

We are proud to announce three new seminars for the month of April. Check out the follow below

APRIL 7th – Twitter 101 : The Power Behind the Bird

This the beginning. Learn from the author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies on how to fully maximize Twitter to create customer relationships that will actually… last.
We will be breaking down the common uses of Twitter as well as the following points:

• The Twitter Basics
• Setting up and maximizing your profile
• The importance of re-tweeting
• Sharing content that matters
• Time productivity tools Is quantity better than quality?
• Using Twitter to grow your business
• The secrets to maximizing Twitter search
• And much.. much.. much.. more!

This seminar is for both the beginner and the intermediate user.

APRIL 14th – Building Your Personal Brand Through Social Media

Your personal brand is what sells your product. We are all building personal relationships and our networks to strive to be better professionals. Are you doing the most to make your online brand impressive and true? Your personal brand drives everything in life.

This seminar will show you the top ten ways to use social media to build your personal brand. You will learn how to improve your online persona when communicating to others. As a business owner, it’s essential for you to demonstrate your knowledge. Your knowledge builds trust – and the best place to start is with your own personal brand.

• How to create your “story”
• What to do if people are talking about you (good or bad)
• Creating a leveraging a blog
• How to leverage LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter
• The “Six Ps” for improving your online brand
• The Must Do’s and Dont’s to building your personal brand

APRIL 21st – Creating a Social Media Policy for Your Employees

It is probably not a secret that social media is scaring the CRAP out of your company. Do you have a policy in place to teach your employees the right and wrong ways to use social media? Have you offered training to help ease the change into the new world of communication?

In Building a Social Media Policy for Your Company, we examine how to draft a companywide policy to share with your employees on what they can and can not do on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites. You will be taught exactly what should be in a social media policy, update your knowledge on the perils of social media for your company, and be able to discuss the topic with key executives at your company.

We will also be emailing you a social media policy in Microsoft Word to help in your editing process.

I Was Just Exposed on Facebook

Peter Preksto is a co-founder of image-recognition company Alta Data Solutions, Inc.

My business is pretty esoteric–we scrape petrified information off of paper or microfiche at super high speed and make it machine readable, useful for lawsuits and electronic benefits claims, among other things. Our customers are a relatively small number of service bureaus that process billions of such documents per year. I hadn’t thought of my use of social media as a marketing tool because we’re not really expecting to grow through word of mouth but by providing more functionality and speed at a lower cost to those who care about such things. My peers are in their 50′s and 60′s. Most of us started on mainframes, helped invent document-processing technology on intervening platforms, and have ended up in the cloud. In 1983, we first started inter-office chatting to each other using a utility in Novell Netware, and we mostly haven’t shut up online since. Twitter ultimately didn’t pass muster except as a novelty, but Facebook was a natural adoption. We tend to clamp our privacy down perhaps more than our younger colleagues, but we’re using and like the service a lot.

I’ve long believed that you cannot conceal who you really are if you use Facebook regularly–people can really get your number by looking through your books, music, quotations, links, videos, smart-ass remarks, notes of sympathy, whatever. In this big country, you stay closer to friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, and folks who you might otherwise have let drift (and a few who have come drifting back against the tide). If you work it, you stand exposed.

A couple days ago, I was friended by a really important business colleague, president of one of the big service bureaus whom we serve. While we don’t need to network to grow, if you screw up in our small community, it has a big impact. He joked on the phone about my Facebook content, saying it was really “out there,” lots of “personality,” very “young at heart.” I froze. At that moment, I realized the double-edge sword of Facebook. Even if you practice a policy of avoiding writing about politics, religion, creationism, diet, immunization and handguns (and boy don’t we all have opinions we’d love to share on those!), you still stand exposed–in a way even Rotary didn’t do to you in the old style of networking.

I seriously considered un-friending all of my business colleagues and leaving it strictly social and family. Fortunately, I probed the guy a few days later, joked about his comments, and found out that I had it backwards–what he saw, he liked, and it brought us closer together–Facebook shortened the learning curve he would have climbed to learn who he’s dealing with.

A life on Facebook is no place to hide. So maybe letting whoever the heck it is that you’ve turned out to be shine through that medium might be good for business–even if you’re not using it exactly as the pros would suggest for viral growth.

Speaking of pros, many thanks and much respect to Kyle Lacy and Brandon Coon for the company they’re building, and thanks for sharing so generously their insights and experience in their blogs.

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How Intuit Stays Relevant Using Social Media

Christen Wegner is a former journalist turned resident Gen Yer on the communications team at Intuit. When not on Twitter, she is usually texting, on Facebook, or writing for various blogs like Small Business United and TurboTax.

One of the hottest topics for any business, from the small to the large is social. So my first thought when Kyle Lacy sent me a tweet asking me to write a guest blog post I was like “Oh cool, Intuit is doing so much, yay, let’s share.”

So I started collecting info regarding all out campaigns, events, and information and started sharing that with friends and family. But what floored me was what I would find out after talking with a couple former coworkers. Companies are actually still banning their employees from social media – things like Facebook, Twitter, and gasp, personal blogs.

I guess I live in a little bubble and take for granted the fact that at Intuit, we are trusted that we will do what is right as THE voice of Intuit on social channels. And without those social channels there is no way Intuit could have done anything fun, interesting or relevant to what small businesses want and need.

One of those conversations was with a former colleague who told me her company has just blocked Facebook and MySpace from their computers stating employees were “wasting too much time on the social networks.” Of course, her IT department didn’t account for the mobile applications and now employees are frequently seen gripping their Blackberry’s and iPhones.

Thriving with social

When I joined Intuit, social media wasn’t new but it was this undiscovered territory. We were trying to find the right balance between keeping our employees happy and keeping them productive. Happily three years later I can sit here, write this article, have TweetDeck running in the background, and occasionally check out Facebook.

In fact, Intuit encourages employees to do just that. We have employees who train customer service reps, engineers and developers how to start interacting in such social channels. On our Intuit Community dozens of different employees interact every day answering questions, solving problems and simply act as a sounding board for our customers. And what is even better is the Community is where customers go to talk to other customers as well.

And our Small Business team was one of the first teams at Intuit on Twitter. Today we have more than 50 teams and individuals out there. What they learned early on meant a change in strategy for Intuit and insights into how we can help small businesses succeed.

Much of that success led to a desire for other social networking events like town halls, small business events, and a blog where regular experts discuss their tips and tricks (http://smallbusiness.intuit.com/blog/). All of this to help small businesses succeed in business and thrive in the social realm.

Over the last eight months we have managed the Love a Local Business Campaign in which Intuit is putting small businesses on the map. The idea is that fans, including customers, vendors, employees, and the community, determine what small businesses deserve some love with winners receiving small business grants.

That’s right, free money for doing what these small business do every day – take care of their customers and being social.

A big part of our strategy reflects a changing world where people and businesses are increasingly connected. We want to arm all small businesses and employees with tools , ways to listen, and create strong customer engagement as one small business community.

I don’t think any of this could have been done without access to our social channels. So thanks Intuit for letting me and my team stay relevant. And the hope is that our work helps small businesses stay relevant as well.

Why Aren’t You Integrating Your Marketing?

I need to rant. I picked up REACH magazine while hanging out in my apartment yesterday… do we all know what is inside the Reach magazine? Coupons… a ton of coupons from local

businesses…spreading their message and product across the city.

I am all about coupons. I use coupons to buy food, clothing, and services. There was only one problem with the hundred (or so) ads/coupons in the magazine. There were no links associated with social media on any of the coupons. I could not find one logo from  Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace throughout the entire catalog.

This does not make any sense to me… not one bit of sense.

Why wouldn’t you integrate the different forms of media on your coupons? Why wouldn’t you show every type of touchpoint to a buyer? Even the website addresses of the companies failed to show the social media connections on the homepage.

This is absolutely idiotic and ridiculous.

Setting up a Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account, or Myspace page is FREE. The only thing that social media can cost you (initially) is your time. Why wouldn’t you setup different accounts to capture potential clients in multiple ways… multiple touchpoints… multiple places.

There are multiple levels of marketing to capture the interests of an individual. It is absolutely ridiculous that a social networking was not mentioned ONCE in the catalog.

In my mind… I would want to capture every single individual who was on social media and was ALSO picking out my coupons… why would I want this type of individual? THEY ARE THE BUYER. They are the influencer. They are the one that spends money with your brand. They are the one you need to communicate with on a daily basis. If they are on social media… why not connect with them on a completely different level then Reach Magazine or newspaper coupons.

And on a second note… their friends are with them on the social networks. Welcome to the best viral marketing you could ever possibly want, need, or desire.

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