Day 7 of the We Love Boobies and Hate Breast Cancer Tour

We have been on the road for seven days now… raising money for the Susan G. Komen Race for a Cure in Indianapolis. For those of you who have not been in the loop here are the details:

I am on the road with two guys, Daniel Herndon and Daniel Robertson. Daniel Herndon founded an initiative called Forkout.org that helps non-profits raise money by experiential marketing. Forkout.org will be the central location for all the content being distributed during our road trip. You can view the places we will be stopping at the Forkout.org Fan Page.

There is only one catch. Everything that we are using from the car to the hotels are all donated. We still need some help with lodging and food in certain cities. Let us know if you can help! We will be live web casting our trip via the Forkout.org webpage. You can view us live pretty much the entire two weeks of our travels.

We are currently on day 7 of the 14 day tour to raise money for Komen Indianapolis. It has been an awesome experience! We have visited the cities of Fort Wayne, Lafayette, South Bend, Marion, Merrillville, and Indianapolis. We will be hitting the cities of Muncie, Rushville, Columbus, Vincennes, and Evansville. We return home on April 6th!

I wanted to show you a video of a young women we interviewed on the 3rd or 4th day of our travels. Adrienne was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 19 and is now cancer free at 22. She is about to graduate and get married in July. Watch her story!

We still need your help with donations and support for the Komen Cause. We are trying to save 250 women by the end of the trip. When you are getting a mammogram through any type of cancer services it usually costs $100 for each woman. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of breast cancer is curable if detected early.

To give to our cause please visit http://www.forkout.org. Any amount helps!

Thanks to the people who have helped us out the past few days!

• The wonderful people at Fanimation bought a hotel room for our travels to Marion
• Beth Kinney donated a room in Fort Wayne
• Douglas Karr of the Marketing Tech Blog donated $100!
• Steve Quirk of Standt’s Fine Jewelery in Anderson, Indiana donated $100
• Jennifer at the Cancer Services of Grant County fixed us dinner on Monday night!
• Chad Pollitt and Digital Hill donated dinner on Sunday night in Fort Wayne
• LaSalle Grill donated food on Friday night in South Bend!

Facebook Evolution: Business Communication Tool to Viable Conversion Platform

Since 2002, Chad H. Pollitt has played an integral role in designing, developing, deploying, executing and tracking robust web marketing strategies for over 100 client companies and organizations and is an internet marketing expert. He holds a BS in Entrepreneurship from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and an Internet Marketing Masters Certification from the University of San Francisco’s prestigious School of Business and Management.

With over 400 million users, a valuation of greater than $10 billion and the recent title of most traveled place on the “Internets,” Facebook has become a juggernaut.  As a result, businesses are scrambling to find their place on this most popular internet platform and have been for the last several years.  Their biggest challenge isn’t setting up a Facebook Fan Page, but the deployment of a viable and measurable strategy that converts visitors into customers.

Social Media is a communication tool by its very nature and lacks a true internet marketing sales funnel that businesses can utilize to convince visitors to take action.  Facebook is no different.  These strategic sales funnels are usually reserved for the company’s conversion platform, it’s website.  Because of this, businesses are forced to “encourage” visitors of their Facebook Fan page to take the leap from Facebook to their website.  Internet marketing professionals have known for years that click-through rates drop significantly when people have to jump to a different website.

As a communication tool, Facebook is great for building brand awareness, growing SOV, and building relationships.  As a conversion platform, Facebook is inflexible and breaks commonly known conversion conventions.  That has been changing over the last 12 months with the proliferation of custom applications that enable businesses to utilize more gracile elements of conversion conventions.  That all changed when Digital Hill Multimedia, Inc. launched its newest Facebook application called TabSite.

The Facebook TabSite application allows businesses to easily build a website on their Facebook Fan page.  This website can have multiple pages, a contact form and it even allows for the use of flash animation.  Companies will now have the ability to deploy a robust conversion strategy on their Facebook Fan page just like they would on their website.   With TabSite Facebook has officially evolved from a social media communication and networking tool to a robust conversion platform that businesses can take advantage of.

It is commonly accepted that people only go to the web for two reasons: to solve a problem or to be entertained. Most companies on Facebook are in the business of solving problems. As a result, applications such as TabSite allow for businesses to present their unique value proposition utilizing the creativity of a custom website and commonly used conversion conventions. Facebook Fan pages are also indexed by Google for search. This begs the question, will websites go away with Facebook being the preferred platform for gathering information? I believe it’s too early to tell, but companies like Honda have already began to push past and prospective customers to their Facebook Fan page in lue of their website. This may be the next logical evolutionary step for Facebook and social media.

E-Mail’s Role in Social Media

Rory Carlyle is an Email-Geek, frequent twitter hound, web-analytics nut and an all around dweeb. With experience in consulting, agency work and as an Email Marketing Manager; Rory has seen issues regarding email from many perspectives. Continuing on a 6+ year march through all things interactive marketing with a strong affinity for email, Rory hopes to make the web a better place one inbox at a time. Outside of his email passion he fills his time with beer/food/books and the occasional flight to somewhere random.

Quite a few years have gone by since 2004, the year an article was put out by John C. Dvorak regarding the death of e-mail. Since then numerous articles have followed suit in 2007, 2008 as well as 2009. Each post has valid points and comparisons; most of these posts reference SPAM and online social vehicles for the diminishing usefulness of e-mail. While I would whole-heartedly agree that there are numerous reasons why e-mail may not be the prime vehicle for communication online, I would argue that e-mail is far from dead, maybe even still in its infancy.

E-mail today still plays a pivotal role within online communication, even within the social arena. The ‘social inbox’ is just another indication of how valuable e-mail is to users on social networks. David Daniels of Forrester released the US E-mail Marketing Forecast, 2009 To 2014 mid last year with a projection that e-mail will continue to grow for the next 4 years – at least. Spending in e-mail will increase to $2 billion. Peripheral research also suggests that “Social Networkers Still Love E-mail”, noting that 42% of social network users check their inboxes more that 4+ times a day. I would agree with that considering I leave my Gmail web client open all day to monitor my inbox and I’m an avid Twitter and Facebook user.

I predict, going forward e-mail will continue to play a large role in online marketing and social media. E-mail marketers are becoming smarter and better equipped to facilitate direct personalized communication to consumers; the usage of advanced list segmentation, behavioral targeting, and retention based automated deployments will all play a huge role of reducing e-mail clutter and becoming a huge tool for social networks to continue providing services to users.

My call-to-action for my fellow interactive marketers would be to embrace e-mail and leverage it into each and every marketing effort; social marketing will not eradicate e-mail marketing, it will only envelop it. E-mail marketing and e-mail in general is here to stay due to the start-to-finish measurability and fantastic ROI of the channel. Don’t believe for a second that e-mail is dead.

Thanks for listening to my blabbering; much thanks goes to Kyle Lacy for allowing me a guest spot on the blog. Viva la E-mail!

Connect with me @rorycarlyle

Disco is Dead, and So is the Lone Ranger

Mary Biever is a social media strategist and trainer with DanaMNelson.com.

Disco is dead, and so is the Lone Ranger.

In Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta loves to dance but stands alone as he poses for the movie poster. With Social Media, you can too. Dress up, preen with every post and make sure it’s all about you. Shake your booty and show us all you’ve got.

The Shake Your Booty Outfit goes in the What Not to Wear closet for social media.

Instead of Shake Your Booty, try the Move and Shaker Ensemble. Move and shake your resources to build your local community. Listen to your customers, care about them, and answer them. Showcase unsung heroes. Inspire those you know to dig deeper, reach higher, and help each other.

Reality TV gets viewers. Reality branding is here, but most companies haven’t figured that out. Show us behind the scenes in your business. Let us meet the people in your office and get to know them. Give them and your fan base a real voice through social media.

If you become known as the Mover and Shaker, you won’t stand alone on the dance floor at the end of the party. Instead, you’ll be like Patrick Swayze at the end of Dirty Dancing.

Lots of mistakes are made in Dirty Dancing, but everyone gets a fresh start at movie’s end. Johnny puts a new record on the player. He and Francis begin to dance. The other staff join in the dance. They pull in the resort guests. By the end of the song, everyone is dancing together and trying new steps. New relationships begin.

This is what good corporate social media strategy can do. Your moves on the dance floor now determine whether everyone’s dancing with you.
Don’t be a solo act wonder.

Social Media is for Branding and not Sales?

I wrote this post 2 years ago and thought it would be relevant to post again. What do you think?

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An interesting post flowed through my Google Alerts email this morning from Digital Response Media. The post was entitled: Social media ‘ideal for branding.’ The point of the post was to explain how the digital marketing manager of British Airways, Chris Davies, uses social media to raise the profile of his brand online. Basically, he finds extreme value in user generated content on the web.

There was an interesting quote in the piece from Mr. Davies:

Most UGC site users are wary of big brands coming into what they conside to be ‘their space’…. But if you are giving them something that helps then, some sort of social currency, then they’ll likely thank you for it.”

I found it interesting that Mr. Davies thought of a social media strategy as a COMPANY enterting into a space of individuals. I find that branding/communication strategies in a social media environment obtain more useful information and build BETTER brand value when personality is added into the mix. A good example of this would be Comcast. Whether or not you agree that Comcast is an excellent services (sometimes they are far from it) they have done a great job at using twitter for customer service. You can connect to Comcast on twitter @comcastcares.

Comcast did it right. They entered a space where individuals were sharing information and they added content themselves. When I ‘tweet’ @comcastcares I do not think of it as messaging a company but messaging an individual.

A brand can no longer enter a space as a ‘sponsor’ throwing up their advertising all over the page in an attempt to gain recognition. We can see this through Myspace and Facebook. Does it work? You might get some click throughs. You might even sell something!

When it comes down to it you are not really building a lasting brand image.

You are building a weak wall that will crumble and fall.

So which one is it? Is it better to gain customer engagement and corporate awareness than focus ultimately on lead generation… or does the two play hand in hand?

Hey Execs: It’s Time to Embrace Social

I had the pleasure of contributing content to an excellent report released yesterday by email/direct marketing company, ExactTarget. The report is called Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious About Social Media. Here is the breakdown:

You know social media is a big deal and that you brand should be engaged. But you still find yourself questioning how to monetize social media and where it fits with your other marketing activities. Sound familiar? Here is what is covered:

1. The importance of planning and implementing a social media strategy

2. How to build stronger customer relationships using social media outlets
3. Operationalization of social media marketing and how it directly impacts your bottom line
4. The value of social media testing and optimization efforts

I was joined by eleven other consultants in the report. Please check out their sites and join in the conversation:

Jay Baer – Convince and Convert

David Baker – Razorfish

Sergio Balegno - MarketingSherpa

Olivier Blanchard – The Brand Builder

Jason Falls – Social Media Explorer

Ann Handley – MarketingProfs

Joseph Jaffe - Powered/Flip the Funnel

Valeria Maltoni – Conversation Agent

Shelly Palmer - Advanced Media Ventures Group

Trey Pennington – Spitball Marketing

Jeffrey K. Rohrs – ExactTarget

It is all about navigating through the wonderful world of social media. If you would like to download the report please click the follow link and enjoy > Letters to the C-Suite: Getting Serious About Social Media.

Making Social Media Work for the Alcohol Industry

I had a great time over at Monarch Beverage yesterday with a ton of different breweries and individuals in the alcohol industry. We were talking about social media… plain and simple. How does the alcohol industry utilize social media to drive interaction as well as purchases… or foot traffic?

Our main focus throughout the entire presentation was focusing on the story. I read an excerpt from Donald Miller’s book, A Million Miles in A Thousand Years:

If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.

I know that is sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to you as a business owner but the truth of the matter is simply this… you have to tell a story to gain the attention of any individual on the face of the planet. You have to tell a story worth reading and more importantly… worth sharing.

Before you venture out into the world of social media… plan your story.

Here is the presentation:

5 Ways to Increase Donations through Social Media

We finished up our Increasing Donations through Social Media seminar yesterday and it was great to meet individuals from the not-for-profit world in Indianapolis. We had some awesome conversations surrounding the idea of telling YOUR story to the world… the story that drives emotion through each and every donor. I wanted to upload the Powerpoint presentation I used yesterday and give a couple of pointers on increasing donations through social media.

5 Ways to Increase Donations through Social Media

1. Message Boards. Create a message board or central location for your supporters and their friends to communicate with each other and your organization. For a great example check out the Lupus Foundation of America’s message boards. It is so important to create a comfortable place for your supporters to chat. It is up to your supporters to decide where they want to host the conversation. If it ends up on Facebook then… it ends up on Facebook.

2. Start a Blog and Communicate. This really should be number one on your priority list. You should be writing your story… every second of every day. You do not need to be sitting down and typing out each story but (at the very least) you should be thinking about how to form the story of your organization. People buy into stories… period. For a great example of story telling check out the organization > Charity + Water.

3. Start an Affiliate Group on Facebook and LinkedIn. Create groups of Facebook and LinkedIn that connect your supporters to each other in activities outside of your organization. An example of an affiliate group would be a Facebook Fan Page for your local youth soccer league or a LinkedIn group for your local Kiwanis club. Why does this matter? You are creating touch points with an audience that is not expecting you (the organization) to be at that place…. at that moment.

4. Start a Facebook Cause and Encourage Supporters to Join and Share!

5. Use Your Email List to Drive Growth on Social Networks. Every supporter who has given you permission to market to them through email… could still be utilized to support your cause on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Search for your email subscribers in the social networking world… the chance is… they are using the same email to support their social networks. The more times you can connect with a prospect or supporter… the better.

Social Media for Lead Generation? Maybe Not

I came to a conclusion about lead generation and customer service while I was reading through “The State of Small Business Report” from Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business. The report focuses on the development of small business and a section of the report talked about social media adoption. Social media adoption has actually doubled for small business over 2009 from 12% to 24%. However, that is not the interesting stat.

Based on the performance of Social Media image to the left it was rare when social media actually met the expectations of the business owner. This could be chalked up to higher expectations but there is an interesting dynamic that I recognized in the stats. The one stat that actually received higher than expected results was the collaborating more externally with vendors and customers.

This further supports thoughts I have had with Jason Baer and Brandon Prebynski... we talked about the concept of people laughing about social media being used for lead generation. The true value of social media is ingrained in communication through stories and customer service. We are talking about a communication medium where sharing, customer retention, and customer communication are absolutely… positively… king.

This also supports the concept of enterprise systems developing more social capabilities in the software helping corporate cultures market and communicate. Every facet of customer communication needs to be looking towards social as another way to speak values across a subset of people.

It is hard to imagine a world where every social media consultant is NOT talking about lead generation. However, we may be experiencing another shift in the way we look at social media.

By the way… small business is still increasing spending in social media. Let the games begin.

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.