Posted in Public Relations, Reputation Management, small business, social media
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22/07 2010

Is Email More Important than Social Networks?

The business debate rages on about email marketing and social networks (social media). Should businesses focus more attention on their social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook…or email interactions? I tend to land right in the middle. Frankly, I’m pretty tired of people just arguing for the sake of arguing. What does the customer want? How does the customer want to receive YOUR information? Sometimes businesses fall short and forget the simple age old rule: Customers First. I don’t care if you don’t want to spend time on Twitter or you think it is stupid. I don’t care if email takes way tooooo long. If a customer has subscribed to your email, follows your tweets and has liked your fan page… they must want to be contacted through these channels (maybe).  The debate continues on… which one to use… when and for what?

When deciding how to share information with your customers you must first  understand how customers view each and every channel.

According to MediaPost Publications, the majority of costumers view email as the least intrusive way for companies to engage . Customers trust email more than social networks. Period. They believe they know how to avoid being scammed in email but do not fully understand the risks in social networks. Email is also viewed as being a good source for detailed information or when looking for exclusive deals.

Facebook engagement is more for entertainment purposes. Although customers can still get information and access to deals it offers a fun, different experience with the company.

Twitter is simple and to the point. It also fosters a relationship between the brand and the customer… which can generate brand loyalty and trust.  Like the people, like the brand.

So, which reigns as king? There really is no channel that surpasses the other. However, there are channels that are more appropriately suited  for delivering different messages to the consumer.  If we can agree that Facebook is more for entertainment then let loose a little (have fun with your fans on Facebook). Email your customers when you need to share some updates or detailed information.  An email is private. Twitter is perfect for engaging in a conversation with your customers. Get to know them and let them get to know the company on a more personal level.

Customers (for the most part) haven’t changed but there communication expectations have… thanks to social media and the Internet.

 
Posted in Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Micro-Blogging, Reputation Management, Social Strategy, business, content, innovation, selling, social media marketing
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21/10 2009

Think Big and then Think Small

I’m not going to lie to you. This blog post is completely… and utterly… inspired by Jay Baer over at Convince and Convert. His blog post titled Get More Bait in the Water has a great thought that pushed me to write this blog.

“Thought leadership via social media content is about thinking big. And then thinking small.”

I believe that we are so focused on thinking big that we deny the concept of thinking small when deciding on strategy and implementation. It can lead to inconsistent messaging and promotion. We are talking about the death of many small to mid sized companies.

The overall strategy of a specific marketing initiative is the concept of thinking big. How are we (as a company) going to achieve our goals? How are we going to move from point A to point B and dominate the market? The overall goal of strategy planning is to think big! But creativity can only take you so far. I can use my own social media and design company as an example.

We do a ton of creative brainstorming. My role as head of business development allows me the luxury of thinking big.. 24/7. Early on we ran into the problem of implementation. We had some huge ideas both internally and externally but they were not implemented properly (for our clients or our company). My business partner, Brandon Coon, took it upon himself to be the implementation guru.  We hired an awesome company ran by Nicole Bickett to help us with process and we acquired an excellent project manager named Amy Rowe.

It is so important to remember the small things that make a BIG IDEA work. The same concept applies to your social media strategy and implementation. You have big goals but how are you going to accomplish the social media goals?

A top ranked blog or seach engine ranking takes small posts and careful planning to reach that coveted spot. Great lead generation tools for your sales team takes little ideas implemented over.. and over.. and over to work. In the words of the great Chet Holmes, “Pig headed discipline and determination is key to business success.”

Be pig headed and stubborn… but remember planning and implementaxtion.

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Posted in Guest Post, Marketing, Public Relations, Reputation Management, blogging, branding, business, indianapolis
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15/10 2009

Where is Your Customer Conversation?

Amy's pictureAmy Lemen is the President of ALL In One Marketing, a strategic brand and marketing consulting business in Indianapolis. She specializes in helping companies leverage customer insights to build better brands, develop new products, and create marketing strategies.

If your brand were a celebrity, who would it be and why?
This is a question typically used to define a brand’s character, which is a critical component of the overall identity of a brand.

Up until recently, many brands were able to grow without having a well defined and compelling brand character. As long as a brand provided a consistent set of meaningful, differentiated benefits to a target group of customers, it had a chance of being successful. This was because the brand could control its messaging, as it consistently talked to its target customer.

The communication framework between brands and customers is now very different. A brand now must engage in a conversation with its customers. A conversation means that a brand can’t just keep stating its key messages. It has to respond to what customers are saying and asking, and sometimes the key messages just aren’t appropriate responses.So in these cases, what is a brand supposed to say? This is where the brand’s character plays a critical role.

The brand’s character enables the brand to talk with its customers without the key messages while still staying true to what it stands for. The character is truly the brand’s personality, defining its temperament, attitude and behaviors. It is now the critical component that supports conversations between a brand and its customers. Without it, who are the customers really conversing with?

Can you identify the celebrity that personifies your brand? If this doesn’t come easily to you, perhaps you should take some time to more fully develop your brand’s character. It will make the conversations between your brand and your customers far richer and more meaningful.

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Posted in Corporate Strategy, Guest Post, Marketing, Public Relations, Reputation Management, Social Media Community, Social Media Expert, corporate blogging, innovation, productivity, relationship, social media, social media marketing, social media mission, social networking
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5/10 2009

Do Tight Corporate Social Media Policies Help or Hinder?

windyLinda Skrocki is the Senior Engineering Program Manager/Owner for Sun’s primary, external-facing community sites (blogs, forums, wikis, etc.). In addition to being a corporate social networking evangelist, she has managed many of Sun Microsystems highest profile web programs over the last 9 years.

What is your risk & transparency tolerance?

That’s a question every company must ask before embarking on their officially branded new media journey, but let’s be honest, tightly controlled content is nothing more than traditional website content and/or press releases. If that’s the most risk your culture/policy allows when it comes to marketplace conversations via social media platforms, don’t waste time and money implementing an external-facing officially branded collaboration site — it simply won’t be an environment conducive to meaningful, authentic marketplace conversations and certainly won’t foster healthy business relationship building that ultimately affects your bottom line.

If a tightly controlled or no approach is the chosen path, it’s important to note that conversations about your company, good and bad, won’t cease to exist. They’ll just have to happen elsewhere — most likely in places far less findable by you; thereby, giving you less opportunity to:

  • amplify positive company & product feedback from the marketplace
  • strengthen your company & products by listening and acting upon negative feedback
  • rally interest and extend awareness by being able to easily participate in the conversations

(Re)evaluation of our fears

Still reading? Thinking your company’s social media policy might need a laxative? Not sure how to get started? Try this: Each overly rigid policy term is based on fear of a specific situation. Examine each term & it’s fear-based situation & ask:

  1. Aren’t these legal bases already covered in our company’s employment terms and/or site Terms of Use?
  2. Why are we trying to control conversations employees & the marketplace may have on social sites any differently than conversations they have at a bus stop, dinner party, etc.? Don’t we want them to drive awareness of our company and products?
  3. Why are we scaring our employees to a degree that they don’t want to engage in cool and interesting marketplace conversations about the company and our products?
  4. In the statistically* unlikely event that an employee goes hostile and says bad things about us,
    a) do we really think policy will stop them?
    b) wouldn’t we want the likely inaccurate rant to happen in our own backyard where it’s more easy to find and respond to?
  5. Is it really worth sacrificing hundreds of thousands of fruitful conversations because we’re afraid of a possible nasty conversation?
  6. What if the nasty conversation happens? Why can’t we just counter by publicly correcting the inaccurate points with facts and own-up to the accurate points by making our product stronger and gaining bonus points for driving this awareness?

Relax, Trust & See Goodness Unfold

I’m not saying let go entirely. Employees appreciate guidelines. They want to remain gainfully employed and don’t want to get themselves or the company in trouble. They may not clearly be aware of the company’s stance on topics to avoid if they are buried in pages of legalese. To augment existing employment terms, a set of brief, comprehensive social media guidelines will not only stand a better chance of actually being read by your employees, but will set everyone’s minds at ease by knowing how to effectively engage in the social media space.

If you need a solid example of an effective set of guidelines, Sun’s Guidelines on Public Discourse has stood the test of time and has proven to be amazingly effective not only for Sun but for other companies who have used it as a model.

* Example: http://blogs.sun.com, along with the Guidelines on Public Discourse, deployed in 2004. No approval is required prior to employees blogging. The original tag line “This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything” remains in place. As of this post, there are more than 140,000 blog posts and only a handful of possible policy violations have been raised.

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Posted in Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Reputation Management, Social Media Community, innovation, productivity, relationship, small business, social media, social media marketing, social media mission, social networking, twitter
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10/09 2009

5 Ways to Track Your Competitors Using Social Media

My post on Tuesday talked about the growing trend of social media being used in order to gain more lead generation and marketing potential in businesses across the nation. You are going to need to be online. You are going to need to have a voice in this world of social communication.

Can we talk about another reason to be on social media? Are your competitors using it? This should be a deciding factor in whether or not you get involved. So where do you start? The first thing is to investigate.

1. Sign up for an account at Competitious.

Competitious is a cool tool that allows you to track, organize, and solidify data from your competition. Right now the beta is a free account… jump on over… sign up and try the tool. It also allows you to share and collaborate on different forms of data internally inside of your company.

2. Use the search tool SocialMention.

SocialMention is a keyword based search engine that aggregates different forms on content from across the web. You can search on microblogs, blogs, comments, events, and images (to name a few). Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, a competitor, or the latest on a celebrity.

3. Google Alerts never hurt anyone.

Google Alerts is an awesome tool that allows you to sign up for… you guessed it… email alerts when a keyword is used in any type of content on the web. I have setup keyword alerts for Indianapolis social media, social media, Kyle Lacy, Brandswag, Twitter Marketing, and corporate social media. Check out this tutorial on how to use Google Alerts.

4. Do some investi-ma-gative journalism.

This should probably be step number one but it seems pretty simple… go to their website. If they are using social media in the right way they should be listing the tools in which they use. Follow them… feed them.. watch them. You could learn a ton from the way they share information.

5. Use HubSpot to track down the competition.

Hubspot has plenty of tools that allow you to track and influence different levels of your competitors use of social media. They give you the ability to track conversations online and hook up with different influencers in your industry. This is a paid service but it can extremely beneficial to the long term success of winning over the competition.

Get out there and listen to the net!

Are there any tools you have used? I would love to hear more!

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Posted in Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Micro-Blogging, Public Relations, Reputation Management, blogging, content, relationship, social media, social networking
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19/08 2009

Screw Stats. It is about Portability and Experiences

I am co-hosting a webinar tomorrow with Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware entitled Getting a Grip on Social Media. The first slide of my presentation simples says: Screw Stats. The whole concept behind the slide is the idea that we can run around statistics and figures all we want but the most important thing to understand is the future of portability and experiences in social media.

Portability

Portability is mobility. The mobile phone domination is going to grow even larger in the next couple of years and social media will be right behind it. There is no better way (other than text messaging) to utilize the iPhone or Palm Pre than securing applications that can be used to strengthen a users social media experiences. I don’t think the concept of social media is going to die because of the power of being mobile. Customer service is going to be dependent on securing social media because of a users ability to automatically tweet or post an experience the moment it happens… that is powerful.

Experiences

Selling is now almost completely dependent on the experiences of the customers. Peer recommendations have always been a staple to sell your services… referral and word of mouth marketing are inherently connected to success. Social media has made experiential marketing and referral marketing extremely powerful because of the ease of sharing a message. Social media is strengthen by the experiences customers share online. It is extremely important for a business to understand the ability and the important of using social media to empower your customers to share your message.

There are other reasons to join, research, and implement social media but the future of tool is in the ability to leverage portability and customer experiences.

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Posted in Corporate Strategy, Investing, Marketing, Reputation Management, blogging, content, corporate blogging, small business, social media, social media marketing
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16/07 2009

The 3 E’s of Social Media: Embrace Educate and Empower

I had the pleasure of talking to the Indianapolis Public Relations Society yesterday about the evolution of technology. The concept of the presentation is to shed light on the ever-changing landscape of communication. How is technology changing the way we communicate? How are WE (as communication experts) transitioning into the new age? Are we allowing for a paradigm shift?

The people attending the presentation are stoic figures in the public relations community in Indianapolis and while talking with them I realized three important principles to implementing social media into your organization.

Embracing. Educating. Empowering.

Embracing: The first step in implementing a social media strategy for your business is to embrace the concept of communication in the online environment. It is simple. It means you recognize the change that is transforming the way millions of people communicate on a daily basis. As a brand, you are embracing social media as a way to create a marketing message and tell a story to thousands of potential clients. You do not need to be particulary comfortable with the notion of open communication but you DO need to understand the concept of implement a strategy into your business.

Educating: Once you have embraced the concept of using social media as a communication platform.. it is important to educate yourself and your staff in the philosophy and practical use of the platforms. Whether you are debating on using tools like Twitter or Facebook it is important to educate yourself in the simple and complex workings of the social media world.

The first step in education? Listening. Listen to what people are saying on the Internet about your company, product, or industry. By listening to the masses you will be able to adapt yourself to the world of online communication.  There are also great seminars and learning environments to immerse yourself into.. every city has them… search and you will find.

Empowering: After embracing the tool and educating yourself (and your team) on strategy and usage it is time to empower the actual implementation of a social media strategy. This could mean with money, time, and other resources. Use the strategy plan you have written (or had written from an outside firm) and empower your team to use the tools.

Remeber that pig headed discipline always wins out in the long run. Empower yourself to have the discipline to stick with the strategy you have crated whether it surrounds blogging or a use of a social network.

This is just the start to great journey that is unfolding in front of us. Use the Internet to communicate (both internally and externally). I think you could be pleasantly surprised at the outcome.

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Posted in Corporate Strategy, Reputation Management, Social Media Community, customer evangelist, facebook, relationship, small business, social media, social media marketing
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13/07 2009

233 Million Hours Spent on Facebook in April

(Stat courtesy of the Seattle Times)

Nielsen recently reported that there was an average of 233 million hours spent on Facebook in the month of April. 233 Million HOURS! Let me repeat that.. Americans are spending 233 million hours a month on Facebook. That is unbelieveable.

I would like to think that the majority of the time spent on Facebook is productive and not a MASSIVE time suck but that is not what is important. The important thing to take away from this Nielsen Online study is that the online communication platform is still growing. There is a massive shift happening in how people communicate. Whether you like it or not…

People are moving online to share ideas, thoughts, opinions, and their lives.

What does this mean to the business owner? Your customers are experiencing a new way to communicate. They can now connect to individuals through their daily lives! Get your sales people on Facebook. Teach them how to interact with people in the REAL sense of true interaction. This is not a hard sell environment… this is a relationship based environment.

Create relationships and win… and maybe… you will find that 233 million hours spent on Facebook can actually drive leads to your door.

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Posted in Reputation Management, Social Strategy, productivity, relationship, social media, twitter
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13/07 2009

Is Social Media Changing Lead Generation?

I was reading Jeremiah Owyang’s post about social networking and corporate sites connecting and he makes a general reference about the changing landscape of lead generation:

“Because brands will let users login using their social network identity (like Facebook or Twitter) they are increasing their chances of user interaction and engagement –but miss out on lead generation in the traditional sense.”

This was an interesting proposition from one of the leading minds in the Internet interaction world. Is the entire definition of lead generation changing in the business environment? I would venture to say… maybe a little bit.

There are plenty of lead generating activities that will not change the overall concept when it comes to search engine marketing or e-mail list buying. There are still ways to produce lead generation using content through software services like Compendium Blogware or an awesome organic search firm like Slingshot SEO. But there has been a slight shift in how small businesses and corporate brands are building lead generation through social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIN.

We are talking about  lead generation activities built through relationship development. Let me be clear that you need both strategies when developing a marketing strategy for the Internet but it is important to recognize that consumers may want more interaction than previously believed.

Through interaction and engagement you can build a different type of list than in the “traditional sense.” This is the whole concept of customer evangelists… empowering people to share your brand. You may find that sales may be longer but they are sales just the same.

Connect both strategies of search lead generation and social networking interaction when connecting your brand to the marketplace.. you may be pleasantly surprised!

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Posted in Reputation Management, Social Strategy, business, content, small business, social media, social media marketing
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29/06 2009

Are You Vomiting Ideas Through Social Media?

I know. I know. This is probably not the best title to read early in the morning. For that matter, it is probably not the best post title to read any time of the day.

When writing your blog, participating in social media, or just communicating (period) it is important to remember that your readers and participants are consuming your data. There is plenty of regurgitation happening on the Internet… an idea is started on one end of the world and re-written hundreds of times. Where does the original content come from? Is there really such a thing as original content? Yes, there is and it happens from the personal realm.

Many would argue that there is no such thing as a new idea. We all write and read marketing, accounting, financing, and business content that has been hacked a part and repurposed countless times… so where does original content come from? Your personal experience.

Remember to write about what you learn on a daily basis in your business. How do YOU help your clients and customers? How did “Mary” feel about your product? How did an individual experience your thought leadership? How are you building trust?

We are all trying to produce content that people will read and share. The most original content you can create is through your personal experience. Write about what you learn, know, and experience and we will love you for it.

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