The Social Media Content Progression

jakeaull — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:44:29 +0000

Here’s the Zen of it – social media content progression evolves in a circle. Wanna do it right? These are my recommended stages for you and your brand:

Listening (starting point: social sphere research and observation of your industry)
Answers (your responses to industry questions across the social media sphere)
Discussions (often on others’ communities)
Shared Stories (with reader response)
Whole, Themed Communities (you built it, they came)
Customer-Driven Wikis and Communities (about your brand)
Monitoring and Answering (back to start: the cycle begins again)

And it’s that simple – the starting point and the goals to strive for – all in one fell swoop.

Feel there are more stages than what I outlined? Have a different way of looking at it? Respond and comment below!

Interest in Pinterest?

jakeaull — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:16:07 +0000

If you pay attention to the birth and adolescence of new social media channels, then chances are Pinterest is high on your radar these days. “Photo-bookmarking social network Pinterest, run by Palo Alto, California-based Cold Brew Labs, reportedly grew by 52 percent, to 17.8 million unique visitors, in February, making it the nation’s third-fastest-growing website.” (from Portfolio.com, 03/26/12). We’ve seen new social media channels growing faster and faster to trend benchmarks – Facebook, GooglePlus, and now Pinterest. As more and more people do more and more online in social sites, it makes sense that the adoption timelines would be compressed.

In the social media marketing class I teach at GSU, the most common blogged-about social channel recently was Pinterest (I assign students to research and blog about a specific social media channel, its popularity and marketing applicability).

An intriguing, rapid-growing phenom, Pinterest has a massive female target audience (I believe recent numbers I’ve heard attribute around 85%). It can be labeled a “digital pin board site,” where users collect images and info from the web, “pin” them to their own pin boards, to share, comment on and access later. They can also use Pinterest for more functional purposes, such as to-do lists, and item shopping input from friends.

Marketers of course should desire their brands to be the object of “pinning” and positive commenting and recommendations. Being there and being easy to “pin” suddenly become vital social media marketing activities. After all, why not? The more our traditional, manual and physical tasks become digitized and automated, why not the old, cluttered pin boards our mothers and grandmothers kept? Where’s that old recipe again? Check Pinterest!

How about you? How do you feel about Pinterest and rapid-growth social media channels? Respond and comment below!

Can Old Media merge with Social Media for Brand Success?

jakeaull — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:47:35 +0000

Last week I and my GSU Social Media Marketing students were lucky enough to be invited to a Tweet Up for the TV reality show “Escape Routes,” its cast members, host and YouTube/virtual host.

Ford has received attention for years for its notable social media approaches. Years ago it freely gave Fiestas to prominent bloggers to promote and blog about. Next it created a short TV reality show and social communities surrounding the Focus. This year it has carried this forward for the Escape. Socially intensive tactics this go-around include live-streaming videos about the contestants’ exploits, one-week cycles between actual recorded events and TV broadcast, individual contestant Tweeting and Facebook posting, and an exclusive virtual host on the website, YouTube and other social channels. As if not enough – one of the contestant teams – “Team YouTube” – were already stars in that channel and continue their social communications and engagements throughout the show’s duration.

The social media objective here is to get consumers to follow and help each contestant team – for the chance to win an Escape of his/her own. Of course in the process, fans help promote the car itself and publicize the show to their own social networking followers. All of this does well to spread and mitigate the risk of viral marketing efforts – as a company can never predict the results of a truly viral marketing, advertising or YouTube campaign.

All of this gives the Ford Escape multiple touch points to reach consumers for awareness – and multiple promoters spreading the message. While a TV show and virtual host may seem large expenses, the poignant question is how many avid, virtual “net promoters” or raving brand fans Ford is achieving for their spend? If, per the old rule, the best marketing is word-of-mouth, Ford is certainly achieving that through this buzz.

So – here’s where I’d really like to see the numbers: Ford is obviously casting a wide net broadcasting a TV show and multiple social channels and communications. It’s casting a much smaller net obtaining raving fans to follow, promote and personally help the contestant teams. There’s no hard sell here for the Ford Escape – which is good – hard selling doesn’t work in social media communities. So it grows brand awareness, but I wonder – what happens to the middle of the funnel? What happens to all those consumers who may watch the show but don’t feel attached enough to any of the teams to actively claim and promote them in social media? And should there be any projected relationship between the show/social communities and visible access to the vehicle or local dealers?

Either way, Ford is doing a good job of spreading its message across channels – and escalating such programs and promotions over time (presumably based on some kind of success metrics). I’ll be looking forward to its future experiments.

What do you think? Respond and comment below!

10 Steps for Social Media Listening & SEO Maintenance

jakeaull — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 07:01:25 +0000

“Listening” isn’t just something I do on my phone receiver; it’s a standard term in social media marketing today for brand monitoring in the digital space. Listening is also cited as the first-step objective in social media in the landmark book Groundswell by Li and Bernoff. In short, companies should know what’s being said about their brand by consumers and influencers (industry experts, bloggers, trade publications, etc.). And monitoring is the way to do it. Social listening is largely what I focus on in teaching my GSU course on Social Media Marketing and SEO (search engine optimization).

So – how to go about it? Here’s the process I like to use in my own consulting practice and teach as well:

Pick the brand names (brand names, not actual services, categories or consumer benefits for now) you wish to focus on.
Take those names and run them through keyword analysis, using tools such as iSpionage, Google AdWords or SEM Rush to identify associated major keywords in heavy search.
From these, create a final list (including your original brand names).
Apply these keywords to follow in tools such as HootSuite, SocialMention and Google Alerts.
Likewise, search these keywords in the aforementioned keyword analysis tools for competitive websites where these words are used organically (and/or in advertising).
At this point, you will have a number of results for digital use of your keywords. Additionally, tools such as SocialMention will conduct sentiment analysis of usage. That is, SocialMention will analyze and prescribe the amount of positive versus negative uses.
All of this gives you good surface data on digital uses of your keywords. They also give you the links to dive deeper into specific uses based on concerns or questions to be addressed; basically, unanswered opinions, even negative, in the digital space present a face of brand “disinterest” or dislike of customers and their issues. Whereas a sincere attempt to resolve negative situations displays good brand-and-customer relationships and honesty. Negative reviews in social media also show a human, believable side of companies to their customers – it’s hard to believe that a company would have absolutely no negative reviews.
Finally, it’s also worth analyzing your brand blogs’ and websites’ inbound links. That is, who’s linking to you, and why? They aren’t always positive (as I found out in such analysis for a recent client). They also might reveal some good, future affiliate or digital link-sharing partnerships.
Good tools to uncover inbound links include MajesticSEO and Blekko.
And again, these tools allow you the ability to dive deeper assessing these source sites for their intentions, or even for your own increased PR promotion (for example if the sites linking to your own are newspapers or major blogs).

ADDENDUM

Finally, don’t forget about geo-local channels and directories – even if you’re a national company or don’t have a brick-and-mortar retail component. You have an address, and these channels help SEO overall. So go to channels such as Google Maps/Places, Yelp and CitySearch, claim and complete your profiles, and request automatic notification for whenever anyone gives you a review. You should want to know anyway, but it’s a vital part of brand listening and responding.

And there it is… enjoy!

Have alternative approaches? Respond and comment below!

B2B meets SoLoMo

jakeaull — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:28:58 +0000

Recently discussing with friend Anand Thaker (@AnandThaker), I fell into a classic marketing trap! We were discussing the applicability of SoLoMo (social, local, mobile media) to B2B (business-to-business) marketing. I focused my thinking and responses on the tactical channel instead of the big picture objectives. What do I mean? Here’s a good example of solid, strategic, big-picture thinking: The horsewhip manufacturers erred in the early 20th century; in order to fit their brand-perceptions and future business success, they should have changed their business model to selling “accelerants” (for automobiles) instead of horse-and-buggy accoutrements (my thanks to a speech by Jeffrey Hayzlett ‏ @JeffreyHayzlett for this concept). Similarly, the value of SoLoMo for B2B is not in and of itself. It is the strategic concept of consumer reviews and SEO effect.

SoLoMo and directory services today provide users the desired ability to find, rate and review businesses. More and more consumers do this, and more and more they use these reviews to research and make purchasing decisions. Customer research and reviews have value in B2B (perhaps even more so) as well as B2C. Businesses today need to be aware of and prepared for the reviews they get (whether general, industry or even local channels). And the channels with reviews could surprise you – perhaps they are InsiderPages.com, CitySearch.com, YP.com, perhaps even Yelp or GooglePlaces (some of these channels often have businesses’ profile listings by default, but they are frequently wrong or incomplete). And regardless of quantity of reviews, full, solid and accurate business profiles in these channels boost the company’s SEO (search engine optimization) overall (yes – even in B2B).

Are printing and sign companies found and reviewed in such channels? Phone services stores? Industrial supply? Office equipment? You’d better believe it! And in this day and age who can afford to ignore customer reviews? Can you?

Do you agree or disagree? Seen different results? Respond and comment below!

Web Analytics — 2.0

jakeaull — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 05:00:49 +0000

Lately I’ve been re-reading Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik (thanks to the tip by Dr. Pilling, GSU). Some good stuff here (although I wish it had the clean elegance of books such as Marketing Metrics by Paul Farris, emphasizing the bold simplicity of visual formula after formula). Kaushik talks about the breadth of available web-based data today, yet users rarely apply insights. And he talks of: “In the traditional world of enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management (CRM), and deep back-end enterprise systems, all you had was your data. You had very little information about your competitors. On the Web, though, you can gather tons of information about your direct or indirect competitors! And usually that info is free!
At www.compete.com, you can type in the URLs of your competitors and within seconds compare your performance with theirs. …
That’s the power of Competitive Intelligence data. Knowing how you are performing is good. Knowing how you are performing against your competition is priceless…”
In the world of Web Analytics 2.0, clicks don’t rule; rather, the combination of the ‘head and the heart’ rules. When you are ruled by the head and the heart, you care equally about what happens on your website as you do about what happens on your competitor’s. Your world is one of continuous actions (that is, surveys, testing, behavior targeting, keyword optimization) and continuous improvements, where customers, not HiPPOs [Highest Paid Person's Opinion], rule.” (p. 10).

Kaushik goes on to say “I have come to believe that Multiplicity is the core reason for the awesomeness of the Web. You have a wealth of effective tools to do jobs that you have never thought possible.” (p. 11). I personally like the multiple tools’ approach – although more data means more work in divination. And different tools use different algorhythms and filters to pull their data. For example, Google Trends qualifies its demographics analysis of website visitors by serving only data on visitors who stayed longer on the site, visited similar sites or searched relevant keywords. OpenSiteExplorer reveals demographics for site visitors without all this filtering. Therefore, one or the other, or an average of the two, might fit most appropriately for one’s targeting.

Alternatively, some web analytics pros say it’s necessary to pick one primary tool and stick with it undistracted; they say that consistency wins in the long run. Others emphasize expensive paid tools (such as Omniture or Radian6) over the freemium tools which I favor (such as those offered by SEOBook Tools, or iSpionage.com). Personally, I still like Kaushik’s approach, and my variety of tools.

Another web analytics element I often run into as a consultant, is people asking for “the standards,” or expressing how “social media has no basis for comparison measurements.” My reply is that everything digital is measurable; you just have to go in the door knowing what you want to measure. Identify your digital or social media measurement plan upfront with your primary objectives and marketing plan. Then implement the tools and KPIs to fit those. In fact, I’ve written whole blog posts and slide decks (see slideshare.net/jakeaull) on aligning social media KPIs with objectives and traditional marketing approaches. Or, as Kaushik puts it, “A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives. That last word – objectives – is critical to something being called a KPI, which is also why KPIs tend to be unique to each company.” (p. 37). Well said Kaushik.

How about you? What tools and approaches do you like for Web analysis? Respond and comment below!

The 90/10 Rule for Social Media

jakeaull — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:32:24 +0000

A few years ago I blogged about my observation of social media “parodying” the Pareto Principle, if you will. In marketing, this rule states that roughly 20% of one’s customers represent 80% of the business. Yet in social media, time and again, I’ve come across 90/10 ratios (for actions, purchase, whatever).

Apparently I’m not the only one to think this.

I’ve been lucky enough recently to be the writer for the instructor supplements of Pearson-Prentice Hall’s first Social Media Marketing text book (published, 2012). Here’s the authors’ take on the rule:

“For an online community to thrive, a significant proportion of its members must participate. Otherwise the site will fail to offer fresh material and ultimately traffic will slow. Participation can be a challenge though, because as we saw in Chapter 3 most users are “lurkers.” Researchers estimate that only 1 percent of a typical community’s users regularly participate and another 9 percent do so only intermittently. The remaining 90 percent just observe what’s on the site, so they don’t add a lot of value—other than adding to the number of “eyeballs” the site can claim when it tries to convince advertisers to buy space.” (Tuten and Solomon, Social Media Marketing, Pearson-Prentice Hall, 2012, pp. 87-88)

What do you think? Agree or disagree? Comment below!

How Time Magazine Affects the History of the Web

jakeaull — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 01:48:57 +0000

Since I teach social media marketing at GSU, one of the more interesting aspects is teaching the history of Web 1.0 & 2.0. For example, so many books about social media will discuss 2006 Time Magazine’s Person of the Year being “YOU.” One wouldn’t expect a traditional print magazine dating back to the 1920s to be relevant to the history of social media. The reason why lies in the fact that the person of the year, this time, meant the sudden visibility, individuality and creativity of everyone in the social space. Americans willingly reduced their passive TV time to write, create pictures and collaboratively communicate online. A new era of human history had emerged – and so had the individual.

Just last year, Time magazine went and did it again. This time, the power of the individual was manifested in the latest person of the year – The Protester. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, the protester made his voice heard in 2011. And she did it by self-organizing, posting and documenting in social media.

More than just a cop-out, I believe Time got it right again – and surmised the history of social media. Because today we have moved past mere lunch reviews, puns and jokes. Today we use social media to elicit change – real change. On a global scale.
Everyone ready for the next decade? Can’t wait.
Want more? Can I help you answer this to market and grow your company? Let’s talk!

WordPress vs. Tumblr

jakeaull — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:02:25 +0000

Thanks to my good friend Rebecca Harris (@RLHMedia) for inspiring this blog post! She asked: “Apparently Tumblr is outpacing Word Press for blog publishing. Any thoughts on Tumblr?”

My answer: That’s gotta be current adoption rate, not total qty of adopters nor posts.
Tumblr has positioned itself targeted specifically to the creative, fashion and art industries. It is pursuing a segment – like the car “Scion” – since WordPress is more the “GMC.”

WordPress is the content management system (CMS) backbone for many websites today (and growing; including those I create for clients – and this site as well!). My thought would be that Tumblr is becoming more of a community, a cult, like Flickr (which was the old social channel targeted to artists; Tumblr is re-possessing that audience since Facebook started being used for ubiquitous picture upload and sharing).

WordPress meanwhile is becoming more of a general platform – do whatever you want with it. It is the blank sheet of paper – the IT infrastructure to let you start from ground 0. With Tumblr, you start with the expectations and style of that community (the anti-establishment crowd has its cannons as well).

So – answer is – if someone wants to express a brand of artsyness and creative style – sure – use Tumblr – the platform makes that statement. But if you want ubiquitous compatibility in a platform that definitely won’t be a passing fad (not that Tumblr necessarily will) – then go with WordPress.

You know what? It’s probably a Mac vs. IBM/Windows thing…. But what do you think? Agree, disagree, add points! Comment below.

If Your Brand Were a Wikipedia Article, What Would it Say?

jakeaull — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:33:09 +0000

The optimal brand message and positioning is something so simply fundamental, and yet simultaneous difficult for companies to identify. Part of it is that it’s just plain hard for people to get outside of themselves and look in. I mean, how many of us can easily and well describe ourselves in 30 seconds? And sooner or later there are surprises when we discover how others view us or our companies.

One of the most important roles of marketing and branding is to identify not our descriptions of ourselves, but what our best audience is seeking (when we can provide it). As a search engine marketer, I emphasize keyword analysis as critical to this this discovery. In other words, what are consumers searching for most in your industry; what (content and services) are in demand? Upon identifying primary keyword search terms, brands can then incorporate these into their website copy, social media, promotions and even their tagline.

But here’s another great way to look at it: what should your Wikipedia article say?

Let’s say your brand’s average prospect were in Wikipedia. What should he or she search for to find an article about your company, products or services? If you could be featured in one article, instead of your competitors, what subject matter, what article would you want to be about your brand?

Want more? Can I help you answer this to market and grow your company? Let’s talk!