Tag: social media

Inbound Marketing Cliffnotes for Business

Dan’s Social Media & Inbound Marketing Cliffnotes
Keys to making social media work for your business

I have read 6 books about Social Media, Personal Branding and Inbound marketing over the past two years and I thought it might be helpful to provide you with a super-condensed “cliffnotes” version I recently compiled:

Be Social. Listen. Communication is a two-way street

  • The real key is it’s not about being ON social, it’s about BEING social, but make sure you have the right people on your team to talk for you.
  • Social media marketers ask, “What can we provide our customers online that will make their digital experience better?”
    • Create something worth building a community around
    • Identify and recruit advocates immediately
    • Give people something to chew on
    • Welcome criticism
  • Don’t “play” with community building, take the no-bullshit approach:
    • Define Goals
    • Establish Measurable Objectives
    • Enact Strategies and Tactics to accomplish them
    • The measure what is done and the results of it
    • Rinse and repeat.
  • To sell online, stop thinking like a traditional marketer. Remember the fundamentals of this type of marketing:
    • Listen first
    • Be responsive
    • Be honest
    • Provide value
    • Sell last
  • There is a difference between driving business FROM social media sites and driving business THROUGH social media sites.

Get Found with Inbound Marketing

  • Customers are getting better-and-better at ignoring marketing “interruptions.” Inbound marketing today is about “getting found” using Google, blogs, and social media on the Web.
  • Inbound marketing as opposed to outbound is achieved through social media marketing when your business:
    • Asks and answers questions;
    • Provides information or engagement through content, or
    • Shows up when the audience members are having conversations about the industry, the company or anything at all really.
  • It is about having a seat at the table.

Create Remarkable Content

  • It is important to create remarkable content on top of having a remarkable value proposition. Remarkable content encourages your message to be spread giving you links of people that may possibly become customers to your website and allows you to move up in the search rankings for your keywords. Remarkable content is the gift that keeps on giving, unlike paid advertising. You need to make sure that you create content that people can effectively spread online like:
    • Blog Articles / Posts
    • White Papers (about industry trends and challenges, not products)
    • Videos (short 2 to 3-minute videos about industry and/or products)
    • Webinars (live ppt presentations)
    • Podcasts (Ten to twenty minute audio programs)
    • Webcasts (live video shows viewed online)
  • You have to give to get with remarkable content. Today your marketing effectiveness is a function of the width of your brain. Think of yourself as half marketer, half publisher.

  • Blogging

  • Video Posts:

    • Videos are a great way to give a sneak peak behind the screens of a company and make people feel like you are more real and approachable.
    • Videos should be less than two minutes, accompanied by text descriptions and posted on the blog.
    • In general video views drop by about 1% per second for the first minute or so (10.4% @ 10 sec, 55% @ 60 sec, etc). Simply posting any video does not mean it will be watched from start to finish.

Tweet your tweeter off – but don’t be a lame broadcaster

  • Think of Twitter as a micro-blogging interface
  • “Give more than you expect to receive out of twitter,” and to ask the question, “How many people can I engage in a dialog with?”. 20% about yourself 80% about everyone else on social media is the rule.
  • Focus more on starting conversations and less on broadcasting
  • Most everyone on Twitter is looking for new wisdom and hope. Order of operations for using the collaborative power of Twitter is:
    • Find a topic;
    • Ponder;
    • Share your thoughts and findings.
  • In terms of Twitter Research:
    • Find awesome people to follow. You can use wefollow.com and other sources (there used to be a site called twellow, but it has closed down).
    • If you are all about the metrics, check out influence measurement tools like Klout and Twitalyzer
    • Twubs.com and WhatTheTrend.com are great resources for tracking what people.
    • Start using Hootsuite or bit.ly to track your links and see what people actually click upon.
    • For monitoring, check out SocialMention.com and google.com/alerts. Set up some alerts for our topics (i.e. Solar, WasteWater Efficiency, things like that). You can receive email alerts when something new pops up. For instance, any time my name appears on the web somewhere new, I get an email letting me know someone is talking about me.
  • Look at personalizing (and possibly standardizing across the company) a twitter background that includes name, contact info, web, and bio but is not distracting

How to get started – game plan #1:

A big shout out to @DrBret for help pushing many of us to jump into the fire and get started in this way:

  • Define Value Stream:

    • Define a simple yet niche value stream for your online communication (say Solar for California municipalities)

  • Tweet:

  • Facebook:

    • Similarly engaging content as found and posted on Twitter should be posted to the Facebook page, but not as frequently (say once per day) without handles, though Facebook now recognizes hashtags.
    • Consider asking questions and provocative (non-scandalous obviously) content is encouraged. Example:
      • Project Vesto post: “Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week.” – Lori Greiner.
        ‘Like’ if think this is true
        Example of Engaging Facebook Content - Lori Greiner Project Vesto
  • Publish two blog posts and one video post per week
    • Publish posts on different days
    • Each post should be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and/or LinkedIn where appropriate
  • Comment on relevant blogs:
    • Comment on say 2 blog posts per day with insightful and relevant thoughts.
    • DO NOT just comment to comment or spam with a bunch of links back to your homepage. If you have nothing to say, keep that nothing to yourself.

Be Human. Be Genuine.

Get to the point

  • Spend less time searching and more time engaging. While you obviously want to make the most of this experience, the priority with social media is action over precision.
  • Between searching, listening, creating content, sharing content, and engaging with folks don’t spend more than one to two hours in the day (though when you are first getting started I understand it taking a little longer ). A person could spend all day doing this stuff, but that wouldn’t be the most effective use of all of their time.
  • Don’t end up in analysis paralysis in searching for the perfect people to follow or engage. Take the startup culture mentality by getting 60% of the way there and then acting  and testing your hypotheses.

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Thank you for reading my blog – Daniel S. Herr.
I invite you to connect with me on Twitter @DanHerr
Or follow to my blog 

Sources

Even Reno Landscape Companies Kill it with Social Media Marketing!

“We sold $150,000 in one day though, can you believe that?”
– Small-time Reno Landscape Guy

Social Media Marketing isn’t just for the chic & trendy businesses anymore. This morning I must have walked in on good ‘ol boys landscaping industry meeting at Starbucks. Okay it was definitely nothing official but four guys from different landscaping companies were definitely having coffee together this morning… Collusion in Landscaping perhaps?

I didn’t catch where the others were from, but one of the company tee-shirts was clearly legible (but will remain nameless here) Anyway, I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation about what works and what doesn’t in advertising and marketing today.

They started off my talking about the fresh orange teeshirt the guy with the long pony-tail in his 50’s was obviously proud of. The young guy of the four chimed in about the cost of having one of those billboards up in Verdi on I-80 and how bummed he was that some backyard waterfall company landscape company that he didn’t care for was using one.

Finally the biggest and oldest started talking about the Anniversary Sale he had recently posted on Facebook. He said, “We sold $150,000 in one day though, can you believe that? People just started sharing our ‘45% off everything’ post that we put up on Wednesday and you know it went viral.” The pissing contest continued. “Everything didn’t go perfectly, but we learned a thing or two in the process.” He said, “Well I’ve been getting all those calls from Groupon and LivingSocial the past couple months, but then we figured out that we could do the same sort of deal ourselves.” And in the process not give away 75% of the farm!”

Who knew? Landscaping businesses making big money with Social Media Marketing?! You got it. He was not at the table this morning, but if you want a great example of a Lawn and Landscaping Business in Reno that is doing all the right things in Social Media, look no further than Cory’s Lawn Service:

coryslawnservice.com/

Audience Sovereignty

Business owners around the world have been freaked out about Social Media. There is this scary buzz in business management communities about silencing the audience, suing them when they turn on you,  and the delusion of “controlling the message” of the masses. But marketers forgot something along the way…

The audience has a voice, and your brand is owned by the customer.

You may say, “But social media is a new thing, and this is the first time my audience has had a voice.” WRONG. News flash, it is not new.

I listened to a Freakonomics Podcast called “Boo…Who?” a few weeks back that said that Audiences, when it comes to entertainment performances, have been “loosing their sovereignty”. In recent times people are more and more content to sit quietly in the dark and listen without engagement. This is not how it used to be. Audiences were expected to react, to interact.  Huzzah’s. Boo’s. Hisses. People heckled and booed poor performances, but today we are conditioned to sit through crap.

I argue that the Television has turned us into a world of one-way consumers. We’ve bought the lie since the end of the Great Depression and WWII: “We will feed you, and you will consume whatever we dish out.” The options were limited, times had been tough, and people were thrilled to live vicariously through TV’s stories: I Love Lucy, Bonanza, The Andy Griffith Show, Dallas, the Cosby Show, 60-minutes, and now today’s American Idol. In 2009 I read how TV show themes and stories have been great indicators of the times (I have since been unable to find that book I read in Auckland: sorry no reference). But perhaps it is more that our collective moods and actions reflected the shows we lived through. That we consumed and have lived as we were told.

Marketers and TV producers have pitched junk at us for decades, and time after time we sat down in front of the TV sifting through 600+ channels complaining that “there is nothing good on.” But what were you going to do, write a letter to the station? Bang on the door of the producer? Start your own station? “Nah, the heck with it, I’ll just drink my beer and watch this crap,” settling for whatever. But something has changed. Have you noticed that YouTube is now the second largest search engine in the world (which happens to be owned by the 1st – you know who :).

Once upon a time the audience was sovereign, and it still has the ability to be; everyone has simply been conditioned to sit-tight and take it. Business marketers joined the bandwagon and were happy to “control the message.” But they forgot that a brand is not a bunch of cool colors and a catchy name. A brand is how you are perceived. A brand is what you stand for, what I think you are, that experiences I have had and shared with and about you. They weren’t expecting the internet to be the megaphone that is freely shared.

The audience has a voice, and your brand is owned by the customer.

The fact is your customers have always owned you, but businesses found a way to ignore it for a while. The internet has reminded the audience of its birthright, and allowed it reclaim its throne, but surely as the coming summer, the audience will reign supreme again. Transparency, honesty, and ethical business are the only ways to survive. Treat your customers well, for they truly define who you are.

Thank you for reading my blog – Daniel S. Herr.
If you are interested, I invite you to follow me on Twitter @DanHerr
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