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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Sources

Julia Boorsten of CNBC: I have an Inbound Marketing lesson for you

Facebook’s IPO is obviously a landmark achievement; $16 Billion raised in no time, $104 Billion Market Cap, estimated wealth in excess of $20 Billion for Mark… Well done guys. One of the big concerns prior to the Facebook IPO has been GM’s announcement (or leak) that it was pulling away advertising on Facebook, and asking why would GM do and say that now.

Earlier today I was watching the Facebook Special on CNBC’s PowerLunch when something concerning caught my ear (good thing we have TV with a DVR in preparation for the Olympics – thanks babe!). Today Julia  Boorsten said:

“I think if you look at the numbers of what GM was actually spending; they were spending $10 Million on Facebook Ads, but $30 Million on creating content for Facebook. That’s a wierd mix. A lot of people say that that’s not the way you should advertise on Facebook.”

Bravo Julia on subscribing to the old-school advertising bandwagon that is dying. You’ve done a lot of digging into the Facebook story, but I’d say GM has the might know a bit more about social media than you at this point…

No Bullshit Social Media:

Only 5% of people trust advertising, and only 9% say advertising companies act in customers’ best interests while 84% of people buy based upon what other people have to say online. The web, post dot-com bust, is about relationships, communication, and sharing by the people (exhibit A for Facebook’s success thus far).

Some other hard to swallow numbers for traditional marketers:

  • Newspaper advertising revenue fell more than 28% in one quarter in 2008. More than 20 metropolitan daily newspapers have folded or moved online since 2007.
  • Television advertising is predicted to fall more than 75% in the next decade
  • Since 2007 radio advertising has declined for 14 consecutive quarters (to publication of book in 2010)
  • From 2008 to 2009 only cable TV and online mediums showed audience growth with network TV, local TV, magazines, and newspaper all in decline.

Inbound Marketing

Ch1: “The bottom line is that people are sick and tired of being interrupted with traditional outbound marketing messages and have become quite adept at blocking marketers out!” The “10-years ago” tactics in marketing do not work anymore, people primarily gather information through search engines such as Google today. As you are well aware, the average info-seeker performs dozens of searches every day. The second place people look is at one of the more than 100 million blogs on special topics. Thirdly people learn/shop (other than search engines & blogs) with recommendations through social media.

Ch3: In order to move from outbound to inbound marketing you have to stop interrupting people and “get found” by them instead.

Ch4: Remarkable content is the gift that keeps on giving, unlike paid advertising.

Ch7: The value of Facebook is the ability for content to go Viral and for remarkable content to be genuinely shared with friends of friends, not advertising.

Ch11: On average inbound marketing leads are 61% less expensive than outbound marketing leads.

Ch12: In years past Procter & Gamble, Coca Cola, and IBM perfected the craft of interrupting their way into customers’ wallets using outbound marketing, but the era of interruption-based marketing is coming to an end.

My Thoughts on the Facebook IPO:

In case you care about my two cents on Facebook: The stock price will jump because its hyped in the short-term but personally I would not go long on it. Facebook will continue some good growth as it enters into more new markets for the next few years; I have seen that stalker-book obsession of new users too many times since thefacebook.com’s introduction to Cornell in 2004 to not place merit on its new market growth potential (currently less than 1/7th of the world is on Facebook).

You might remember, one of the main reasons people shifted to Facebook from Myspace was because it was clean, simple and free from ads and spammy content. Facebook, in looking to become a more and more profitable business, has forgotten its original premise and those of us who were on the site when there were less than a few thousand people have begun to distance ourselves from it. I do not believe that outside of application (in game etc) advertising Facebook has a solid-enough revenue model as people are more and more annoyed with interruption advertising and are exceedingly better at ignoring it (which devalues Facebook’s offerings). Their introduction of sponsored stories changes the game a little bit, but again at some point, people will get sick of the advertising in this manner.

In the midst of the hype it may seem like Facebook is the end-all conduit for online communication of the future, but I believe its time is coming and that its purchase of Instagram for so elevated a price is a warning sign and insecure fear of insignificance from the leadership.

I welcome your comments…

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