Social Media Strategy

Going Social: Size Doesn’t Matter, Sizing Up Your Audience Does

March 25th, 2012 by Coreen Tossona | 4 Comments

Bigger isn’t always better. Sure, Facebook has about 800 million users worldwide, but that doesn’t mean you will find it useful for your brand.

What about all these smaller networks popping up? Are you frozen by FOMO (fear of missing out)? Or even worse, are you creating a presence for your business on all these sites just because of this fear?

When social sites pop up like prairie dogs (and they will continue to do so), the important factors on whether you join in stay the same. Ask yourself:

Is my target audience on this site and engaging?
Are people talking about my brand or similar brands here?
Do I have valuable, relevant content to provide which will engage my target audience?
Do I have the resources to manage effective participation on this site?

Whether your company is large or small, you might find a niche network is the perfect place for you. Let’s take a look at some of the sites you might consider.

If you can provide content that is very visual in nature, consider using:

Pinterest is like a pinboard for various ideas, tasks, recommendations, and more. It’s more about curation than creation, and works best with very visual concepts and products. Lifestyle brands and tourism do very well here. Also, the Today Show has an impressive presence as well.

Types of businesses that fit:

Retail, fashion, restaurants, food products & services, photography, graphic design, interior design, architecture, lifestyle brands, tourism, magazines.

Brands doing a good job:

HGTV, Whole Foods, Men’s Health, Martha Stewart, Better Homes & Gardens, West Elm, Bergdorf Goodman, The Today Show, Travel Channel.

Instagram

Instagram is all about photos—taking them and sharing them while on the go. This mobile photo-sharing app is now available on iPhone and Android phones. Brands can participate in two ways:

Create and maintain a brand channel.
Encourage user participation related to your brand through hashtags.

You can run contests, source images, and more. Levi’s ran an open casting call for models by asking Instagram users to tag their photos with #IAmLevis.

Types of businesses that fit:

Lifestyle brands, fashion, retail, travel, tourism, news.

Brands doing a good job:

Maersk, Puma, Ann Taylor, General Electric, Sharpie, Washington Post, Starbucks.

Keep in mind, just because your industry does not fall into the typical user’s realm doesn’t mean you can’t use Instagram. Look at GE and Maersk. You wouldn’t expect to find them here, but both are doing a great job. GE has its own Instagram channel and Maersk engages users by asking them to take Maersk-related pictures and tag the photos #Maersk.

If you have quirky or creative content to share, interact in more than 140 characters:

Tumblr

Tumblr is a place to tell another story about your brand—a different, more fun side. This is not the place for a corporate blog, but it could be a place for a corporation to show a more personal and creative side to your brand. Get creative. The audience here is younger. This is not your grandfather’s blog site. Combine compelling copy with visuals that pop or entertain.

Types of businesses that fit:

Fashion, retail, entertainment, publishers, broadcast media.

Brands doing a good job:

Target, The Today Show, The Atlantic, Bergdorf Goodman, Rolling Stone magazine, Coca-Cola.

Brick and mortar – Location based:

foursquare

Users of foursquare use their mobile phones to check in to locations, find out where their friends are, read and write recommendations, save money and unlock rewards.

The History Channel, though not a brick-and-mortar business, actually does a great job engaging its almost 300,000 followers. Users can check in and get historical info on sites they are in or near.

Types of businesses that fit:

Local shops, cafes, restaurants, museums, universities, libraries, cities.

Brands doing a good job:

Starbucks, The History Channel, MTV, New York Times, Bravo.

Foursquare is planning changes for 2012. Read more about it in an interview with CEO Dennis Crowley.

SCVNGR

SCVNGR is very similar to foursquare, only with added gamification. This mobile app does a little more to engage users at the site of contact. You check in at participating locations and then complete challenges to unlock rewards and savings. Brands can get very creative with the games, challenges and rewards they offer.

Different from foursquare, SCVNGR incorporates a mobile payment app that allows consumers to create and use their own, unique QR code to pay at participating merchants.

Types of businesses that fit:

Restaurants, universities, museums, cities, local shops, tourism, sports teams, retail.

Brands doing a good job:

GameStop, American Eagle, Buffalo Wild Wings, Smithsonian museums, Dunkin’ Donuts, Clarkson University, University of California-Santa Barbara.

Some final tips

There are many more social sites out there and more will keep coming. Remember your important questions to ask (above) before joining any. And keep this in mind.

The “unfriending” trend is on the rise. People are trying to focus their online communities more and make their interaction and time spent more meaningful. This means smaller, more focused niche networks are gaining in appeal.

Your participation should be driven by the questions discussed above. Audience size is not the most important driver. Audience demographics are. If your customers aren’t using that network, chances are neither should you. You shouldn’t have to struggle with ways your brand can participate—that’s another sign you can divert your attention to another path.

Remember, just because it’s a niche network doesn’t mean it’s YOUR niche.

For more info on choosing social media channels, read Which Social Media Channels Should Your Business Use?

Content Drives Social and Search: Creating “Authorship” of Original Content

February 23rd, 2012 by KellyK | No Comments

When you think about what drives social media, it’s content and relationships. Content can be in the form of videos, comments, tweets, Google +1’s, Facebook Likes, social bookmark sharing sites, graphics, infographics, and much more. If you are providing something of value to the right audience, it will gain social media traction and give you the opportunity to build relationships.

Defining the value of the content varies from audience to audience and person to person when it comes to social media. For example, some people find value from getting a good laugh at a funny joke in the form of a graphic image or some find value from a video that walks you through how to cook a favorite recipe.

But one thing is for sure—the value of creating authorship through Google is apparent in search results.

Why Create Authorship

With social media coming around full circle and content spreading like wildfire, it’s important to capture the originality of content through authorship. Creating authorship by getting verified through Google will help users find your high quality content on the web and empower users to engage with content authors through Google+. From the author’s perspective, you also get to see analytics for your content in search.

How Authorship Appears in Google Web Search

When Doing a search for “Search Engine Optimization Changes”…
You may have noticed when doing a search in Google, they have made the default search option to include “personalized search results” from your Google Plus social network. As you can see below, this includes photographs and a count of how many personal results are appearing for my specific search.

The author’s photo and name shows up in search results as seen below. This provides you access to more content by that same author.

How Authorship Appears in Google News

In news results, the authors name and a link to click on “More by ” is available.

Some Examples of Google Authors

Google is piloting the display of author information in search results to help users discover great content.

steven levy google plus

javascript inheritance

Check Your Analytics

After your authorship is verified, you will be able to measure how often your content is showing up on the Google search results page by visiting Webmaster Tools as seen below. This will show you how many impressions and clicks your content received on the Google search results page.

Check out what Matt Cutts would see for his content:

Photo Credit from: Google

If you want your authorship information to appear in search results for the content you create, then get verified. (Disclaimer: Google doesn’t guarantee to show author information in Google Web Search or Google News results.)

Here are 2 easy steps to add author information in Google search results:

1. Create a Google Profile with a high-quality and clearly recognizable head shot as your profile photo.
2. Claim authorship of your article or blog post by linking it with your profile.

Get Started today! Claim Your Content ~ Get Verified ~ Measure Your Results

Google+: The Effects on Social Media and Search Engine Optimization

January 27th, 2012 by KellyK | 1 Comment

Fact is…

Google+ has 90 million users and is growing very quickly, adding approximately 625,000 new users per day (as of Jan. 19,2012).

The prediction:

“I predict that 2012 is going to be a breakout year for Google+ and that it will end next year with more than 400 million users,” Paul Allen wrote.

Yes – 400 million users by the end of 2012. [That is not a typo.] In December alone, nearly 1/4 of all Google+ users (24.01%) have joined. Some of that growth is coming from the 700,000 Android devices activated daily and this number is expected to grow as well.

So, how do you know if Google+ is right for you? Given the fact that Google has just released 3 recent changes to their search algorithm on 1/10/2012, known as “Search Plus Your World”, it’s giving the mixture of Search + Social a whole new meaning.

Let’s dig into this…

What Makes Up Google+

Google+ is a place for real-life sharing and connecting online. So what exactly are all the pieces that make up Google+? It starts with your profile.

Google+ Profiles

Your Google+ Profile is a way to share information about yourself. With privacy settings, you can choose to share this information with the world or with a select circle of contacts, depending on your comfort level. It’s also a great way to share content created by you or that you suggest for further reading.

Google+ Pages

Google+ Pages are a way to spread the word about businesses or brands by connecting with customers and fans. They can follow your Google+ Pages by adding them to a circle or recommending you with a +1. Connect even further by having a Google+ Hangout, which gives you face-to-face interaction between your brand or business and customers and fans.

Circles

Organize your circles to make it easier to share relevant information with specific groups of people. You may want to send certain information to only friends and other information to your professional network. Having control over what you share with who is really easy with Google Circles.

+1’s

Recommending content and Google+ Pages has never been easier with the +1 button. The number of recommendations content receives or a Google+ Page gets shows up in Google search results. This +1 button can be integrated in websites to make it really easy to receive recommendations.

Hangouts

Face-to-Face interaction happens live with Hangouts. This can be done on an individual level through your Google+ Profile or represent your business or brand and start hanging out with customers and fans through your Google+ Page. It’s a great tool for engaging with your Circles, customers and/or fans via a casual meetup.

Google’s 3 most recent changes to search (As of 1/10/2012)

The Google+ tools are providing a fully integrated and personalized approach into your search results. From the number of +1’s received for content and Google+ Pages and the number of circles you’re included in, these types of social activities are starting to influence how Google search results appear to you. Here are the 3 most recent changes Google made to the search algorithm that integrates Google+ pretty heavily.

Personal Results

When you search for information, your results will now include Google+ photos and posts – both your own and those shared specifically with you. These results will be unique to only you on your results page.

Profiles in Search

Profiles appear both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following.

High-Quality authors show up in these results, which is why it’s important to “claim your content” by getting validated as an author. [Check back for a future blog post about authorship coming soon!]

Once you select a profile and you’re signed into Google+, it’s very easy to add them to your circles right from the results page.

People and Pages

Help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. The idea here is that behind every search query is a community.

How is social media affecting your search results?

Search Plus Your World is creating a personalized search experience based on your social media connections and what they’re sharing. If you drive any business from online, you’re going to need a Google+ page if you want to achieve page one domination in the future.

Google has been pushing its Google+ results ahead of other social media networks and natural search results; which is basically forcing the adoption of Google+. With over 200 signals that make up the Google search algorithm, is it realistic to think a social media network is providing the most relevant information? Larry Page said long ago, we want to give you back “exactly what you want,” but with social networks at the top of the search results, the relevancy of information is debatable.

As the world of social media continues to explode with zero consistency, there is no way to determine what will be ranked for relevance or popularity on a consistent or long-term basis. Google makes changes to its algorithms on a weekly basis and as they are testing various strategies and receiving feedback about how they are leveraging their Google+ social media network, the algorithm will continue to change until there is a happy medium in the search engine results driving the most relevant content. I just hope Google doesn’t lose site of delivering “exactly what you want.”

While there is no simple answer and never a guarantee like 1+1=2, what always sticks with social media is being a valuable resource and building professional relationships with your social network, thus driving people to you directly. Building professional relationships through your social network through engaging conversation is one thing the algorithm can never change. It also requires consistent nurturing and feeding of content and overall dialogue. Get started today!

5 Quick Tips to Get Started In Google+

Strategy: Think about your G+ Business Page strategy – what value do you want to bring to your target audience/customers/fans?
Profile: Create your G+ Business Page and populate your profile.
Segment: Create circles to segment your target audience. This will allow you to make the most of having relevant conversations with your target audience.
Engage: Seek out industry experts and your target audience. Engage in conversations with them.
Share: You can never go wrong with sharing information that would be of value to your target audience or industry experts. Use your circles to share relevant information to specific segments of your target audience.

5 Resolutions for Digital Marketing Success in 2012

January 4th, 2012 by Coreen Tossona | No Comments

The new year is here, and already January is chugging along. So, what’s your marketing plan? Are you going for “business as usual” or will you finally take advantage of all that digital marketing has to offer?

If you want to draw new customers or keep the ones you have happy, you need to focus on at least these five things.

1. Keep up with technology.
This is probably the most difficult, yet most important action listed here. Make sure you have technology gurus and geeks within easy reach in your company—ideally within every department.

Be ready to add more interesting and useful technologies to your operations and marketing mix. Cashless payments, QR codes, augmented reality, geotargeted coupons and promotions, 3-D digital displays for advertising, more personalized and interactive online advertising…the list goes on and on. Be ready to adapt quickly if that’s what your audience demands.

2. Be consistent and true to your brand.
With all the social media channels you’re on and all the different forms of online (and print) advertising you do, it’s easy to feel a bit scattered. That’s okay if you personally feel that way, but your audience should be hearing one clear voice from your company.

Yes, having a presence on different social networks means taking a different approach for each network. Your message and tone should be modified based on the audience who is there and the context of the site. But, having a strong brand means that all those approaches still have the same underlying voice, even if the tone and message are different.

Your goals still stay the same. No matter how big or small your social presence is, you still must stick to your mission. Be true to your company and your customers.

3. Provide interesting, original content.
Using blogs and social sharing sites, give people information they want and can use. Like Steve Jobs used to say, give them what they don’t even realize they want. Be original. Yes, content curation does have a purpose and an audience, but focus on ways to provide relevant, original content, drive interaction and keep your voice.

Say more with photos and videos. Photos and videos, when chosen carefully and done well, keep people on your website and other social networks coming back. Keep this in mind:

Over 90 billion images have been uploaded to Facebook.
Video is the most responded to posting on Google+.
YouTube has become a vital part of marketing for many types of companies, ranking second in visits among all social networks.
Video and graphic applications will become increasingly important for tablets and smartphone users.

4. Listen to your employees more.
Your employees are already on social networks and fully understand what appeals to them and what doesn’t as customers. Use their expertise, even if they’re not in your marketing department. Find people most excited to spread the word about your company and empower them. You can always teach marketing, but you can’t teach personality and enthusiasm. Take advantage of that when you find it.

Create a social media policy that drives engagement as opposed to stifling it. Policies and codes of conduct are important, but they have to be put in place delicately and with sensitivity toward freeing up barriers to social media engagement.

5. Build valued relationships with your customers.
Do these four things above well and number five becomes easy. Remember, relationships and communication go two ways. Give your audience relevance and value, and they will trust you and want to engage with you more. From this interaction, you will get valuable information and advice from them as well.

Two crucial factors:

Be where your customers are. Do some research and social listening. Find out where your customers hang out and where they’d be most likely to welcome your presence.
Speak their language. Many business people think you have to use jargon and multisyllabic words to sound smart. Not true. You want your customers to understand you, and the easiest way to do that is to communicate clearly and simply in words they use and understand.

Most importantly, don’t try to do it all. New social networks pop up all the time. That doesn’t mean you have to be on them. And not every new technology will be suitable for your company to adopt.

There is no one-size-fits-all prescription. Above all, when deciding which social media channels to be on or which technologies to use, you must always go back to your goals and objectives and understand who your audience is, where they hangout and what they want.

Whatever you decide to do, be sure you have the resources to do it well.

Good luck and cheers to a successful 2012!

Top 3 Social Media “Game Changers”

November 29th, 2011 by Skip | 2 Comments

I had the pleasure of attending the Social Media Plus Conference on November 16 at the Philadelphia Convention Center. Hundreds of Social Media enthusiasts converged on Philadelphia from all over the country. I came away with dozens of tools, tips and ideas for powerful Social Media Marketing.

In this post, I wanted to highlight 3 trends worth considering in your Social Media Strategy. These themes seemed to permeate most of the talks that I attended and I believe they represent leading edge topics for Social Media.

Visibility into Social Media Performance. Koka Sexton shared that nearly 60% of B2B companies aren’t able to track their leads from Social Media. Its challenging to determine what’s working in Social Media. Was it your recent Meetup? Perhaps a Webinar contributed to your recent sales? How about your sales team’s participation in LinkedIn Answers? Google Analytics has recently added “multi-channel” funnel visibility which helps your company to see “assists” from Social Channels towards a particular goal.

If you are serious about using Social Media for business, you must invest in tracking performance, setting goals and measuring results. While complexity remains, Google Analytics and other tools are providing a new generation of visibility to help answer questions about contributions from Social Media.

Personalization. Koka also pointed out B2C has been built on personalization, but not B2B. Yet B2B companies can take advantage of one to one marketing using Social Media. Changes in executive profiles, updates on company acquisitions or new product roll-outs are opportunities to create and extend relationships. Invest the time and reach out to your B2B contacts. Meet them on the channels where they are hanging out. And BTW – as far as I’m concerned, the telephone IS a social media channel. Personalization is taking place on search results too… which leads us to…

Google+. Wil Reynolds provided excellent insights into how Search and Social are starting to play together. Wil’s insights make it clear that Google has the upper hand on search with Google+. You’d better be on board to play in this game if you are serious about competing online. By integrating social sharing results (e.g. +1, Facebook likes) with your Social Circles and personalized search results, power is shifting to those who are engaged with their audiences – and Google plans to reward those who use their platform as well.

Do you think these trends are game changers? What other game changers are you seeing in the Social Media space?

(Photo credit: Magnifying Glass from www.ereleases.com )

Crank up Your Holiday Sales with Heat Maps

October 26th, 2011 by RyanDraving | No Comments

You’re running a bit behind your e-commerce goals this year, and everything depends on the upcoming holiday season. In the pit of your stomach, you feel a sense of dread. If your conversion rate doesn’t increase significantly by the time holiday traffic starts hitting your site, you might get a bundle of coal in your stocking instead of a big fat bonus.

Everything you’ve tried so far has flopped. You have a beautiful (in your own humble opinion) website that follows all the latest UI trends and marketing theories. You’ve spent hours poring over what keywords are being Googled to find your site, your most popular web pages, the volume of visitors you’re receiving, and what links they’re clicking on. You’ve been getting a huge amount of visitor traffic to your website, but your conversion rates are, quite frankly… pathetic. Somehow your website is attracting visitors who refuse to pull the trigger. It might not be that the visitors aren’t interested in your offerings. It could simply be that something’s fundamentally wrong with the design of your website. But how do you acquire the data to figure out how your site is failing to direct the visitors to actually buy your goods and services?

Why Eye Tracking Is Not the Answer

Eye tracking might seem like the answer, but it can be quite expensive and tends to draw conclusions based on a statistically small group of people. It’s essential to pair eye tracking with a strong analytics program. Think of eye tracking as dessert, and a robust analytics program with extensive analysis as the main course. Similar to focus groups, a company has to pay for a group of people to be organized and placed in a controlled environment for testing every single time new user experience data is needed. Additionally, eye tracking is incompatible with people with poor vision, the elderly, and most people of Asian descent. While the data can provide valuable insights, it can be expensive and statistically insignificant.

Why Heat Maps Are So Cool

We prefer a handy little technology called heat map software. Heat map software provides similar results to eye tracking, but it gathers that data in a very different way. Heat map software monitors visitor mouse movements, and then combines data from all visits to create a color-coded map displaying the web page’s levels of activity. Unlike eye tracking, heat map technology runs on a bit of code installed on your website and gathers data based on actual visitors to your website without requiring any human intervention. We recommend heat maps as a sidekick to your primary analytics package. Some companies even use it as their only analytics tool (bad idea, but certainly possible). Since heat map solutions often integrate into your website with a simple bit of JavaScript code, there is no need to organize groups of people for eye tracking every time your company wants to measure user reaction to a design change.

Tips for Success

One of the biggest complaints about heat maps is that the JavaScript code increases page load time. To avoid this problem, simply ask your programmers to insert the code just before the </body> tag in your web code HTML, and it will load after the page contents have already rendered. Using this trick, heat map data tracking will not affect visitor experience. In fact, the anonymous data monitoring process will be completely invisible to visitors.
Be aware of these downsides before you buy:

Heat maps are not a good fit for every website. Websites with dynamic web content will not be able to gather reliable data.
Additionally, in some programs the admin panel that displays data reports can be painfully slow. In some cases it can take up to a hour to load a single page. This doesn’t affect the live webpage for the end user, but it could give your analytics team a good excuse to whip out their iPads for a round of Angry Birds.

If you’re ready to give your standard analytics a strong sidekick or you need a simple tool to communicate user experience to your boss (or client), consider heat maps. You’ll gain a constant stream of real-world data in a simple, visual format to get your whole team behind web design improvements.

Let us know how you use heat maps for your website. How did heat maps affect your conversion rate?

Who? Where? Why? Using Integral Personas for Social Media Marketing

August 22nd, 2011 by Skip | 1 Comment

There are a number of challenges in adopting social media as a marketing channel. Companies embarking on social media efforts need to seriously consider questions like:

- Who is our audience?

- Which social channels make the most sense for our business?

- Are we confusing our perspectives with the perspectives of our audience?

- What kind of language resonates with our audience?

- Are we behaving in ways that are acceptable for our audience?

In this post, I’d like to introduce the idea of Integral personas, which can greatly enhance marketing efforts. At Philly Marketing Labs, we apply personas to help develop social media strategies using a framework derived from Integral Theory. We find that persona development supports rapid discovery with the client and organizes useful insights for action.

The approach described here builds on the work by philosopher Ken Wilber. Wilber’s Integral Theory model (aka AQAL) is a five-part roadmap to human experience. We use a component referred to as the “Quadrants” in AQAL. The quadrants recognize that everything in nature, including us, are actually both an individual and a member of a collective. We are both human and humanity. Furthermore, each person has both an interiority that every one of us comes to in private way. We can describe it, but only our individual self can experience it directly. We also have a set of exteriors that can be measured and defined. Think of these as our credentials, our demographics, our activities and personal statistics.

Similarly, each collective has an interior and exterior. The collective interior is the world of culture and meaning-making. It is used to answer questions about what a group considers good, cool and bad. The collective exterior defines social structures like organizations, associations, corporations and social media.

The template below demonstrates how a marketing team might parse discovery items into the four quadrants.

So what? We build these nice little quadrants. How can a marketing initiative take advantage of the personas?

1) Organizing. It helps us to organize our thinking. In working with clients, we usually find two to five core personas that we should be thinking about. By segmenting the results, we can gain clearer insights and avoid mixing strategies and messages.

2) Messaging. Beyond helping with organization, persona quadrants lay out the foundations for messaging. Motivation, values, and core imagery are often readily apparent from a newly created quadrant. With these in hand, we can improve website copy, advertisements, newsletters and our social interactions.

3) Discovery. The persona quadrants allow the discovery of key social media platforms for meeting and integrating with our audience. Through a thoughtful conversation around a persona, we can fill out the lower-right quadrant with the social media platforms most likely to yield connections to that audience.

Consider this simple sample persona for an audience of stay-at-home moms with toddlers:

Once you spent some time critically thinking about this persona, I’m sure you could find ways to extend and improve it. However, you can also see how it could inform campaigns and launch initiatives, advertising efforts, and messaging.

Organizing, messaging and discovery are just the beginning of the journey. But they make a strong foundation for composing campaigns, developing analytics and creating results.

If you’ve used some helpful models to understand your audience, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section. Please let me know what you think of the ideas presented here as well.

Businesses: Start Preparing for Google+ Business Pages Now

August 10th, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

It’s true, Google+ is not yet available to you as a business—large or small. But it will be at some point, and you can (and should) take steps to prepare now. We know you may be thinking:

Why should I waste any time on Google+ when I’m not even sure it will stay around?

Good point. Google+ may not have legs, but right now it has over 20 million users. That statistic can’t be ignored.

The better question is: What will happen if Google+ does stay around? Do you want to have to play catch up in your competitors’ trail of dust? (Okay, that was two questions.)

If you want to be ready for Google+ once it opens up to business pages, focus on these three things now.

1. Pay closer attention to your Twitter and Facebook followers.

Listen more closely to your followers on every social network you’re on. What are they saying about Google+? Are your follows and likes decreasing or are they still increasing? Poll your Facebook and Twitter followers who are also using Google+. Get their thoughts on what they want to see from brands on Google+ business pages.

2. Get familiar with personal page functions now.

Create a personal Google+ page, and have people on your team do the same. If you’re a Marketing Director or CEO, you can start representing your company now until brand pages are released. (For an example, see what Michael Dell is doing.)

With your team, test out the features and talk about what features your audience seems to be using most. Notice that you can also use these features for business purposes:

Circles – You have time now to name your circles thoughtfully, so do that. Plan out how you want to segment people you follow and people who follow you. Now you can follow back customers and separate their stream of posts from other streams. You’ll be able to segment your messages and send out more targeted info and promotions.
Hangouts – Video chat with your team and test out potential customer service uses. Role play and practice potential scenarios so you’ll be able to experiment and prepare away from the public eye. Even better, test out Hangouts as an informal focus group tool. You’ll have a chance to get small groups together and chat with them on a regular basis. (Remember this also when naming your circles.)
Huddle – Test crisis response. Huddle allows you to text as a group, as you would talk as a group in a conference call. A perfect scenario for using this function is any sort of emergency. For example, you have a public relations nightmare brewing and it’s after hours. You need to get your team together quickly and share messaging. You can do it by text. Get comfortable using Huddle now so you don’t have to fumble around when speed of reaction is crucial.

The point is to start brainstorming now on all fronts, so you’ll be ready to implement once Google+ brand pages become open to you.

3. Start working on your Google+ page now.

Get photos ready to display and videos ready to load. Have an editorial plan ready to go. How will you migrate followers and information from other social channels? How will you integrate your marketing efforts?

Yes, you may have to make changes once the final version of Google+ business pages is released, but you will already be ahead of the game, instead of at square one.

In your overall marketing strategy, integration and coordination are crucial. Your Facebook page and Google+ page can’t be the same. They can be similar and have similar purposes, but you must have different strategies for each—based on their different audiences and the way people use them (among other things). Strategy is something you can start talking about now.

Once Google+ brand pages are open to all, it’s time to execute. Don’t be the only company still standing at square one.

As always, if you need help, you can rely on Philly Marketing Labs as your strategic marketing partner.

***************

Post written by Coreen Tossona, Digital Communicator and Brand Strategist for Philly Marketing Labs. This post is repurposed from her original post in her In the Crowds marketing blog.

Pitching Social Media to Organizational Leaders: Crowdsourcing Solutions

June 10th, 2011 by admin | No Comments

Last week I played facilitator to a group of super-sharp social media professionals at the SoMeBizLife conference in Doylestown, PA (put together by Chuck Hall). This group helped me crowdsource some answers to tough social media questions like:

How can we be sure a client is ready for social media?
What are the common objections that we hear from organizational leaders?
How can we demonstrate value in social media efforts in advance of a project?
What kinds of expectations need to be set?

I’ve updated my presentation with a number of the deeper questions that the brain-trust came up with – as well as some of their solutions. Thanks to all of you who participated!

My favorite five takeaways (shown below) are all included in the SlideShare presentation on Pitching Social Media:

Remember the ROI (Risk of Ignoring). Conversations happen with or without you. Do you want to be able to influence the conversation?
Listen first. Start with listening. Discovering what people want and care about and how your competition is playing is a powerful and smart strategy.
Integrate social into transaction points. Make it easy to leave testimonials or to tweet, as in “Hey! I just bought a cool supersonic widget from Widget Masters!”
Help educate clients that costs and demands will change. I like to think of this as crawl-walk-run. The needs for a listening project are different from an engagement effort – and will change as engagement is progressively expanded and moved to internal team members.
Use the marketing needs pyramid to determine if the basics are in place BEFORE a company contemplates a social media presence.

We don’t have to stop here though. Check out the full presentation and all of the other great ideas put together by this group. Please add your questions and ideas on pitching social to organizations in the comments below to continue the conversation.

Post by Skip Shuda, shown here doing some “deep listening” to his collaborators!

Which Social Media Channels Should Your Business Use?

May 5th, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

Answering this question doesn’t have to be that difficult. We know, there are plenty of social media channels to choose from—probably too many. But, you don’t have to weigh the pros and cons of each channel. You simply have to focus on three things:

Audience
Resources
Priorities

Audience

The channel or social media space doesn’t determine whether you should be there, your audience does.

First, ask yourself these questions to help create a list:

Where can you best reach your audience?
Where does your audience expect you to be?

Once you narrow down your list to the places your audience is and would expect to interact with you, then you need to figure out what it would take for you to manage those channels.

Resources

How much time will it take to maintain a valuable and engaging presence on the social media sites you choose? Can you handle it in-house or will you have to outsource?

Determine what skills your team has and how much time you’ll need to keep up with each channel.

Priorities

Now you know where your audience is and what resources you’ll need to engage with them there. Next, it’s time to use this information to decide which channels you should create and maintain a presence on.

For example, let’s say you’ve determined your audience is on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, foursquare, Gowalla, Flickr and YouTube. You have seven possible channels to engage on, but you think you only have the resources to maintain a solid presence on three or four.

How do you choose which four?

At Philly Marketing Labs, we recently asked ourselves this question. One particular question we had was about Facebook. We’re a marketing agency, and initially thought it might be important for us to be there.

We chose these categories to weight and rate:

Credibility
Sales – Value to Sales and building business
Reach
Resources
Skills

Your categories might be slightly different based on your business and your goals. Here’s an example of what a decision table would look like:

Each category gets a rank or weight in terms of importance. Then each channel gets a rating under each category that represents how much:

Credibility that social media site gives you with your audience
Value the site can bring in terms of sales, brand recognition or business building
Reach the site gives you access to in terms of your target audience
Resources you have available within your business to manage these channels
Skills your team has to accomplish your social media goals

Your total number for each channel then represents a more objective, weighted ranking of how important that particular social media site might be for your business. So using the table above, you would conclude that LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and foursquare are the channels you should focus on.

Keep in mind, just because you decide today that a certain channel is not one you should be on, that answer may change in the future. Most social media sites are constantly evolving and, to keep up, hopefully your business is too.

*****

Post written by Coreen Tossona, Digital Communicator and Brand Strategist for Philly Marketing Labs. Coreen also writes the In the Crowds marketing blog.

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