Posted by admin on December 22, 2010 under Business | 
Blogging is a fairly new social media platform that is fast becoming a popular form of marketing for many businesses. As a professional blogger myself, I believe that every business should participate in blogging. Just like every business should be following what people are saying about them via social networks and social media, every business should be blogging as well.
Many business owners believe that having a company blog or participating in social networking is a waste of time and provides no return on investment. Tell that to Dell, the computer company that attributed $3 million in sales due to Twitter.
So, why should your company have a blog? Here are a couple reasons:
You have more of a chance of being discovered in a search engine like Google. Unlike regular websites, blogs are on the search engines’ radars because blogs are updated more often. Search engines love fresh, relevant content.
Blogs enable your company to interact with your customers, plus you can build a community of loyal customers who appreciate your services and what you have to say. By providing value via tips, news or articles on topics related to your business, you establish a relationship with your customers. They will remember you the next time they need your product or service.
A good example of a business that provides value via their blog is this San Diego Cosmetic Dentist…
Dr. Timothy Collins and Dr. David Landau are dentists who own a practice called Complete Dental Health located in San Diego, California. Besides owning a regular static website that contains a host of information about their business, they also own a blog that offers dental health tips and advice, plus news about the dentistry field.
Let’s say that someone in San Diego was searching for a dentist, but this web-savvy person wanted to find a dentist with a blog. He/she does a Google blogsearch for “San Diego dentist”. Guess what blog shows up in the top results? That’s right – the Complete Dental Health’s blog shows up near the top of the list. So the potential customer reads the Complete Dental Health blog and likes the information. This potential customer then decides to call Complete Dental Health to set up an appointment.
Although this is a very simplistic example of what happens when you blog for business, maybe it will banish any of those thoughts that blogging is just a “trend” and isn’t worth exploring as a way to attract new customers.
Posted by admin on December 14, 2010 under Online Business |
Twitter is all the rage now; I wish I had a nickel for every time a client mentioned it. Succeeding in it is another matter, though, and at first it can be hellishly confusing.
When I first started, and was following dozens of people, I felt like I was in a busy sports bar during the Super Bowl. I remember thinking: I don’t know these people. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I must be in the wrong place.
It helps to know the rules and a little about the culture before you jump in. It’s not rocket science but it does take a little study and work.
1) Plan: First, think about why you’re even on Twitter.
Know what you want out of Twitter. Are you there for networking, building a brand, driving traffic to your blog? Determining this early will help guide your strategy and improve your odds.
2) Package yourself: First you need to pick out a Twitter ID. Consider your name first (I use @markivey); alternatively, you could use another name with your company, role or skills (example: @mediaphyte). You want something that will build your brand and/or illustrate your expertise.
And don’t skimp on your profile; make it sound engaging, and choose some nice wallpaper—this part is all about personal packaging (you can also customize your own wallpaper, using your company’s logo if you want). Study other Twitter examples because you need to get it right.
3) Follow the right people: Twitter is about following and being followed (more on connecting/conversing later) You can use the basic Twitter search or, better, one of the tools I recently reviewed like Twellow in my blog (www.ioncorporation.com/blog, date: Feb 6). These search engines can make life much easier for you by identifying the right people to follow.
Start with the influencers and industry experts in your industry. Find people with common interests and/or just people you want to track because they’re interesting. Check out some of the really big names here. Look for interesting directories and specialized lists; for instance, here’s 10 journalists worth following. And don’t forget your colleagues–you may have people all over your company tweeting. As one example, here’s a partial list of employees tweeting at Cisco.
4) Learn the lingo: Before you jump in and start tweeting, get up to speed on the lingo and abbreviations. Some common terms*:
• “tweet”: is a message.
• @ ID : A message with the @ sign preceeding the Twitter ID is a reply message; so if you want to send me a message, start with @markivey. (Note that your entire network can view this message).
• DM ID: Putting a DM in front of someone’s ID is a private message (you can only send private messages to people who follow you).
• RT: a retweet. If you find a post particularly interesting, you can copy and paste it and retweet it, as long as you give credit (tools like Tweetdeck have a RT button). (this is one of Twitter’s most interesting features, and how some Tweets go viral).
5) Manage efficiently: The last task is to download a “client” to manage your tweets and traffic. Twitter.com is ok for starters but you’ll soon want to move on to a better platform. These include clients like Twhirl and TwitterFox, which have built in search features, URL shorteners (which you’ll need) and nice interfaces to view and respond to your Tweets. Twitterfox is a Firefox extension, while Twirl is a downloaded application.
My favorite, though, is Tweetdeck.
What I love about Tweetdeck is you can arrange the people you follow into separate, manageable categories. I currently have four categories: “social media” (people who follow social media); “individuals” (business contacts, other influencers in other areas); Favorites; and “all.”
But you can set up categories for almost anything–influencers in your industry; friends/family/close contacts, sports/hobbies; special lists, like journalists or even by twitterers in your geographical area. Just add a new “pane” for each group.
You can also set up search features in separate categories to hunt for certain keywords, like your company name, personal ID or an issue or event (ex: China or World Series) . I have searches set up for “Twitter tools” and “Twitter tips.” The default search is search.twitter.com and Twitscoop, which reports on hot trends and keywords in Twitter.
One warning: Tweetdeck is a memory hog. It can also be addictive. Plan to set aside designated times, say 20 min. 3 times a day, to check it or you may wind up sitting there watching it for hours.
One way to become more efficient is to integrate Twitter into Outlook with a tool like Outwit. You can update your Twitter status and follow your friends without having to open any other applications.
Outwit allows you to schedule your Tweets to be delivered every minute to an hour, and dump them into a separate folder. This way you can check them at your leisure. You can also easily categorize them by name and save them, something you can’t do with Tweetdeck. One downside: your email box can quickly get overloaded (as if you need more email).
Posted by admin on December 7, 2010 under Business |
In recent years, blogs and social media monitoring have become a fundamental part of the press office operation and many PR agencies’ bread and butter services.
As social networking has matured, companies need to engage proactively to ensure their brands are effectively supported.
Traditional media such as magazines, newspapers and TV channels have increasing numbers of journalist-written blogs as part of their online presence, meaning a top tier of blogs are seen as being just as influential in the media landscape as their e-zines and print media counterparts. There has also been an increase in the number of business-led social networks, business users of blogs and micro-blogging tools such as Twitter and Google-owned Jaiku, and multimedia social sites like Flickr.
However, a huge portion of the blogosphere and social media landscape is not professionally produced and individually these sites do not have huge audiences. Collectively though, these smaller outlets comprise as much as 99 per cent of the social media landscape and together form a powerful force that the PR industry is looking to harness. As the majority of blogs and social media sites contain personal content written in the first person, viral issues and stories can spread quickly. The sites connect people and when issues spread virally across social networks, they become big news for organizations that they affect. This is why tracking blog buzz across the whole of the web is critical for reporting on brand image, online coverage, and building a picture of customer perceptions.
An example of how effective a viral campaign can be, was when an online grass-roots campaign was formed on the social network Facebook. Protesting against an overdraft charge that the bank HSBC was imposing on recent graduate accounts, thousands of students joined forces online through a viral Facebook group which generated massive media attention, and forced a u-turn at HSBC. Within just a few weeks of the group launching, the bank scrapped the overdraft charges.
Over the last year, the fact that blogs impact a company’s brand image online has become more established. Marketing, PR and communications departments are increasingly exposed to the impact blogs have on a brand’s reputation, whether that’s negative coverage of a product or an online petition or a campaign across social networks. As this issue has gathered momentum, companies have realised that blogs and social media need to be actively managed not just monitored.
Some progressive brands are already doing this successfully. US retail bank Wells Fargo for example has a team dedicated to responding online to bloggers’ issues and complaints in order to increase positive sentiment around the brand online and reduce the amount of negativity that might emerge.
What caused the need to move from monitoring to engagement? Early adopters have led the charge. And the masses have followed. We are seeing social media’s evolution in the business ecosystem move from early adopter to mass market status and web tactics are rapidly becoming better understood tactically and strategically as part of the PR mix. The challenge is to turn the opportunity into action.
