What’s the *#@! is inbound marketing and outbound marketing?

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In those kind words, it was still a good question someone asked upon me the other day. I’ll let the infographic describes it best (see below). Inbound and outbound marketing, their buzzy words the last few years yet everyone seems to have a slightly different response to it.

In my view, inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that a user or customer dominates or controls.  It  focuses on a specific and targeted group rather than the masses, yet its fair to say the masses can still be funneled through it (ex. websites and search).  Inbound marketing is essentially an online based marketing tool that has shown strong and effective results. Read more

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Fedex Usage of Social Media for Brand Crisis

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FedEx Bad Delivery Tosses Computer Monitor | Viral YouTube VideoRecently FedEx learned the hard way of social media power and consumer influence, and reciprocated the same to respond to a potential ugly crisis management situation.

Recently (December 19th, 2011) a YouTuber posted a video of a FedEx practically shot putting the delivery of  a new computer monitor to one of FedEx’s customers. Read more

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Ready for Social Media Optimization?

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SMO (social media optimization), yeah, another acronym we don’t need, but a good comment to share from this years Ad Tech in New York, on social media marketing…

Just as business owners were getting a grip on the basics of SEO (search engine optimization), now they can add social media optimization (SMO) to optimize their brand for social.

“Just like you optimize for search, you need to optimize for social,” Dave Linabury, said director of interactive experience at Campbell-Ewald, speaking on a panel about social media. Linabury described the most innovative brands are beginning to audit their sites and finding new opportunities to encourage sharing of products, services, and content. Read more

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Why Create a Facebook Page for Business?

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Facebook is the largest one-stop-shop of consumers that offers small businesses the opportunity to target consumers at a granular and local level. Where better than to submerge a your business through a Facebook Business page to connect, engage, influence and make an impact with local consumers and customers.

Getting your business on Facebook and other social media properties as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and others, all have their place and purpose. You here  business owner conversations at local cafes or seminars about getting your business needs to be on Facebook, starting with a Facebook Business page. But why? (see graph inside) Read more

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Tip: LinkedIn Reputation and Promotion

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LinkedIn.comLinkedIn has added a few new features that impact marketers and business owners. Promoting your business information on LinkedIn has become a lot more engaging, and  knowledge-sharing with industry peers.
A few unique LinkedIn features that are worth exploring in our online marketing: Read more
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Tips: SEO & Social Bookmarking

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Social Bookmarking websites attract a considerable amount of user attention and are still a significant part of any organic SEO campaign. Most of these websites use No Follow attribute so as not to pass link juice to websites that they don’t trust. But here search engines are not the entire limit of the world, there are users also who are looking for information on the web and you can fetch direct traffic to your website through these no follow links even if you don’t get Google traffic.

Social Bookmarking websites attract a considerable amount of user attention and are still a significant part of any organic SEO campaign. Most of these websites use No Follow attribute so as not to pass link juice to websites that they don’t trust. But here search engines are not the entire limit of the world, there are users also who are looking for information on the web and you can fetch direct traffic to your website through these no follow links even if you don’t get Google traffic.

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Part 2: Social Media Advocates – ‘The Social Media Plan’

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Social Media InfluencersContinued from ‘Creating Social Media Advocates‘ – Part 2.

Where to start with your social media plan?

Now that we’ve gotten through the myths of social media, we can turn our focus to developing the plan on how to turn our online audience, including customers, into our evangelists and advocates.

Where to begin? Take your social media thinking back one step and figure out what you want your champions (advocates) to do to build loyalty and drive traffic, sales, conversations, etc. to your site or social presence.

Do you want them to give up video endorsements, spark or respond to conversations on the web, be the first adopters of a new product, provide support, produce written reviews, etc. This all aligns with the objectives you set for champions – what you want them to do!. Read more

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Google +1 Button – Another Facebook ‘Like’?

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Updated: May 27, 2011:  Google +1 & Search Rankings

As we eluded to in the below post we published on Google +1, the affect of the new social media ‘recommendation’ button will impact search results. Matt Cutts confirmed what Google said when the +1 button launched: Google will use +1 activity to influence its search results. “It’s definitely a signal we’re paying a lot of attention to,” Cutts said. “It has tons of potential. It looks very promising.”  Google is expected to offer the +1 button for website owners in the near future.

Who is Matt Cutts? Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google as well as webmaster issues in general, and is generally an outspoken and public face of Google.

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Google +1 Button

Great. Another new social media tool marketers need to put in their marketing arsenal.  Taking Facebooks ‘Like’ head on, Google recently launched the new Google +1button.

Google’s new +1 button is similar to the social function of Facebook’s ‘Like’, to let you recommend a piece of content to your digital social circle of friends, family, visitors, etc. that you find is worthy of mentioning.

Similar to Facebooks ‘Like’, Google +1 button aims to allow individuals a way to make a recommendation, or in some way ‘advice’ on something that you feel is important to share and that others will find helpful. This builds on the value and power of personal referrals, or more technically, ‘personal collective intelligence’ to make referrals and recommendations on products, brands, content, etc. vs. the now old-aged corporate ‘drive-the message-down-the-throat’ push-message approach. Read more

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Part 1: Social Media Advocates – Myths

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Social Media Myths

Continued from ‘Creating Social Media Advocates‘ series.

Before getting into the ‘tools’ or ‘strategies’ of successfully building and harnessing the power of a social media strategy, let’s first begin by looking at some of the most common myths of social media. The point of here is to get over the typical myths and cliché’s of social media, and start with the essentials of understanding where to begin and what influencers can do for your social media strategy. Read more

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Creating Social Media Advocates

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Social MediaAt least a few times a week I receive the same, or similar, types of questions about social media. It’s either “How blogging /Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn, etc., work for my business?”, or “I’ve tried Twitter, or tried Facebook, and it doesn’t work. Is it all just noise?”

Two very common questions that I’ve finally found the time to address….or I’m just tired of listening to myself repeating the same points, and figure just send them to a link to read themselves. In either case, I’m going to cover a these questions, and a few other common social media questions, in a 2 part series of creating social media advocates.

Part 1: Social media myths
Part 2: Creating a social media plan

In the interest of  ‘not another hype about social media’, the plan is to discuss social media myths and the reality of social media, then get into what you should tackle when developing a social media plan.  Some have heard me preach – you fail to plan you plan to fail. Same applies to social media…and most of marketing, so I’ll also cover how to build a social media plan. We’ll also look at how to measure certain social media metrics – such as measuring a Tweet, and cover a recent case study on how social media is being used today..successfully! Read more

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