In-bound Marketing
Find the people who are already looking for what you are talking about or offering.
In-bound marketing.
In the past marketing was solely placed around TV and radio, newspaper ads and HTML emails— these forms of marketing really hit people over the had with your marketing message. These old school way of marketing are becoming more and more less effective due to TiVO, spam filters, DVR, and customized content becomming overwhelmingly popular and the norm. So we now look toward placing marketing and ads, in places that are already reaching your targeted audience.
Meet people and start conversations. Answer questions and help others, from this trust is gained and a relationship is likely to be formed. Social media is the business networking event of now! In the past at a networking event or a cocktail party your reach is limited...now your reach is much much broader, more authentic and personal, if done properly it is a much more effective conversation with "real people". Engage genuinely and interact with people, build authentic relationships, add personality, and converse with your audience.
Reasons for blogs:
- Showcase your personality
- Create a feedback cycle
- Build a loyal community
- Create an emotional investment
- Increase your credibility
Be proactive...whatever industry you're in, start building relationships now in the community because you may need to pitch something in the future. While blogs are now considered mainstream with more businesses using them to get their message out if you don't have one start today! And don't forget to engage in customer conversations and respond to negative comments.
What about facebook?
http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Create a business page, become a fan of your page to affiliate yourself with the business page. Create an engaging page...no body cares about you or your services except for you...so what do you do? Host events, videos, discussions, articles...things of interest and things that engage people with your content. Leverage the viral nature of things like news feeds and social bookmarking features.....engage your users and fans...that activity becomes published and all their "friends" get to see this, further extending your reach.
A few tips on your business page with facebook:
- Create your ad...add social actions.
- Choose PPC beacuse CTRs are very low on facebook.
- Find the URL then make a "find us on facebook" link
- Create applications that your audience will want to have, and they will pass it on
Strengthen. Empower. Amplify.
Strengthen. Empower. Amplify.
We are living in transformative times. Social media influences mind decisions...there is more persistence of information...now opinions are out in the world on an exponential scale. Leveraging those opinions and gaining loyalty for your brand or small business, when done positively, will surely boost sales and business potential.
Respond out loud (blog) if your good and it's worthy of sharing...people will look at it and do the marketing for you. It can change your emotional outlook and hopefully that of your potential customers. Things that people can relate to, especially if they are honest and real; become viral. This means that if people are compelled by your content, then they will be compelled to share your content, resulting in free marketing for you.
This already is conventional and is today's public relations in today's marketplace.
Make sure people know your integral value !
Strengthen, empower, amplify refers to :
Trusted relationships.
I've done it...10,000 visitors
So...the first milestone to reach more customers online.
I reached 10,000 visitors in one (1) month.
flash design new york
Another Social Media Blog Post
Social marketing is a good way to get free publicity for your company or brand. It's where the consumers and the brands meet and can have a dialogue instead of just a static message.
Marketing organizations need to ensure they are not reactive to change but driving and leading change in a proactive way. Social Media allows your company to react more quickly to what people are saying or how they are using social bookmarking.
You can test an idea online in the morning and by evening test results. It drives changes in how you listen to your customer. Blogs for instance allow you to listen into water cooler discussions you never had access to before. Social Media drives change in how you communicate to the customer as a dialogue versus a broadcast message.
Marketing is all about relationships and all relationships have a set of common factors. First, all relationships require listening. Listening has become core to everything. Second, in the best relationships, there is a lot of active communication and dialogue. This dialogue is essential to growth in the relationship. Third, a great relationship is one that is built on honesty."
What does Social media promote?
- Better understanding your customers
- Much better allowance of immersing yourself into their conversation.
- Understanding the numbers and demonstrating faster value
5 simple starter tips for SEO
These days there are so many articles on how to improve your web site traffic with Search Engine Optimization techniques. I found this one very simple as well as useful for starters:
http://www.webdesign.org/article.php?id=16693
Online Video in 2008
here's a great list from Webpronews.com about online video in the past year.
view the web page now
Web 3.0
Source : Marta Strickland (paraphrased)
I have Bold-ed the semantic information in this post
What the Semantic Web -- or Web 3.0 -- Can Do for Marketers
Whatever You Call It, Get Ready for Greater Relevance
It's been nearly 10 years since Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the worldwide web, expressed his vision of a "semantic web," in which all web data -- and the meaning of that data -- could be read by machines. Since then, much of the slow-moving progress toward this smarter and more powerful web has been courtesy of academics and data librarians.
Semantic web is just one of a few things often referred to as Web 3.0 -- others include topics like data portability or mobile web. But I think entrepreneur Nova Spivack offered the most useful definition by simply calling it the third decade of the web (2010 to 2020) and referring to the technology trends that will hit maturity during that time. Most importantly, the next generation of the web will bring us out of information overload and be more relevant and meaningful.
Semantics refers to the meaning behind data. Right now, computers are good at sending data back and forth but not great at discerning the meaning of that data. Semantic web aims to change that. Perhaps it's best explained in describing what marketers can hope to gain from it.
Improving Ads
Has your contextual advertising turned into a contextual nightmare? Current contextual advertising depends heavily on keywords. Sure, it seems safe to buy a word like "feet" -- until your ad comes up right next to a story about severed feet. What if there were a technology that could analyze what is really being said on the page?
By using natural language processing and artificial intelligence, semantic advertising solutions, like Peer39, can look at the structure of a sentence and interpret word meaning and sentiment. Semantic text analysis relies on synonyms and relationships between concepts, rather than rudimentary keyword scanning. Identifying sentiment is becoming invaluable for advertising on user-generated sites such as blogs, where you wouldn't want to place ads on a negative post.
Online advertising has another obstacle to overcome: information overload. We live in a world where information evolves at an alarming rate and, let's face it, consumers trust each other far more than they trust advertising messaging. So how do we dynamically pull smarter and more relevant content into ads?
That's where the efforts like Dapper MashupAds come into play. In addition to pulling from a brand site database, the dynamically generated ads can scan social content sites like Yelp and Flickr for the newest (positive) reviews and photos of your restaurant. It's the power of your brand message only promoted by your consumers.
Improving Measurement
One of the toughest marketing challenges of recent times has been in measuring the success of social media. How do you measure the success of a human conversation? We can measure reach (visits, views, clicks, downloads). We can also measure exposure or buzz (what people are saying about our brand). But it's inside those walled gardens that everything interesting is happening: How strong is the community? Are members active? Are we changing their minds? Changing their actions?
It's the tough nut of the new marketing conversation, but Web 3.0 might be the key to cracking it.
Semantic technology is able to pull together connections between words and phrases. How often is concept "X" said in the same breath as concept "Y"? Measurement tools will be moving away from the tag cloud, and we'll be able to immerse ourselves in the trends of the real conversation, not just the keyword of the day.
Next, there is the dilemma of message velocity; i.e., how far is my message traveling and how fast? Sure, that's an easy thing to do when you are measuring a viral video or widget but what about a conversation? Semantic technology builds on meaning, not keywords. And so it doesn't matter if your followers say, "The new Batman movie is going to be awesome" or "You have to see the 'Dark Knight' trailer"; semantic buzz tools will tie the conversation together.
Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular tool in the marketer toolbox. And its next generation will look at the entirety of a comment or an article, from whom it came and to whom it was directed. It will use natural language processing and analysis of meaningful relationships to distinguish the "good" comments from "bad."
And what about building a community of loyal enthusiasts? What about creating a relationship with your customers? Companies like Chat Mine measure the connections between members of the community and between people and concepts. By looking at both friending and popular dialogue, it can tell you if your brand brought a community together in passionate conversation.
When O'Reilly coined the term Web 2.0, the marketing world divided into skeptics and enthusiasts. And a wave of start-ups began rolling out under the 2.0 moniker. It's only wise to fear the same for semantic web or Web 3.0. As nightmares of books and white papers race through your mind, it's important to separate the reality from the hype.
The successful technologist won't approach the marketer with buzzwords. He won't throw out phrases like "dynamic ontologies" or "semantic triples." Because good semantic technology is like movie editing -- you aren't supposed to notice it's there but it fundamentally changes the experience. So when someone approaches you about a "smarter" semantic solution, make sure they can answer this:
How will this make my ads more relevant and my metrics more meaningful?
Keep up the Compelling Content
Yes, there are some challenges that we face when entering web 2.0 space.
For instance over saturation; it seems that once a platform like 'My Space' or 'Face Book' becomes a popular space to offer content, it then becomes flooded with useless content, eventually being abandoned by marketers and on to the next digital arena.
The battle on the internet is not to provide the most novel campaign solution and medium, but to provide the most compelling content.
Who cares how many iPhone apps exist today? It really doesn't matter as long as your clients' have the best functionality with the best mix of packaging (interface robustness, pretty graphics) and features. The nature of social media is such that your application will be discovered, rated, and passed along without much work on your end.
Instead of searching for the next "virgin" territory in the social media space, create the best content for your clients, distribute over as many mediums as possible, and encourage feedback from the communities.
We must remember the simple rule: add value.
Each and every marketing execution must add value to the user's experience. Users flee platforms when they feel put-upon and taken advantage of. In order to avoid this fate, marketers need to improve user experience, not impede it.
Marketers can do this by underwriting great new content, making cool new features and functionality possible, creating transparent environments in which users engage with issues, each other, and yes, the brand.
The great thing is platforms are always evolving, and marketing tactics with them. So create that differentiating content that people will want, people will use, and they will pass-it-on accelerating your brand.
gim-crack the widget
Branded widgets are the refrigerator magnets of the Brave New World. These compact, portable little software apps -- from video players to countdown clocks to makeup simulators -- are inexpensive to distribute, free to the user and (often enough) distinctly useful. At a minimum, they carry an ad message wherever they go.
That's at a minimum. At a maximum, the widget is something like the magical connection between marketers and consumers, not only replacing the one-way messaging long dominated by media advertising but vastly outperforming it. Because online the link is literal and direct, and along its path, data of behavior, preference and intention are left at every step. Oh, and your target consumers actually go out searching for your branded gimcrack.....read more on AdAge
source AdAge
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