Marketing Autopsy Blog » Marketing

Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:18:30 +0000

Everyone knows that advertising isn’t cheap. This is why social media is becoming a very important advertising channel. When done right, this low-cost “advertising platform” beats out all the other advertising methods hands down in terms of cost and effectiveness. A small or medium business should have six social media elements, according to Heather Lutze in a recent article at Tech Journal South called “Social media advertising strategy: six profiles you must have.”

Called the “Social Media Advertising Formula,” Ms. Lutze says there are six essential platforms that business owners must have to garner the potential of social advertising. Each platform offers you specific ingredients that only it can offer, so you’re not duplicating your social media effort when active on each one while targeting your message to targeted audience. Additionally, each platform allows you to optimize your presence and message best suited to its strongest points, furthering the effectiveness of your presence online. Targeting your audience and optimizing your presence equal best social advertising potentials.

Let’s look at the six.

LinkedIn. This business profile site ranks well in search engines and is a great platform to keep business associates updated on your business events. To optimize your profile on LinkedIn, select one core keyword and use it frequently, but not without being spammy or sacrifice user experience.
Facebook. This is a closed community so it does not rank in search engines. It is an effective place for personal profile online, but you can also use your business keywords to optimize your marketing effort. To optimize your profile on Facebook, select one business keyword and aim to become the subject matter expert in this community.
MySpace. This is an open community, ranks very good in search engines, and allows full profile for businesses. To optimize your profile on MySpace, again use a specific keyword for your business, and take advantage of the search function to create an effective MySpace outreach network.
YouTube. This is the biggest and most well known video sharing platform, and still is the best for viral marketing campaigns. You can run marketing campaigns for your own business and for your clients as well. To optimize your YouTube campaign, use each video to target specific keyword, and use the same keyword in both the video title and its description.
Blog. You blog is one of the most important and easiest platforms to get yourself ranked high in organic search engine results. Blogs are also a great tool to build trusted followers as you build your (or your business’) own reputation. To optimize your blog, use specific keyword(s) for each post and use the same keywords in the meta title, meta description, and in the body of the post itself. Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Twitter. This is the hottest micro blogging platform currently. Though it has several limitations, Twitter can be an effective tool for business as many can attest. Twitter posts are open so they also rank well in search engines. To optimize your presence on Twitter, brand your profile to reflect your product/service expertise, while using keywords in all your Twitter posts.

Read more on Heather Lutze’s “Social media advertising strategy: six profiles you must have.”

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising

Brands, Social Media, Authentic Relationships and Ultimate Success

Cuong Huynh — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 19:13:08 +0000

JD Lasica recounted the Your Brand, Their World event at Razorfish on August 18 in San Francisco. The goal was to draw social media thought leaders and experts together to “discuss the ways in which social media is changing the relationship between customers and brands, and what it means to marketers, merchandisers, product developers, customer service organizations, R&D and senior management.”

Participants included Garrick Schmitt, GVP Experience Planning for Razorfish and an expert panel consisting of Megan O’Connor, Levi’s; Michael Brito, Intel; Marisa Gallagher, Razorfish; Sam Faillace, Shutterfly, and Jon Swartz, USA Today (moderator.) In addition, an engaging audience of social media and marketing specialists was present to share their views.

Here are some of ideas and highlights coming out of the panel and audience interaction.

An interesting tweeting strategy for business: the 80-20 rule. Michael Brito tweets 80 percent personal and 20 percent business, which is a great reference for both beginner and experienced tweeple. If you are not sure about what mix your messages should have, this is a good starting point.
Social media should not be the ultimate marketing tool but must be an important element in the marketing mix. Not all companies need a Faccebook or Twitter account. Ultimately, the key is to know what you want to achieve with social media and select the appropriate tools to meet your goals.
While return on investment (ROI) is not an easy thing to quantify from social media marketing activities, Marisa Gallagher mentioned one of the best metrics: sales. This is right on because regardless of your goals for a specific campaign (brand awareness, survey participation, opinion gathering, etc.) what really matters to all company is sales.
On Twitter followers, following and the value of realistic interaction, a great bottom line message seems to emerge. It’s this: “You can effectively interact with maybe a small finite number of people, but do not discount the benefit of having many more followers/friends. They may be lurkers and never interact with you, but they have their own networks, can like/don’t like what you say/offer, and will share their opinions about you with the world.”
Someone from the audience offered a clear, simple and easy to understand roundup of inbound vs. outbound marketing. “Outbound is the traditional form of interruption advertising (commercials on TV, a billboard interrupting your thought process), while inbound marketing is about people opting in or getting recommendations from friends.”
Here’s a little “Ah-ha!” moment on why a company decided to deploy (or not) social media: “The auto companies don’t have as much fear jumping into social media as some of the other incumbents because it’s do or die for them,” as commented by Gallagher. Sure, we all know the phrase: “Live everyday like it’s your last.” That’s how you make a difference.

There are a bunch more great takeaways from that meeting. Read more of JD Lasica’s post “Social media, brands and the way forward” over at socialmedia.biz.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Brands, Social Media, Authentic Relationships and Ultimate Success

Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark

Cuong Huynh — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:59:50 +0000

Pear Analytics recently did a study on how people are using and consuming Twitter. The study took 2,000 random tweets from the public timeline in English and in the U.S. over a period of 2 weeks, from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and was posted by Ryan Kelly. While I applaud the effort and think they are on the right track on providing a super-value added study to the public and marketers, I wouldn’t call this a conclusive study. Ryan mentioned that they will update it regularly so that’s a good thing.

Here are the results of the study with the categories defined by Pear Analytics:

Pointless babble 40.55%
Conversational 37.55%
Pass along value 8.70%
Self promotion 5.85%
Spam 3.75%
News 3.60%

You can read about the details of the study yourself (link at end of this post.) Some of the most surprising results are the following:

Self promotion and spam are not as prominent as many have complained about.
News represents a very small amount of activities, despite recent media buzz.

So it looks like issues that affect many people (like the Iran election and spams) that receive huge news coverage also tend to pump up public impressions about Twitter and exaggerate their real impacts. The real numbers seem to show that these are not much of a problem; you just think they’re big problems because they’re constantly in your face or they annoy you a lot. With more refinement (such as extended time of day included in the study) we may see an increase in these numbers.

I look at this study as work in progress with better updates to be expected. Here are a few issues I see that should be resolved to improve the study value in the future:

Pointless babble is not necessarily a negative thing as its name may suggest. This category needs more refinements as this big group represents many important pieces of information, both to consumers and marketers. For the consumers and individuals, it is exactly the social aspect of social networking, and people will continue to socialize the way they want to. All you can do accept it and understand it, not control or eliminate it. And this social spaces and activities are exactly where marketers need to be to understand consumer behaviors.
The time periods of 11:00 am to 5:00 pm CST is too limited to really understand Twitter users in the U.S. It’s only 6 hours of each of the time zones. At a minimum I think the study should begin at 6:00 am to midnight for each time zone. As it is, it merely tracks only the lunch to early evening hours of east coast time (noon to 6:00 pm, entirely missing 12 hours of east coast tweets,) and includes only the mid morning to mid-afternoon hours of west coast time (9:00 am to 3:00 pm, again entirely missing 12 hours of west coast tweets in the morning, late afternoon and evenings.)

See the original Pear Analytics post on “Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage.”

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Pointless Babble Is King: Twitter Study Almost Hits the Mark

Bing Is Not Showing All Results in a Bing Search

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:09:25 +0000

So I had a problem with Bing claiming to help you make decisions (see Bing – Helps You Make Decisions or Just Another Search Engine.) But a recent post by Benj Arriola from BusinessOnLine really put the nail in the coffin.

Through a tip from an SEO friend, Benj demonstrated in a simple search test that Bing search results are way biased, or inadequate for a major search engine, or both. The test consisted of searching for the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” in each of the Google, Yahoo and Bing search engine. A very reasonable task, I should add.

Guess what the results were? In a nutshell:

Google search engine: Each of the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” came back with plenty of relevant results. No surprise because that’s what you’d expect for well-known sites.
Yahoo search engine: Same expected results. Each of the search terms “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “Microsoft” came back with plenty of relevant results.
Bing search engine. The search on “Google” gives a single result on google.com. The search on “Yahoo” gives a single result on yahoo.com. But the search on “Microsoft” yields plenty of results on both the company and its various products and services!

You can test all of this by conducting the searches yourselves. It’s totally duplicable, at least for now. Below are my own tests.

Google search engine results.

Yahoo search engine results.

Bing search engine results.

These are real funny results. Heck, the term “yak” (or substitute your own term) returns more results than “Google” and “Yahoo” combined, according to Bing.

Oh and another thing. If you look at Bing’s search results for “Google” and “Yahoo” you’ll see to the right of the single result in each case is a list of similar search engines. And Bing is at the top of this list. But when you search for “Bing” on Bing, there is no list for alternative search engines to be seen anywhere. It’s like google and Yahoo don’t exist. Pretty odd.

The bottom line: I don’t think users of Bing is getting unbiased search results. You can make your own conclusion.

Read Benj’s post “Should I Trust Bing’s Search Engine Results?“

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Bing Is Not Showing All Results in a Bing Search

Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 01:38:27 +0000

Regardless of how popular or visible Twitter is currently, your corporate social marketing and new media strategy still need to maintain an effective blog. Twitter or FaceBook alone cannot solve all your marketing challenges, but a corporate blog remains a very strong and viable marketing channel. Whatever you do, you’ll need to pay special attention to 2 key elements of corporate blogging: content relevancy and trackable analytics.

Content Relevancy

Content has been king, and will always be king for your corporate blog. It’s hard to defeat great content using anything else, tricks or otherwise. If you don’t have great content, then whatever you do won’t affect your site’s popularity or traffic in any meaningful manner. In fact the goodness of your content correlates directly to how relevant you are to your prospects and customers. Are you providing the right information that your prospects are looking for, at the time they’re looking for it? Are you making available help to solve your customer’s dilemma in a timely manner? Are you providing solutions that eliminate your clients’ problems before your competition does? In short, your corporate blog is a very powerful tool, and it can help you provide relevant content that is totally under your control.

Trackable Analytics

Analytics play several different important roles. One, it can help you find out what visitors are looking for and how they are finding them. It can also show you how your company may be able to satisfy that need. Two, it can be used to help guide your content generation plan. As we discussed before, relevant content is critical, and knowing what content is relevant before you generate it is a no brainer. As a bonus, trackable analytics can also give you a roadmap with which to directly engage with your audience, at the specific time and place in the blogosphere when they congregate.

Tips to Running Effective Corporate Blog

So how do you maintain a strong corporate blog in order to engage with your customers, build your brand, while at the same time drive potential sales? Consider these following tips:

Go where the buzz is. Know where the conversations are taking place that either talk about your brand or discuss something that your brand can help solve. Get involved with genuine desire to help, to build relationship and to establish yourself as subject matter expert. No marketing spiel is needed here; just stick to the facts. That’s what people are looking for. To help with this discovering and listening task, there are social media “listening tools” available to help.
Making and maintaining contact. Once you find out where you can beneficially contribute to the conversation, interact with both those already familiar with your brand and those new to it. Think carefully before you engage to make sure you understand the conversation and meaning behind each and every conversation thread. Again your involvement in the conversation must be relevant and helpful, or at least contributes on an informational level, otherwise you’ll be looked at as someone just out for personal gains. Lastly, maintain all social networking etiquette at all times, because you need to. To read more on social networking etiquette, here are a couple of articles to help: SEO and Social Networking as Reputation Management Tools, and Putting Twitter in Your Marketing ToolBox.
Maintain a powerful corporate blog. Make it exciting. Make it attractive. All rules about good website designs still apply, including easy and clear navigation, fast loading speed, simple yet effective interface, etc. And most importantly, post fresh and relevant articles often, and invite interaction and feedback.
Stay in control and work smart. A successful corporate blog doesn’t have to cost an arm or a leg. Once you established your plan and strategy, it’s easy to post new posts, it’s cheap to use monitoring tools and follow/track the blogosphere, and it’s painless to participate in dialogue to help other people. Corporate blogging does take time, so it helps to keep it simple and institute a routine and stick with it.
Continuously develop your social networking and new media skills. Common stumbling blocks abound. They include falling behind with regular posting of fresh and relevant articles, failing to follow and keep engaged in conversation threads, running up against corporate policies that should have been created at the beginning of your corporate blogging venture, and not taking advantage of all possible effective social networking traffic channels. You may be leaving free customer traffic on the table without realizing it.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Corporate Blogging – Minimum Must-Have Elements For Successful Strategy

Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz

Cuong Huynh — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:24:22 +0000

“What Women Want.” That’s how Ford did it.

Getting bloggers involved. Prominent, well-known women bloggers. And get instant buzz in the process. It’s focus groups at work in the new social media space. There’s nothing wrong with it and it’s not a new trend. Pepsi did it in their Pepsi rebranding campaign. The Air Force is doing it in their Air Force social media push. And you remember 3M’s Post-It Note Carjacks? Now Ford is doing it with refined social media skills. But really, bloggers watch out, you may be part of a bigger PR machine without realizing it.

Check out any of these Ford YouTube videos. Here are some samples of blogger reviews.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU-A6kCnbTA

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDC1sBQY038

Ford describes the event in an article titled “Ford Wants to Know: What do Woman [sic] Really Want?” which included breakfast with a Ford executive, a day packed with hands-on tours, test drives and roundtable discussions, and I’m sure schwags. By the way, the event was conducted during the 5th Annual BlogHer ‘09 Conference, July 23-25, 2009. Quite timely and convenient.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve always advocated that businesses need to get more into social network marketing and develop strong new media strategies. But there’s a grey area that both companies and bloggers need to be careful not to cross. In this case, to me anyway, if Ford really wants to get women’s input to help design future cars, the company probably won’t get them just from this narrow group of women demographic. But they will get a lot of free blog posts and discussions out of it, that’s for sure.

The final score: thumbs up for Ford marketing, a “huh, what were you thinking?” for the bloggers.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Ford Gets Bloggers Involved in “What Women Want” for Instant Buzz

Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:23:48 +0000

Think lawyers are expensive? Maybe so. But it’s cheaper to bring them in before you have a problem. This common wisdom holds especially true for your corporate social media strategy, which is why your social media team should have a legal representative as well.

It should be a requirement to make legal professionals part of your team from the inception. Bringing them in on the back end to clean up a mess is never desirable. Plus it doesn’t make for a great collaborative relationship, because you messed up and you now need legal’s help. And solving legal problems on the back end is never pleasant. It’s far better to know and establish legal rules of the social media road before you’re entering into and engaging in conversations on social media sites. Let’s face it, corporate social media activities are really public relations (PR) in the new social networking space. Therefore it makes sense

Part of the POST method, your new media team should, at a minimum, get legal involved in the O (Objectives) and S (Strategies) phases. At a generic level, legal can help you stay out of trouble, guide you in all policies relating to news media and customer-facing communications. Legal can also provide you with guidelines on what an employee can and cannot (or should and should not) do in the social media arena. Here are some specific roles of legal participation within the social media team:

Social Media Policies. Comments, backtracks, discussions on and off of your site. This covers locations both within your own websites, blogs forums, and on other websites, blogs and forums. It also controls how your employee(s) should start new topics, and how to resolve complaints and negative feedback. Legal can provide guidance.
Authorized Corporate Bloggers. If you’ll have just a few key individuals actually doing the engagement with the outside world, establish rules for them to follow. Otherwise if you encourage a wider employee participation, then have a different set of rules applied to all. The key words here are guidance and coordination, not hindrance. Legal can help establish rules.
Social Media Interaction. We all know that the Internet is always open, and with the global reach that it provides, the corporate social media team (and therefore your company) is also always open. Consumers worldwide are active in the social media space all the time (and especially after work within their local time,) your social media team must be ready to engage at any time of day, within reason. This is especially critical when a potential issue (positive or negative) about the company and its products is going viral. So you’ll need to be involved early. Legal can help define the dos and don’ts.

With all these guidelines in your pocket, you are now ready to go all out and promote your company, products and services. They will protect you while you’re out there engaging, supporting and solving your customers’ problems.

So go ahead. Build your social media team. Select the best and sharpest marketers, PR people, and technologists. Just don’t leave out the legal rep.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Creating a Social Media Strategy? Don’t Forget the Legal Team

Marketing Basics and Building Buzz – What About Integrity?

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:07:21 +0000

We’ve all been bombarded with Michael Jackson’s news in the last few weeks. While many, fans and non-fans alike, were affected by his death in some way, MJ’s father went on the offensive to promote his new business venture just days after. In these modern days, I guess there are still salesmen so blinded by money that they sell their souls too. So now’s a good opportunity to get back to basics. Marketing basics, that is.

Marketing – whether push or pull, traditional or online, outbound or inbound – is a game of either creating your own buzz, or riding someone else’s buzz. Creating your own buzz is tough to do, unless you have something new, unique with mass appeal to tell people about, or you can ride on your own reputation built over time. Riding someone else’s buzz, on the other hand, is quite easy. It’s popular for those who want a quick spike in their marketing performance and return on investment. It’s a legitimate marketing technique if done properly.

Here are a few “riding someone else’s buzz” ideas:

Associate with well-known or recognizable brand names. It’s all about attention grabbing, and household names and celebrities give you instant buzz and attention.
Hot topics or stories of the day. By definition these are already hot, so huge attention base already exists. All you have to do is make it relevant to your products, services or situation.
Controversial or outrageous people and stories. These can come from anywhere and take many shapes and forms, but the bottom line is the controversial and the outrageous command free publicity, which also benefit from its natural viral characteristic.
Stealing someone else’s great content. Even though this works well, it’s short-lived. Therefore it’s not recommended, and it’s against many laws, including the social networking law.

I may be guilty as the next guy who mentions MJ is his post. And maybe I am. But more importantly, if this post can stop a few marketers and help them think about what they do just for a little while, it’s done its job.

So, no, marketing basics do not start with what you may learn in business schools, from others in the industry, and certainly not by your desire to be successful. They start with you and your integrity.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Marketing Basics and Building Buzz – What About Integrity?

Bing – Helps You Make Decisions or Just Another Search Engine

Cuong Huynh — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:57:04 +0000

Okay I guess the buzz on Bing has died down a little. When it first came out, everyone is eating up their marketing spiel about Bing’s capability to “help you make decisions.” My initial reaction was: “What!? Somehow they have gathered enough information on me, and know how my mind works, to help me make my decisions now?” I had reasons to worry.

But a few quick searches on Bing helped put my worries at ease. Bing gives search results. Bing doesn’t help you make decisions, it’s just a search engine. I said “just” because Microsoft had search engines before (MSN and Live) and it’s not meant to belittle Bing. But to me Bing looks like a search engine with some pre-programmed searches, if you will, plus other new features.

Some people can argue that if Bing gives you search results then it’s helping you make decisions. They must have been living under a rock, because all search engines do this! What matters most to me is being able to find relevant information to make my own decisions.

According to Bing on itself (meaning I typed “what is Bing” into Bing,) this is what I got

Bing is a search engine that finds and organizes the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.

The question becomes, how does Bing find and organize the information I need to make my own decisions, that live.com or msn.com didn’t? Microsoft (MS) has been consistently third in the search engine war and is trying to improve traffic. With a reported marketing campaign upwards of $80-100 million, I think MS would be better off revamping their search (which they did,) and running $100 lottos every hour with the winners selected from Bing searchers. That would get their usage up against Google and Yahoo.

But do you know what’s real interesting? I still can’t get Bing to help me make my decision to use it regularly, or at all.

For SEOs who want to take a closer look at Bing SEO, Benj Arriola has some good views in his article “MSN, then Live, now Bing – What do SEOs need to know?” at BusinessOnLine.com.

Post from: Marketing Autopsy Blog
© 2009 Marketing Autopsy Blog.

Bing – Helps You Make Decisions or Just Another Search Engine

How to Build a New Media Corporate Marketing Team

Cuong Huynh — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:29:52 +0000

You know what I’m talking about. New media. You know, social media, social marketing, blogging, and Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc, for your company? Many have found success where many others have failed. In the corporate environment, pursuing social media marketing is a full-time job.

Corporate social networking functions require individual special skills and knowledge, plus clear corporate objectives and goals. For companies that want to get with it in social media and marketing, don’t just try a few things here and there using inexperienced resources. What you need is focus and dedication. The key is to develop a clear reason why you want to be in the blogosphere, and provide dedicated resources to achieve those goal.

Here are the minimum considerations that must exist for your social media marketing to stand any chance of making a difference. Anything less will be just a waste of your time, money and human resources.

Establish a clear corporate social networking policy, the rules of engagement so to speak. It does not have to be detailed or elaborate, but it needs to have the basics in place. Remember this is still emerging technology.
Create your team from enthusiastic and knowledgeable individuals. They don’t have to be your best marketers or sales persons. In fact they should not be. The key characteristics you’re looking for include: being savvy with new technology and tools, being passionate about the company, its products and services, and above all, being honest with high ethics.
Empower and authorize team members to do what’s best for the company. If your team is knowledgeable and passionate, then they’ll do anything to ensure the best interest and protection for the company and its reputation. They are smart, and they’ll do the right things.
Always be on the look out for opportunities to go viral, especially in support of customer-generated viral media. All you need is to be there, provide support, and maybe give a little nudge. It’s social marketing after all. Do it right and you’ll attract loyal followers.

What about corporate legal? Do you need to get their blessing all the time? Probably not. Just do what’s right. Here’s what I mean. As long as you’ve made the proper communication with legal department and addressed corporate policies from the beginning, legal may just be your best friends in the company to get your social networking job done.

Marketing Autopsy Blog » Marketing

Must-Have Formula For Business Social Media Advertising

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