Category: Blog

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The ROI of Social is "Will Your Business Be Around in 5 Years?"

I first blogged the latest edition of Socionomic’s now ubiquitous video about how the media landscape has changed to digital and its social implications back in December. Now, six months later, the world has changed again and Socionomics has come out with a new video called Social Media Revolution 2 (though not the second edition of their video, which has been around for over a year – an eternity in the age of the iPad).

A few facts, from Socionomics:

  1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
  2. 96% of them have joined a social network
  3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
  4. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
  5. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.
  6. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
  7. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
  8. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
  9. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
  10. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  11. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  12. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
  13. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  14. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
  15. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
  16. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
  17. Only 14% trust advertisements
  18. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
  19. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
  20. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
  21. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
  22. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
  23. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
  24. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
  25. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
  26. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
  27. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years

How is your company reacting?

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The Brand of Me – Or How Journalism Is Changing

I frequently say that digital media and digital marketing is not about the tool. It’s not about Twitter or Facebook or YouTube. It’s about the fact that communication — and how people get their information — are changing.

People don’t get their information from the daily newspaper, get their local paper — if you’re lucky and live in a big city you get the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times or Chicago Tribune — or go out to the local store and purchase a newspaper and read whatever’s in their paper. Rarely pay attention to who the journalist is that wrote the piece. Or are lucky to read papers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal with an amazing array of editorial writers.

In today’s digital age, people don’t look for news. News comes at them and to them — at an amazing, rapid rate. Millions of people are getting their news from links on Twitter – whether retweets or posts from their friends or network, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher with 4.8 million followers, corporate accounts, or news sites like CNN with over 3 million followers. Twitter is a news source.

People find out about what’s happening in the because they see a link posted on Facebook or Twitter. A recent study by some Korean researchers argued that Twitter is less like a social network and more like a news source; Twitter is the new CNN.

This was also discussed at Israel’s Com.Vention, the country’s largest annual Internet convention. At one of the sessions, with Robert Scoble, and several high tech executives, about digital content creation, it was mentioned by one of the speakers that today, because we get our information at us — and not dependent on any media outlet — journalists are dependent on their own personal brand. Instead of getting our news from a print newspaper, we read journalist’s — people who have credibility and write quality, regardless of what degree they have or what outlets they write —  blogs – whose links we found on Twitter or were shared on Facebook.

I apologize that the sound is not very good, as I took this video from my cell phone. Start at 2:00 in particular, where it talks about how journalism and content consumption and creation is changing, and especially at 3:00 where the speaker talks about the “Brand of Me.”

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Five Things to Do When Developing a New Website

The world has moved online and, despite the explosion of mobile marketing and social networking, your website is an even more important component of your marketing strategy and brand identity than ever before. Yet, many companies still have sites that look like they were designed in 2003 or earlier.

There are a lot of things that go into web design – usability, content writing, SEO, SEM, functionality, content management systems and IT decisions. But there are a few easy things that everyone who has a company and a website needs to know about today. Before you sign a contract with a web designer, here are five things to discuss. Here are five things every company needs to do when developing a new website:

5. Meta Description – As with titles and links, Search Engine Optimization is a complicated process, which factors in many considerations. Good SEO is also not enough to get your site found and building customers but best practices are a minimum. It’s important to learn about these factors when designing your website. But as soon as your website is live, there are a few things that you need to learn how to do and evaluate on your site.

One of the major things that you need to check that each individual page has a unique metadescription. A metadescription is a short (ideally 154 characters or less) description of your page. It’s not visible to your reader, but rather written in your XHTML code. If you’re lucky, and one of the reason to include it, instead of trying to guess what your page is about, Google and other search engines will use your meta description in their site description.

For example, when searching for “brand development”, the focus2 agency has no metadescription and when there results appear in Google’s search results, I have no idea what they are about – and therefore am likely to search elsewhere.

Note that this isn’t just about SEO. Focus2 still showed up on the first page of Google when searching for brand development, albeit at the bottom. Other pages that have metadescriptions appear on the second, third, even thirtieth page. Although maybe this company would have ranked higher had they had a compelling metadescription on their page. But it’s not helpful to their potential customer.

Alternatively, look at the first result. Even though it’s not what the whole site is about, this insider page shows up as the first result in Google. More importantly, the reader learns more about the topic of the page.

The same can be seen when searching for CRM system. Without a meta description:

With a meta description:

4. Title – Does your page title adequately reflect your content or is your homepage title “Homepage”. If your title of your landing page is “homepage” well, your readers don’t know what your site is about and you certainly aren’t showing up in search engines.

Do each of your individual pages have unique titles or is every page the same, repeated title? Besides not being helpful, duplicate titles (and duplicate metadata) can hurt your search engine rankings. Yes, it means that every single page – including individual blog posts, about pages, and boilerplate content – needs to be unique and original.

3. Links – Are people linking to your website?  While link exchanges reflect the worst of the web, and hark back to banner exchanges at the birth of the Web in the early-1990s, the more quality links your site has, the better ranked it will be in the search engine. Consider press release distributions, finding like minded trade groups, blog aggregators, and partner organizations, and asking them to link to your site. Start building quality links – and don’t stop.

However, don’t rely on the low-wage, offshored labor that promises you 25 links for $10, frequently found on eLance and other services. That’s link farming. Those links may include links to black-hat sites or other low-quality sites and may actually do more harm than good. Farms are for growing food, not website traffic.

2. Mobile – The Internet isn’t just for the Personal Computer anymore. It’s gone portable. With the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Nexus, Nokia phone, Symbian, WebOS, Android, or other mobile operating systems, the Internet has gone mobile. A recent Nielson study has shown that 43% of all mobile phone owners are able to access the internet with their handsets, with about 29% of those now actively using the internet via their phones. Additionally, smartphone users are most prominently using their smartphones for searching, with 73% of mobile internet users having conducted an internet search on their mobile. The iPhone and iPod Touch, which have been around for almost three years now, have roughly 85 million users. At the same point in their histories, Netscape and America Online (AOL) had just 18 million and 8 million users, respectively, according to ReadWriteWeb.

1. Usability – How do people use your site? Is it easy for them to find what they are looking for or do they have to click through a variety of menus to find their information. If your potential customer can’t find what they are looking for quickly, that potential won’t be realized and the sale won’t be made.

Conduct usability research, invite others to try to perform tasks, and think about what tasks your potential customers will perform.

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Happy 7th Birthday LinkedIn

One of the points that I try to make to clients is that, while social media has revolutionary changed communication, it is not so new. In fact, this week marks the seventh birthday of LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking site. Launched in May 2003, LinkedIn has over 65 million registered users in over 200 countries. LinkedIn helps users with the most important professional skill: networking. Users can use this business social networking to find jobs, post jobs, or ask and answer professional inquiries.

Businesses can use LinkedIn to establish professional credibility and to recruit for open positions. They can also use it for due diligence, to see if a perspective employee has been recommended, verify their employment history, and see if they have other skills that are not included in their one-page resume.

In a future post, we will talk about 10 ways to use LinkedIn, but for now, we just want to wish this important business network a very happy seventh birthday!

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How much time do you spend on inbound marketing?

As mentioned in the previous blog post about inbound marketing, one of the core tasks of inbound marketing is content creation.

The central component of inbound marketing is content creation. This could mean anything from writing a blog post, having posts and conversation on Twitter or another microblogging service, interacting on groups and pages on Facebook, or creating and administering a page on Facebook. Perhaps it’s creating a video cast or podcast. Content creation can be further narrowed down into two more categories:

  • Tasks that are initial and time-consuming but not ongoing. Examples might include creating a custom landing page, writing SEO metadata for your website and doing keyword research for your static pages. Writing static page web copy is another example. These tasks take a long time but then they stop. It may be a full time job for a month, but when you’re done, the time commitment lessens –  though it’s not totally over.
  • Community management – Writing frequent blog posts, responding to comments, commenting on other’s blogs, interacting and engaging with the twitterati, update your Facebook status, comment on linked in groups, etc.

Another important concern is data analysis. Sure, you have written copy for your website and have metadata. Yes, your Facebook page has a beautiful landing tab with conversion form. The design work is done. But is it doing its job? Are you doing A/B testing to test the effectiveness of your landing page? Are you using your analytics tools to track conversions? Are there new searches and keywords to consider optimizing for? A few hours a week need to be devoted to analyzing and constantly tweaking your content. Perhaps your website still says © 2005 – or worse. Have you updated this?

One of the core content hubs is a blog. A recent post by HubSpot on the fast evolution of SEO makes essential point both about the SEO and lead-generation benefits of blogging and on the time commitment that content creation takes.

What is the most important thing an SMB can do to improve organic traffic?

A Blog. Period.

Write content, have others write content and make it engaging and relevant, then the links will come. I Can’t even begin to tell you the potential here, if you are willing to engage for a few hours a week.

What’s the point? Content creation takes TIME!

The amount of time required in content creation is often underestimated. Yet, inbound marketing practioners say that the amount of time (remember, this is a general rule – it could take less or more time depending on your specific task) is at least two hours daily.

Chris Brogan writes (“How much time should I spend on social media?”) that “2 hours a day is a minimum for MOST efforts.” Matt Dickman of Fleishman-Hillard agrees (“The two hour minimum“) with Chris Brogan. He set the “two hour minimum per day” rule.

Two hours a day? Just to go update Facebook and go on Twitter and do all this unimportant social media stuff is TWO HOURS A DAY? Really? What do you do with the two hours? Chris Brogan and Matt Dickman divide it up differently but the core is: listen, listen some more, interact, engage!

This is how Chris Brogan divides up his time:

  • 1/4 for Listening – Start your day by listening and finding what the world is saying about you, your competitor, your marketplace, etc. Need help with listening? See grow bigger ears. In this space, I also count reading (reading other people’s blogs and other online materials).
  • 1/2 for Commenting/Communicating – Spend time commenting and replying back to people on the various channels where they reach you. If that’s Twitter, email, or wherever you hang out, fine. In the commenting timeframe, I also include sharing. Be sure to tweet links to great articles, use StumbleUpon, Delicious, Facebook share, and all the other various tools that help people find the good stuff. In Google reader, a simple SHIFT-S gives an article a whole lot of new potential fans. In here, I might also add the act of linking in and connecting with people on various networks.
  • 1/4 for Creating – Your efforts in content creation are every bit as important as your connectivity and communication. This might include blogging, making video or audio, creating email newsletters, and anything else you’re building to contribute something to the space. It might be posting those event photos in Flickr and on Facebook. Whatever it is, creating content of some kind should take up 1/4 of your social media efforts, as this is the way you get found. Search engines thrive on new content. Humans seek out new material. The more you can be helpful, the better your opportunities.

Dickard divides his time up similarly.

Listen – Check your feed reader, check your Google alerts, monitor Tweetdeck, do a Twitter search (unless you’ve added them into your reader), check Technorati (you never know), look at your commenting service (co.Comment/Backtype/etc.) to see who has replied to you. This isn’t a one-time thing, set a schedule through the day and check back for 5 minutes.

Engage – Monitor those conversations through the day and reply as close to realtime as you can. Overnight delays are common and (I think) accepted in most cases. During the workday, however, you can make more impact by replying within 2-4 hours. If you have a blog, write a post or at least brainstorm new ideas based on what you’re seeing.

Discover – Another part of the day should spawn from the listening and engagement phases. You should constantly look for new blogs, people on Twitter to follow, new relevant posts to comment on, etc.

How long do you spend on your inbound marketing tasks? How do you divide them up?

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Inbound Marketing – It's Not Just Social

What is digital marketing? Is it just social media marketing? NO! When looking at marketing today, a better way to look at things is to look at the old way of doing things — outbound marketing — and compare that with the new way: inbound marketing.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing is NOT social media. Social media is one component of Inbound Marketing

How does inbound marketing differ from outbound marketing?

Outbound marketing is “traditional, old-style” marketing. It is:

  • Flyers
  • Sales calls (cold calling — you know, those annoying sales calls that always come at dinnertime!)
  • Junk mail
  • Anything that is directed out at you, that you didn’t seek out

Inbound marketing is about getting found by customers. It includes:

  • Creating videos that customers want to see
  • Writing blog posts and maintaining a blog that talks about subjects that people want to see, subscribe to, read, and interact and engage with
  • Participating in the conversation about your brand and its principals on microblogging and social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
  • Creating useful content that people want to read and engage with

There are three key components of inbound marketing. They are:

  • Content: This is the substance of any inbound marketing campaign
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This makes it easier for your potential customers to find your content. Today, content isn’t king but rather optimized content is king.
  • Social Media: Amplifies content

As you can see, social media’s sole purpose is to amplify and promote the optimized content that is being created in the first two components. Most of an inbound marketing campaign’s time should be spent on content creation and not sending content via social media. We will shortly post on how much time is required on a daily basis for anyone who wants to engage in inbound marketing.

According to HubSpot, “When your content is distributed across and discussed on networks of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic and nuanced, and is more likely to draw qualified customers to your site”

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What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is in the news a lot and it’s something that businesses are finally getting. According to a new report from the University of Massachusett’s Center for Marketing Research, more than 79% of Inc 500 firms said that social media is important for their marketing strategy.

But what is Social Media Marketing and how does it differ from traditional marketing and outbound marketing tricks like dial marketing? While social media is conducted on social media marketing channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, it’s not about the channels. Rather, it’s about the social media marketing VALUES.

What is Social Media?

Social media is participatory. Comments, conversation, news, photo, and video and podcasts are made public. This is not just comments and conversation from your brand but also from your customers, community, and — yes, it’s true — even detractors.

Social media connects experiences with a community and brand.

Social media is based on the notion of influence. This is the same principle as traditional public relations, but instead of the journalist acting as the gatekeeper, each individual can have influence – regardless of their day job.

Social media applies cross-platform and cross-task. It’s not about the platform. It’s also not just a marketing task, but an interdisciplinary and cross-department task. Social media marketing is a term that describes use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service.

Social media marketing is just one component of Inbound Marketing. It’s not the be-all and end all.

How about your business? Do you consider social media important? What results have you seen from using it?

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What is blogging?

Blogging is an essential part of any content creation strategy. Yet, there is still a minority of people who still have not read blogs or do not know what a blog is. To address that audience, as well as to discuss more advanced topics of what are some ways to host a blog, I created the following presentation. For some people, this may be too simple and for others it is too advanced.

If it is too advanced, or there are things you do not understand, I am curious to know what you think.

Introduction To Blogging

View more presentations from clinegroup.
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What a successful inbound marketing campaign looks like

HubSpot is one of my favorite online marketing and web analytics companies frequently blogs about inbound marketing. In one of their recent posts, they answer a question that we are often asked by clients: What does success look like? How do you measure success? While analytics, traffic, and sales are an important end result of success, this does not happen by magic. One of my favorite quotes is from wine guru and business guru Gary Vaynerchuk: “Viral is not strategy. Viral is an outcome.”

But what needs to be done in order to get to that outcome? How does a company need to transform itself in order to achieve inbound marketing success? It’s actually a fairly intense process that requires organizational buy in and a different organizational structure than previously needed. Hubspot’s blog post “What does an Inbound Marketing transformation look like?” does a good job in addressing this issue.

Content Creation

You already know you need to create content to be a successful inbound marketer, but if you’ve transformed your company, it might look a little different than you expect.

  • Marketing team is managing the blog – Maybe they’re writing a few blog posts or producing some videos, but primary responsibility for content creation isn’t in their laps any more.  Instead…
  • Bloggers come from other departments –  If you’re a software company, your product managers and engineers are blogging.  If you’re a consulting company, your consultants are producing all kinds of content.
  • The executive team is watching your blog analytics – Why?  Well, your blog is allowing you to get found, so they care.  They also want to make sure that you’re getting good ROI from the time folks are spending producing content.

Sales

Maybe it was tough to get the sales team’s buy-in at first (especially since you might be making them blog!), but now they’re complete inbound marketing converts.  Why?

  • They don’t cold-call any more – Every lead they get has already been to your website or interacted with your company.
  • They know what leads want – They’ve checked all the available reports and know exactly which pages of your website their lead has visited.
  • They know when leads are thinking about you – It’s not magic, it’s an email alert they get when a lead comes back to your site.

Public Relations

Maybe you’ve gotten rid of your traditional PR department by now, but, at minimum, its functions look wildly different.

  • The PR folks are all about social media – Their Twitter Grade is 99+, and they’re completely aware of every single time your brand is mentioned.
  • Everyone in the company does some PR – The gist of your social media policy is “use common sense”, and everyone is encouraged to Tweet, Facebook, & blog responsibly.
  • Press releases fit into SEO strategy – Press releases are written to specifically align with link-building and keyword-targeting strategies.  The era of vomiting how cool you are all over the place is over.

The Executive Suite

This is probably the best measure of how tranformed your company is.  Your executives buy into inbound marketing and pay attention.

  • ROI ROI ROI – And have we mentioned ROI?  They care about how you’re spending your time and energy, and appreciate that they understand the ROI they get from inbound marketing.
  • Transparency – They’re aware of (and care about) your social media presence and your blog.  They’ve even been known to write a post or three themselves.
  • They’re true believers – Sure, they were skeptical at first, but now your executives have become obsessed with seeing where your leads come from on a high level.  They love inbound marketing and give you active suggestions on your next content creation effort.

Does your company look like this yet?  What might you have to do to get there?

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Toyota: Example of a Crisis Communications Fail

Toyota’s recent failures and poor press is a example of how crisis communication in 2010 must embrace the cultural changes taking place.

When speaking to clients, the most important thing that I try to explain is that social media and the Internet is not about technology – it’s not about Twitter or Facebook or blogging or Flickr. Rather, it’s about transparency.

The recent worldwide Toyota recall was a major communications disaster for Toyota precisely because they forgot that one essential point — transparency.

Since 2002, Toyota warned auto dealerships of problems in the Toyota Camry. While the company later claimed that their problems were due to stuck floor mats, the earlier documents referred to the problem as electrical.

FAILURE #1: Changing their story and covering up. While cover ups (while unethical) may have worked in an age where information was hard to come by, in today’s age of legal and digital transparency, any cover up will be discovered in short time.”They can fix these problems easily,” said Tim Howard, a Northeastern University law professor who heads the legal group suing Toyota. “But it would cost them about $500 a car nationwide. If you have six [million] to seven million cars, you add the numbers — it’s between $4 [billion] and $5 billion. It’s hard to actually tell the truth when those numbers are at the bottom of that truth.” (CNN)

But the problem continued. Five years later, in 2007, over 55,000 Camry’s were recalled. And two years after that, Toyota’s image was significantly tarnished with millions of their vehicles recalled. Backtracking on their 2002 story, the auto company recalled thousands of floor mats in 2007 and 2009.  Yet, while Toyota blamed the floor mats in their November 2009 recall letter, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA)  said that Toyota’s letter was “inaccurate and misleading” and that, “removal of the floor mats is simply an interim measure, not a remedy of the underlying defect in the vehicles.

When Toyota’s CEO was called in from Japan to testify in front of a Congressional testimony, he was also criticized for evading the congressmen’s answers.

Had Toyota been transparent, the problem could have been resolved with far less negative press, without Congressional sanction, and without the decline in sales.t was estimated that each Toyota dealership in the US could lose between $1.75 million to $2 million a month in revenue, a total loss of $2.47 billion across the country from the entire incident. Additionally, Toyota Motors as a whole announced that it could face losses totaling as much as $2 billion from lost output and sales worldwide. Between 25 January and 29 January 2010 Toyota shares fell in value by 15%. Competitors began offering incentives for Toyota owners to trade in their cars and purchase competitors.

Toyota has not done an adequate job of engaging with their customers online. Toyota’s European Twitter account has less than 2,100 followers and only tweets sporadically. The same is true with their Canadian account.

Toyota is slowly reversing these concerns by starting to address their safety concerns via their other social network profiles. For example, the background of Toyota USA’s Twitter account (@toyota) now includes a link to the recall site and they are tweeting out the official statements. The company should, however, empower their community ambassadors (those tweeting under the brand’s name) to speak about the problems Toyota is facing.

Beyond a link, their Facebook account does not reference the crisis in a professional manner. After Akio Toyoda’s forced Congressional testimony, the company began to address the crisis by hoping that readers would demand less information. In fact, readers are demanding more recall information.

If your product is due for a recall, here are some steps that you can take:

  • Plan Ahead – Businesses should have a recall emergency plan. They should also consider purchasing recall insurace.
  • Be Transparent – Transparency will win you a lot of goodwill. One company noticed potential problems and voluntarily contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission and then, when faced with a product recall, was told by the CPSC that it didn’t need to make its recall public, but the CEO did it anyway. The result? The company was able to rebound.
  • Respond on Your Marketing Channels. This means not merely sending out a press release over the wires but also a response (and preferably a personal response, not simply copying your release) over your company’s blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, microblogging account, and other social networks that you may be on.