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February 9, 2010

US Army Embraces Social Media

The US Army is going to great lengths to embrace and encourage the use of social media. “We do not want to be a closed institution” said LTG Benjamin C. Freakley – US Army Accessions Command. With that in mind, the Army has created online communities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and MySpace. They currently have more than 250,000 friends and followers – and this number is growing daily.

“It’s really transforming the way we look at recruiting, advertising, and communicating” added LTC Brian Tribus. It’s allowing families to stay in touch during difficult and stressful times. They can share photos, instant messages, and web cams. It’s clear that this is a trend the Army continues to expand – especially as the technology further develops. There are a number of potential uses that will improve communication and morale among our soldiers.

Army Strong Stories is an innovative program which allows deployed soldiers “to share their unfiltered perspective on daily life in the military through blog entries, photos and video.” There is currently over 100 soldier bloggers participating in this program.

I think this is an incredibly functional and practical use of social media. I’m anxious to see other branches of the armed forces adopt these tools as well. I’ve added them to my blogroll and look forward to interacting with them.
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January 26, 2010

Email optimization strategies to boost revenue

Email optimization strategies to boost revenue Successful email marketing incorporates a combination of strategies. I’ve condensed a long list to what I would consider the top five best practices

Compelling content
Effective email strategy starts with intriguing content. Don’t just send emails preaching about how great your company is. In order to captivate the attention of your readers, you first need to fully understand your audience. It’s a good idea to do some research and identify topics that will be of particular interest and timely. Share your knowledge of the industry or a unique perspective on an important subject. Continually mix up your creative messages and styles. Feel free to use a rotation of different templates to give your newsletter a fresh look.

Segment your audience
It takes a lot more time and preparation, but segmenting your list of recipients allows you to speak directly to your customers and prospects. You’ll be able to clearly identify common business problems and cover topics that truly captivate you audience. The key is planning, organization, and testing.

Delivery dates
You can significantly increase the effectiveness of your newsletter by determining the best day of the week and time to send. Know your audience. For many businesses, Tuesday or Wednesday are the best days to deliver. Mondays can be hectic and Fridays can be busy or people may be rushing to cut out early. Know your audience and more importantly know their schedules. This will help you to determine which day they will be most inclined to open and read your e-newsletters.

Maintain lists and keep them updated
e-Newsletters can only be effective if your customers and prospects actually receive them. In today’s economy, turnover rates can be high. Periodically confirm that you have the correct information – more importantly, make sure you have the most appropriate contact person on your list. If an assistant is receiving the information, there’s a good chance, it’s getting filtered into the trash bin. Also, clean out undeliverable addresses and respect those who unsubscribe.

Optimize landing pages
As your email links back to your website, take the time to optimize the landing pages and highlight the information that you want them to see. Take full advantage of the qualified traffic you are generating. Highlight upcoming events, new product releases, and other relevant announcements.

While there are many strategies which can improve the effectiveness of email newsletter campaigns, I have taken excerpts from our white paper which discusses in-depth best practices to boost revenue. We encourage you to share your success stories or challenges with email marketing.

January 24, 2010

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie break up – a marketing scheme?

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie break up It’s been reported that the powerful Hollywood couple Brangelina, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, have officially called it quits. With a brand as recognizable as Brangelina, why would this pair consider separating? Could this be a stunt to generate even more publicity? When you’re on top of the entertainment world for five years, what else is there to do?

With six children between them and arguably the most popular Hollywood icons of our time, is this just a silly rumor circulating around the Internet? That’s what Perez Hilton says. However, it seems there is more validity to this report than is apparent.

Was Jennifer Aniston a better fit for Brad… what do you think?

January 22, 2010

Measuring Social Media ROI

Measuring Social Media ROI For many small businesses, measuring the return on investment (ROI) for social media is a mystery. While some of these businesses actively engage in blogging, tweeting, and perhaps even Facebook, they have no idea on how to gauge the effectiveness of their efforts. The remaining businesses that have not entered the social media frenzy are hesitant to get started because they too are looking for an accurate method of determining the ROI or impact of their social campaigns.

Since this has been a burning question for many small businesses, I’d like to share my thoughts. For starters, let’s take a quick look at measuring ROI for a traditional marketing vehicle – direct mail. The first step is to determine the goal of the campaign. Are you trying to create awareness, generate leads, close sales, or drive traffic to your website? Once you have decided on your goal, establish an attainable benchmark and track responses against that baseline. For example, let’s say you are anticipating a 2% response to your campaign. It’s good practice to direct your recipients to respond to a unique URL or web address. Since this page is not part of your standard web traffic, you can easily determine the number of people that initially reply to your mail piece. Furthermore, if you have an offer, you can have them submit some basic information to access a whitepaper or other incentive. This will further screen your qualified leads and allow you to monetize the results of your campaign. From this point, you should have some metrics that determine your conversion rate – from interested prospect into valued customer. The most accurate ROI calculation takes into account a customer’s lifetime value, or the amount of sales generated by that customer over time.

So if measuring the results of traditional marketing is so tangible, why is social media different? The answer, it’s not. Many of the same principles of conventional marketing analysis holds true for social media campaigns. For example, let’s say you want to start a company blog. Unlike the options for traditional marketing, your goal should be to share, educate, and create awareness. In other words, you post information that is timely and of interest to your customers and prospects. You do this in a non-invasive manner to attract potential customers. You can create awareness and drive traffic to your blog with an e-newsletter and direct mail, but additionally you want people to seek you out and subscribe to your content on their own.

This brings us back to measuring the effectiveness of your blog (or Facebook page or Twitter account). There are many tools available such as Google Analytics which can generate a number of meaningful reports. You definitely want to monitor the traffic of your blog over time. This will help determine trends and most appealing topics. Again, without a clear benchmark, you won’t be able to accurately determine your ROI. Set realistic goals… perhaps set out to obtain 2 new subscribers to your blog in the first month, 5 in the second month, 10 in the third, etc. I won’t get into how to attract new subscribers in this article – but rather stay focused on the success-rate of the initiatives.

Using a combination of website traffic statistics, new subscriptions, and specific page views, can help you determine where to focus your energy – and the effectiveness of your social media campaign. Unlike a single direct mail campaign social media is an ongoing campaign. It takes time, knowledge, and patience to get it right. Over time, you can build long-term relationships and interact with customers and prospects in a friendly manageable format. With the proper tools in place, you can accurately determine the ROI of your social media efforts.

Don’t be discouraged. We can help.

January 21, 2010

What’s next for Twitter?

What's next for Twitter? After millions of people scrambled to get a Twitter account activated, they later asked themselves – ok, what’s next? While the underlying concept behind Twitter is interesting – stay connected with brief snippets, the software is still in its infancy. There are several companies trying to add more functionality and purpose to this infrastructure.

January 20, 2010

Profiting from social media

Many people continually ask me how they can make money or increase sales from social media. My answer is simple: it’s like losing weight. There are no shortcuts or magic pills that will instantly shed pounds. Losing weight is a lifestyle change and commitment to health and fitness.

The same holds true for social media. Don’t expect to sign up at Twitter or Facebook in the morning and start generating sales in the afternoon. It’s not that simple. It’s a change in corporate culture. It’s a commitment to participating in relevant online communities and discussions. It is most effective by adding relevant and interesting content and opinions, inviting others to share their experiences, and most importantly reading and listening.

Jeffrey Gitomer had some interesting observations in his article: Social media – the new cold call. Wanna play?

There are key words to consider as you try to build your social media world. Connections, attract, video, value, consistent, fan, relevance, write, allocate, monetize.

But there’s a secret. How you position and promote yourself in the NON-social media world is critical to your success in the social media world. Your writing, your website, your blog, your ezine, your personal brand in your marketplace, your perceived value in the marketplace, and your reputation, are elements of attraction that affect your social media status – and surely your success.

There’s billions of dollars of new business being generating by social media – how much of it will you get? Maybe you need to get a bit more serious about being a bit more social.

It’s not an overnight sensation; social media is here to stay… and your involvement could be critical to the future of your business.

January 15, 2010

Making a viral video

Everyone has the same idea… let’s make a viral commercial and get millions of views and free advertising. Well, the reality is, it’s not that simple. Nobody wants to watch a commercial simply promoting a product or service.

I’ve done plenty of research on this topic. The most viewed or viral videos are simply the ones that make us laugh, amazed, or inspired. Think spontaneity or the unexpected. All natural videos of babies laughing, animals doing something incredible, and people falling. Those are the videos that capture our attention… the ones that evoke emotion – and that we remember. Furthermore, they motivate us to pass the video on to our friends and colleagues. Whether it’s a laugh or a feeling of disbelief, we want to share that emotion with others.

With that said, making a viral video takes a lot of imagination and perhaps some special effects to create an illusion. People may watch repeatedly just to determine if the video is real or not. Think content and story… not message. That’s the major difference between traditional commercial advertising and a viral video.

January 13, 2010

Social Media Predictions for 2010

An interesting outlook for social media in 2010 from Scott Monty:

…it’s clear that people want to connect with others by location, as well as share experiences and seek recommendations by those who are well informed. And whether that means connecting in the communities in which they live or those to which they travel, people will begin to use more of these kinds of services. As an adjunct to location-based social networks, expect location-based search to blossom as well.

With that said, an increase in usage of sites like foursqure and tripit is anticipate.

many in the mainstream still don’t know what an RSS feed is or how to use an RSS reader (or that they simply don’t use one), it’s clear that email subscriptions still rule the roost. Not to mention that email is ubiquitous. It’s just generally accepted that everyone has an email address.

keep your eyes on the mobile space, on fuller integration of PR and marketing, and more focus on quality content in 2010. Overall, the space will begin to show some signs of maturation, and will begin a future trend of being integrated as a part of day-to-day business in many organizations.

January 12, 2010

How do you listen to your customers?

Understanding the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a critical ongoing step in developing a successful product or service. There are many techniques to effectively process and incorporate customer feedback. Historically, this has been allocated to a sales or business development role – which in turn would “occasionally” share this information with the technical or marketing team. There are a few challenges with this type of system: 1) it can be slow to get feedback, 2) the feedback is not always accurate since it gets interpreted by many individuals, 3) the feedback can depend on the established relationship or level of comfort between the sales rep and the customer.

Regardless of your industry, you should ensure you have the proper channels in place to allow customers to conveniently voice their opinions. Invite them to share their experience or usage of your products/services. Whether through a corporate blog, online survey, webinar, or e-newsletter, there are many options to encourage feedback. Consider offering a reward for feedback. Perhaps a discount for feedback which leads to an enhanced feature. The odds are, if one customer experiences an issue, they’re probably not alone. This leads to quick conflict resolution.

As always, your comments and experiences on customer interaction and VOC are welcome!