Start With a Yellow Pad

Your Starting Point to Outline Your Community of Interest

Dan McCarthy drafted a great post yesterday about our Community of Interest, that was thought provoking for me, in that for all of the social tools we have, they are just tools.

And, in Dan’s post, the starting point is a blank sheet of paper, with four quadrants. What comes to mind for me is, the Basics of this exercise is not dissimilar to what we all did before the advent of Social Media, just then it was Business Cards, or a Rolodex we used, but we still started with paper.

So, I too started with a blank sheet of paper to out line and better plan my own Community of Interest. One thing that Social Media has done for me is greatly influenced the reach each of those four quadrants, and the speed.

Social Media is Outreach on Steroids

We have said this before in our presentations, but it really is so, the reach of social media to further connections is really incredible. Think about your favorite author, it is most likely you can communicate directly with them via one of the multiple conduits.

Social media has allowed everyone to be much more accessible, and much easier to contact and connect.

So, as you think about next year, and expanding your own Community of Interest, know that it works fast and furious, and you likely can connect to just about anyone you want, Including your competitors customers.

Is Your Brand Listening

I follow Andy Sernovitz because he is really in tune with what larger businesses are doing with Social Media Marketing, Corporate Blogs and a whole array of Word of Mouth Marketing.

Lands’ End verses Zappos

Andy’s recent article Land’s End Verses Zappo’s caught my interest, first just from the point that Andy was making, What happened to Land’s End, everyone used to talk about them, now all the buzz is about Zappo’s.

My first reaction was, well, Land’s End simply got outmatched by the beloved Zappo’s. Tony Hsieh is a pretty dynamic guy and created a culture at Zappo’s that most business executives only dream of. It is fascinating that they sold their company to a rival, who is in the same business, and could have done everything Zappo’s did.

But Then, Land’s End Responded

The real point of this post isn’t about either online retailers, it is about Land’s End LISTENING. Shortly after the post, Stacey Symonds Senior Director, Marketing & Customer Analytics at Lands’ End responded to the article. Her points were clear, and not defensive. Stacey brought up many Social Media initiatives that they were working at Land’s End, including an extensive facebook fan page and facebook campaign.

While I am a huge fan of Zappo’s, I am also a new admirer of Lands’ End. The manor in which this unfolded is exactly how brands should respond, and Engage.

Nice Job Land’s End!

Are You and Your Brand Listening to what folks are saying, You Should Be.

Follow the Money; Social Media Spend Shifts

So, No Pepsi at the 2010 Superbowl! Wow, what do you think about that?

As reported by the good folks at Mashable;

For the first time in 23 years, Pepsi will not have any ads in the Super Bowl. Instead, the company will be spending $20 million on a social media campaign it’s calling The Pepsi Refresh Project.

Such a large move is noteworthy for any company, however Pepsi’s symbiotic relationship with the Super Bowl makes this shift to new media that much more seismic. ABC News notes that Pepsi spent $142 million on Super Bowl ads over the last decade. Pepsi’s ads are often some of the most iconic, and the company has historically pulled out all the stops for the Super Bowl.

We believe that The Directional Flow of Marketing Has Changed If you are following what the big brands are doing, it is pretty clear that they are waning from traditional marketing more and more in favor of Social Media Marketing.

Will they find the payoff?

Well, that has yet to be seen.  But one thing that we are seeing with Social Media Marketing, both from our own experiences with our small business and what others are doing that isn’t talked about is that it is largely about Marketing Within. What we are seeing is that many times the most successful social media marketing campaigns are about the brands customers.

Compound Effect

We penned a post a year or so ago over on Search Engine Guide about the Compound Effects of Social Media Marketing, and received almost sixty comments. The point of the post though can be seen in what Pepsi is doing.

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This is an interesting strategy, especially for a company that continues to spend much of its advertising budget on television. Like other social media campaigns, execution is key. If Pepsi can effectively orchestrate the Pepsi Refresh Project, the company can build brand awareness while also helping out communities across the world. On the flip side, if not executed properly, the company could wind up spending $20 million on philanthropic causes (which is to be commended), without getting the benefits of a buzz-generating ad campaign.

So, an opportunity to create brand Awareness AND Philanthropic Causes sure seems to be an excellent leverage of marketing dollars. This will be an interesting experiment to watch.

2010 Social Media Marketing Predictions

Dan Zarrella is an award-winning social, search, and viral mar­ket­ing sci­en­tist and author of the O’Reilly media book “The Social Media Mar­ket­ing Book”. He has a back­ground in web devel­op­ment and com­bines his pro­gram­ming capa­bil­i­ties with a pas­sion for social mar­ket­ing to cre­ate appli­ca­tions like the social URL short­ener Votrs.com, Link Attrac­tion Fac­tors key­word tools, as well as Tweet­Psych, Twit­ter­Brand­Spon­sors, Tweet­Backs and Tweet­Suite.

His Link Attrac­tion Fac­tors report helped read­ers deter­mine which top­ics, days, times, and key­words attract links in social media sto­ries for seman­tic con­tent opti­miza­tion, while his Viral Con­tent report details the moti­va­tions, pref­er­ences and habits involved in online con­tent sharing.

Here are Dan’s 2010 Social Marketing Predictions;

IRL

One of the most pow­er­ful poten­tials of social media is for it to not only con­nect peo­ple online, but facil­i­tate con­nec­tions offline as well. 2010 will see an increase in loca­tion aware apps and games that blur the line between the web and the real work with tech­nolo­gies like Four Square and aug­mented real­ity. Dri­ving this will be con­tin­ued inter­est in and improve­ment of mobile web tech­nolo­gies like smart phones and net­books. The real world be impor­tant again.

Micro-Targeting and Personalization

Every­one actively engag­ing in social net­work­ing is shar­ing a ton of data about them­selves and in 2010 com­pa­nies will lever­age this infor­ma­tion in increas­ingly sophis­ti­cated ways. Micro-targeting and per­son­al­iza­tion will take advan­tage of infor­ma­tion on indi­vid­ual peo­ple to deliver highly cus­tomized mes­sag­ing and con­tent to small and smaller seg­ments. Opin­ion min­ing tech­nolo­gies will begin to mature, allow­ing researchers to uti­lize the entire social web as a global focus group for any brand, prod­uct, ser­vice or idea.

Small Busi­ness Social Media Marketing

In 2010 small busi­nesses will con­tinue to real­ize the high bang-to-buck ratio of social media mar­ket­ing and will get into it like never before. Social media is a great equal­izer in that it allows small com­pa­nies to com­pete more effec­tively with large ones. They’ll take a strong do-it-yourself stance and will demand account­abil­ity and effec­tive analytics.

The Real Time Web

We’ve been hear­ing about the emer­gence of a real time web for a while now, but 2010 is the year when it will really come into its own bol­stered by advances in mobile tech­nol­ogy, micro-content pro­duc­tion and the recent inte­gra­tion of Twit­ter with Bing and Google. Tra­di­tional link pop­u­lar­ity search is too slow so it will be aug­mented or replaced by instant real time based search. Trend spot­ting will hap­pen min­utes or hours after some new fad starts, rather than days, weeks or months. And you’ll hear about break­ing news faster than ever before.

What One Top Blogger Recommends for Realtors

Another Sherpa product is about to launch, CRE Sherpa! (Comercial Real Estate Sherpa)

CRE Sherpa is a turn key social media marketing tool for CRE Brokers, property owners or property managers. For a low monthly fee, CRE Sherpa takes the risk and complexity out of social media marketing, creating a new kind of Internet marketing presence for your company.

What One Top Blogger Recommends for Realtors

If you are new to the space, one of the best known Social Media Bloggers is Chris Brogan, also a best selling author of Trust Agents, had the following to say in his article, If I Were a Realtor,

We think Chris has a pretty solid approach, albeit it may seem a little strange if you are new to Social Media Marketing, Here is Chris’s article;

If I were a Realtor looking to use social media for my business:

DigitalSherpa:Content, Engagement, Analytics, and Lead Creation

For a manageable monthly fee, DigitalSherpa will develop and execute a complete social media Internet marketing program. This is a fully integrated approach with a custom blog at the core. Content management, social newtork identities, tools, SEO and reporting analytics are all included.

 

 

 

DigitalSherpa provides the following services for an affordable, fixed monthly fee:

Content Management

• Blog hosting and maintenance for your single location business, or a network of blogs for regional and national businesses with multiple locations.
• Ongoing content creation and management; regular blog posts with content written specifically about your products, events, promotions, projects, and business highlights. Also relevant content created by our award winning home design journalists along with additional sources we identify and source for you
• NCI supplied content is selected and developed to establish community engagement around the design sensibility, budgets, and project scope of your target prospect and existing customer;
• Image galleries to present your perspective;
• Interactive content;
• Helpful resources, tools, and answers to FAQs;
• Content that you want to share about personal favorites, tips, and activities that define you, your community, or your business.

Social Network Development Maintenance

• Creation of social identities for your business on Facebook and Twitter
• Development and publishing of content for your social identities
• Recruiting and development of your social network connections among your clients and prospects
• Monitoring of your social network activity for problematic or sensitive issues and dialogue

Internet Tool Development / Search Engine Optimization

• Periodic enhancement and upgrade of social media tools, such as blog platforms, interactive widgets, etc.
• Analysis and refinement of Search Engine Optimization performance for your professional business blog in search engines such as Google, to increase traffic and raise your business and personal brand’s profile.

Reporting Analytics

Monthly reporting and analysis will include:

• Measurement of how many members of your network interacted with your program
• Report on traffic and leads
• Referal activity measurement
• Measure business activity among customers who are participants in your social network vs. non-participants

Engagement; A Lost Art

We speak of Engagement with the customer today as if that is something new, but it really is just a Lost Art. I grew up in a small rural farming community in mid state Ohio. My father was a home builder. We lived on a small farm that my grandfather and father sort of farmed.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

The closet town was a few miles away. Way before 24/7 grocery stores, the ones that used to close by 6:00 PM and just sold groceries, AND they bagged AND carried your groceries to the trunk of your car. The owner of the store was also the head butcher. Whenever we would go to the grocery store my folks were always greeted by first name, seemingly by everyone in the store. But the piece I remember the most was that the store owner “Knew” our family, all of us, and knew lot’s of things about us, including exactly how my dad liked his cut of meat.

The biggest takeaway from all of this was the Experience, in a time when creating that happened as a part of the business exchange, and not a targeted strategy.

Are Those Days Gone

Certainly lots 0f Brands are working hard to create and execute a Customer Experience. Will the days of the grocer knowing the cut of meat ever return, well, maybe.

Think about Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, they all know me pretty well, and they know individually other of our family members, at least based on our preferences. They have enacted a different form of Engagement, and I can even reciprocate with comments and reviews.

We Are Connecting Again
We returning to those old days of Engagement, albeit it may not look exactly the same. Think about blogs, (we do that here at Digital Sherpa you know, LOL) Blogs allow a two way conversation, and a rich interaction with the followers and commentators, and Your Customers, and Your Competitors Customers.

And there is another thing, a pretty important one too, the Internet allows like minded folks to connect and organize at hyper speed, literally with a single click. It does that by scanning for “keywords and phrases”, henceforth that whole world of SEO (Search Engine Optimaxzation) has unfolded.

The Internet, allows your Company Blog to be a super charged Outreach Machine. Provide some great and value driven content on your Blog, and guess what Shows Up, Engagement!

Will we sell more stuff

As we wind down the year, like many others I reflect a lot on where we have been, and where we are headed. It seems like we have been talking about Social Media Marketing and all of the benefits for a long time, yet until recently folks looked at you like you had a horn protruding from your head.

As we close out 2009, Social Media IS all the buzz, but will it deliver the Results? And friends, some Social Media Marketing Studios get rather fuzzy regarding Results.  Most business folks aren’t so fuzzy about results, yet how many times have you heard

“I Know Half My Marketing Works, I Just Don’t Know Which Half”

The first question to ask your marketing studio or marketing director, frankly the only question, is “Will we sell more stuff”

“The sole purpose of marketing is to sell more to more people, more often and at higher prices. There is no other reason to do it.”

That was our starting point for our own business at Urbane Apartments when we started to apply Social Media Marketing in 2004. Build it and they will come IS a myth, you have to market your product, there really is no other way. Our Goal for employing the effective use of Social Media Marketing was To Rent More Apartments.

Put that bluntly to many of the Social Media Purists typically spurs a reaction, as some folks aren’t so comfortable with Results. It is easier and more fun to talk about all the many things that Social Media Marketing will do to enhance your companies relationship with your customer, all of which are true, but the bottom line is, If You Aren’t Selling More Stuff, It Is Just a Hobby.

So, That is our Starting Point for effective use of Social Media Marketing, To sell more stuff, to more people, for more money.

Social Media Campaigns Build Strong Community Preference

Consumers are engaging with businesses and brands they follow through social networks and media platforms. A recent study by Razorfish entitled “FEED: Digital Brand Experience Survey” polled users that were active “friending” businesses as summarized in a recent report.

The research showed a dramatic increase in awareness or inclination to consider the brand when in the market to buy, and then to ultimately purchase or recommend the businesses’ service or products for consumers following those businesses through their online social communities. Here are some of the highlight results:

DigitalSherpa programs allows companies and brands to integrate social media into their marketing plans by simplifying the process and doing all the heavy lifting at an extremely affordable monthly cost. Just email us at ajapko@nci.com and let us help you put the social web to work for your business.

The ROI of Social Media Marketing

DigitalSherpa is a service of Network Communications, Inc. and the company’s Chairman & CEO, Dan McCarthy, has been an early adopter of social media as an internet marketing strategy. In his blog, ViralHousingFix, Dan has shared many of his observations about the application of social media to marketing and has articulated some foundation principles.  To better understand DigitalSherpa’s approach to social media marketing and to gain additional perspective, you may want to read Dan’s following posts:

ROI of social media marketing: 3 case studies

Winning at search (small and medium sized businesses)

Explosive growth of social media: A visual experience

Demographics of online social behavior

Video: Fact-based, compelling — social media growth

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