Why you want a social media presence

Our roughly 1,000 Digital Sherpa clients buy one of our Sherpa programs for a variety of reasons.  Of course everyone likes to attract online traffic, find new customers and generate leads.  And while those are outcomes of a good social media and content marketing program, that’s not always what brings our customers to our virtual door step.

Some buy it for the content creation; it takes a lot of time and discipline to write 2 quality blog posts per week.  But there are a great many who buy our program because they want to build a social media presence.

The adoption of businesses in the social media space has been exploding in the past year.  And Sherpa clients are a part of that surge of businesses on that leading edge of social media adoption.  But often when we ask new clients why they want to build a social media presence, the answers range from “because I don’t want to be left behind” to “my son/daughter/grandson/friend said I should” to “I really don’t know, but I feel like I probably should”.

The answer to why you want to be in social media can be found in a recently published report from Comscore.  Comscore is an internet marketing research firm that tracks and reports on online behavior.  Their recent report “Women on the Web:  How Women are Shaping the Internet” gives some great insight into the very question of why you want to be in social media.   The report speaks for itself, but I’ll highlight a few things I found particularly relevant:

• Women are more enagaged than men on the internet
• Social networking is central to women’s internet experience
• Women drive a disproportionate amount of online spending
• 9 out of 10 women in North America visited a social networking site in April 2010

Social networking sites are prime areas for attracting new customers whether you want to lure them to online sales or to visit your showroom.  The audience is there, what are you doing to make sure they find you?

White Papers and eBooks

Health and Fitness just went digital with HealthFitSherpa

The time to get pumped up has officially arrived. Digital Sherpa is growing, and building a new brand around, well, body building. The NCI company dives into the health and fitness market with the release of HealthFitSherpa, a fixed-cost monthly subscription service aimed at industries focused on health, fitness, beauty, wellness, cosmetic, spa, nutrition and diet.

Following the lead of other successful Digital Sherpa ventures – such as DesignSherpa for the design industry and CommunitySherpa in the apartment community market – HealthFitSherpa offers health industry businesses a chance to expand their digital footprint with an original blog, Facebook page, Twitter presence and more.

The custom-branded approach means to improve search results, increase referrals and leverage social media tools to deliver fresh content and will ultimately impact a company’s bottom line. It’s a proven approach that offers measurable results.

“Social media marketing requires expertise, management and focus,” said Bill Pryor, business development director for HealthfitSherpa. “NCI has successfully created over 1,000 social media programs for local businesses in a variety of industries. HealthfitSherpa will now serve the health and fitness industry, which has natural communities ideal for this type of client and community engagement.”

Learn more about HealthFitSherpa here.

The Customer Experience Gap and How to Bridge It

Our  friend and customer service advocate, Becky Carroll penned an interesting post over on her blog, Customers Rock. The jest of the post is the significant disconnect with what companies think they are delivering relative to Customer Experience, and what their customers purport.

Understanding the principles of customer experience and actually delivering them do not necessarily go hand in hand. In 2008 Bain & Company found that while 80 percent of companies believe they deliver a superior experience to their customers, only 8 percent of those companies’ customers report having such an experience. Similarly, a CMO Council study found that fifty-six percent of technology vendors perceive themselves as being extremely customer-centric, compared with only 12% of their customers.

There is a clear disconnect between the experience companies think they deliver and what customers experience, perceive and – more importantly – desire. It’s not about what you think… it’s about what your customers think.

In order to determine whether you are disappointing, meeting or exceeding your customers’ expectations, you need to continuously listen. And it’s not as easy as it sounds. It goes far beyond monitoring the chatter on Twitter and other social media platforms or performing your annual customer satisfaction survey. It requires soliciting customer feedback on a regular, ongoing basis at multiple touch points, and closing the loop to address issues and understand root cause.

How to Bridge the Gap

I think part of the issue stems from confusing Customer Service with Customer Experience. It is much easier to Enhance the Customers Experience than to deliver stealer Customer Service. We confuse great customer service as being Ritz Carlton or Nordstrom, it isn’t, as customer service varies based on the product type, brand and product price point.

Folks can argue that if they want, but you simply do not expect the same level of customer service at McDonalds, a fast food chain as you do at Mortons, a high-end steakhouse. The problem with focusing on increased Customer Service is, irrespective of your product price point, folks always expect a little more “service” than your product offering is designed to deliver. Trying to out service your competitors is a race to eroding profits. I am not suggesting that a company only deliver minimal customer service, but am pointing out there are differences.

However, companies that shift their thinking toward Enhancing the Customers Experience should have a much easier time, and really speaks to shifts in your behavior to align with your brand. This was an epiphany moment for us at Urbane, as once we started behaving, consistent with our Brand, things became much easier and more clear, all of which centered around Enhancing the Residents Experience at each of the touch points throughout the resident life cycle.

What are your thoughts about this? Is there a difference between Customer Service and customer Experience?

Social Influencers Help You Sell More Stuff

Social Influence Marketing, as described in Social Media Marketing for Dummies, is a technique that employs Social Media (content created by everyday people using highly accessible and scalable technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, microblogs, bookmarks, social networks, communities, wiki’s and vlogs) and Social Influencers, (everyday people who have an outsized influence on their peers by virtue of how much content they share on line) to achieve an organization’s marketing and business needs.

Social Media, which was likely one of the most hyped buzzwords in 2008, refers to content created and consumed by regular people for each other.

Social Media and its making now allows everyone in the world to be a content publisher and arbitrator.

Social Influencers are the everyday people who influence the consumer as he/she makes a purchasing decision. Simply, the people who influence a brand affinity and purchasing decisions are Social Influencers. Engagement is a Lost Art, are you targeting Social Influencers as part of your overall marketing objectives?

Social influence is the change in behavior that one person causes in another, intentionally or unintentionally, as a result of the way the changed person perceives themselves in relationship to the influencer, other people and society in general.

Christine Thompson describes Social Influencers in her post titled Social Influence Marketing;

Key influencers – people who have almost celebrity status in the social media world – in some cases can exercise considerable influence on purchase decisions throughout the consumer’s buying process. Rarely does the consumer actually know these key influencers in real life.

Social influencers are people whom the consumer follows on Twitter or FaceBook, or whose blogs and product reviews appeal to the consumer. Their influence is greatest during the earlier phase of the buying cycle: awareness and consideration, but wanes during the action phase. Although the social influencers are likely to be within the consumer’s social graph, they may not actually know each other.

The greatest impact occurs through known peer influencers: colleagues, friends and family. How much impact these “known peers” exercise varies by product category and how much the consumer respects the person’s insight and expertise in that category. For example, a husband can influence the brand and model decisions when it comes to auto purchases or leases; however, he has no impact on purchase decisions for yoga classes, mats and accessories, or other yoga-related items. This is because I don’t believe he has an informed opinion in this arena.

1. Are you connecting with Social Influencers to drive your marketing needs and business needs?
2. Does your Digital Footprint have the required reach and inclusion of Social Influencers relevant to your brand?

Digital Marketing Starts with SEO

I attended my first Social Media Seminar a few years ago in Columbus OH. The conference was put on by Jennifer Laycock, editor of Search Engine Guide. After having attended all sorts of apartment related seminars and events, that basically said the same thing year in and year out surrounding Apartment Marketing, it was real treat to further dig into Social Media Marketing with folks who were doing it.

I was pretty flattered when Jennifer reached out a few weeks later and asked me to write for her at Search Engine Guide, from a small business perspective, and relating to the various things we were doing in our own boutique apartment management business at Urbane Apartments. Although my writing there has been off and on over the last couple of years , mostly because of time constraints of operating a small business, I have learned a lot from both Jennifer and several other contributors. You can peruse those articles here if you like. Search Engine Guide is in the top ten highest ranking blogs in it’s class, with a significant following. I have also joined Jennifer on a series of small business panels at places such as SES Chicago.

One of the top contributors and one worth following his work is Stony deGeyter, President of Pole Position Marketing, a leading search engine optimization and marketing firm helping businesses grow since 1998. Stoney is a frequent speaker at website marketing conferences and has published hundreds of helpful SEO, SEM and small business articles.

Stoney pioneered the concept of Destination Search Engine Marketing which is the driving philosophy of how Pole Position Marketing helps clients expand their online presence and grow their businesses. Stoney is Associate Editor at Search Engine Guide and has written several SEO and SEM e-books including E-Marketing Performance; The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!; Keyword Research and Selection, Destination Search Engine Marketing, and more.

Putting it all together

SEO isn’t especially difficult to do, but it does take time and enough knowledge to help you get started down the path to learn as you go. Many small businesses will try to save money by doing SEO on their own and they can be successful to a point, so long as they have the time needed to not only gain the knowledge but to implement it as well.

Here is Stoney’s series on the  basics of SEO. Read up on these and you will be well on your way!

Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags
Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names
Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links
Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking
Part 8: Everything You Need To Know About Keywords
Part 9: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Core Terms
Part 10: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Qualifiers
Part 11: Everything You Need To Know About SEO Copywriting
Part 12: Everything You Need To Know About Page Content
Part 13: Everything You Need To Know About Links
Part 14: Everything You Need To Know About Link Anatomy
Part 15: Everything You Need To Know About Linking

Apartment Marketing; It Starts with a Google Search

A Guest Post by Brian Owen; Executive Director of Marketing for Laramar Group in Denver CO. Brains post illustrate exactly what we teach folks in our Move the Google Needle sessions, most recently at Optimization Summit in Dallas. Here are the slides should you have interest.

Enjoy Brian’s post, and let us know your thoughts and comments,

Google Killed the Adjective

Quite frankly, Google doesn’t care what serene, beautifully landscaped, sparkling surroundings your apartment community is nestled in nor do the prospects using Google, per se.  Not initially at least.  This makes marketing apartments a little less creative from a writing standpoint, but a little more fun and challenging from an analytics and strategy standpoint.

If you currently have Google Analytics on your website, run a report to see if anyone found you by typing in adjectives other than those related to proximity or cost (close, near, cheap, affordable).  Trust me, they didn’t.  So why do many of us continue to use those “romance” paragraphs on our website and in our ILS advertising?  The only answer I have is that some of us are still stuck in a print mindset, and between you, me and Dupree, using romance paragraphs in your print ads is a waste of creative energy as well (that’s a whole other discussion).

I’m not going to tell you what keywords you should be using on your landing pages of your websites, but I will say that if you are close to the campus of University of Michigan, you sure as hell better mention that because Google will find that a lot more relevant than a sparkling pool.  Highlighting your city name, neighborhood name, landmarks, points of interest, major roads and freeways, public transportation, shopping and entertainment in the area is the way to define your community and for many of our communities are the true amenities prospects seek.  It’s not sexy, but those of us who are creative and savvy will find a way to make it work and boost our search engine results.

Web Site Performance and Conversion: Get Out the Measuring Stick

Our Guest Post today comes from Jennifer Kennedy, Technology and Operations Specialist at Property Counselors Management Group in Fort Myers, Fl. Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and getting the conversation going. This is Jennifer’s second Guest Blog with us, her first post, Does Increased Web Traffic Draw Increased Sales had lots of comments!

Get Out the Measuring Stick

A few years back industry leaders were conveying the importance for properties to have a website and online presence.  This is when our team at PCMG decided to move forward with each property having its own website for current and future residents.   After the initial launch, we saw a significant increase in traffic.

However, it is far too easy to create the websites and then just set them on the shelf.   Are the photos currently on your site from the fun and exciting resident function you had last week or last year?   We have come to realize that it is critical to keep updating content and evaluating website performance.   We just completed revamping our entire company website, which is quite an undertaking that requires resources constantly allocated to website content and improvement.

Now that the websites are launched and the content updated, it is time to get out the measuring stick.  The primary purpose for a property website is to generate traffic and secure leases.  In order to properly evaluate these goals, standard metrics need to be in place.  We currently measure our website conversions for unique visitors that lead to an online guest card or a phone call to the property.    As a portfolio, websites are converting 5% of new visitors to an online guest cards and 4% converting to a phone call resulting in a 9% total conversion.

The most important part of measuring is that our efforts are producing new leases.   Portfolio results consistently show that any property that converts 10% of its new visitors has seen a boost in occupancy with most averaging a 3% increase.

There is nothing I would like to see more from our industry than coming to a consensus on how to measure website performance with benchmarks that we can gauge our results against. What measuring stick are you using to evaluate your property website performance?

B2B Social Media; Senior Marketing Executives Want Control

A Guest Post from HiveFire Marketing; Taariq Lewis

B2B Social Media; Senior Marketing Executives Want Control

While participating at the Online Marketing Conference, I heard a few comments from a few very hard-working working eMarketing managers.  These managers commented on their company’s leadership view of the growing importance of Social Media for their businesses.   In their view, most senior executives still don’t understand the need for all this focus on Social Media.  Sure, some bosses are willing to devote a little time and budget, but senior marketing executives see lots of fads in their lengthy careers.

Thus, the brave eMarketing Managers, whom they employ, are usually pioneers, risking their careers, to launch and integrate Social Media plans into their corporate marketing efforts.  Not only do they have the smallest budgets, but they usually have the highest ROI proof requirements.  I am guilty of chuckling at the true story of one eMarketing Manager sneaking their company’s credit card to make a Social Media tool purchase.  They were only able to keep their job after showing the ROI on the tool!

It’s my view that senior marketing executives in large companies clearly understand and see progress in Social Media.  This is old news.  Many of the leading social media marketing technology companies have covered it here and elsewhere.  However, the problem, from my perspective, is one of control.  Who controls Social Media in the organization?  Does it fall under Corporate Marketing or Marketing Communications?  If Social Media ROI doesn’t deliver, as promised, who’s responsible, the eMarketing Manager or her boss?  Finally, if an eMarketing or Social Media Manager positively impacts revenue growth, how does the firm properly reward that individual and encourage the rest of the organization to support that success?

Social Media Marketing is not easy.  It’s not non-technical and it requires increasing understanding of analytics, software, and rapidly evolving Internet technology.  Although there’s sufficient education for eMarketers through organizations such as Online Marketing Institute, where’s the educational opportunity for Senior Marketing executives?  How will they learn about Social Media so that they can feel empowered to move their marketing organization, with confidence, in this rapidly emerging and highly effective direction?
In the absence of more education, tools must suffice and these tools need to get easier and give Senior Marketing executives more control and easier participation in Social Media marketing activities.  Information automation tools and social media dashboards are a start.  However, there’s more that can be done and I’d like to see more conversations around other possible solutions.  Unless our senior executives are encouraged to participate in B2B social media, we’ll miss out on their insights and support for this new customer engagement channel.

Your Digital Reach; How to Increase Your Social Media Outreach

Good Morning, A few random thoughts of Digital Footprint and Digital Reach

We are pretty excited here at Digital Sherpa as we organize the final details to launch a series of Lab Experiments, for the purpose of helping our clients Expand Their Digital Footprint. It will be a fun time as we drill down into the whys and why not of engagement, metrics, what is meaningful to measure and what isn’t.

In thinking about this, different clients will have different things that are important to them to achieve through their marketing initiatives. Social Media touches a lot of different marketing points across your company.

eMarkter summed it up well in their post titled How Social Media Can Work Across Multiple Parts of Your Business

If you accept that your company needs to be involved in social media—as most marketers do—then it’s important to figure out where social media fits within your organization.

Tempting as it might be to compartmentalize social media, most companies find that it gets assimilated into various functional teams, including marketing and communications, sales, customer service, human resources, IT and executive management. Firms from Ford Motor Co. to Dunkin’ Donuts to Hewlett-Packard describe social media as a cross-organizational discipline that touches a wide range of functions.

What is Your Digital Reach

The ways and means at which Social Media Outreach works is nothing less than fascinating. We have started to track and log most everything we are doing here in the Digital Sherpa Laboratory, starting with our own personal blogs, twitter feeds, facebook profiles and fan pages, blog traffic, web traffic, blog comments and so forth. Some of the stuff likely doesn’t matter, but what really struck me was the significance of Expanding Your Digital Footprint, or put another way, Your Digital Reach.

Shelf Life

The advent of all of the tools allow such a rapid expansion of marketing outreach. But what these tools, platforms and venues also allow is  Infinite Shelf Life. Unlike traditional marketing, the effects of a given marketing campaign had a shelf life equal to or a bit longer than the length of the campaign itself.

In the digital world, your content is out there forever.

So What Does That Mean

Start by Getting in the Game. Your Digital Reach will not expand by itself. Folks say that followers don’t matter, and there is truth in that, sort of. What matters is the engagement level of your Circle of Influence. If you are adding value to your Circle of Influence, your business will drive more leads.

We would love to hear about ways in which you have extended your Digital Footprint, and what your challenges and successes were,

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