Category: neck deep in the zeitgeist

Thirty ideas from the Digital Marketing Mixer you can implement tomorrow

Dave

The closing session of the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer featured a team of four “mixologists” who gathered and shared their top takeaways from the event. The mixologists were Jason Baer “@jaybaer”, Stephanie Miller “@StephanieSAM”, Michael Brito “@Britopian” and Beth Harte “@BethHarte”.

Stephanie handled the Must Know track:

  • Build credibility before you start selling via social media.
  • Allow open “but governed” access for employees to Twitter and blogging.
  • Broadcast emails are not effective. Create relevancy and be helpful – even once a month.
  • Use your Facebook fan page to promote key content of your email newsletter.
  • Join the right conversations at the right time.
  • Think about your front page as a collection of pages, not one home page.
  • Improve search spending ROI by using down-funnel data. Use a human filter to get rid of the keywords that don’t perform.
  • Invest in social media. It’s not free.

Jason Baer handled the Integrating Marketing Programs track:

  • Companies are telling people that they have to blog because of their position, but you should find the people who really love it.
  • Don’t be afraid to test things that defy convential wisdom, because you might be surprised by the results.
  • Clean up your landing pages.
  • Keep your troops informed.
  • Insert retweet buttons into PDF documents.
  • Remove gates in front of content. People are getting used to free content and are less likely to register unless you have really great content that no one else has.
  • Use your brand community as a free market research program. “”I actually crowdsourced this beard.””
  • Engage in online communities as a person first, as a marketer second.
  • Use Google keyword tool to determine how your customers describe you, your products or your category.
  • Optimize all your content for search.

Michael Brito covered the Engaging with Customers track:

  • Build relationships with firestarters “influencers”.
  • Build community first, monetize later.
  • Offer value on Twitter, don’t self-promote.
  • Have passion and jump on every possible situation you can on the social web.
  • Through the social web, building relationships with customers creates a memorable brand experience.
  • When you launch a blog or Twitter account, set goals, measure, iterate.
  • Social media guidelines should be short and succinct.
  • Be organized internally to effectively manage social media externally.

Beth Harte covered the Peer-to-Peer track:

  • If you’re blogging, no one really cares about your products. Tell them how your product fits into their life.
  • Humanize your blog.
  • Get your legal counsel talking to other companies who have succesfully implemented social media.
  • Have conversations with senior management to find out their appetite for social media.
  • Provide your community something that is personally beneficial to them.
  • Let your members decide how they want to use ‘their’ community.
  • When doing video, be mindful of people’s time, attention and surroundings.
  • Use trackable links to help track back to metrics.

Beth: You need a plan. Benchmark where you are and create measurable objectives. Your objectives will drive your strategies, your strategies will drive your tactics. When someone questions why you’re doing this, you can say, “It’s in the plan.”

Best quotes:

“Content doesn’t win. Optimized content wins.”
“People don’t expect your company to be perfect. They expect you to provide solutions.”
“Don’t train. Simplify.”
“Measurement is like laundry. It piles up the longer you wait to do it.”
“Your customers are listening in social media, and so are search engines.”
“Many crummy trials beats the big thinking.”
“The art of Twitter is in the retweet – you must be interesting.”
“Tactics without a strategy is like doing nothing.”

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

Business Blogging: Tips and Case Studies

Dave

My notes from the Business Blogging: Tips and Case Studies panel at MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer.

Panelists:

Mike Volpe, @mvolpe
Charlie King, @CharlieKingGolf
Ilya Mirman, @IlyaMirman

Mike:

Smaller companies can get a lot of leverage out of inbound marketing. The amount of money you have no longer dictates how many people you can reach. The reach of your blog is about the brainpower, creativity and effort you put behind it.

Stop thinking like a marketer or advertiser. Start thinking like a publisher and socializer.

Target content to your personas. Know who the people are that you’re selling to and make sure they will enjoy and appreciate the content. Content is what makes you interesting in social media. It’s what you link to in Twitter or Facebook, and the blog articles behind them. Without blogging as a core part of your strategy, just adding social media can be a mistake.

HubSpot’s blog is their third-most important source of leads and drives about 10 percent of visits to the company website.

SEO and social media are equally important for HubSpot. 25-30 percent of visitors come from SEO and 20-25 percent from social media.

They look at every article they publish from an editorial perspective and look at the number of inbound links, comments and visitors and discuss that information in monthly editorial meetings to talk about what’s working and how to enhance it.

They track traffic, leads and sales by channel or source. They can see how each channel is performing. Their two key goals for the blog are to get more traffic and more conversions.

Charlie King, Director of Instruction, Reynolds Plantation

Charlie was named one of the top 100 golf instructors in the world. David Meerman Scott’s “New Rules of Marketing and PR” first alerted Charlie to the possibilities. His audience is golf instructors who want instructional materials. Any time he deviates, he gets low traffic numbers. “Blogging is so democratic,” he said.

He’s also done a lot of video tips. His first video was called “Three Steps to Proper Club Throwing,” a funny video which showed up on golf.com. Charlie’s first thought was, “This could be 19 years of legitimate golf instruction right down the tubes.” He was concerned about the reaction but kept getting positive emails. Golf.com told him the video had gone to a million views in a week, and is now up to about two million views.

“My serious videos, they’re in the hundreds.” One called “Golf’s most important lesson” is up to 18,000 views. He has about 30 videos on YouTube.

Charlie writes 8-10 blog posts per month. He works to keep them SEO optimized and keyword-rich. He has 30 videos and an e-book called “New Rules of Golf Instruction.” “No doubt a tip of the hat to David Scott.” His blog now has more than 600 subscribers and more than 15,000 e-book downloads. More important, where most businesses are down 20-30 percent, they are breaking even.

Tips and Takeaways:

  • Content is king. You can be your own media mogul.
  • Get started before your competition to get ahead.
  • Make SEO part of your blogging strategy.
  • Even non-technology businesses can benefit from a blog.

Ilya Mirman, VP Marketing, Cilk Arts

His company is focused on developers working with multicore processors, a startup that raised a “couple of million dollars” and had a staff of nine. The goal was to create a worldwide standard for multicore processors. They were acquired by Intel, “So that’s pretty cool,” he said.

Their go-to-market approach revolved around inbound marketing and an open-source business model. They hired no sales people, but had one marketer “Ilya” eight months before shipping the product to implement the inbound marketing approach.

Results:

  • Reached more than 100,000 developers
  • Traffic and awareness matched or exceeded competitors
  • Adoption at >250 universities worldwide
  • >6,200 inbound links
  • >3,000 leads
  • Blog posts boosted search engine ranking for key terms

Tips:

  • Get the whole team engaged. Everybody can blog a little bit.
  • Don’t obsess over the number of comments.
  • Inbound links drove their search engine rank.
  • You don’t know ahead of time which posts will drive the most traffic.

    They kept an eye on traffic stats and put together the most popular content into an e-book, and drove a big spike in traffic “close to 20,000 copies distributed worldwide”.

    Do:

    • Get your whole team engaged.
    • Be real, be genuine, let your personality come out.
    • Build an editorial calendar with a broad set of interesting, valuable content. Target the key personas you care about.
    • Discover which topics are worth investing more in. Invite guests to contribute.
    • Leverage content in many ways: blog, e-books, tutorials, etc., make it consumable via YouTube, SlideShare, social media sites, etc.

    Don’t:

    • …be a blatant self-centered commercial.
    • …focus on just one topic.
    • …make your blog your only social media effort, instead spend time on other blogs, community sites, and contribute.
    • …worry about number of comments.
    • …worry about slow periods “number of visitors, subscribers, comments”.

    The slides from this session are available at http://www.mikevolpe.com/mpdm.

    Questions:

    What kind of editorial guidance do you give bloggers?

    Ilya: You need some kind of guidance and editorial control. We suggest that you need at least four or five paragraphs to cover a topic. Sometimes it goes longer.

    Charlie: For me it’s been more about the videos than the words. If I was trying to do instruction just via words, it could be easy to misunderstand. I have short posts that lead into video.

    In order to get a blog off to a good start, you need to give up something to commit the time to it. Did you give up other things or attract new resources?

    Charlie: For me it goes in waves. Spring and Fall are my busiest seasons. Now I’m trying to stick to a schedule. I just have to stay later that day. I guess it would be called “giving up time with my family.”

    Ilya: There’s no such thing as a free lunch. I made the case for us investing a quarter of our time in doing this, but it was cleear because of our community-related business value. If you look at it as a marketing investment, stop doing things that have lower value and spend time or money on blogging.

    Do you get a lot of negative comments. Are you worried about that?

    Charlie: I’ve had mainly good comments. What I’m doing is not really normal within golf to have a blog yet. Sometimes to get people to sign up I call it a “weekly email update” because the term “blog” does not resonate well with my audience. He got one negative comment about the “New Rules” book. You can’t have a thin skin. There’s no way to have 100 percent acceptance.

    How much does SEO drive your editorial calendar?

    Ilya: For us it was more the tail than the dog. We were mindful of wanting to do better on relevant terms but we didn’t pick a word and then right a blog post around it.

    When you launched your blog, did you do any publicity?

    Ilya: We did none of that. I’m not saying that’s a great best practice. We wanted to first see if it was of interest to anybody. If the content is bad, all marketing will do for a blog is let more people see that it sucks. When we had the e-book we started sharing it with more people, editors, etc.

    Charlie: I had to be stealthy. The general feeling in our company was negative about blogging. My answer if I was asked was that I was writing about golf and golf instruction and our industry, not a personal blog. A year later it’s a little bit better.

    Do you see the number of golf blogs growing, people copying what you’re doing?

    The ones who already have bigger names than me have a competitive advantage, but I’m hoping they don’t catch on for another year or two. Most of the blogs I see now are golf enthusiasts, not golf instructors.

    How much personality should come through in a business blog?

    Mike: A lot of it depends on what your brand is. HubSpot has 8-10 people who blog regularly and bring their personalities, but we do want to stay close to the corporate brand. Don’t use profanity, for instance, even if you would in your personal life.

    Ilya: The bigger deal is not the tone and the personality but the topic. You don’t want to be totally irrelevant. Don’t talk about what you had for breakfast that day.

    Final thoughts: What’s your one piece of advice about getting started in blogging?

    Ilya: I get no commission, but I would say read “Inbound Marketing.” The blog is recurring traffic, recurring revenue. You write a good blog post and it pays dividends forever.

    Charlie: I have the email that Mike sent me about what he wanted us to talk about. Not once did he say, “Talk about HubSpot.com,” but that is my piece of advice. I followed step-by-step what David Meerman Scott, Seth Godin and HubSpot had to say, and every piece of advice they’ve given me has been true. Other than that , I would say, “Start small.” Have a goal and work toward it. Blogging is a tool to help me reach my goal, and as time goes on it will become a more important part.

    Mike. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. For the first few months it can be very depressing. You have to think about a long-term strategy. You need a six-month runway before you’ll start seeing any real traction. All the examples I’ve seen, and it was true for us as well, the first few months are depressing.

    Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

Integrating Social Media into Your Marketing Strategy to Gain a Greater Response

Dave

My notes from the Integrating Social Media into Your Marketing Strategy to Gain a Greater Response panel, from MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer.

Panelists:

Pam O’Neal, Vice President of Marketing for BreakingPoint Systems, Inc., @poneal
Glenda Ervin, Vice President, Marketing, Lehman’s, @Galen_Lehman
Debra Ellis, Founder, Wilson & Ellis Consulting, @wilsonellis

Pam O’Neal, Breaking Point

Pam led off with an extremely tidy and well-organized slide showing all the different social media tools BreakingPoint uses and the ways they use them. I sincerely hope she’ll make her presentation available online. Here’s my untidy text-only summary:

Market Intelligence
Monitoring “RSS feeds, Twitter, Clicky, BuzzStream”
Crowdsourcing “Twitter, LinkedIn groups, HARO”

Thought Leadership
Education “blog, Twitter, forums, RSS feeds”
Awareness “community, blogs, video, twitter, marketwire”
Community “LinkedIn groups, blog, YouTube, Facebook”

Demand Generation
Search/onling mktg “Google, Bing, Yahoo, StumbleUpon”
Web traffic generation/conversion “RSS feeds, Twitter, blog”
video/podcast/webcast

Sales Enablement
social prospecting “LinkedIn Q&A and groups, Twitter, blog”
pipeline influence/nurturing “blog, Twitter, LinkedIn”
sales education “YouTube, blog, Twitter, Yammer, Wiki, RSS feeds”

Glenda Ervin, Lehman’s

Lehman’s carries “the largest selection of old-fashioned, non-electric appliances in the world,” Glenda said. Customers have choices. When her father started his store, it was the only store you could go to. Now customers choose how, where and when they want to shop. “For us it’s not about the how many, it’s about the who.”

Their social media strategy revolves around “branding Dad.” He has his own Facebook page, a video, his photo on the side of trucks, etc. “It’s not fake, it’s real.”

Glenda pointed out that it’s no longer enough to satisfy a customer. What you want is a loyal customer. A satisfied customer will leave. A loyal customer will come back. Take quality and marry it to consistency, and that breeds loyalty. “And then for us, we put Dad’s picture on it.”

They began to realize all the different things they did that could be shared in social media. “If we’re doing a cider press demonstration in the store, why not shoot a video of it and put it online?”

Lehman’s also subscribes to the theory that it’s better to have negative comments on your own site where you can see and deal with them.

“We love to get bad reviews. We want to know immediately so we can address it. Plus, in our small marketplace it shows that we care.”

Random tool mentions: They use Kaboodle and StumbleUpon, which work well with their predominantly female audience. They see Facebook as “an international, free, real-time focus group.”

Steps for getting started:

  • Start by looking at sites you like and seeing what they do well.
  • Have somebody get involved and keep up with it.
  • At the very least, set up a Google Alert for your name. Find out what people are saying about you.
  • Comment carefully and non-defensively in social media because it sets you up as an expert. Answer other people’s customer service questions.
  • Never ignore a super-negative post or a super-positive post.
  • Join and make a commitment to offer relevant content on a regular basis.

If people say they don’t have time for social media, that’s irrelevant because “it’s not about you, it’s about the customer.”

Their blog is the number one referrer to their Web site. They post based on what customers are interested in, “from plant to plate to pantry.”

Some successful blog posts have included:

  • Why do people become and stay Amish?
  • What are you growing?
  • What to know before you grow
  • What to do in Amish country “written by her 10-year old daughter”

I looked at the @Lehmans Twitter stream. This was the second tweet I read:

You can remove the hulls from grain by hand. http://is.gd/4pNX6 But, it’s slow. Anyone know of a home-sized grain cleaner/dehuller?

Debra Ellis, Wilson & Ellis Consulting

Debra began by focusing on how to sell social media to clients and bosses. Her advice: Have a plan. You can’t walk in and say “social media is great.” It needs to have goals, tangible objectives, strategy, contingency and scorekeeping.

The social media view is, “It’s all about the conversation. But at the end of the conversation if we haven’t discussed something about business, I don’t know what you do and you don’t know what I do.”

The typical corporate view features a continuous cycle of Merchandising – Marketing – Operations – Financial. Where does social media fit in?

In the revised social media view, it’s all about using conversation to enhance the customer experience and expand marketing reach.

The goal of traditional marketing is to get the sale. When you add social media, the becomes not only to get the sale but to get the customer talking about your company and your product.

When presenting to people inside your company you need to convince, Debra suggests presenting your ideas in corporate language: increased sales, reduced costs, specific goals, measurable results, intangibles.

Focus on what’s right for you, your community and your corporate culture.

Debra’s takeaways:

  • Begin with the end in mind – look for the ROI.
  • Keep it simple and strategic.
  • Complete the cycle: add consumption to the marketing/sales/fulfillment cycle. Make sure your clients are using your products and services and talking about them.
  • Get out of the fishbowl. If you hear about some new channel you think you need to try, go back and see if it fits into your plan.
  • Connect the pieces: marketing, channels, employees, operations and customers.

Debra’s ebook The New Rules of Multichannel Marketing is available at http://tinyurl.com/wec-mpdm

One audience question asked about Google vs. Bing. Both Debra and Glenda are Bing fans. Debra said, “I love Bing. People go deeper and stay longer.” Glenda added, “Surfers use Google, shoppers use Bing.”

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog

How Big Brands Engage in Real Time Conversations with Consumers

Dave

Notes from the panel discussion today at MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer.

Panelists:

Michael Brito, @Britopian
Becky Carroll, @bcarroll7
Tom Diederich, @Dieds

For their Ajay Bhatt campaign, Intel found their was a huge outpouring of demand for t-shirts with Ajay’s picture, based on the conversations on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. They gave away 100 t-shirts in June, sent the winners the shirts and asked them to upload photos of themselves in the shirt. The web metrics show there are still people searching for “Ajay Bhatt t-shirt contest.” Michael is engaged daily with 15-20 of the winners. Lots of them still comment on Intel news, retweet it, etc.

Search for “Ajay Bhatt” in Facebook and there are mutliple fan pages. One is official, has 1500-2000 fans and has a lot of engagement.

“Did it move the needle, did it impact sales? I don’t know.” But it created memorable brand experiences for the people involved.

Becky Carroll:

Case Study: Hansen’s Connects with San Francisco Hansen’s sells natural sodas. They have very loyal and enthusiastic customers and wanted a new way to connect using social media.

“Social media is not a campaign, it’s a relationship.” That’s harder to get management to buy into. Hansen’s started with a “Hansen’s Loves San Diego” photo contest. They asked people to take a picture of themselves in San Diego with a can of Hansen’s. It was quick, “got some uptake.” The results were “okay, not out of this world.” They wanted to go back later and do some more, but the fact that they had looked at it as a campaign and not a relationship meant that all the traffic they had built in Twitter, Facebook, etc. had died off.

They changed their social media stance from broadcasting “”Hey, we don’t use high-fructose corn syrup!”” to a more conversational stance. They tried to tweet things more relevant to the audience “information on natural foods, gardening, etc.” It changed the nature of the communication with audiences. They had direct interactions with customers and even got
mentioned as someone to follow in Twitter in “Follow Friday” tweets.

Offline is just as important as online. Hansen’s had street teams as well, giving away cans of Hansen’s, driving around in Smart cars, taking photos of fans with the cars, posting them to the Facebook page and encouraging fans to come to the site and tag themselves.

San Francisco campaign traffic was 70+ percent referrals from social media sites. Over 40 percent of the referring traffic was from Facebook. More than 15,500 votes. Ten percent of the people who came to the site engaged and voted, compared to 1 to 2 percent average.

ROI: Cost per reach including street teams was 12 cents. “Hey! Actual ROI numbers!”

They have fans who are interacting with them as friends online. The next step is to build on these relationships and take it to the next level, enlisting their new online evangelists to spread the word.

Tom Diederich

Started at Symantec in the B2B-focused side. Symantec inherited an existing community from Veritas acquisition in 2003. Customers kept it going. Tom reinvigorated it. There were three
superusers who answered 90 percent of all customer inquiries. Tom made them his “VIP group.”

In about four months they created the Symantec Technology Network: user driven site including tech news, tech videos, expert blogs and forums. Tom moved on the Cadence, where “community became the front page.”

“Promotion of your community is key. At Cadence, we put the community front and center on cadence.com.”

The community was limited to two main sections, forums and blogs. Tom looked at blogs “in a new way; treating them like a newspaper.” Tom set up weekly editorial meetings and had an
editorial calendar. “Your bloggers aren’t journalists, they are your advocates. They need to be guided and given some help. Having a managing editor is really key.”

Audience questions:

To what extent are your campaigns and engagements providing incentive for participation. What do you think the FTC rulings will do?

Becky: Hansen’s incentive was the possibility of winning $500 in the contest. For anyone who entered, money was donated to a San Francisco urban gardening project. As far as the FTC ruling goes, there was a session at Blogworld. From what she saw, the Hansen’s campaign would not have been affected as it was a traditional product giveaway and contest. Since these were consumers and not bloggers, she doesn’t believe it would be covered under the FTC rules.

Michael: Contests are good for launching campaigns but not for sustaining relationships. Intel is full disclosure on everything. We’re very careful with how we interact with bloggers, isclosing everything.

Tom:

If you’re a community manager, you never want to reward your superusers monetarily. They want recognition. You can create fun and creative ranking systems that people can move through. They get special icons they can use for their LinkedIn pages, blogs, etc. If they’re really dedicated, fly them out once a year and let them speak on a panel, but ” I would never pay for a post or content in any way.”

Have you considered LinkedIn?

Tom: Cadence has a strong presence on LinkedIn and we’re using it more and more. Becky recommends that as many employees as possible be on LinkedIn and use it to share content like blogs and connect. LinkedIn groups are valuable but take a lot of work to keep up. “The Q&A section is also great.” If you’re an organization that wants to be known as a thought leader, get your execs to answer questions and increase your visibility.

Question: I’ve got a forum with 1000s of people. Facebook and Twitter are taking them away. How do you get them to engage?

Tom: Promotion, superuser management and forum structure are key. Listen and follow people on Twitter and include a short link to your community. Reach out to them on Facebook as well. Where are you promoting your forum on your site? The homepage, the support page? Do it everywhere. Twitter and Facebook are ramps to your community, to funnel people to your community or your blog.

Michael: Fish where the fish are. Corporate websites are becoming irrelevant and they aren’t always going to come to your site. Go out and communicate in the third-party sites and become a trusted advisor. Then when you post something on your site, people will come to it because they trust you and the value you offer.

Tom: Never censor your bloggers or filter their content through PR or marketing.

Becky: We don’t own our brand anymore. Let your employees interact as people with other people. That will be very important in creating the right brand impression.

Tom: As long as they don’t violate the guidelines, leave those negative comments up. You need to figure out the problem and engage with them. If you delete them, they’ll take them somewhere else.

Becky: Much better to have the negative comments on your own site so you know where they are.

Tom: Don’t ghostwrite executive blogs.

Becky: Don’t get the intern to do it. They might know the social media tools, but they don’t know business and they don’t know your brand.

Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog