The Future of Blogging
posted by Jeanannv on April 7th, 2009With the exception of this blog, I have become a real blogging slacker. I force myself to post at least twice a month, shooting for once a week, on my other sites. It’s not that I don’t publish content, it’s just that blog sites are starting to feel a whole lot like static websites, compared to all of the other social media platforms out there.
Don’t get me wrong, blogs are still one of the most valuable branding tools in an online marketing campaign. And their 
SEO benefits are really unbeatable…but this father of the social media revolution feels a bit archaic when it comes to interactivity.
And why wouldn’t it? Compared to Twitter and the new Facebook design, a traditional blog is like standing still. Regardless of the number of plug-ins we try to add or the number of comments we respond to, a blog is still very low on the interactivity scale. Think email as compared to texting or IM…whole different world…and if you are used to IM’ing, email seems like an absolutely archaic method of communication.
So much of our blog content is syndicated to our social media sites that blog numbers no longer really reflect our impact and readership. And though I have a Google Reader full of blogs, I rarely read through it. I find that the information I need is syndicated in my social media communities, eliminating the need for leaving my current site to read content. I do use Google Reader to keep track of all the blogs I want to remember, though. It is a helpful Delicious-type service for blogs.
Traditional blogs may stay around for branding and SEO purposes, but I expect we will continue to move away from using them as our mainstay of communication. Though for me to do that, Twitter and Facebook would have to stop with the nofollow/closed system business. Really, it is this proprietary rigidity that prevents people from making this shift now. Other sites like Posterous and Chi.mp are exploring eliminating these boundaries and returning control to the content generators.
Some reports estimate that by the end of the year, 84% of internet users will be using some form of social media. As more and more people start getting up to speed with various platforms, I think we will see a big jump forward in the evolution of usage patterns.
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Don’t Be Afraid of Negative Chatter
posted by Laurenc on April 7th, 2009Brand Consulting: Don’t Be Afraid of Negative Chatter
One of the best ways to use social media is monitoring the chatter that is going on in the community about your company and brand. But what do you do when the conversations you hear begin to turn negative? “It’s enough to make the average business owner break out in a cold sweat; the thought of bloggers ripping them. But while many businesses and companies are fearful of posts that shine a negative light on their business, these instances are in fact a wonderful opportunity,” says Mack Collier of The Search Engine Guide.
The scenario is simple, a blogger or other form of online communicator writes a negative review about the company, or their products/services, based off of their own personal experiences with the company, or something that they have heard that the business has done, or will be doing. Many companies will become frustrated about these negative communications, some will choose to ignore them, and some may even become angry and retaliate by responding in a similarly negative way. None of these reactions is the ideal way to handle negative press, and retaliation can make the situation escalate faster than you could imagine.
Instead of reacting with fear, anger or not reacting at all, businesses should see this scenario for exactly what it is…an opportunity! The blogger/online communicator has just given the business an open invitation to reply to them, AND to address his/her readers.
Think of it this way… Some companies spend thousands of dollars a year paying people to try to get their business noticed online. “Unfortunately, if you went to a blog and left a comment explaining what your business is, and how it functions. You’d be slammed unmercifully for self-promotion, and ’spamming’ the blog. Your online reputation would suffer. As it should, because you would be entering into a conversation that had nothing to do with you, and would be promoting yourself. VERY bad move,” says Mack.
But by responding to criticism, you can do two things at once:
- Inform and educate the public about your company and the products/services you offer
- You get the opportunity to redeem your company by coming to their blog and correcting the misunderstandings, and (if you are REALLY smart) you can then reach out to connect with the blogger to better explain how your efforts are organized.
You show the public & your criticizers that you are not willing to stand for poor service from your company and you want to do whatever you can to rectify the situation. So remember, when you see a negative post/comment from a blogger or community member, don’t panic and try to figure out how to make it go away. Instead, realize that you now have an invitation to address these blog readers and better explain yourself to them, and connect with them. This can be a great opportunity to build up your reputation, as long as you respond politely and honestly.
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No Experience with Social Media? No Problem!
posted by Jeanannv on March 18th, 2009A lot of business owners are afraid to venture into the world of social media marketing. Mainly because it seems incredibly foreign and somewhat like drinking from a fire hydrant. But here’s the good news…not having any preconceptions about it is really in your favor.
If you go in expecting that it will drive 8,000 people to your site overnight, well, that just isn’t going to happen. And if you have already decided that certain platforms just won’t work for you…they won’t.
The key in social media is to find the right platform reaching the right target audience. Then, you have to provide some value to this community and start building relationships. This takes a bit of time…but leads to great brand loyalty and higher conversion rates.
When you start learning about this new frontier, try not to make any immediate decisions about the worth of a particular platform. Not only will it change over time, but so will you. you could start out absolutely hating Facebook, only to discover later that it is just the thing to build a groundswell of interest in your latest venture.
There is an adjustment period that comes with learning anything new and this is certainly no exception. While you are learning, seek out information from multiple sources, don’t just rely on one “expert”. And in fact, if they call themselves a “social media expert” chances are good they aren’t.
Embrace the sometimes awkward, often frustrating new user experience…and avoid Beta versions for a while. They can be a challenge for experienced users…and there is no need to add any level of difficulty. Try using one or two sites at a time…not 10. Oh, and be proactive. You have to reach out to other people. Using social media is not a passive process.
Above all, be patient. There is value in understanding how social media works. It can be a great tool for marketing your business. But understand that it may take a while for it to all come together.
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Two Tools for Brand Management on the Web
posted by Jeanannv on March 2nd, 2009There are multiple strategies that help a company with brand management on the web. But the foundation for all of them is finding out where, when and how they are being mentioned across various networks.
There are several tools out there that offer this service, many of which cost money. But today, I am sharing a couple of free sites that will get you started. They don’t have all of the bells and whistles, but they search and aggregate data from across multiple social media platforms. You can search for company or product name or keywords and find out who is talking about it and where.
The first is Who’s Talkin’. Don’t be fooled by the deceptively simple home page…this is a powerful search engine that tracks information like nobody’s business.
Here, I have entered the term “Social American” and clicked on the “blogs” tab. What follows is a list with blog posts from all of the platforms to the left of the page. This option includes traditional and micro-blogs, as well as a meta search via Technorati and Social Mention. Notice that you can also choose news, networks, videos, images, and forums.
In addition to tracking your brand and keyword mentions, this search also allows you to identify the people who are doing the talking. Connecting with these folks is essential in addressing concerns and networking with influencers/supporters.
The second tool is a similar site called Social Mention. Here you can see I have entered the search term “social media marketing”. The links above the search box indicate what platforms are being searched.
I found Social Mention to have less specific results for “Social American”. Too many were unrelated and would have taken too much digging on my part to discover. However, this site did a great job with topical keywords like “social media marketing”. Who’s Talkin’ actually includes Social Mention results in its blog searches, so I would recommend using that feature if you are specifically searching for your company name.
Social Mention also has a ranking system (on the right of the page) that tells you how often the term is used and how many hits from which sites. The other benefit is that it has comments and Q & A search offerings…which I didn’t see on Who’s Talkin’.
Bottom line for small business: These sites can generate quite a lot of good information. You can track your brand and keywords across multiple social media platforms…and best of all it is free! How can you resist with that kind of price tag?
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Using Ping.fm to Build Business Branding
posted by Jeanannv on January 23rd, 2009Ping.fm isn’t a new site, been around for close to a year. I use it so often, I almost forget that it is one of my favorite applications for building business branding. Of all the online marketing tools I use, this is definitely one of three or four that I would be willing to pay for…not that I am asking to be billed…
In case you haven’t heard of Ping.fm, it is an uber-updater that allows you to push updates out to multiple networks simultaneously. The list of sites it updates is insanely long, but let me mention a few:
- Plurk
- Mixx
- Delicious
- Identica
- Brightkite
- FriendFeed
- Rejaw
Which sometimes leads me to build followers on sites that I don’t frequent very often, like Brightkite and Rejaw. It has a great email update feature, which I use when mobile. And, it just added text updating services, which makes it more user friendly for cell phone users who don’t have Blackberrys or iPhones.
There are a couple of ways that Ping.fm helps build brand awareness. The most obvious being that if you don’t have a full time person running your online marketing department, updating a few times a day will give you a whole lot of bang for your buck. The second is that it builds context-rich links around the web with little effort.
Now, there are some SEO gurus who will scoff at my love of building links in this way. I have heard many say that they think as soon as links drop off of the front page of a social media site, they are lost to posterity. But they are wrong…when I look back at my link history, I see 5,000 or so links, probably 50% of which are social media related. and thousands of links with the right keywords can’t hurt.
Finally, I often use it in conjunction with link monitoring sites. By posting a tracked url, you can chart which social media platforms respond well to what subjects. This is an easy and effective way to collect market research….and I like easy and effective.
If you haven’t thought about Ping.fm in a while, go check it out again. I think you will find it to be a great distribution channel for quality marketing messages.
Monitoring the Web with Yahoo Pipes
posted by Jeanannv on January 20th, 2009Yahoo Pipes is, in my humble opinion, one of the best free tools for brand research. One of the first steps in creating an online marketing strategy is to understand your market. This requires quite a lot of time and effort gathering and culling information. Pipes can do quite a lot of it for you, which makes this little gem a time saver.
Sadly, it hasn’t gained a broad base of users outside of the tech community…probably because it looks a bit intimidating to create your own pipe.
Case in point:
I created this pipe to monitor the chatter about the latest social media news. Yowza! And that isn’t even a complex pipe…all of you programmer types out there can twist and mangle these things into mazes of rss feeds, filters and outputs. Me, not so much…
But, I do understand it enough to do a few things that prevent me from having to run to 800 different sites during the day to gather information.
Now, my brand is built around social media, so I want to find out the most current, most valuable information on social media marketing on a regular basis. This pipe, which I cleverly named “Social Media Info“, aggregates information from several sources. I built the base with a handful of blogs I trust, added a Digg feed and threw in a Yahoo search.
This might seem like an awful lot of information…definitely bound to have repeating articles or links. But Yahoo Pipes allows you to add filters for non-unique items, which I promptly added. You can also specify keywords or phrases to limit the content.
In the event that you don’t feel quite ready to create these from whole cloth, you can simply subscribe to someone else’s feed.
In fact, you can import that feed right onto your igoogle page and keep an eye on the latest information.
You can also clone a feed and add or take away different parts to fit your needs.
Not all pipes are published…but there are plenty that are.
And yes, it is a bit like drinking from an open fire hydrant. But, it is a workhorse that can do a lot of the gathering and filtering…which makes it one of my favorite social media marketing secrets.
Brand Monitoring part.2 – Talking Back
posted by Laurenc on January 19th, 2009Branding Strategies: Brand Monitoring – Talking Back
Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporation. Marketers must understand that conversations are being held on the web with or without our consent, and when conversations start on the web, like a forest fire, they travel very fast and wreak havoc along the way; what might start out as a mere tweet, may turn into a blog post and potentially national news.
Last week, I told you about some great (and free) tools for monitoring the chatter around your brand. Now, I want to talk to you a little bit about responding to all of the comments/chatter.
Talking Back
Once you have set up an effective monitoring plan, and you have listened to what the community is saying, it is time to talk back. Here are some guidelines for communicating with online users about your brand.
- Respond quickly to criticism. If you don’t respond quickly to criticism, you can lose control of the conversation.
- Admit your mistakes. Why is this so difficult for brands? When you mess up, the only—and I mean ONLY—acceptable response is to take full ownership, explain what went wrong, and share your action plan for fixing the mistake.
- Empower your employees to become problem solvers. As a customer, there is nothing worse than having a full-on collision with bureaucracy. We’ve all been there. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’ll have to check with my supervisor.” Or worse, “I’d like to help, but we have a policy against that.” Tim Ferriss, author of the bestseller, “The 4-Hour Workweek”, tells his employees and contractors, “Keep the customers happy. If it is a problem that takes less than $100 to fix, use your judgment and fix the problem yourself. This is official written permission and a request to fix all problems that cost under $100 without contacting me (p. 105).”
- Exceed your customers’ expectations. Every customer problem is an opportunity to create a new amazing experience. But it’s not enough to meet their expectations, you have to exceed them. Anything less is merely restitution.
Conclusions
Understanding brand monitoring and its impact on your business is critical. Static websites are no longer the pinnacle of communication, as today’s consumer seeks engagement and two-way conversations. As consumers are increasingly empowered to take control of brands online through user generated content, blogs, forums etc, marketers must adopt new ways of approaching brand management and marketing their products/services.
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Brand Monitoring: Tips & Tricks part.1
posted by Laurenc on January 16th, 2009Brand Consulting: Brand Monitoring – Tips & Tricks part.1
Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporation. Marketers must understand that conversations are being held on the web with or without our consent, and when conversations start on the web, like a forest fire, they travel very fast and wreak havoc along the way; what might start out as a mere tweet, may turn into a blog post and potentially national news.
Why is this Happening?
Until recently, information was dispersed and controlled by mass media networks of television, radio and print, where large corporations could control the mass media with the right combination of public relations and marketing.
Now, however, the Internet has fundamentally transformed the way in which information is created, distributed and consumed. In additional to marketers losing much of their control of bramd image, they are also facing a larger variety of marketing channels than ever before.
The modern consumer has developed greater immunity to the constant barrage of advertising messages. Increasingly, consumers are turning to online communities, consumer writers and fringe media as trusted sources of input on everything from what to buy to how to vote.
What Can You Do?
Developing a brand monitoring plan should be one of the most important pieces of a company’s marketing strategy, not an after thought. All too often I have seen companies fail because they have not listened to the buzz in the community.
All successful brand monitoring plans have two critical pieces: Listening & Responding.
Listening
Listening is the gathering of online information about your brand. It is simply put, listenting to what is being said about your products/services/brand online. There are a variety of tools that help marketers “listen,” but here are a few of my favorites:
General Brand Monitoring
- Google Alerts - Google alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe to each alert through email and RSS. The alerts track blog posts, news articles, videos and even groups. Set a “comprehensive alert,” which will notify you of stories, as they happen, for your name, your topic, and even your company.
- Yahoo! Pipes – This is also a good tool for aggregating and combining feeds into one central repository.
Blog Monitoring
- Technorati – Technorati tracks “blog reactions,” or blogs that link to yours. Search for your brand on Technorati, and subscribe to RSS alerts so that when someone blogs about you, you find out.
- Backtype – Backtype is a tool for monitoring blog comments, by allowing you to find, follow, and share comments from across the web. Use it to remind yourself where you commented, discover influencers who are commenting on blogs that you should be reading, and continue conversations that you started previously. You can even subscribe to these comments using RSS.
Discussion Board Monitoring
- BoardTracker – Along with blogs and traditional news stories, discussion boards are another channel where people can gather in a community and talk about you. Most people disregard discussion boards until they see other sites commenting on information viewed on them. Use boardtracker.com to get instant alerts from threads citing your name.
Other Great Social Media Brand Management Tools
- Yacktrack – This service lets you search for comments on your content from various sources, such as Blogger, Digg, FriendFeed, Stumbleupon, and Wordpress blogs. For instance, if you comment on a blog, you can locate other people who are commenting on that same blog post and rejoin the conversation. My favorite feature of this tool is the “Chatter” tab, which allows you to perform keyword searches on social media sites and then notifies you of instances of your brand name. Yacktrack’s search page results also gives you an RSS feed for the search term.
- Twitter Monitoring – Using Twitter search, you can locate any instances of your name and decide whether you want to tweet back or ignore them. It really depends on the context and meaning of the tweet. Conduct a search for your name, your company’s name, or various topics you’re interested in and then subscribe via RSS. Twilert is another tool you can use to receive email alerts.
- Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to track mentions of your brand across all of these areas. The results are aggregated from the top social media sources, such as Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more. Like the other services, you can subscribe to your results by RSS or email. Other social search engines include Serph and Keotag
It’s also a smart idea to listen to conversations about your competitors. For example, if the Marriott had a Google Alert setup for “Sheraton” they could listen online for customers who get frustrated with their Sheraton experience enough to blog about it, and they could engage those frustrated bloggers, and possibly gain new customers.
Tune in on Monday to learn how to respond to all of the chatter you are listenting to….
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So You Have a Facebook Profile…Now What?
posted by Laurenc on January 12th, 2009Brand Consulting: Building Your Brand Online
One of the first things that a lot of companies will do in their social media strategy is to create a social network profile, via MySpace, Facebook, Ning, or other network, but knowing how to fully utilize that profile is another matter entirely. Many companies look at a social network profile as a way to plug their brand as often as possible, spamming anyone they can, by sending out mass messages. Others, will form a profile, gather friends, and then disappear completely, thinking that the “hard part” of their job is already complete. Both strategies would be wrong.
So, how do you effectively engage and interact with your new audience? Well, to help answer this question, I have compiled a short list of engagement ideas that you can use for your social media strategy. These ideas were pulled not only from my own experience with my social media clients, but there is also some great advice from industry leaders.
Create content that is relevant to users. Creating great content for your social network starts with preparation and knowing your audience. Get to know the community and the types of content they like before spending your time and energy on content development. Social Media expert Alexander Barbara adds, “With social media, the bottom line is that your campaigns will be more successful if you create content that speaks specifically to the community audience.
- Ask for opinions, product advice or reviews. Social networks are filled with users who are screaming out to talk to companies and brands about their products/services. They all have opinions, and they can all help you objectively look at your products/services to discover room for improvement, changes that need to be made, or even offer up ides for new products…All you have to do is ask.
- Ask for feedback on your competition. What does your user base think of their products/services in relation to your company? What ides do they have for you after looking at your competitors sites/products/services. By getting your customer base involved in your research, you are getting them invested in your company.
- Take the time to become an active member of the community. Become a strong member of the community before you begin “selling” your services, or the social network users may write you off as being to spammy. Matt McGee expounds, “When getting involved in social media, enthusiasm is great — and you probably have it in spades at the start of any new venture. But contribute first by joining existing discussions on other content. You should be studying the types of content that get the most attention, whether it be in the form of votes, comments, or whatever the ‘hook’ is for that social community. Knowing the audience is key to creating content they’ll love.”
- Engage users by telling stories. James Chartrand recently wrote about the power of storytelling on Copyblogger, “A good story grabs anyone’s attention. We love stories. We listen to the tale and imagine everything in our mind’s eye. We experience emotion and are compelled to take action because of the stories we hear.” Tell you users stories of your successes, failures, and struggles in between. Soon, you will see them start to root for you, wanting you to succeed, because they want to be a part of the story as well.
- Don’t break the rules of the community. You must develop a keen understanding for the written and unwritten rules of the communities you join, and their tolerance for sales promotions, or you may be asked to leave. Social networks are developing an increasingly short fuse for companies who are overly sales-y or spam-y. Abide by the rule or you may be asked to leave.
- Practice consistancy with your profiles. Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com writes, “All of your online profiles should share the same information. Make sure to use the same user names. If possible, use the same profile pictures (if applicable), logos and contact info.”
- Build a strong army of followers. Mike Fruchter explains, “Choose your friends wisely. This is the army you will need for the battle you are about to embark on. While you have the option to friend people back, it’s all about your objectives using social media. If you want a mass audience, then friend everyone who friends you back, but if you have no intention of ever having any level or engagement, then you are just fooling yourself, and all your doing it list building. You need to be receptive with friends who are trying to engage you positively. It’s impossible to interact with hundreds or even thousands of friends, but the ones who reach out to you, by commenting on your blog posts, sharing your content, tweeting your content and so forth, you can not neglect.”
In conclusion, if you are expecting results from your social media strategy, you must be willing to put in a substantial ammount of effort following the guidelines above. If you have any suggestions or advice on effectively communicating with users online, please leave me a comment, I would love to include it in my next post.
Hello Web 3.0: Open Web is Open for Business
posted by Jeanannv on December 16th, 2008Yesterday brought an exciting announcement from Google that Twitter will now become a part of Friend Connect. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Friend Connect, it is an effort to expand social networking abilities beyond single platforms, allowing you to connect with your social media friends. It’s not the only one of it’s kind…a similar effort called Data Connect was launched by MySpace. And this month we saw a collaboration between Flock, MySpace and Vidoop, creating an OpenID Login process essentially integrating the Open Web concept into the Flock browser.
This type of “Open Web” network has the potential to forever alter our understanding of communications and our brand promotion efforts. Right now, many of our social media applications are siloed. Each site requires a log in in order to access that community. Even sites like FriendFeed, which is an aggregator for streams of information from across multiple platforms, still requires you to go in, set up an account, then tediously log in and connect each application. Even then, you can’t automatically find your friends on all of those sites…you must go in and create yet another circle of friends to follow.
With Open Web technology and social media, we are talking about ultimate efficiency…instead of your finding followers on each platform, when you log in to participating sites, you will automatically know if your tweeps or FB friends are on the site so that you can auto-connect.
In 2009, we will move closer than ever to dreams of the inter-connectivity of Web 3.0. This type of shared information is a hallmark of the vision of our future web. But as we advance towards this new paradigm, will we be creating an ever widening digital divide? Conceiving of social media is challenging enough when it is in discrete, defined communities. Now that we are taking this to a quantum web configuration, will those who didn’t grasp it in the beginning have an even harder time joining the melee of social activity?
We must find a way to make our new media branding strategies user-friendly and help bring others along in this brave new world. In all of our efforts to increase accessibility and connectivity, let’s not create a hierarchical system of social media elitism.
