Facebook Ads for Your Church

Pound for pound, this may be the most effective advertising a church can buy. Because of the demographics, it beats the snot out of the Yellow Pages and other traditional forms of marketing. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…

Bishops urged to embrace social media to evangelize effectively

Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglica...
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Social media is not only here to stay but should be recognized and used as a “new form of pastoral ministry,” U.S. bishops were told Nov. 15 in their annual meeting.

“Social media is proving itself to be a force with which to be reckoned. If not, the church may be facing as great a challenge as that of the Protestant Reformation,” said Bishop Ronald P. Herzog of Alexandria, La., a member of the bishops’ Committee on Communications, in an address to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore.

Bishop Herzog noted that although social media has been around for less than 10 years, it lacks the “makings of a fad” and is “causing as fundamental a shift in communication patterns and behavior as the printing press did 500 years ago.”

“I don’t think I have to remind you of what happened when the Catholic Church was slow to adapt to that new technology,” he told the bishops. “By the time we decided to seriously promote that common folk should read the Bible, the Protestant Reformation was well under way.”

Now Cheryl Cole Fans Can Check-In To Billboards

L'Oreal Elnett, now promoted by Cheryl Cole
Image by shahid1618 via Flickr

Brands have moved quickly to incorporate Facebook Places into their advertising strategy, with the latest campaign urging people to “check-in” to billboards across the UK for singer Cheryl Cole.

TechCrunch reports that the campaign, designed by media agency MediaCom and Polydor Records, gives fans a chance to win two free tickets (plus travel and hotel) to one of her X Factor shows.

There has long been an alliance between mobile and outdoor in the advertising world. For several years many advertising posters and billboards have been built with QR codes or Bluetooth receptors to enable consumers to download more information. Location check-in is a natural evolution, as smart phones becoming increasingly widespread. The Cheryl Cole billboards are among the first for Facebook Places, but a similar concept was used earlier in the summer when Gowalla users were invited to “check-in” to a giant billboard for the New Jersey Nets in New York City.

Other innovative uses of Facebook Places since its launch in August include a marketing campaign for the University of Kentucky, singer James Blunt using Places check-ins to reward concert goers with free music downloads, and a scavenger hunt in San Francisco for Giants baseball player Tim Lincecum.

Hmmm. Billboards and social media. Interesting combo…

OpenTable Seated 15.4 Million Diners in Q3 2010

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Online and mobile reservation service OpenTable released its third quarter financial results, which showed significant year-over-year gains in revenue, restaurant installations and total seated diners.

Most notably, the publicly traded company posted $24.5 million in total revenues for Q3 2010, a 44% increase over the same quarter last year.

OpenTable is also reporting a 52% increase in year-over-year diners with 15.4 seated diners for this past quarter. The company now says it has a client base of 13,025 restaurants in North America — a 26% increase since September 30, 2009.

Yeah. Hmmm. 15 million people were seated using social media? Now tell me again why restaurants should care about social… :-D

What companies need to ask when hiring a social-media consultant

Letting an outsider influence your brand’s social-media presence can be a scary thing. You’re giving a consultant or an agency an enormous amount of power over your brand — and probably paying them a pretty penny. You know you need help to make your social-media efforts bear fruit. But how can you be sure you’re bringing in the right person?

At the 2010 BlogWorld Expo, panelists shared their takes on the social-media hiring process. As the panelists — each of whom is no stranger to the process — talked, they returned again and again to three fundamental questions that companies need to have answers to before confidently bringing a consultant or an agency on board.

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article…

6 Ways to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines

a chart to describe the search engine market
Image via Wikipedia

In an earlier article, I talked about the importance of blogging and search engine rankings. However, once you’ve got the blog up and running, the next thing to do is to start optimizing your posts for the search engines. Although search engine optimization (SEO) can be overwhelming to the newcomer, once you understand a few basic concepts, you’ll soon find it’s really not that difficult.

Good SEO copy and a search engine–optimized website accomplish three things:

  1. They’re easy for the search engines to read
  2. They’re easy for the target audience to find
  3. They’re easy for people to read

Everything you do to optimize a post is based around those three basic concepts.

So with that in mind, here are six things you can do to optimize your website or blog posts for the search engines

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go directly to the source to get the whole story if you’d like to get the 6 ways…

49% of Small Business Owners use a Smartphone

“Over the past few years, it seems that a few mobile devices — laptops, Bluetooth headsets, and increasingly, smartphones — have become ubiquitous among business people. The days of the pager are gone. Small business owners seem to be outpacing the rest of America in smartphone adoption, according to a recent survey of nearly 10,000 small business owners. While only 17% of Americans own smartphones, according to a recent Forrester study, a whopping 49% of small business owners are reported to own smartphones. Of those smartphone owners, 35% own BlackBerrys, 33% own iPhones, 25% own Androids and 7% own Windows Mobile devices. While the study didn’t include a comprehensive look at how small business owners are using their smartphones, we suspect that merchants are turning to mobile devices to stay on top of everyday business needs through e-mail, scheduling and calls. We’ve heard success stories from business owners who also tweet on the go, see the importance of location-based services, and are investing in mobile advertising.

If you’re a small business owner looking for a smartphone, don’t fall victim to the hype — know why you’re doing what you’re doing and make a smart decision. Here’s my perspective on selecting a smartphone…

#1. In many ways, the cellular provider you pick is more important than the phone you use in many cases. If you live in a large metropolitan area, this is kind of a non-issue but most Americans live in non-metropolitan or rural areas. An iPhone is worthless where I live because AT&T is worthless where I live. Before you select a smartphone, review the coverage areas of the network you intend to use and make sure coverage is good in all the areas where you do business and live…

#2. Having selected a network, the services you use should dictate the phone operating system you select. imho, all small business owners should select Google Apps for their business. Period. The Android phone operating system is developed by Google and optimized for Google Apps. BlackBerrys, iPhones, and Windows Mobile devices can all benefit from Google Apps but Android works best. My advice is that small business owners use Google Apps with the most powerful Android phone available from their carrier. Get the best phone you can afford…

#3. Having selected a carrier and a phone, find a rep at your cellular provider who has a clue. You may laugh, but finding a good rep can be a bit like Diogenes searching for an honest man. For me, my carrier is Sprint, my phone is an HTC Evo, and my rep is Cindy Otley at the Oneida Street store in Green Bay. For me, Cindy IS Sprint and she is a primary factor in my decision to stay with that carrier. She’s smart; she knows her company, their policies and the options they offer and she’ll work hard to help you select the plan and phone that will work best for you. I don’t make a move with Sprint these days without talking with Cindy. YOU need a rep like her, especially if you’re not sure about #1 and #2…

There was one more juicy tidbit in the post…

While only 12% of respondents said that they currently market their businesses through mobile — via mobile ads and apps, for example — other reports point towards an upward trend in mobile advertising budgets. In fact, spending on mobile advertising is set to grow nearly 50% to top $1 billion in 2011, according to eMarketer.” Source: 49% of Small Business Owners Use Smartphones [STATS]

More about that later…

Social Media for Farmers…

Bringing in the Harvest
Image by barockschloss via Flickr

Social media is not just for the kids, the young, hip and aware. It’s also for ag producers. I’m David Sparks and I’ll be right back to tell you why. My kids can’t wait to get on Facebook to tell everybody, that has committed to being their “friend”, everything they want them to know. It’s like a cyber self-promotion. Now all of a sudden, this phenomenon is catching on big time in the ag world. Why not? Doesn’t it make sense to promote good ideas, like cost savings, new technology, communicating with the public, otherwise known as the consumer? So social media is definitely catching on in the agriculture industry. AGCO Corporation started its social media initiative at the 2009 Farm Progress Show. Today – nearly 18-thousand Facebook users like the AGCO page and about a thousand more are following AGCO on Twitter. The company also blogs several times each week.

Sue Otten is Director of Corporate Marketing and Brand Communications Worldwide for AGCO and heads up the company’s social media efforts. “It’s a nice blend between our own original content and talking about our products and technologies which is something our audiences are interested in as well as interesting ag news from around the world. It’s good for farmers in one part of the world to know what’s going on in other parts of the world. Ag is getting a bad rap these days and this is a way for the farming community to tell their story.

Click here to go to the source and get the podcast; aginfo.net

AGCO rocks! Nice work, Sue…

What Companies Want in a Social Media Intern

As well as looking good on your resume and netting you college credit, interning in social media can offer you incredibly valuable experience in the world of work, where social media experience is becoming ever-more important.

However, competition for good placements can be fierce, so it’s good to know what companies look for in a social media intern, so you can focus on improving or highlighting those skills.

From big companies, small businesses, non-profits, educational institutions and commercial ventures, we talked to the people who recruit social media interns to find out just what it is they want in a candidate.

If you want to know what makes a good social media intern, look no further than Jamy Lyn Johnson of AGCO. In the spirit of full disclosure, Jamy is a client that has fully embraced the ‘e1evation workflow‘, personalized it and made it her own. A few weeks ago, the AGCO blog [which Jamy drives along with her boss Sue Otten] received a huge honor when they earned a spot in the Alltop Agriculture channel — kind of a bloggers ‘hall of fame’ making them the only Farm Equipment manufacturer to achieve that hallowed status…

What make Jamy so successful? Mashable lists 4 qualities that companies want:

  • Good communication skills
  • Solid writing skills
  • Top notch social skills
  • Enthusiasm

Jamy had all four out of the box. As a journalism major at Furman, she gained the solid foundation that many business bloggers are lacking. She was also familiar with social media tools but needed a system and a process for using them in concert to achieve business objectives. That’s where I came alongside her for a brief period of time to connect the tools and give her a logical workflow using Google Reader combined with all the tools on the AGCO blog.

If you’re looking for the real deal in social media interns, look no further than Jamy — she’s a model for success in this space! AGCO better snap her up soon… :-D

Stop Phoning It In

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If you’re responsible for your company’s newsletter [‘or blog or any other outward facing communication’ ed. note], stop looking at it as a burden. Ask yourself this question: “What would be MOST useful to the people getting this newsletter?” And then ask yourself this question: “What else besides my company’s pitch can I put into this newsletter?” Then ask yourself this question: “Would I share this with someone in my family or with my friends?” That’s one way to figure out how to fix newsletters.

If you’re looking for new buyers, don’t just lamely ask people. Figure out how to find them. Use social tools. Use old fashioned search tools. Create interesting content that would appeal to the kinds of people you need, and figure out ways to promote that. Look OFFLINE. It’s amazing how few people do that last one, by the way, if they’re getting deep into the online world.

If you’re responsible for improving coverage for your company as a public relations professional, put more time into building your relationships with your network before you have a new story. Connect with them about their own things. Ask them about their own passions. Get to know them outside of the article. Ask them how you can help them, or much better still, just figure out a way to be helpful and do it, gratis.

Marketing Progress Poll Results

With only 40 respondents, I don’t know how solid this data is but I still find it interesting. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source to read the rest of the article. e1evation = “simply powerful social media”!

When Churches Keep Quiet: Is Silence Deafening Your Message?

Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglica...
Image via Wikipedia

Churches and their communicators are always sending a message to their local communities. Our given message is to be the kingdom of God and gift of Jesus Christ. When this message is not clearly proclaimed by our verbal and non-verbal communication, our audience fills in the blanks. Our neighbors come to two conclusions: we are either ignorant of their problem, or we don’t care. Or both. And unfortunately, there are churches in both camps.

No one accidentally concludes you are a loving church without hearing your message. No one guesses you are a serving church without seeing your actions.

The current religious climate demands we exhaust every possible avenue in carrying the message of Christ clearly and concisely to any open ear. If your church is not using Facebook, then start—your high school, chamber of commerce, library and most tax paying citizens are. If you don’t use Twitter, learn—your friends and community already have. Does your local community have a bulletin board, free town mailer, radio station or homepage? Get on it. Go out in your community, and do something. The church’s silence is killing her message. If you make people guess what you are about, they will guess wrong.

B2B Social Media And Lead Generation

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With a business blog, there are many different ways to get people to become a “lead” from a visitor.  For example: including buttons in the sidebar to talk to a representative, or text links within content to whitepaper landing pages or to download content.  HubSpot has found it successful to add calls to action at the end of content.

We have found that a majority of posts generating leads haven’t been published recently.  Older content is generating  leads.

It’s important to remember that your customers are more important than you are.  For example, HubSpot has a customer in Virginia that installs pools and spas.  All he does is share what someone might want to know when installing a pool.  He doesn’t directly sell his products, but that’s okay.  Even if people aren’t ready to buy, publishing value added content adds them into that consideration section.

Getting all team members involved in the business blog is vital.  People want content from people, not necessarily just companies.  Getting different people from different departments – i.e., research or product, allows marketers to expand the relevant information covered on a given blog to appeal to a larger subset of customers.

Business blogging drives leads and serves as a hub for search and social media visitors.  It doesn’t feel like they are visiting a website that hasn’t been updated in years.  A blog provides much better context for a business.

Big Talk. Small Acts.

If you’re going to do anything in Marketing, is it more important to focus on “how many?” people you put your message in front of or “who?” you put your message in front of?

You can see this as the classic “quantity over quality” debate or you can look at it as “big vs. small,” however you slice it, it’s hard to argue that brands can now get major results through many small (and sometimes minimal) acts. There are winning business cases (in fact, more than you may think) around every corner. A cause for celebration if you dabble in the Social Media space (we like to claim those small victories as our own).

But, Social Media alone will not save you.

While some small brands can do many small things that achieve incremental results, the bigger brands tend to be doing a whole lot more of the the little things while pushing their weight around if something clicks. One example of this would be the indie-turned Paramount Pictures scareflick, Paranormal Activity. Leveraging many of the Social Media platforms (from Twitter and YouTube to Eventful) the movie had an initial groundswell that enabled Paramount to kick marketing dollars into additional online spaces (and traditional mass media ones too) and slowly push it to become the blockbuster that it became.

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in learning more…

The Birth of Product Evangelism

Image representing Scott Klososky as depicted ...
Image via CrunchBase

Over the last decades, salespeople often used the power of personality, or the development of a relationship to build trust and heavily influence what a sales prospect would think of the product. In other words, the better a person was at the art of sales, the less the product they were selling even mattered. Hence the phrase, “he can sell ice to Eskimo’s.” It might be true to say that the harder a product was to sell, or the harder it was to get someone to spend a large chunk of money, the more you needed the human element involved in order to influence the prospect into signing the agreement. For example, I spent about three months of my life at 18 years old selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door. Now these are good machines that do the job, and they are also very expensive compared to competing products. We sold them door-to-door and it was commonly known that some of the easiest people to sell were those that would struggle the most to afford them. However, these were the people that were easiest to influence from a human level. In fact, one of the top sales guys targeted people living in trailer homes.

The reason this kind of sale worked was because the salesperson could parachute into the lives of the prospects and whatever came out of the salespersons mouth was hard to verify easily. Today, things have changed. Even a person in a trailer home can go online and in an instant type in a product name and see what others have paid for it, how it stacks up against competitors, etc. The reality of where we are headed is that people are becoming less and less willing to be pushed into to making decisions with the only information coming from the sales person. It is just too darn easy to check the Web to gain more information.

This change in human behavior is going to drive us to a world where we still can promote products and services by influencing, but the influence is going to have to be supporting and evangelizing a products strengths, and those strengths are going to have to be supported by information that can be found online. Not only that, people will also be able to verify pricing ranges because buyers and reviewers will post this information so the salespersons ability to unfairly get in the pocket of a prospect will diminish.

I had the chance to hear Scott speak in the springtime — his perspective on the impact of social media on sales is an interesting one. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in reading the rest of his article…

Four reasons your Executive Director should be on Twitter

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Executive leaders at nonprofits should put community engagement via social media as a top priority in their job descriptions. They need to get their hands dirty.

But more often than not they don’t.

A broken model?

Usually, staffers do the “dirty work” with social media while management gets a debrief on ROI.

This is like having a nurses aid listen to a patient’s acute cardiac symptoms and tell the heart surgeon where to operate. A lot of critical information would be lost without the surgeon using her own stethoscope to listen directly to the patient’s heart.

Listening to your community is no different. Your community’s voice has a particular rhythm that can only be understood firsthand.

Four reasons EDs should be on Twitter

  1. Executive leaders can understand the community better through unfiltered direct access
  2. They can create greater trust within that community by demonstrating the orgs commitment to engage
  3. Respond faster to the community by eliminating the time it takes to play the telephone game
  4. They can anticipate needs that less experienced staff members might miss

But what if our executive leaders are too busy?

Too busy? If they aren’t willing to make an effort to hear firsthand from the people they serve, maybe they aren’t the right leaders for the organization.

…or maybe they don’t have the right tactics & tools. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in learning more…

Sorry, But McDonald’s Did Not See a 33% Increase in Foot Traffic Because of Foursquare

A McDonalds in a Toronto, Ontario, Canada Wal-...
Image via Wikipedia

According to a current headline on TechMeme, McDonalds saw a 33% increase in foot traffic to its stores when it ran a promotion during Foursquare Day earlier this year. At that time, the fast food chain offered users who checked into McDonald’s a chance to win $5 and $10 gift cards. On the Econsultancy blog, Meghan Keane reports that McDonald’s head of social media Rick Wion claims that, “with this one little effort [$1000 in gift cards], we were able to get a 33% increase in foot traffic to the stores.” These numbers, however, simply don’t add up.

There is clearly some confusion here about the numbers that Wion was talking about. Keane reports that McDonalds saw a 33% increase in check-ins from the day prior to Foursquare day and a 40% increase in check-ins for the week the special ran. Then, however, she goes on to quote Wion as saying that he “was able to go to some of our marketing people — some of whom had never heard of Foursquare — and say, ‘Guess what. With this one little effort, we were able to get a 33% increase in foot traffic to the stores.'” It seems clear that Wion was talking about check-ins here and misspoke when he claimed that this campaign increased foot traffic by 33%.

Some of our colleagues, however, then took this number and ran with it – after all, a 33% increase in foot traffic to one of the world’s largest brands because of one of the most over-hyped social media companies sure sounds like a good story.

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…

Why no one is reading your blog…

You want to throw a party and have lots of people show up.
You want to have a successful blog but you want people to read it.

It’s a trick

So here’s the trick (and it really is a mental trick).  You have to write a blog post like someone is reading it…even if no one is.  Anyone who knows how to use Google and can “cut and paste” can add analytics to their site to see exactly how many people are visiting.  Here’s my advice…add analytics and then ignore them.  They’re too discouraging and in the end it’s not the point.  CNN.com has a lot more visits than your web site and they always will.  So what?  If your goal is to spread your ideas then start spreading them one post at a time.  You’ll know when your ideas are spreading, trust me.

How do I get traffic?

Somebody cares about what you’re saying.  If no one seems to care then talk about something else or change how you’re delivering your message.  But, somebody cares.  Let’s go back to the party comparison.  If you don’t come to my party guess what…I’m not coming to yours.  So if you want me to come to your blog then come to mine and let me know how to get back to yours.  If you want readers then spread the love.  Spend time at other blogs and then go back to yours regularly and write like someone is reading it.

You better have a frosty beverage for me

The other reason you need to write like someone is reading is that one day, when you do start to get visitors you’ll need something for them to read.  Blogs archive your entries so they’ll have a treasure trove of info that you’ve written if you post before they show up. Not regularly posting to your blog or creating content of any kind (podcast, ebooks etc.) and inviting me to visit your site is like inviting me to a party without having any good beer to drink or any food to snack on.  When I get there…I expect something from you.  It’s bad news if you expect those people to come back if they didn’t find anything the first time they showed up…they’re not likely to return.


Action points:

  • Install analytics on your site
  • Ignore the analytics for a long time
  • Comment on other sites every day (you can start with this blog).  Commenting on the big blogs can get you traffic…not from the big names but from other people who leave comments (happened to me this week).
  • Write a post a week (minimum).  But please write something.

The brand called you

Marlboro logo.
Image via Wikipedia

Tom Peters wrote this article over 12 years ago, but it’s truer now than it was then…

“The good news — and it is largely good news — is that everyone has a chance to stand out. Everyone has a chance to learn, improve, and build up their skills. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.

Who understands this fundamental principle? The big companies do. They’ve come a long way in a short time: it was just over four years ago, April 2, 1993 to be precise, when Philip Morris cut the price of Marlboro cigarettes by 40 cents a pack. That was on a Friday. On Monday, the stock market value of packaged goods companies fell by $25 billion. Everybody agreed: brands were doomed.

Today brands are everything, and all kinds of products and services — from accounting firms to sneaker makers to restaurants — are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.” Source: The Brand Called You | Fast Company

Must read! Go to the source and devour this article…

Small business and social media

Brian Solis
Image via Wikipedia

Just because you’re a small business, doesn’t mean you can’t leverage social media — in fact, it’s quite the opposite…

“Social Media impacts every business, every brand, and in doing so, connects a network of distributed communities of influence, making the world a much smaller place in the process. Small businesses are in fact at an advantage in Social Media Marketing as they can focus on hyper-local activity that can offer immediate rewards or at the very least, the real-time feedback or lack thereof says everything about next steps.

A recent survey conducted by Citibank offers a contrary point of view, citing small business executives who believe social networks offer no benefit or promise to expanding their business. This isn’t all that uncommon however. The truth is that without knowledge or direct experience, it’s virtually impossible to envision the potential of something where they’re most likely absent as a consumer themselves.” Source: The Socialization of Small Business | Brian Solis

The article goes on to say…

“Ad-ology published its “Small Business Marketing Forecast 2010″ report that revealed that among the other benefits of social media, lead generation is the biggest benefit of online networking. Other benefits ranked as follows…” Source: The Socialization of Small Business | Brian Solis

You’ll have to go to the source to get the complete ranked list. Comment, call or contact me to discuss how this applies to your business!

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define:brand

I got this from Seth Godin who got it from the Google dictionary…

“A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.

A brand’s value is merely the sum total of how much extra people will pay, or how often they choose, the expectations, memories, stories and relationships of one brand over the alternatives.

A brand used to be something else. It used to be a logo or a design or a wrapper. Today, that’s a shadow of the brand, something that might mark the brand’s existence. But just as it takes more than a hat to be a cowboy, it takes more than a designer prattling on about texture to make a brand. If you’ve never heard of it, if you wouldn’t choose it, if you don’t recommend it, then there is no brand, at least not for you.

If you hear a designer say this, “A TCHO Chocolate bar, with its algorithmic guilloche patterns, looks like a modern form of currency. “Modern” was always part of the brand brief — no faux traditionalism, but resolutely forward-looking for a new generation of chocolate enthusiasts…” then I wonder if there’s a vocabulary disconnect.

Design is essential but design is not brand.

(Believe it or not, I didn’t make that quote up).

PS a Google tip: you can find the definition of any word by typing “define:” followed by the word into your search box.” Source: Seth’s Blog: define: Brand

This goes hand in hand with the earlier post I did about Facebook pages…

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