Thinks I find along the way
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”!
Okay, so you’ve decided I’m not crazy, and you’re going to try out some of this social media stuff. Where should you start? I’ve got some advice.
If you’re intrigued by the idea of applying social media to your business, you’ll want to follow the ‘via’ link to this article by Chris Brogan who nets out the basics for you…
I apply Chris’ wisdom in what I call the ‘e1evation workflow’; a system and process of ‘consume, create, communicate‘ that makes Chris’ ideas easy to implement on a daily basis. Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business…
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.
Blogging can be intimidating for someone who hasn’t done it in the past or grown up in the age where everyone has a personal blog. It is, however, critical that business owners and marketers ‘blog for business.’ Putting pen to paper or more appropriately, putting fingers to your keyboard is the biggest challenge for most people. So let’s talk about how to get started.
If you’re interested in blogging but not sure how to get started, you’ll want to follow the ‘via’ link above to read the rest of this article. If you’re going to start, I encourage you to set a goal of posting once per day. If that seems like a lot, remember that all your content does not need to be original! In my book, there are two main types of posts; creation [original thoughts] and curation [quoting someone’s content with proper attribution]. I uses tools like Gist and Google Reader to listen to subject matter experts in my field, quote their articles, and then post my opinion just like I’m doing now…
Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business!
This is the first post in what I anticipate will be a 7 part series…
11 months ago, I posted this introspective piece on the results I was getting from blogging…
Yesterday, I passed the 400 post mark. 400 posts over 18 months. Wow! Roughly a post a day for a year and a half. Is that a lot? Is that too little? I really don’t know. What I do know is this — when I use my ‘pass or play’ methodology, traffic to my site increases and my ‘pipeline’ fills…
My good friend [and brother in law] Jim Gilligan has a blog that he’s starting for his life coaching business at EffectiveLiving, LLC. Jim asked me how many posts he should create before he goes ‘live’. I told him a dozen or so is enough to get started but recently I did an experiment and I believe the number at which you start to see good results is closer to 100 over a 3 month period. Here’s a real world case study…
I had neglected my business blog for a little over a year — my passion was politics and I was attempting to leverage my social media skills in the political space. My political blog was ranked most influential in Wisconsin a dozen times earlier this year and my Alexa ranking rose to within the top million sites in the world, but it didn’t get me what I wanted. More business. One year ago today, my business blog, however, had only served up 147 page views for the month. The whole month. Two weeks ago, I got 233 pageviews in a single day and my traffic so far this month is 11 times greater than a year ago [and the month’s not even finished yet]. By the way, the Alexa rank on my blog is currently 338,142. [That was in the US at the time — now my rank is 341,593 global. ed.]. All this as a result of 100 posts over a 3 month period. Pretty good return on investment, I think.
Yesterday, I passed 2,400 posts — 2,000 additional posts — in less than 11 months. What do I think I’ve learned? Here are some more or less random observations…
1. Blogging is the best, fastest, least expensive way to establish a thought leadership position. Period.
The key to thought leadership is having a point of view that is ‘searchable, findable, knowable and shareable‘ as I say in my seminars. There is not better way to do that then frequent reiteration of that point of view on the internet. If you use the right set of tools, it’s easy and fun to do as well…You can read my posts on blogging here, but two of the best I posted within the past week; read ‘Why I blog’ and ‘Confessions of a really new blogger‘ for two different perspectives on why blogging rocks. It is helpful, however, if you have a simple, repeatable process so that you don’t burn out…
There are 6 more lessons that I’ll roll out over the course of the next week or so; be sure to collect all 7…
A global business I’m working with is run by a very successful woman who is rarely in her office–or in her home state, for that matter. She spends a large percentage of her time developing relationships with her clients in other parts of the world and making them wildly successful.
She’s right where she needs to be. And because she is, she trusts her online media presence to others like me who can launch timely social feeds that generate buzz.
Most of my clients dabble in social media, but don’t have the time to stop running their businesses to manage their online marketing and media presence.
But the latest trends show us that someone at your company absolutely must be keeping an eye on what your customers are seeing, hearing and feeling from your brand.
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. Favorite quote from this post? “Imagine not tapping into that enormous potential! Gone are the days when we can dismiss social media as a fad or something that only the younger generation is into.”…
We know it’s a brave new world for consumers and brands. If United breaks your guitar, or your Maytag doesn’t work properly, you can take on the company that messed with you via social media — and you may well win.
But technology empowerment works both ways. Consumers can take a stand against poor business practices, and brands can empower their customers like never before.
Mobile is a hotbed of innovation in this department. Point your phone at a restaurant and see if it’s worth an evening out. With the addition of cloud services, you get stuff like the iPhone app from UK car dealer Auto Trader, which can tell you the make, model and the price of used cars just from snapping a license plate photo.
To take it one step further, companies that invest in technology and innovation can not only sell more products with digital tools, but empower their own employees. Below, we’ve highlighted some examples of businesses that are using technology creatively to solve customer issues and spur innovation.
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…
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…
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…
Pop Quiz: How would customers rate your organization on characteristics like “honesty and trustworthiness” and “acts in the customer’s best interests?” While those may seem like far from relevant concerns in the realm of social media, I assure you that they should be among the first things you think about.
Yet another national study has proven that consumers instinctively judge brands in much the same way they judge other people. (It’s called the “warmth and competence model”) And what’s one of the key reasons that brands get into social media? To inject a level of humanity and dialogue not seen in most marketing efforts, of course! In other words…to make their brands more like people…to attract more people.
Yet, it’s not that easy. In the same study, they looked at why Tylenol, who had a large recall in 2010 fared so much better (leagues apart) than BP in the court of public opinion. It’s simple – Tylenol exhibited humanity across their communication channels – which developed trust in their brand. That said, the underlying reason that Tylenol (Johnson & Johnson) was able to do that in the first place stemmed from the selfless servant-marketing attitude that they have toward their customers and that’s ingrained in their corporate culture.
See, social media “value” isn’t really about ROI in many cases. Rather it’s a question of how it fits with your culture and brand attitude. If yours is a brand that could score well on characteristics like “honest and trustworthy” and “acts in the customer’s best interests”, then you’ll likely derive a great deal of value from social media. If not, it may not be the perceived effectiveness of social media but rather your culture that’s holding you back.
Who’s your favorite social media gooroo? Mine’s Dana VanDen Heuvel and I’m thrilled to be on a panel with him this Thursday to discuss Thought Leadership marketing. I’ll put up a link to the event a little later but in the meantime, follow the ‘via’ link and head over to MarketingSavant.com where you can learn more about Dana and his craft…
Since the economic collapse, there are not enough jobs being created for the population as a whole, much less for those in the twilight of their careers.
Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group — 7.3 percent — is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.
After other recent downturns, older people who lost jobs fretted about how long it would take to return to the work force and worried that they might never recover their former incomes. But today, because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy’s recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.
Time to start a business? You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go directly to the source and get the rest of the story if you’d like…
As a blogger, I get paid in bags of stale Tootsie Rolls. Is that good? I have no idea. Actually, I am getting a better idea of what my job is worth now that I have checked out some salary comparison sites. Specifically, I I’ve found out that there are places you can blog where you’re paid in fresh Tootsie Rolls.
If you want to see how your salary compares to the industry at large, be sure to visit MySalary, a site where you can find salary ranges for virtually any career. There’s a lot of stuff on the site — job search and education information in particular — but be sure to click the Salary tab and enter your job title and zip code. You’ll instantly get access to a slew of job titles that are similar to what you searched for.
The resulting histogram shows national averages for salary ranges, like this one for speech writers (I always wanted to know what Ben Stein used to make).
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…
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…
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. Comment, call or use the contact form to discuss how this applies to your business…
Kudos to the school district of Janesville, WI for leveraging “good, fast, and cheap” social media tools. You can ‘like’ their page here…
My business website is one of the most visited sites in Wisconsin, outranking websites with much bigger brands, more popular products, and bigger marketing staffs. How do I do it all by myself? The short answer is that I blog. The longer answer is that I have a documented workflow that anyone can use to drive traffic to their website and value proposition and it’s driven by email and bookmarking – two skills that almost everyone has mastered in this new millennium…
Now I don’t know a whole lot about search engine optimization or SEO – if that’s what you’re after, you want to call my friends at Envano. I do know however, that if you use the right tools and process, there’s a natural SEO that occurs through frequent posting. That ‘right tool’ is a blog…
“B2B blogging experts understand that a blog is a lead generation machine. This blog generates more traffic than our main company website. Each month, tens of thousands of people find this blog through search engines and social media websites, and thousands of them like the content enough to take the next step and respond to one of our offers and become a lead.
Some B2B bloggers think a business blog is just about thought leadership. Yes, B2B blogging is great for thought leadership and brand building. But, with this blog we get all the benefits of thought leadership, and also get lots of leads. By maximizing the lead generation potential of your B2B blog, you can have your cake (thought leadership) and eat it too (leads).” Source: How to Turn a Blog into a B2B Lead Generation Machine
There are options to consider whether you have a website or not. The first situation may actually be easier to resolve, depending on how much you want your new blog to resemble your existing website. I used to be a real stickler on this, but as time has gone on, I’ve become less concerned about matching the exact look and feel of the site [just know there are options for you regardless of your perspective] and more concerned about just driving traffic.
It’s an easy thing for me to add a blog to an existing site that will drive traffic using my ‘e1evation workflow’. From a design perspective, it’s much easier to just start from scratch using WordPress – a blogging platform that offers blogs that are already integrated with websites – but starting from scratch begs the issue of how you will populate the other pages on your site with information about your brand and products…
The bottom line is that whether you have an existing website or not, there are a couple of “good, fast, and cheap” solutions that are available to you. If you’re trying to figure out how you can add blogging and social media to your already overflowing plate and still get home for supper, comment, call or contact me — I’d love to show you how…
When my company is stuck, I’m just as inclined to hire an outside advisor as other leaders are. But I hate it. Hiring a consultant means something needs to be fixed, or grown, or that I don’t know what to do next. I’m not talking about contractors whom I hire to do what I need and they are supplemental labor. I’m talking the consultants where I hire them to advise me. Hiring them usually means we’ve already failed in our first effort. It mostly means we are vulnerable. We need. So I believe we should all hate consultants. You probably already do. It’s okay. I give you permission.
I love Nilofer Merchant’s perspective on things — it’s so different from what I hear day to day, and yet so wise. Follow the ‘via’ link for the rest of this article and follow Nilofer Merchant in social media — just try to keep up!
Sue Otten of AGCO, David Sauter of Envano, and I are meeting Randy Sprenger, Electronic Advertising & Direct Promotions, Harley Davidson, for lunch today — can’t wait!!! HD is one of the great global brands and their home is right here in Wisconsin. I’m really looking forward to hearing the inside scoop on how HD is leveraging social media…
AGCO continues to rock the ag world with social media — this time taking a ‘best of’ award at NAMA…
Because social media is just getting started in the ag world, there was no category for social media per se. Instead, AGCO dominated in the ‘broadcast news’ category demonstrating again the value of social media and the pressure it’s putting on traditional media…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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