Tag: Facebook

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You can follow the ‘via’ link above to read the article…

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A client approached me today and asked whether or not I thought it would be a good thing for her to advertise in the Yellow Pages. I said I dunno — let’s look at the numbers…

Over the past 13 months, her Yellow Pages campaign had generated 5,500 impressions and a little over 60 clicks. In one year. Perhaps the thing that amazes me most about that is that our county tends to lag behind a little technology-wise and you would think the Yellow Pages would still be popular here. Perhaps even our humble county is falling prey to this national trend….

The White Pages, where many of us have found residential phone numbers over the years, are slowly being phased out in a number of states. NPR reported on this in early October, and now New York is part of the movement, too.

There will still be Yellow Pages, for the time being — it’s just the residential listings that phone companies are seeking permission to stop printing, except for customers who specifically request them. Everything from environmental concerns to the ubiquity of online directories to the decline of land lines has added heft to the cause, and in a growing list of states, you already won’t get the White Pages automatically.

But the piece in The Wall Street Journal notes that where AT&T has stopped printing the White Pages automatically, 2 percent of customers still request them. It’s not a lot, but it’s something.

It’s not hard to imagine a day when the Yellow Pages, too, will no longer be able to justify their existence, and the entire concept of a hard-copy phone directory will be something almost nobody remembers and almost nobody can imagine using.

via npr.org

Now let’s take a look at Facebook ads. Here’s the report summary for a little campaign I did a few weeks ago…

In brief, for a cost of $20.92, my ‘facebook ad using’ client got 25 times more impressions, almost the same amount of clicks, in a much more targeted audience than my ‘yellow page using’ client got in the previous 13 months for less than %1 of the cost. Oh — I forgot to mention the first client spent $3,900 to get her 60+ clicks…

I don’t know — you tell me. Should client #1 continue to use Yellow Pages or test the waters on Facebook Ads? I think even I can figure that one out…

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It’s always interesting to go back and see where you were a year or so ago thoughtwise and what you may have learned since then. My ‘old post promoter’ randomly brings up old posts and this one, looking back on 2009 is very interesting to me. In it we find the genesis of what I now call the ‘e1evation workflow’ which now consists of 10.5 tools — many of which have stood the test of time since 2009. The mainstays of this process have been working for me for over 18 months now and continue to produce consistent results across a wide variety of industry verticals. What follows is the original post…

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LOL! Here I sit looking back over the past decade, thinking that it seems like only yesterday that we were sitting in fear of Y2K. Now I’m making a living using tools that for the most part didn’t exist back then. It’s a wonderful [tech] life, eh?!

Wrapping up 2009, here’s the list of my favorite social media tools, organized according to their position and role within the e1evation system. This may look like a simple list but it took over a year to develop and that’s not because I’m a slow learner — it’s because I use rigorous filters for inclusion in my social media toolkit. I also am constantly using Einstein’s Razor [“Things must be as simple as possible but no simpler.”] to keep the toolset small. With that intro, here they are…

Perception

  • Google Reader
  • Feedly
  • iTunes [for sme podcasts, silly!]

Publishing

  • Posterous
  • ScribeFire
  • Shareaholic
  • FriendFeed
  • Facebook Page [along with key applications]
  • WordPress

Propagation

  • Facebook Page
  • Twitter [along with Hootsuite]
  • LinkedIn
  • Feedblitz
  • Tumblr

Preferences [other favorites tools]

  • Delicious
  • Evernote
  • Instapaper
  • Scribd
  • SlideShare
  • YouTube

Effectively using these tools together has elevated my business blog to #474,040 in the United States and #1,612,683 in the world in just 6 months according to Alexa. Imagine what you could do if you added one of these tools to your toolkit every month or so next year!

Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment or use the contact page. And, have a great 2010!

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You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source if you want the goods…

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:-D

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My first (solo) Guest Post on Mashable
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Anyone who wants to rank socially networked cities is going to be in for a fight. But the brave souls at Men’sHealth aren’t shying away from a tussle, placing the top 100 most socially networked cities in order for all to see.

How did they do it? It appears to be a fair and scientifically valid procedure. First, Men’sHealth figured out each city’s LinkedIn and Facebook users per capita, and then tapped the NetProspex marketing database to figure out each location’s amount of overall Twitter usage.

Not stopping there, the next step was to consult online ad network Chitika to quantify traffic from MySpace, Friendster, Reddit and Digg, and finally, SimplyMap helped determine the percentage of households using chat rooms and blogs.

The list below is as much a study of how to find this information as it is a valid assessment of which city has the bragging rights to calling itself The Capital of Social Networking. Speaking of capital, who knew our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., would be at the top of the list, or that Milwaukee (#45), the location of Mashable’s humble Midwest Test Facility, would rate higher than the mighty New York City (#53), home of Mashable HQ?

See how your city ranks, and feel free to trash-talk those other lesser bergs in the comments.

via mashable.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link to see where your city ranks, but if you’re from Northeast Wisconsin, don’t bother! Green Bay and Appleton aren’t on the list. How do you feel about that? Does that mean social media is still a breakout strategy for you or does that make it officially a waste of time in your mind?

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Does this sound familiar?

“I routinely declare email bankruptcy and simply delete my entire inbox. But even so, I currently have 2,433 unread emails in my inbox. Plus another 721 in my Facebook inbox. and about thirty skype message windows open with unanswered messages. It goes without saying, of course, that my cell phone voicemail box is also full (I like the fact that new messages can’t be left there, so I have little incentive to clear it out).

How do I deal with email now? I scan the from and subject fields for high payoff messages. People I know who don’t waste my time, or who I have a genuine friendship with. Or descriptive subject lines that help me understand that I should allot a minute or more of my life to opening it and reading it.”

Wow. Talk about a dysfunctional way of handling communications! Are you having problems like this? Here are a couple of ideas…

  1. Use Gmail. No other ISP offers the tools to handle large volumes of email like Gmail…
  2. Read ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen. If you’re in a hurry, skip to #3…
  3. Check out Inbox Zero…

If you can’t implement it on your own, scroll down and give me a call — I’ll be happy to help you out…

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Sharing is a foundational part of the social media process. Here’s an interesting perspective on the topic of sharing on the internet…

“The parts of the report that caught my eye included the following:

  • People still share via email and instant messenger more than via social networks. An astounding 59% of all shares on the widget were done via email, 25% via instant messenger and just 14% were passed along on networks like Facebook and Twitter.
  • Twitter, which has recently emerged as the share site du jour for those in the social media world, accounts for only one percent of all shares. Facebook is 11%. Yahoo mail is the highest individual share channel at 26%.
  • Yahoo (44%) and MSN (25%) mail are way ahead of Gmail (19%) as the email provider used by Tell-A-Friend users.
  • Facebook accounts for 79% of all shares via social networks. MySpace is second at 15%. Twitter is just 5% of all social network shares via the widget.

While I do think there is a separation between what I would call hyper-tech users (those who owe their soul to Google, defer to other bookmarklets and other methods rather than clicking on the share widgets provided) and the average Joe or Jane, the statistics are significant. They show us how wide of a gap there is between those two crowds. When we as Internet marketers are making recommendations and building functionality for the mainstream, we have to remember that WE are not the mainstream.

Another insight I get out of this data is that one-to-one communications – email and instant messenger – are still enormously powerful. Most people either don’t realize they can share with more folks via social networks or are not comfortable doing so. It might just be that sharing the information with one or two people is the methodology of choice for the rest of the world. That can change how we approach social media strategies for some products and services. Design programs and products that inspire more one-to-one pass alongs rather than “LOOK WHAT I FOUND!” messages on social networks.

To gather some comparative data, I asked Tell-A-Friend competitor ShareThis if they minded sharing some cursory data. For the month of October, their users also shared more via email (46.4%). Twitter was higher than Tell-A-Friend’s results, but also surprisingly low (5.82% of all shares). Facebook accounted for 33.32% of all share paths for ShareThis in October, higher than Tell-A-Friend. If you’re wondering about ShareThis’s IM numbers, they don’t offer instant messenger clients as share options, sans AOL Instant Messenger, which is buried on the third tab of their full icon set option.” New Study Reveals How People Share Online | Social Media Explorer

How do YOU share? For me the most important tool in my toolkit is Shareaholic! I’m pretty sure it’s available for all major browsers at this point…

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A little while ago I wrote a post about 20 great Facebook Fan Pages. Most of the HubSpot blog readers found the examples eye-catching and inspiring, but many of the comments contained a similar yearning to see if these same concepts could be applied to B2B businesses.

Like the general idea of Inbound Marketing can be applied to both B2C and B2B companies, so too can the Facebook marketing techniques portrayed in the previous examples. In order to understand how to incorporate these principles into a B2B Facebook Fan Page we must first make sure that we understand the objective of these pages.

Engage Your Audience

One of the main reasons that people “Like” a page is because they want to stay up to date with the latest happenings at a particular company. Just like a company blog, if your Facebook Fan Page is rarely updated then people aren’t going to have much incentive to “Like” your page. It’s not only important to update your page with relevant company info, but also interesting goings-ons in your industry.

Encourage Sharing with Others

Other ways to engage your audience include holding contests or offering specials to fans. People love free stuff, and contests and specials are a great way to encourage fans to share your page with others. It is very common for friend’s on social networks to have similar interests and likely that they work in the same industry. Creating events that encourage current fans to share with others is an excellent way to extend your reach to those who are likely a good fit for your business.

Create a Conversation

This is similar to engaging your audience but takes it one step further. If you are regularly creating great content and sharing it, people will be more inclined to keep coming back to visit your Fan Page. If you’re actively participating in conversations with visitors in the comments and on your page’s wall then you will see an even better response. Showing your fans that behind your company logo is an actual person with whom they can interact is a great way to create happy customers who might even tell their friends about you :)

via blog.hubspot.com

You’ll have to follow the ‘via’ link if you want a peek at the 7 awesome pages. Comment below or ‘connect’ above so we can talk about how this applies to your business…

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Go to the source of the quote here: johnhaydon.com

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A couple of days ago I filled in for Dana VanDen Heuvel in a class he was teaching at NWTC on social media. As luck would have it, I taught on the topic of Facebook pages — here are two hot posts that popped up today that I wish I had shared with the class. Although the first targets non-profits, much of it is applicable to small businesses and other organizations as well…

“Facebook Pages are where most nonprofits establish a home-base on Facebook. You can send targeted updates to fans, engage supporters on a wall, and give visitors a customized experience by using a variety of applications.

Your Page comes standard with a few applications developed by Facebook like Discussions and Events. But you can also add third-party applications to your Page.” Source: Eleven Killer Facebook Page Applications For Your Nonprofit — SocialFish

Item #6 on the list is ‘Static FBML’. Mari Smith has some good stuff here for those interested in creating a web page within a Facebook page…

“Let’s assume you have your Facebook Fan Page up and running now. (If not, see FANtastic Fan Pages for ideas and help). Some of the basics include adding a custom graphic, installing apps – particularly Static FBML, adding custom content including a landing tab, and ensuring you’re adding relevant, quality content on a regular basis. I’ll be covering all of these subjects and more on this blog and also on SocialMediaExaminer.com.

If you have visitors to your Fan page and they are not yet fans, I call them non-fans, you ideally want those visitors to be directed to your custom Welcome Tab rather than your Wall.

The idea behind this is you want to have a clear and inviting page that provides these visitors with an immediate sense of who you are, what you do, why they should become a fan, AND you want to provide a call to action with a nice visual to your Become a Fan button.” Source: How To Add A Custom Landing Tab To Your Facebook Fan Page | MariSmith.com

You’ll have to go to the sources to get more, but they’re both great articles. If you want to leverage Facebook pages, but don’t know where to start, I can help! Comment, call or use the contact form to discuss how this applies to your business…

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Christopher Penn
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The most basic framework in marketing is the 4 Ps. Here’s how it breaks down:

  • Product
  • Price
  • Place
  • Promotion

Let’s review these basic components:

Product. This is the thing that you want to sell to people. It can be a book, a service, even an emotion. Everything that provides value is bundled up in product, from packaging to features & benefits.

The most common mistake made by companies? Attempting to use marketing to fix a product problem. The bottom line is that if your product sucks, if your product is something that no one wants or needs, you won’t develop growth. Yes, you’ll sucker a few people here or there into buying your stuff, but they won’t buy again and they won’t tell their friends anything positive about you.

Price. How much do you sell your product or service for? More broadly, how much value does your product or service deliver?

Pricing is its own science, but one of the key things marketers get wrong is failing to connect price to value, to the benefit delivered for a price. If, as an example, you’re trying to sell a financial service, and your price is $1 but your service delivers value of $4 for every $1 spent, then you can raise your price and still deliver value to your customers. Conversely, if your service costs $1 but delivers 50 cents of value, you’ve got a long death spiral ahead of you. Marketing can slow it down, but you’re still doomed.

Place. Where can someone get your product or service? This is a much trickier question in marketing now than it used to be. In the early days of the industrial revolution, place was simple. You went to a store to buy products. In the information age, place can be virtual.

One area that gets especially murky in marketing (and martial arts!) is that place also has a time component. Yes, you can market on Twitter or Facebook, but to make your marketing effective, there is also a time in a relationship you’ve built to do that marketing. If you understand place but not time, you still won’t get the results you want, even though you may be standing in the same place as a competitor.

Promotion. This is the mainstay of marketing, the part that has all the visibility and attention – rightly so, because it’s the part that generates the most results and the part that’s hardest to gain proficiency with. Promotion is telling the right people about your product or service’s very existence so that they can learn more about it and ideally buy it from you.

Go to the source: christopherspenn.com

This is longer than the usual quote I curate, but Christopher Penn really nails it in this article. Go to the source if you want the rest of his perspective…

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