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Archive for the ‘Social Policy’ Category

If you were ever in any doubt about the effectiveness of social media and online marketing, looking at the successes of other businesses can really help turn you into a believer. Seeing what these companies have done with their campaigns may inspire you to do some forward thinking of your own!

Innovating with Facebook

Facebook has always been a great marketing tool, but it can really take your business to stratospheric heights if you just use some of the standard functions in an extraordinary way. In this marketing campaign for IKEA, photos of showrooms were uploaded at various intervals, and the person who tagged themselves first on any item in the photo, won that item. This led to massive interlinking, and a hugely viral success for IKEA.

Tweet your way to the spotlight

The key with Twitter is to take advantage of the ease and speed with which communication happens. Making tweeting fun for your followers is a great way to get them talking nonstop about your product. Take this example of the new Ford Focus – Ford had a cake created in the shape of the car, and the cake contained technology that allowed it to automatically speak tweets containing a special Ford Focus hashtag. While you may not be thinking of such a large marketing gimmick, it’s a great idea to think of ways to use hashtags to spread your message.

Use the Power of Video

As the above two case study descriptions demonstrate, having a video can really help your audience see what you’re all about. Video can also be used to bring you closer to your audience and give your company that personal feel. Home Depot has taken advantage of the video medium to share a number of do-it-yourself tutorials that help customers learn techniques from an expert that will assist them in making the most of Home Depot products. Customers can then feel more confident about their ability to do things themselves. If this tactic can work to put a human face on such a gigantic corporation, imagine what a few well thought out tutorial videos could do to boost your business.

Do you have a social media success story to share?

As we head into February, hopefully you’re starting to see how the changes you’ve made to your marketing strategy  for this year are manifesting.  However, trends are hardly static, and as soon as you start implementing one set of tactics, new developments emerge that can help you decide how to fine-tune your efforts.

Mobile is major! More and more people are browsing on their mobile devices, so it’s imperative that your sites are mobile compatible. Additionally, it is often worthwhile for companies to consider creating their own mobile app. This is generally important for sites that lend themselves to being accessed on-the-go. Businesses that offer location-based components, ecommerce stores, and easily-digestible mobile content like articles or blog posts would likely do well to offer a native app. Many companies can simply ensure that their mobile site provides a good browsing experience, without incurring the additional cost of developing an app.

Another thing that is growing by leaps and bounds in the first quarter of 2012 is video advertising .  Consumers are responding both to the rapport that can be established over video, and also the comfortable familiarity and resemblance to television ads.  Online video advertising can be done for a fraction of the cost of TV ads, so there’s no reason not to branch out and connect with a bigger audience in this way.

Exclusivity is another feature that consumers seem to love.  Having trouble getting your customers to “like” your Facebook page?  Offer special, exclusive content or offers to those who do, and watch those numbers soar.  Many businesses have even found success with offering a tiered paid subscription service that lets subscribers in on special deals or offers.  Keep in mind, though, if you’re going to charge money, the reward customers get will have to be worth it.

On the flip side of the exclusivity issue is loyalty.  Getting customers is one part of your goal, but keeping them is even more important.  Establishing a loyalty program with rewards is a great way to make sure customers stick around, but you should also create a series of perpetual action opportunities that give your customers incentive to try various products or services.

Social gaming is a huge deal right now.  If your business has an actual bricks-and-mortar premises, location-based services like Foursquare can help you take advantage of all that social gameplay has to offer, by creating deals and offers for people who prove their loyalty with frequent visits.  You can even create points-based social games on your Facebook page, giving your fans and followers some friendly competition, and keeping them interacting with you the whole time.

Probably the most important thing you can focus on right now is using transparency to increase your online integrity perception.  Being completely open and honest with your audience about who you are, what you stand for, and how you feel about things like privacy can make potential customers more confident about trusting your company with things like personal data.  That sort of connection is essential in this age of online purchasing.

As you know, you can often have better success with concentrating your efforts on reaching a lower number of people whom you know to be in your target market, than just marketing to the general public and hoping for the best.  You may automatically think that Facebook is the place to be, and there’s certainly an argument for the benefit of Facebook for most businesses, but if there were a fairly well populated niche social network that caters to the same market as your company, then it would make sense for you to at least do some test marketing in that network.  It doesn’t matter if “everyone” is on Facebook – if your target customers are elsewhere, then that’s where you need to be.

Whatever social network ends up working best for you, make sure you implement a system of perpetual testing, and keep an eye on the numbers.  If there was a time when MySpace was working for you as a marketing tool that probably isn’t the case anymore.  In the same way, today’s social networks will evolve, and some will eventually give way to newcomers.  Be prepared pick up and move from one social network to another when the appropriate time comes.

2012 is finally here, which means you have a clean slate to build an improved social media strategy that will better benefit your business in the coming months. Here are some things to keep in mind when constructing your strategy for this year:

Don’t only promote your own stuff. No one wants to listen to you talk about your product or service incessantly. Remember that social media issocial before all else – you can talk normally and share other content while still being informative and helpful about your business, and it will make you seem more like a real person.

Do answer people who message you. Communication is important. People remember when they are ignored, and they also remember when they get a prompt response. Which way do you want to be remembered?

Do train your employees on the company culture before giving them social media access. There’s no better medicine than prevention, so to avoid embarrassing social media disasters in your business, make sure each employee fully understands your social media guidelines, and what image the company is trying to convey.

Don’t send auto-DMs. Nothing says “we don’t really care about you” like sending the same automatic message out to everyone. Take the time to write your direct messages personally, and avoid sounding like you’re quoting from a form letter.

Do follow people with whom you’re engaged in conversation online. If you’re talking to someone online, you can assume they talk to others, as well. Use this to your advantage – follow people you’re engaged with and watch your own network grow.

If you need help developing a strategy, please call me at 703-885-8406 or email us at: info@cogoresults.com.

2010 was a big year in terms of businesses starting to establish a social media presence, and 2011 expanded on that with an explosion in the number of businesses that started taking social media seriously as a marketing tool. Now that we’ve done an adequate amount of setting things up, it’s time to start thinking of 2012 as the year when we really push forward and begin to innovate in terms of using social media in the best possible way, and customizing the experience so that each business is serving its own customers in a manner that suits their particular situation.

With the unveiling of Google+, and more recently the public debut of Facebook’s new Timeline format, it’s clear that social media channels are evolving to meed the needs of a community that perpetually demands more from its online networking. Whereas before we might simply have been looking to stake a real estate claim on the social media landscape, now we want to decorate our spaces to more accurately reflect our businesses.

As SEO strategies evolve to give greater weight to businesses who provide engaging and relevant content to their customers, social media networks will become the place where much of that engagement happens. If, up until now, you’ve been treating your business’ Facebook or Twitter account like a blog, with mostly one-way communication, 2012 will be the time to start opening up more of a dialogue. You’ll want to encourage your customers to talk to you, and to talk about you in their own social media circles.

Google is already starting to reward business that are more frequently discussed on Google+, by giving those businesses higher rankings in search results. Effective SEO is no longer about static links and self-created keyword density, but about real interactions with real people, and the amount of buzz you can create in your target market. The buzz, of course, is the reward for providing your potential customers with quality products, great customer service, and an online conversation that goes both ways.

2012 will be a stellar year for those who can see where this new customer engagement model is going, and can find ways to provide even better communication than is expected. Both search engines and customers have learned to see through the SEO strategies of the past, so this year the focus should be on moving forward with finding new methods to engage with your audience in ways your competitors haven’t thought of.

Over the past few years, online marketing, and especially social media, has developed into a situation where there is less “businessy” talk, and more real human interaction between businesses and customers. Spouting slogans and pasting logos everywhere is no longer the best way to get customers – you have to have actual conversations with the people you are marketing to, and let them know that they’re dealing with real humans, not some corporate machine.

That said, as a business owner, you still want to draw a line between who you are in your private time, and who you are as the social media face of your business. If you have someone else managing your business social media accounts, you want that person to come across as personally open, without dragging the sordid details of their private life onto your company’s Twitter stream. Finding that balance is important, not only in terms of appealing to your audience, but also in order to avoid scandals and getting attention for all the wrong reasons.

Today’s consumer audience is a lot more tolerant and even expecting of a very personal approach to online marketing than the audience of five years ago. These days it’s okay to talk to people on your Facebook page as if you were talking to a friend. People understand that there’s a real human typing the words in, and they expect you to speak to them like humans. Whereas before you might have restricted social media content to company promotions and essential information, now it’s okay to talk to people about how beautiful the weather is or how much you’re enjoying an event that’s happening in your city.

It’s important not to go too far, though. While your customers want to know you’re a real person, they don’t need to hear about your digestive issues or your frustrations with the in-laws. Keep any personal talk light and on the surface. Think chit-chat more than a heart-to-heart. Don’t forget to mix any personal observations in with at least an equal amount of company-related updates – it is a business account, after all. But of course you can keep the tone of the business updates quite personal, to remind your audience that it’s all part of the same package. Once you find the balance of personal and business that works well for your company, stick with it and watch your social media following grow.

If there’s one thing this year’s Google updates have taught us, it’s that we can no longer rely on raw numbers to tell us how well we’re doing when it comes to social media and SEO marketing. The Google Panda update back in February was a pretty big wake-up call that simply having a lot of content and attracting a lot of links wasn’t enough to stay high up on the first page of search results. Counting fans, followers, and incoming links used to give us a good idea about how our campaigns were going, but as Google and other search engines move toward more engagement-based algorithms, it’s up to us as marketers to respond appropriately.

The key, of course, is not to think of SEO as a set of techniques to trick Google into ranking your site higher. The whole point of the Panda update is that Google now thinks more like a human site visitor, and that’s how you have to think, too. This means that you have to put yourself in your target customer’s shoes – if you were visiting your business’ web site or social media profile for the first time, what sort of features or content would immediately make you want to come back again and again?

This emphasis on engagement is something we can expect to grow over the next year, as search engines give more attention to the social aspects of how internet users determine quality. Engaging with customers and potential customers, having someone on hand to answer questions, and providing relevant and up-to-the-minute content are all going to be increasingly important for the SEO and social media strategies of 2012, and it’s not likely ever to head back the other direction, where spamming your own site with keywords could give you a high ranking that wasn’t necessarily indicative of how good the site was.

That doesn’t mean that you should ignore keywords entirely, of course – saying the right things in the right places will always help attract an audience. The difference lies in how you approach that audience once you have their attention. Quality engagement matters now, much more than ever. Getting in the habit of communicating effectively with your target market, which has always been a good practice in the world of traditional business marketing, is now equally important in the world of search engine algorithms.

When we talk about SEO and search engine ranking, the automatic assumption is that we’re talking about Google. While it’s certainly true that Google is the most important and influential search engine at the moment, and possibly for the foreseeable future, it’s also important to remember that Google has other things besides search in its sights. As Google integrates other features under the umbrella of its brand name, other search engines with more of a single-minded focus may be stepping into the spotlight, and if you’re thinking about the future of your SEO strategy, you might want to keep other search engines in mind.

There was a time, perhaps even recently, that SEO experts would laugh if you suggested you might want to optimize a site for Bing ranking, but they’re not laughing anymore. Bing came out of beta a few weeks ago, and although it is not going to come anywhere near the market share of Google anytime soon, Microsoft has released a statement saying that they are prepared to inject the necessary funds into assuring that the public sees what Bing has to offer as an alternative to Google.

Whereas Google is heading toward a more social experience for its users with features like social circle testimonials, Bing is aiming to be more task-oriented than people-oriented. Google’s algorithm is constantly being modified to give increasing weight to results from social media sources, but Bing’s algorithm has evolved to give priority to location-based authoritative sources. In other words, if you’re conducting a search from Australia, Google will be more likely to bump up results from people in your Google+ circle, whereas Bing will assume you want results that are local to your area, from official sources.

As Google keeps fine-tuning how it ranks search results, this is leaving open niches where other search engines can step in and do similarly focused searches with different priorities. Over time, this could lead to a situation where Google is the search engine people turn to for, say, product reviews, but Bing is the one they try for finding a local business, and so forth. Even though that sort of evolution will take time, and may even go a completely different direction, it certainly makes sense to keep other search engines in mind when forming a comprehensive and forward-thinking SEO strategy.

Believe it or not, it’s already December, and if you haven’t already started thinking about how you want to modify your social media, SEO, blogging, and other aspects of your online marketing strategy for the coming year, now is a good time to get started.

Obviously predicting the future is out of the question, but you can easily see the trends evolving in things like search and engagement strategies, and make some projections for how you can stay slightly ahead of the curve.

In terms of SEO, things like page rank and linkbacks will become less important than other factors. Google in particular is starting to use more human-based feedback to determine the importance of sites. This means that providing quality, relevant content will be more important than ever – not for your ranking, but to keep your audience happy so that they improve your ranking by giving you good feedback. While it may seem that this is going to be trickier than simply relying on keyword saturation and links, in the end it will mean better quality for both searchers and the businesses that are competing for ranking.

In the social media arena, the big question is what’s going to happen with Google+. Despite the fact that you can find plenty of experts claiming it’s the Facebook-killer, Google+ still hasn’t managed to gain even half of one percent of the social networking market share, whereas Facebook still enjoys a hearty two-thirds of the entire market. That said, remember there was a time when MySpace enjoyed a similar heyday – just because a site is dominant for a long time doesn’t mean it won’t crash eventually. Facebook has been slowly losing ground, but opinion is still mixed as to whether Google+ is poised for a takeover.

For those who place a lot of importance on their business blogs, it’s important to note that Google is rewarding fresh content more than ever. So, if have been the kind of blogger that sacrifices quantity in favor of less frequent but longer posts, you may want to start balancing things out with shorter posts that get posted more often. That’s not to say that you’ll benefit from filling up your own blog with irrelevant content – remember that repetitive content will hurt rather than help your ranking. As with everything in a marketing strategy, you’ll want to keep things fresh and concise in your business blog in 2012.