by tradesmeninsights | Feb 1, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
One of the first rules of social media is to listen. Most of us get that when it comes to our outward activities and from groups that you belong to. But when it comes to listening to what people are saying about us, are we doing a good job? Jay Baer thinks we all could do better.
In a recent post, he points out that no matter what tools you’re using to monitor your activity, you may be missing the boat when it comes to key words that you are using to track activity. Jay points out that in social conversations, very rarely does your company name or trade names come up in conversation.
Rather, it’s more likely that people will be talking about a plumbing problem of their toilet leaking and are looking at ways to fix it. So if the key words that you are tracking are your company name and the trade name of the product that fixes the internal working of a toilet, you’d be out of luck.
Maybe you should be taking the list of key words you use in your SEO and incorporate them into your listening program. You should also include your competitors, suppliers, distribution outlets. Anything that revolves around your category.
Let me know how you make out.
by tradesmeninsights | Apr 6, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
Business has changed. Are you keeping up with the best practices to keep you ahead of the curve? A study by IBM stressed that we will see more changes that will impact our businesses in the next 5 years than in the last 50!
These changes aren’t about technology of social media, but about how businesses adapt to their audiences. The new era is one of open communications and real-time 
online participation.
Jay Baer and Amber Nashlund co-authors of The NOW Revolution do a great job in simplifying the steps a company needs to change its culture to deal with the current business climate.
The book introduces 7 key shifts that business leaders need to address along with laying out a plan for each.
- Strip away silos and overgrown business processes
- Hire and empower a new type of employee
- Organize internal teams for maximum external impact
- Listen at the point of need
- Travel the Humanization Highway and respond effectively to customer inquiries
- Plan for, find, and manage real-time crisis
- Redesign success metrics in a business world that’s increasingly instantaneous
If you’re serious about social media and how it’s impacting your business now and in the future, you need to read this book.
by tradesmeninsights | Mar 23, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
If you’re active on Twitter, you probably have gotten a “thanks for the RT.” Saying “thank you” helps build brand loyalty and brings a conversational aspect to your tweets. We all struggle on what’s the correct etiquette for thanking someone on Twitter. Do you always have to say thanks? Are there other ways to show your gratitude?
Angie Schottmuller from Interactive Artisan recently did a guest post on Jay Baer’s Convince and Covert that was right on target with helpful do’s and don’ts regarding etiquette. Here are some highlights:
DO’s
- Follow the user – Review their profile and if they are a good fit, follow them.
- Reciprocate – Scan their tweets and see if one is applicable for you to RT.
- Retweet a Retweet – This is a good way to recognize the user and put quality content back into the stream.
- Conversational Mention – Reply with a conversational response about the post to get a discussion going.
DON’Ts
- Don’t put numerous RT’s back-to-back.
- Avoid peak content hours.
- Don’t put out a generic thanks. Always include a hashtag.
If you like this post, you might like:
7 Ways to Use Twitter to Generate Traffic and Leads.
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 22, 2011 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
With the advent of social media, the way customers contact us and us them has changed dramatically. Gone are the days that our only options to talk to companies were either by snail mail, email or a customer service hot line.
Social media opens up numerous ways that people not only can talk to you, but about you, to others. This is the game changer and if you do nothing else on social, please at least listen to what people are saying about your company and your brands. One comment on Twitter can start an avalanche of other comments (good or bad). Wouldn’t you like to know what’s being said about you? I sure would!
I recently read a post by Jay Baer, 6 Parts of your Company That Should be Listening to Social Conversations that I found extremely interesting and wanted to share some highlights. Some are obvious; others we all should put on our list.
- Sales – Listening programs give you the opportunity to find prospects when the timing is perfect and when they’re actually asking for answers you have.
- Marketing and PR – Listening helps make sure that the language you’re using as a company is the same language being used by the people you’re hoping to hook.
- Customer Service – Customers are airing their concerns, questions, and grievances over social media channels, especially if traditional channels prove less than helpful.
- R&D – You can fuel your idea engine by harnessing the input, thoughts and creativity of the online audience.
- HR – The obvious potential here is talent recruiting, in both finding potential employees and examining their online social graphs.
- Executives and Management – They can understand market trends through the unfettered viewpoint of the online masses and determine whether they’re behind, ahead of, or riding the curve.
Are you missing an opportunity here? How many listeners do you have at your company?
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 9, 2011 | Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
My blog is an integral part of our total overall marketing program. We use it as the hub of our lead activity and think most B-to-B companies should be blogging as part of their overall marketing efforts. To that point, there’s a new white paper out authored by Tony Karrer and Tom Pick that asks industry leaders (and mine) their thoughts.
Blogging is often viewed as the core component of a B2B social media marketing strategy, and other than discussion forums, it’s the most mature component of social media. Facebook, Twitter and even newer tools like Quora may be sexier and get more attention, but blogs are the workhorses essential to making social media marketing work. Research from HubSpot shows that small businesses with blogs have twice as many Twitter followers as those who don’t. Increased search engine visibility, targeted traffic and enhanced brand image are just a few of the benefits of business blogging.
So what’s next for B2B blogging? What trends are likely to emerge in the coming year? To answer those questions, the founders of the B2B Marketing Zone asked 22 of the most influential b2b marketing and PR bloggers—including Roxanne Darling, Jay Baer, Ardath Albee, Erik Qualman and Chris Abraham—for their prognostications. You can get the whole story in B2B Blogging Trends in 2011, a free (and no registration required) white paper from Aggregage (the software that powers the BMZ site). Among the findings:
- If you don’t have a blog yet, 2011 is the year to start one. As less than half of all B2B companies currently have blogs, there’s still an opportunity to stand out and establish thought leadership in your niche. If your company doesn’t have a blog, you’re not a laggard…quite yet. But time is running out to grab the best intellectual spots of turf on the B2B blogging landscape.
- Blogging helps a company demonstrate expertise, it’s ideal for search, and as Blake Landau points out, “As push marketing becomes less effective, blogs become more important.”
- Blogs are not islands; as pointed out above, they are the central point to social marketing efforts. Blogging is most effective when integrated with other communications efforts including PR and email marketing.
- Although there is still opportunity to get started with a business blog, it’s crucial to do it right. Jay Baer predicts an “explosion of bad B2B blogs” in the coming year as companies scramble to embrace the medium, but many fail to do it well. To stand out and achieve business success with a blog, it’s critical to focus narrowly on the information needs of your customers and prospects, as Kristin Zhivago and Harry Hoover both note.
There’s much more. Again, you can download the complete Aggregage white paper on B2B Blogging Trends in 2011 here.
