April 25, 2013

In praise of social media perseverence

With social marketing, showing up is half the battle

My advice for blogging and social media marketing alike is as follows: 20 minutes a day — and one hour once a week. If you spend any less time than that, you’re really not a content marketer. However, spending this amount of time on social media brand promotion and protection is really just barely enough time to keep things moving forward.

It’s yeoman’s work and you’ll never win any awards for doing the bare minimum, but if you can keep showing up every work day and then spend an extra hour once a week, and you can do that persistently and consistently over time, you’ll start seeing some impressive results.

Social media rewards consistency, persistence, and attention, even if it isn’t super-service or if you take a full 24 hours to respond to a customer’s query or constituent’s concern.

Come on, you’re not @AmericanAir, and you don’t need to be. My flight was grounded en route to SXSW, I tweeted complaint, and AA got back to me on Twitter by the time I deplaned — you probably don’t need to offer that much service, do you? Continue reading →

April 24, 2013

Using social media to enhance your brand’s reputation

Maintain your social profiles for better search results

Guest post by Cara Aley

With your company focused on its business goals and set up on social channels, it’s critically important that your online business reputation be one that is polished and positive. As you’re likely to be in the market for new customers, clients, partners or investors, it’s important that when they run a Google search on your business or startup, not only are you properly search engine optimized but that meaningful and positive results appear.

Social media as a marketing strategy is an important method for ensuring that this happens, and should be prioritized as much as or more than any other marketing strategy. I’ll explain why.

Understand SEO

Social media profiles are critical for search engine optimization (SEO). You know what SEO is. (See Socialmedia.biz’s series on online reputation.) Now it’s time to start building those social media profiles in order to improve your SEO. Continue reading →

April 22, 2013

Turn social into your own personal media empire

Your personal newsroom calls for authentic, purposeful engagement

If you read your local newspaper or a typical magazine, you’ll realize that most journalism is specialized. You have your columns, reporting, reviews, editorials, letters to the editor, and ombudsman. However, most companies don’t have the volume or diversity of news required to need such staffing.

That said, enough does go on each and every day in your office, among your staff, in your business, in your industry, with you and your very own personal brand that you need to cover the entire newsroom on your own, including the advertising and publicity (because like the news, everything comes down to driving revenue, and if you can’t prove that all the time, energy, and resources you’re spending online aren’t feeding sales, your one-man-social-media-band is not long for this world.) Continue reading →

April 18, 2013

Demo Mobile: The revolution is at full throttle

Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures at Demo Mobile on Wednesday (Photo by JD Lasica).

Startups show disruptive potential of mobile tech

As regular readers know, I straddle the social media marketing and tech startup worlds, and increasingly I’ve been drawn to events focused on the disruptive changes wrought by the mobile revolution.

I stopped going to DEMO events a while back, given the richness of the Launch and TechCrunch Disrupt startup conferences, but yesterday I attended DEMO Mobile and came away impressed by the fervor and tumult evident on stage and off.

Here are 27 photos I took yesterday in this Demo Mobile set on Flickr.

As always, let me begin with a disclaimer that I didn’t attend to provide a comprehensive blow-by-blow of all the speakers, all the sessions or all the entrepreneurs in the Demo room. Instead, here are a few takeaways and highlights that struck me as particularly interesting with a focus on startups and entrepreneurs — to be sure, a decidedly small slice of Demo Mobile. Continue reading →

April 17, 2013

3 ways to tap into customized news & information

The power of the crowd (Photo by laffy4k, Creative Commons)

With Sulia, Flipboard & Twitter, it’s never been easier to keep abreast of topics that matter to you

Guest post by Brian Blondy

Crowdsourcing and aggregation are two key functions for the modern distribution of real-time content within the online news industry. If used properly, each is a powerful method for processing and delivering your interests in a clean and concise manner on information networks like Twitter, Flipboard and Sulia. To maximize the potential for how you follow the issues you enjoy hearing about, both must be embraced and utilized to supercharge your knowledge of online news.

You should know that visiting particular websites to keep up to speed about a specific topic is almost essentially a waste of time. Web surfing is inefficient, time consuming and runs the risk that you may not actually find what you were looking for. These days, one article or one opinion is not enough, especially when you’re making a concerted effort to find information on the topics you care about most. Instead, you need to tap into crowdsourcing to target your precise interests online. Continue reading →

April 16, 2013

4 free tools to measure your success on Instagram

Analytics

Keep track of your small business’s progress with SumAll, Statigram, SimplyMeasured & Nitrogram

Guest post by Rachael Seda

Rachael-Seda For the past few months, my friend Ryan has been managing a boutique in a nearby shopping center called Apricot Lane. I know 80 to 90 percent of the stores in this area are out of my price range and, because they are so expensive, their typical customers are more likely to be women in my mom’s age group.

I assumed that Apricot Lane was another boutique with clothes for women older than myself. That is, until Ryan started an Instagram account for the boutique. She posted photos of the clothes, jewelry, and new items on Instagram. She even posted photos of people I knew modeling the clothes.

I fell in love with the different styles and fun items. I realized my preconceived notions were wrong, and I became quickly convinced that I needed to visit the boutique. Not only did I visit, I brought my mom and sister with me, both of whom loved it. Continue reading →