Social Media for Dummies

5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

kosullivan — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:43:36 +0000

5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Facebook Applications – What You Need to Know

kosullivan — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:23:37 +0000

Sociableblog posted this article on developing Facebook applications. A great idea for brands and small businesses who may have already created a page and want to add some interactive elements to keep users interested. The article gives you some basic guidelines on how you can use applications as a marketing tool. Read the full post in Facebook Application – Develop It with Care

New York Times: How to Market Your Small Business with Facebook

kosullivan — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:40:26 +0000

This article in the New York Times Small Business section provides anecdotes of small business owners who rely on Facebook as a critical selling and relationship management tool. Business owners are using it to find new customers, build a base of followers, and hone in on targeted prospects. With forthcoming advancements in digital communications technologies, like geolocation for Twitter, it will be even easier for mom-and-pop shops to take advantage of social media tools. Highlights from the New York Times article include:

For most businesses, Facebook Pages (distinct from individual profiles and Facebook groups) are the best place to start. Pages allow businesses to collect “fans” the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians and politicians do. There are now 1.4 million Facebook Pages and they collect more than 10 million fans every day, according to the site.

Businesses can easily create a Web presence with Facebook, even if they don’t have their own Web site (most companies still should maintain a Web site to reach people who don’t use Facebook or whose employers block access to the site). Businesses can claim a vanity address so that their Facebook address reflects the business name, like www.facebook.com/Starbucks. Facebook pages can link to the company’s Web site or direct sales to e-commerce sites like Ticketmaster or Amazon.

Facebook enables small businesses to engage in targeted marketing that they only could have dreamed about a few years ago. Facebook users fill out profiles with information like hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and favorite books, movies and TV shows — all of which can help advertisers deliver messages to specific demographic slices.

Read the full article and see what other small business owners say at New York Times.

LinkedIn Gets #in with Twitter

kosullivan — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:15:21 +0000

Finally, LinkedIn has warmed up to Twitter. The new Tweets application on LinkedIn is just being rolled out now. Read more about how it works on the LinkedIn Blog. I expect there to be some good value for businesses, especially small businesses now that LinkedIn is starting to play in the social media app sandbox. LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Twitter’s Biz Stone talk more about the partnership:

Case Study: Honda and Facebook

kosullivan — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:50:06 +0000

Honda has recently had a push adding social media to their marketing mix. The most widely received is their set up of an official Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/Honda. The featured campaign “Everyone knows somebody who loves a Honda” is mediocre, in my opinion, but it’s really the Facebook fan follower response that matters. The campaign was part of the auto giant’s plan to talk about their core values while sticking to a tight budget. The idea is that Honda owners use the site to link to friends and create a global web. In turn, Honda can demonstrate how Honda is connected to everyone else. They refer to this campaign on their page as a “global social experiment”. Although when reading comments from the creative minds behind it, they say “It’s really an awareness campaign on a limited budget.” Not that we marketers and social media users haven’t already figured that out.

While the positioning is hardly original, and the page doesn’t look much different from a car manufacturer’s website, especially given the humdrum lineup of Honda models with devoted pages for each model, it’s enough of a hook to attract the target audience. As of November 10, 266,908 fans can’t be wrong. To participate in the “global social experiment” simply go to facebook.com/honda and click on the button “I love a Honda (current or past)” or “I know somebody who loves a Honda”. You get the idea.

It wasn’t their first foray into social media, but certainly their broadest campaign. They had tried much smaller social media efforts as part of their marketing mix to promote specific vehicles from the Honda family. These included a MySpace page for Element, and then Facebook pages for Fit and the hybrid Insight. Honda was initially hesitant to open up the two-way dialogue. “You open yourself up; it’s risky, but with the success of Fit and Insight with Facebook, they were able to see the advantage,” says Joe Baratelli, SVP and creative director at Honda’s creative agency RPA in a recent article on Mediapost. Ads and offers are noticeably missing from the Facebook page. However, one of the first user comments I saw was from a guy (possibly car dealer) with a car to sell, so there is no stopping users from doing their own advertisements.

It seems that Honda just might be quickly learning from very recent mistakes. They used Facebook within the past few months to plug their Accord Crosstour, which will be available beginning November 20. With a measly 6,745 fans as of November 10, the Facebook page seemed more of a product info dump than anything else, as evidenced by the repurposing of the product press releases on their info page. And consumers used the site to dig into Honda. Consumers were quick to jump on comments about how poor the design looked and that it was a dumb idea for Honda to produce the car. A Honda employee posted a comment about how much he loved the design, except that he didn’t note that he was actually employed by the company.

It didn’t take much time before the auto blogs railed about the faux pas and even though Honda removed the comment, the damage had already been done. I think, as I’m sure many of the Facebook consumers do, that this was completely unethical. They further railed on Honda because the auto maker was perceived as trying to clean up a mess when consumers were too smart to know what they were doing. Honda came back with a very carefully crafted corporate response that mostly defended their point of view. They claimed, for example, that they removed the original employee comment not to try to pretend it never was posted but because he’d actually violated their policy that prohibits such comments without being transparent about stating that he was an employee.

Hopefully, with Honda’s new fan page mentioned earlier, they’ll be mindful of some of their recent blunders. With a much larger audience at stake, they’ll have much more on the line this time if they don’t.

The Myth of the “Last Click”

kosullivan — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:39:25 +0000

More Social Media ROI from Ad:Tech New York. Here we dive deeper into an explanation why the “Last Click” way of measuring Social Media ROI is fundamentally flawed. Ad:Tech — The Myth of the “Last Click”.

3 Challenges of Measuring Social Media ROI

kosullivan — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:10:47 +0000

Have the right expectations when determining ROI from your social media activities.

We’ve covered plenty of posts reviewing what social media is and why it can be important in your marketing and communications. We’ve spent time covering different practices and tools, as well as how to work with your different internal stakeholders to develop your own brand’s social media framework. By now you may have already created a plan and started trying out some social media tools. So how do you measure the effectiveness of what you’re doing? We’ll start to look at measurement of all this stuff.

Business.com provides a great overview of three problems with measuring return on investment so I thought it would be a great way to introduce metrics as a topic in Social Media for Dummies. Tom Pick covers some good points in a blog post on Business.com. It’s geared towards the B2B space, but I think it can be relevant to anyone. Here’s why he writes it can be problematic to try to demonstrate a hard return on social media investment:

Social media is much more of a PR activity than a direct response marketing vehicle.
The problem of last-click attribution (i.e., a buyer is influenced by multiple brand
exposures rather than responding to a single ad or other medium).
It is as much about “influencing the influencers” as it is about reaching buyers directly.

Read the full article here.

10 Things Social Media Can’t Do

kosullivan — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:58:12 +0000

Here are great points from B.L. Ochman that are especially helpful if you are bringing on an agency or consultant to manage your social media initiatives. Read this first before they pitch your business.
B.L. Ochman’s blog: 10 Things Social Media Can’t Do

Posted using ShareThis

Quick Tip: Momentum Counts When Picking Social Media Tools

kosullivan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:00:10 +0000

A quick tip from www.ducttapemarketing.com:

I really like some things about LinkedIn. It has always tended towards the service oriented professional, in my opinion, but it has plenty to like in the brand asset optimization world that all businesses live in as well. My advice for most business owners is to find a social network or platform that seems most suited to your business objectives and dive in pretty deep, focusing more casual attention on the others, at least initially. Going hard and deep into one network, like LinkedIn, is the only way to gain the momentum delivered by consistent work and engagement.ducttapemarketing.com, Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing, Jul 2009

Social Media Crisis Management: Domino’s vs. Burger King

kosullivan — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:39:46 +0000

Here is a great case study presented by Overdrive Online Marketing Blog over two separate, but equally disturbing, events that impacted Domino’s and Burger King. In both cases, workers do distardly things while on their shifts. In both cases, the videos spread virally first via social media channels like YouTube, then get picked up by major news outlets. But as far as a corporate headquarters response, one of the fast-food chains has a specific response through social media and the other sticks with a traditional media approach. In his analysis of the two examples, Overdrive author Nick Cifuentes comments:

Companies traditionally understand the value of crisis management, but as gossip and complaints can spread through social channels faster than the eye can blink, this new interconnectedness of consumers and complaints has brought about a renewed importance in crisis management – social media style.

Read the full post here to see how each crisis was handled:
Social Media Crisis Management 101

Posted using ShareThis