Internet Marketing

Social Media and The CEO – Video Interview With Greg Savage CEO of Aquent

The challenge for a majority of Chief Marketing Officers is convincing the CEO to take the plunge and use the power and leverage of social media to amplify the presence of their brand digitally online. There are some CEO’s who don’t need to be  convinced because of their own experience with social media.

A couple of days ago I had the privilege to sit down with Greg Savage the CEO of ‘Aquent” (a global digital recruitment company with nearly 70 offices worldwide) who understands and “gets” the power of social media to spread the influence of his personal brand and his companies brand globally to great effect.

Greg is on Twitter and has a blog titled ‘The Savage Truth‘ and these two social media channels are just part of his activities on social media. Most of the recruiting staff of Aquent also have corporate Twitter accounts and have personal optimized LinkedIn accounts as part of the corporate social media strategy. In the interview Greg covers some of the moments of truth that brought home to him the need to get engaged online in a digital world. This interview is in two parts

The 8 Keys To Success For Facebook Marketing

Facebook has now passed 500 million users and it is a social media platform that cannot be ignored. Many companies are struggling with their efforts to use it effectively. There is also a lack of research on  how to best useFacebook for brand marketing.  So when I came across this Facebook research report conducted by the Altimeter group I thought it was worth sharing.

As 70% of  brands indicated that they planned to increase spending on offsite social media involvement in 2010 (including Facebook) so it is imperative that companies have the right guidelines so they save time and money in their efforts for Facebook marketing success.

The “8 Keys To Success for Facebook Marketing“ as indicated by Altimeter

1. Set Community Expectations

This includes what fans expect from brands such as deals, tips, support or just news and information.

2. Provide Cohesive Branding

Create a familiar experience for fans and differentiate  a brand’s page from other brands. Brands must complete their profile information, upload branded logos and maximize profile pictures. Create custom features and applications that resonate with your brands theme

3. Be Up To Date

Keep interaction high with with fresh timely content. Suggestions are things like ensuring that you have the right mix of of conversational  and promotional posts and updates. Post content using the 80/20 rule: 80% should be informational, educational or have entertainment value. Only 20% of content should be specifically about the brands product or services.

4. Live Authenticity

Build trust by personalizing interactions with a human touch. Post should be written in first person, using a conversational tone. This will enable deeper relationships and brand loyalty. Administrators should have their names and photos displayed.

5. Participate in Dialog

Connect with customers by fostering 2 way dialog. Two way dialog spurs interaction, trust and the spread of information. When fans comment, acknowledge them and reward the individual for participation and publicly thank them for being a fan.. Direct conversations with consumers cascades to their network. Each time a fan comments on a Brand’s Facebook page, that interaction is shared with an average of 130 friends.

6. Enable Peer to Peer Interactions

Be efficient and enable the crowds help. Customers are already talking to each other and brands should enable this natural behavior. Harnessing the crowd’s energy helps reduce costs and improves the experience for fans. Ask fans to respond to each other, showcase fan contributions and recognize top contributors on Facebook’s wall. Take this engagement to the next level by enabling Facebook’s discussion board features. Participate in these discussions and feature”customers” top questions and answers.

7. Foster Advocacy

Foster word of mouth – the holy grail of marketing. Prospects trust customers more than they trust brands, so promoting advocacy is an essential strategy. Start by simply asking existing fans to suggest the page to others or “like” a wall post. Take it to the next level by encouraging fans to do something on the page that is worth sharing with their Facebook , eg “voting on something” or “sounding off” or even sharing videos or photos. Create polls  and contests.

8. Solicit a Call to Action

Bring it back to business and provide a succinct next step. A “call to action”. Many brands fail to deliver  simple calls to action that lead from fans from engagement to purchase. The idea is is to eventually sell more of one’s product! Start with simple, yet immediate call to actions on your landing page and wall page. Ask fans to “Like” your page, sign up for emails or newsletters. Lead new visitors and existing fans to custom tabs where they can view exclusive deals, browse products and make a transaction.

How To Increase Your Blogs Email Subscribers by 1,833%

I have recently upgraded my blog and added new features as part of a continual optimization of the platform. Optimizing is a journey and not a destination and adding new features such as Retweet buttons and Facebook share are some of the elements that can make a big difference.

Part of the fun of tweaking the blog is measuring the before and after figures to traffic and subscriber numbers. Different strategies will produce varying degrees of  success and part of the challenge is to implement the options that provide the biggest benefit for the least amount of effort .

In a recent post “How To Increase Your Blog Traffic By 55% with One Button” (shortly after transferring my blog from WordPress.com to a self hosted platform on Hostmonster)  I wrote about how effective a ReTweet button had been by measuring the difference in the blogs traffic before the addition of the feature compared to after.

One of the marketing tools that most blogs and websites use to spread their content and continually market their services is to build up a list of email and RSS subscribers that you use for newsletters, announce special offers and launch new products. Most blogs have a passive feature that is mostly in the right panel near the top of the website that provides a subscribe option for readers. This feature on my blog is powered by Feedburner which is a free service and also provides a RSS subscriber option as well. As a blogger I am always looking at what the top bloggers are doing and trialling as they continue to evolve their blogs and increase their traffic and subscribers.

The latest and so far successful addition I have just added to this blog is an email service provided by Aweber. One of the features of this is that you can provide a ‘Lightbox’ option to your blog once you have setup the service. The Lightbox feature is a fade in box that offers a free eBook or Guide to people for subscribing  to the blog, this can be setup to appear every time someone views a post or page or it can be customized so that it only appears every ‘X’ days ( I currently have it set at 7 days).

To make the strategy effective you will need to offer a free eBook or Guide as part of this feature. So far the email subscription rate on this blog is up by 1,833%!!

What that effectively means is that I am increasing the same number of subscribers in  two days that used to take me one month. It is early days but I think it something worth considering.

Why You Should Be Optimizing Your Blog and Website For Mobile

Amazon has just announced its latest sales results for the last quarter showing  sales of $6.57 billion and with that it also provided some figures that revealed in excess of  $1 billion of product sales from mobile devices for the last 12 months. That puts the percentage of sales from mobiles compared to desktops at nearly 5% of all its online sales activity.

I have just added a plugin to my WordPress blog that allows readers to go to my blog and read it easily from a mobile,  so on seeing those numbers I decided to look at my blogs Google analytics and guess what they were very similar at 4.29%. (here is the screen shot from my Google Analytics)

These numbers maybe don’t seem very significant but getting an extra 4-5% of traffic or revenue (in Amazons case) can add up over time.  (the other numbers that I found of interest was that the average time on site is 41% less than normal desktop viewing..so writing snack size articles becomes even more important and that the Apple iPad was by far the most used mobile device.. only 3 months after launch!!).

Some recent research by Morgan Stanley titled “Internet Tends 2010” backs up Amazons numbers showing that the growth of mobile internet  far exceeding what the speed of growth of desktop internet in its first 7 quarters with Apple leading the charge.

I have only had my Apple iPhone for about 12 months and I am certainly noticing that my use for all sorts of web activity is rapidly increasing when I am out and about (whether that be for email, browsing or searching) and I don’t think it will be long until my mobile internet viewing will pass 10%  of  my blog traffic.

In fact Morgan Stanley are predicting that mobile internet use will exceed desktop within 5 years. The mobile internet is here and growing rapidly and cannot be ignored.

So is your blog or website optimized for mobile?

Why Would You Lust After an iPad Social Media Magazine?

We live in a world of information overload. Twitter updates streams past at cyber speed with headlines that scream to be read and with links to fascinating blog articles that compel you to click, open, read and view.

Your Facebook friends photos, videos and links are constantly updated as everyone shares their latest online and offline lives. It is all noise, albeit tempting and fascinating and you can find yourself led into a time and world that takes you away from where you originally dived into this information torrent.

Currently it is all quite raw and uncurated and is mountains of text in columns of data.

Last week an iPad app called Flipboard launched.

Flipboard is supposedly “the world’s first social magazine”, bringing the “timeless layout of print media to social media.”

It offers a way to “flip” through news, photos and updates from what your friends on Facebook and Twitter are sharing. Rather than scrolling through posts and links, Flipboard organises everything shared into a magazine like format.

• You can also share the article by ReTweeting or emailing it.
• Flipboard allows you to comment on the articles and updates
• It curates  and ranks in a date time order
• Each story has a ‘like’ button that lets Flipboard learn more about what you enjoy reading
• It ranks a social story according such as the most number of retweets and who you interact with most (not unlike Facebook)

They are looking at also curating (in the next stage of its development) according to location, so when you are in New York or Los Angeles it will also feed you Twitter and Facebook curated content that is relevant to your location

Experience will be different for everyone as it is ‘your’ Facebook and Twitter streams but curated rather than just turned into more streams like Tweetdeck.

Flipboard  follows the bit.ly links and stores and packages the content for magazine type viewing.

Robert Scoble one of the worlds top tech commentators also known as the ‘Scobleizer‘ on Twitter and he calls it the “App for 2010 that far exceeds your expectations”. Here is his interview with the CEO Mike McCue.

Is Flipboard the tool that we have all been waiting for to turn our millions of notes, blogs, tweets, posts, and updates and make them into something consumable and compelling?

So the evolution of  the web and social media continues.

What are your thoughts on this iPad app? I know I want one.

12 Reasons Why People Blog

Ten years ago blogs were small and personal and people wrote about their hobbies, interests and just their life.

There was no thoughts of becoming a millionaire via a blog or even turning famous.

Today we have blogs where 50 million people turn up every month to read news, watch videos and share their comments about the latest post. There are individual online video blogs that reach millions globally every year.

Earlier this year I started a poll to ask people “Why Do You Blog?” and 492 votes later we have some hard facts and figures on why people really do blog. (here is the screen shot of the results)

The top 5 are in ranking order are.

1. Passion
2. Share  with others
3. Business
4. Self Expression
5. Put forward new ideas

Not surprisingly the number one reason is “passion” for their topic. In fact of all the top bloggers I know that I have reviewed  and researched, this would have to be the number one reason for posting every day year after year.

The third placed reason for blogging I would expect to grow over time as corporate blogging continues to evolve is blogging for business. The other reason for blogging that received more votes than I expected was for “improving writing”

Why do you blog?

Facebook Hits 500 Million Users: 5 Predictions For The Future

Facebook had only 100 million users when I joined just over 2 years ago. Today Facebook announced that it has passed the 500 million user mark and continues to grow strongly, this is despite its privacy issues that have dominated the popular press and it is not unlikely that the 1 Billion users will be the next major milestone.

Currently its revenues are on target to exceed over $1 billion for 2010.

Facebook has managed its way through the the Web ecosystem by adding features that have moved it from a walled private garden to a more open social media channel (despite a lot of screaming and gnashing of teeth by more privacy prone individuals) that has been enabled through adding features such as Facebook Connect that allows you to interact with external services like Twitter and allowing people to respond to Facebook messages from their email accounts. Facebook by continuing to open up its platform has so far seemed to have avoided the fate of a fading AOL that tried to maintain a proprietary and locked in approach to its service that stunted its growth and turned it into a fading star.

So what is the future for the this social media leviathan? Will it challenge Google?

Here are some predictions

1. Optimized Aggregator of All Content on All Platforms (including mobile) for Individuals and their Friends

Currently a lot of people use it to place a lot of their photos, notes and comments about their life. You will see more features added to Facebook that will allow videos and other multi-media rich content to be  shared on social media channels like Facebook. Content aggregation will be continually optimized and organized by the Facebook software engineers and social scientists as they add more features to the Facebook platform that will make it easy for users to add more and more content in all its forms. The commencement of its mobile content strategy can be found at its new mobile site 0.Facebook.com that will allow Facebook to expand its international reach.

2. Portals and Websites for Businesses

I have seen companies that have actually started using Facebook instead of their website as the first digital online Gateway for customers and online visitors. This has been facilitated by vanity and user URL’s that provide a more search engine and user friendly web address. This is dangerous because you don’t own the channel, you are only renting on Facebook’s terms but this will not deter some companies and I think that this may continue to grow and you may find Facebook encouraging this by adding more features and functionality that are business focused

3. Blogging Platform Replacement

It is because that using Facebook is so easy to use and feature rich that setting up your own blog is is too hard for a lot of people so Facebook provides a ready to go platform that gets them up and running in minutes. It doesn’t mean that is the best choice but ‘easy trumps hard’ for most people. Serious niche bloggers will continue to use their own domain and self host. (read more on this at the post titled “Is Facebook Killing the Blog“)

4. Monetization will Continue to Grow

Advertising is cheaper on Facebook than Google and has been shown to be more effective and efficient than the search engine giant.  Facebook’s advertising can very tightly target specific demographics through its very deep and broad database that users have voluntarily provided about themselves and their personal life, this type of targeting is something Google can only dream about.  Facebook will continue to explore multiple avenues of monetization that take advantage of a 500 million user database.

5. Continual Integration With Every Corner Of  The Web

This process is starting to be seen with the the Facebook share and Facebook like buttons that drive people back to the Facebook channel to view what other people have found to be informative, interesting or funny.

Facebook’s star is certainly on the rise and may continue for some time to come but remember nothing is forever

So what do you think the future holds for Facebook, love to hear your comments?

Has The Apple iPad Created a Tipping Point In The Publishing Industry?

Around the time Apple released the iPad to the market I wrote an article on April 14 titled ‘What 3 Industries Is The Apple iPad Threatening To Decimate“. One prediction was that the traditional publishing industry will be impacted in a major way. Let us fast forward three months.

Shortly after the launch of the Apple iPad Amazon cut the price of the Kindle on June 21 from $259 to $189, since then there has been interesting numbers emerge on E-Book sales and the sales of the E-Book reader device from Amazon because it now quite obvious that competition is driving E-Book sales at an accelerating pace.

• Over the past three months, it has sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books sold
• Over the past month, Amazon has sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcovers sold (80% more than hardcover books)
• Amazon has sold three times as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009.
• The growth rate of sales for the Kindle had tripled since the company cut the e-reader’s price from $US259 to $US189 a month ago

Jeff  Bezos certainly thinks we have reached a paradigm shift in the publishing market by saying “We’ve reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle”. He also said that the sales of hardcover books had not declined.

It is certainly not the demise of the publishing industry but companies that are in the space that are heavily reliant upon hardcover sales must be  considering (if they haven’t already) overhauling their business  model.

The digital revolution is certainly a constant trend of industry ‘disrupt’!

Have you bought a Kindle or iPad or thinking of it?

Why Social Media Is Optimizing The Personal and Corporate Brand

We now live in a knowledge economy where the skills,experience and expertise of the executives and staff within organisations are what continues to make corporate brands successful.

I remember starting work in the technology industry and as a sales trainee I looked up to my managers with all their experience, connections and influence with glowing admiration. I admired their personal networks and was even slightly jealous of their executive lunches where they made decisions and exerted influence. It was an exciting time to be involved in the computer industry as the democratisation of computing power was extending at a feverish speed with the rapid growth of the personal computer taking power away from the highly centralized mainframes.

Computing power was spreading to the masses and the computer networks then proceeded to evolve and grow as PC’s were connected to each other. Communication became easier and faster and the reduced friction for ideas and influence to spread accelerated. Personal computer  networks were first kept within offices and then they were opened up to connect other offices to each other.

Eventually the Web connected every device to each other either with wires and without.

Today we have social networks and we have many ways to communicate from many devices as we move around the world. The ability to spread ideas and to influence used to be the privilege of the few and this power was protected by the varied gatekeepers and the senior executives that had the control of the personal and mass media networks.

Today with the evolution of the social networking platforms like Facebook, Blogs, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn and the ability of search engines to find information and ‘personal brands’ has democratized and leveraged the individual’s ability to network and influence with their personal blog, Twitter and Facebook channels.

The passionate and intelligent  individual within the organisation is being heard globally and loudly for the first time and  their ability to make a difference at speed is accelerating the rise of the “personal brand”. This raises some questions!

• Is the corporate brand threatened by the personal brand?
• Is it something that the CEO should be concerned about?

I think it is actually something that should be embraced as people are what attract other people to buy in a knowledge and social economy. An executive with his own blog leverages the brand of his employer some examples of this are

• Scott Monty at Ford (Who is the Global Social Media Director at Fords head office)
• Matt Cutts at Google (who is head of Google’s Webspam team)
• Robert Scoble at Rackspace but was previously technical evangelist at Microsoft
• Mike Volpe (VP of  Inbound Marketing) and Dan Zarella (social media marketing and viral marketing scientist with the title “Product Marketing Owner”) both at Hubpsot

These individual’s passion and expertise shines through and that only adds to and synergises the halo of their employers as people connect to the brand  as well as the individual.

There are many knowledge industries that  could be enhanced by the personal brand such as

• Accounting Practices (where the individual skill sets of the partner could be highlighted via a blog)
• Law Firms (the firms expertise is the expertise of the individual partners and specialists and highlighting their skills via social media channels would optimize the firms online presence)
• Medical and Health Organisations (skilled doctors and researchers could be found and communicated with online to showcase the spread of experience that resides within the organisation)

The individual expertise of the personal brands that stand behind the corporate  monoliths has the power to humanize and optimize both the company and the individual and can bring great benefit to both.

Is your corporate brand encouraging your passionate and expert “personal brands” that reside within your walls to shine?

How To Increase Your Blog Traffic By 55% with One Button

As I write this I am surrounded by men in tights and I am not in Sherwood forest hanging out with Robin’s merry men but in a cafe with cyclists in lycra having their caffeine fix after they have had their rush of endorphins from their morning’s cycling.

I started this blog last year with very little expectation but with an element of  trepidation and a few questions.

How many people would read it? Would they like what they read? If they came would they make any comments and if they did would they be negative or positive.

I built this blog on my own domain (good idea!!) but  not self hosted (bad idea!!) at WordPress.com on a WordPress theme..  (the wordpress theme was a a good choice) and proceeded to write my first post. “The World is Hanging Up“.

As traffic grew and comments started coming and people started turning up I wanted to add features to the blog such as banners, plugins and widgets and other elements but due to the limitations of the platform and hosting on wordpress.com I was restricted and I felt I had one hand tied behind my back and I knew that it was costing me traffic to my blog by not optimizing my blog with this WordPress plugin.

One feature that I really knew was costing me page hits and views was a ReTweet button. Readers to my blog were placing comments on Twitter saying “add a retweet button so you make it easy for us to spread your content”.

So I have been working behind the scenes to launch the blog with

• Re-Design (Banner Caricature by John Haycraft)
• New Template (Frugal WordPress Theme which has a great easy to use powerful highly featured interface for making changes without having to know coding)
• Self Hosted (Host Monster which have provided me with great 24/7 service beyond my expectation)

The challenge was to ensure that when I transferred the blog that I didn’t lose the 10,000 plus inbound links to my blog that had built up over the last 15 months so that prople didn’t have dead links when they clicked on these links to go to my blog on other people’s blogs or websites.

So the transfer was completed 2 days ago and the ReTweet button is installed and though it is only 2 days it appears that compared to my last 2 months average traffic  the Retweet button has increased traffic to my blog by 55% by making it easy for people  to ReTweet my blog without cutting and pasting.

I know it is early days so I will be providing an update to these numbers after a longer term comparison to check to see what effect this one little button continues to add to my traffic.

So do you have a ReTweet button?

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