Social Media | PPC Management & SEO

Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Facebook Places: Location’s Wakeup Call

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Facebook Places will have an immense effect on location.

About one week ago, Facebook released a new product called Facebook Places. It’s an application that allows you to check yourself and your friends in at locations such as restaurants, bars, parks and other places of interest. Facebook Places is only the latest in a series of location-based social media platforms to launch, however, the big difference between Facebook Places and the others (e.g. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt) is that Facebook Places is powered by Facebook and the other are not.

Facebook has done what once seemed impossible at worst and improbably at best; it has made money in the social media space. Twitter is still figuring things out, Google can’t really decide on a product to offer and the other big names (Yahoo, Microsoft, et al.) have pretty much stayed out of it. Because of this and the fact that Facebook is now the top site on the Internet in terms of pageviews¹, Facebook’s entry into the location-based socia media space is a big, big deal.

Despite the fact that Facebook has partnered with Foursquare and Gowalla for the launch of Facebook Places, this announcement couldn’t have come at a worse time for Foursquare. Foursquare had only very recently begun to distance itself from its competitors. Take a look at the change in unique visits since December of 2009 between the three most relevant players in the location-based social media space:

Foursquare had only recently begun to distance itself from the pack.

Even if Foursquare and Facebook are tenuous allies for the moment, that alliance is likely to last only as long as is convenient for the behemoth that is Facebook. With all of Foursquare’s recent success, it’s easy to forget exactly how much smaller it is than Facebook. To put it into perspective, Oreo’s Facebook page has more fans than Foursquare has active users. It may be America’s Favorite Cookie™ but come on! That can’t bode well for Foursquare.

Nothing that I’ve said so far is news to Foursquare; it’s just statement of fact. The future of Foursquare and its ilk seems dependent on the will of Facebook. The real question is, if Facebook emerges as the strongest and only player in the space, what would that mean for location-based social media?

The answer is that it’s a mixed bag. Many users–and when I say that, I mean my friends and me–very quickly grew bored of Foursquare. I earned about five badges and then played for around two months without making any “progress” in the “game.” Foursquare felt stale and uninteresting in a very short period of time. Facebook, in its opening week, released a feature that would have immediately improved Foursquare: the ability to check your friends in with you. This improvement is important because it actively includes others in the “game” without having to send them a dorky “join my network” email that will likely end up in the trash. If they’re on Facebook (and everyone is), then they’re already potentially “playing the game.”

That small but integral improvement shows the potential for location-based social media under a Facebook regime. Even though Facebook might be alone in the niche, it has an impressive track record for innovation. Think about it: the fall of MySpace as Facebook’s only real competitor didn’t affect its ongoing attempts to better the user experience. The reason is that Facebook had a better motivator than competition: money! Facebook figured out how to monetize its traffic and if any company is likely to figure out how to monetize location-based social media, it’s Facebook. Couple an innovative culture and proven revenue generation with Facebook’s API and huge user base and location-based social media suddenly seems to be in good hands with Facebook.

This is certainly an unsavory way to think of Facebook Places.

If that’s the good news, the bad news may give you pause. As much as Facebook has an outstanding history when it comes to usability and innovation, it has an equally spotty history with privacy. Facebook already knows how old you are, where you went to school, which movies you like, what you look like in hundreds of different pictures and which advertisements you are most likely to click on. Facebook probably knows more about you than your closest friend. Well, now Facebook won’t just know where you are; it will have a catalogued record of your movements, like an animal tagged for research purposes and released back into the wild. That’s a lot of information to trust to a single corporation and, don’t forget, Facebook is as much a corporation as Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart or Chevron. Would you trust them with all that information? It’s definitely worth thinking over.

Facebook is much more than just a social network. It’s the first site that people check in the morning; it’s one of the world’s largest warehouses of image and video content; it’s one of the most relevant sites for gaming; it’s the most important property on the Internet with the sole exception of Google. It’s absolutely integral to the lives of countless individuals all over the world. If Facebook Places can have the success that Facebook has had with images, videos, games and overall integration into everyday life, then the space may be locked up by Facebook for years to come. And if Facebook can lock up location, then figuring out how to profit from it will be a fait accompli. It’s important that Facebook users don’t get too comfortable, though, because those profits could come at the expense of user privacy.

Facebook Places is a wakeup call for location-based social media companies but it could prove to be an even bigger wakeup call to Facebook’s own users.

¹ According to data from compete.com

Save this Post!

Tags: facebook, facebook places, foursquare, gowalla, Social Media
Posted in Editorial | No Comments »

4 Worthwhile Ways to Successfully Leverage Social Media

Friday, July 16th, 2010

According to a recent study on social media and dating behavior, more than one in six marriages over the past three years were the result of relationships begun online.

In 2010, the rising popularity of social networks like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter simply cannot be ignored. When people are turning to the Internet to find their soul mates, you can rest assured they are looking online for everything else – from their next pair of Oakley’s to their new optometrist – and if you are a business seeking customers, you are well-advised to look online, too.

All in all, social media is no longer an option; it’s a necessity. But don’t just take my word for it.

Nielsen recently published a study stating that 79% of Fortune 100 companies are leveraging social media to engage their audience, and they are doing it in innovative ways to build buzz, establish relationships, foster communication, improve products, and cultivate long-term brand awareness and consumer trust.

The beauty of social media

Whether you’re a seasoned producer of award-winning viral campaigns or just figuring out how to create a Facebook profile, it doesn’t matter. The beauty of social media is that you don’t need experience; you only need to learn the rules. Social media is not so much a new idea as it is a new way to communicate ideas, and the nature of a good idea hasn’t changed. The same marketing principles from 50 years ago apply today; they are simply communicated in a different way.

How to approach a social media campaign

Social media is ultimately about relationships. It should be viewed as a two-way street. As a brand, you aren’t there to promote a product, you are there to communicate and relate. If you approach social media with sales as your end goal, your audience will notice and, most likely, you will be ignored.

On the other hand, if you offer your audience something of value, and your message is genuine, aka you aren’t faking it, consumers are inclined to listen. Offer users engaging content, helpful information, streamlined customer service, or incentives like discounts and free gifts consistently, and you have the makings of a healthy long-term relationship with a brand ambassador willing to sing your praises to the world.

From that point on, as long as you pull your weight by keeping your message consistent, authentic and meaningful, consumers tend to stay loyal and express that in revenue generated over time and positive word-of-mouth expressed among their peers. That’s the real return on social media.

4 social media promotions and the companies who made them work

The basic principles behind a successful social media campaign – engaging content and authenticity – apply whether you are launching a celebrity-driven viral campaign or a simple online contest to drive website traffic. Designing the campaign, from concept to content to delivery, is where you can be creative; to design a good one requires careful analysis of your goals and your target audience’s behavior in order to deliver a message that engages in the most effective and interesting way possible.

Still, even with so many variables, most successful social media campaigns are modeled after prototypes that employ proven promotional tactics and conventional marketing psychology. The challenge is not so much in the concept, but rather, its execution.

Seem complicated? In the following real-world examples, we will explore how you too can win in the social media marketing game, no matter what you are selling and to whom.

1) Raise brand awareness by hosting an online game or contest

When trendy women’s shoe designer, Naughty Monkey, approached Wpromote, there was already a positive buzz surrounding the brand. Their shoes peppered fashion magazines as celebrities were spotted left and right sporting them. However, Naughty Monkey had only a limited reach so capitalizing on the existing buzz by building a social media presence made perfect sense.

The concept was simple: in the “Where have your Naughty Monkey’s Been?” contest, users were asked to submit pictures of themselves in interesting locations wearing their Naughty Monkey shoes. Users voted for their favorite pictures and the winners received a year’s supply of Naughty Monkeys.

The result? Thousands of new Facebook fans, tens of thousands engaged users, an established social media presence, and the creation of many valuable brand evangelists for the up-and-coming brand.

2) Drive valuable traffic to your social network with a free giveaway

If designing and executing an online game or contest seems daunting, you can always go back to basics and appeal to a universal human truth: people love free stuff.

When ScanDigital, an online photo scanning and video digitization service, wanted to build a fan base and drive user engagement via Facebook, they used their monthly newsletter to promote a simple game akin to the bar classic, Photo Hunt. In the newsletter, two subtly different pictures were featured, and the first groups of users who identified and posted the differences on Facebook received a $25 ScanDigital gift card.

ScanDigital acquired more Facebook fans that day than any other day to date.

In a similar promotion, VeeV Vodka, a delicious acaí berry-infused spirit, found a creative way to make use of extra canvas tote bags sitting around their office. Rather than stuff the bags in a storage closet, VeeV used the bags as prizes in a contest designed to drive user engagement on Facebook.

To win a tote bag, users were asked to post pictures of themselves drinking VeeV on the brand’s Facebook page, a relatively easy request considering the number of drinking photos on Facebook. Needless to say, the canvas tote bags went like hotcakes, and brand awareness increased exponentially. The cost? A less cluttered office for the folks at VeeV.

2) Grow consumer loyalty by giving consumers a stake in your brand

When Vitamin Water decided to launch a new flavor, they ditched the focus groups and branding experts and turned to social networks. Throughout the summer of 2009, Vitamin Water engaged and grew their Facebook fan base by soliciting ideas from users regarding the name and packaging for the new flavor.

Over one million fans participated in the contest, and celebrities were engaged via video clips to spur on interest. In the end, when “Connect,” the new Vitamin Water flavor, hit the shelves, there were a million potential buyers on the market far more likely to pick up a bottle than they had been before the contest.

3) Build brand equity by aligning with a higher purpose

It feels good to do good, and if you can inspire others to follow suit, even better. Our friends at TOMS Shoes have made it their mission to give a pair of shoes to a child in a Third World country for every pair sold. To maximize their contribution, TOMS.com prompts users who buy shoes online to share news of their purchase on Facebook immediately after the sale is complete.

It’s not surprising TOMS’ messaging strategy works as well as it does. When I buy a book from Amazon or add a movie to my Netflix queue, I have little interest in alerting the people in my life. If you ask me to alert them about something charitable I’ve done, my interest peaks.

When I purchase a pair of TOMS online, not only do I want to brag about my good deed, I also want to encourage friends to follow suit. TOMS wins by making it easy for me, and anyone else, to do just that.

Tying It All Together

When we sit down with Fortune 500 executives and the topic of social media comes up, a collective groan ensues. What if they don’t like our product? What about damage control? We need to control our message! And so on.

What’s the bottom line for brands worried about getting social media wrong? The train is leaving the station with or without you. Conversations about your brand are going to happen, regardless of whether you choose to take part. Don’t sit on the sidelines. Embrace the conversation and engage.

Even if you take nothing else from this article, allow me to leave you with this: when it comes to social media, remember the golden rule. If you would be put off by a promotional tactic, your audience probably wouldn’t like it, and if you find something so exciting you want to share it with all your friends, there’s a good chance your audience will, too. Use common sense, and remember that social media networks mirror how we interact in the real world. Similar social rules apply. In other words, don’t be a jerk.

Cool Resources and Links:

1.) Social media campaigns that failed
http://blog.thoughtpick.com/2009/06/10-social-media-campaigns-that-failed-avoid-their-mistakes.html

2.) How to run an effective social media cause marketing campaign
http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/social-cause-campaign/

3.) 25 tips for a successful media campaign
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/203359

4.) More general tactics and ideas
http://mashable.com/2009/08/28/social-media-marketing-ideas/

5.) How to use Foursquare to promote your business
http://beingcheryl.com/social-media/8-foursquare-promotion-ideas-for-businesses/

Save this Post!

Tags: Social Media
Posted in Wprogram | No Comments »

Case Study - Naughty Monkey

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Situation
A trendy women’s footwear brand, Naughty Monkey launched in 2004 and quickly gained popularity. Sold nationwide and featured in popular magazines like Glamour and Marie Claire, Naughty Monkey was successful but wanted to expand their reach – and when the brand missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to generate serious PR buzz, it realized it needed to ramp up its marketing efforts.

The missed opportunity
During the 2008 elections, vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s wardrobe seemed to make headlines almost daily. When Palin was seen in Naughty Monkey shoes, a crowd of reporters arrived at the brand’s headquarters to get a story. Despite having the kind of buzz publicists dream of knocking down its door, Naughty Monkey wasn’t prepared to capitalize on the wave of publicity. With no infrastructure in place to spread the word to consumers, Naughty Monkey saw the spotlight fade before it could take action and wanted to prevent it from happening again.

Building a social media presence
An audit of Naughty Monkey’s social media presence revealed a lone MySpace page and little to no online conversation about the brand. After creating Twitter and Facebook pages from scratch, and redesigning the MySpace page to complement, we raised brand awareness organically by reaching out to users interested in fashion and shoes. Via tweets and Facebook ads targeting stylish women, Naughty Monkey’s networks slowly grew. Once people were conversing about the brand, we shifted Naughty Monkey’s focus to engaging users with dynamic content, open-ended questions, and timely customer service, pushing Facebook’s feed to Twitter and Twitter’s feed to MySpace for consistency.

Strategy
After the Palin incident, Naughty Monkey wanted to energize its marketing, but wasn’t sure how. Upon considering the brand’s goals of more sales, wider distribution, and a way to engage with consumers, we recommended a social media focused campaign. While a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign would have helped sales, it would have done little to build brand awareness on the scale needed to generate demand for Naughty Monkey shoes - but an online contest would.

The “Where Have Your Naughty Monkeys Been?” contest launch
The “Where Have Your Naughty Monkeys Been?” contest launched to 230 Facebook fans and 245 Twitter followers. The rules were simple: submit a photo of yourself in your favorite place wearing Naughty Monkey shoes, and solicit votes on submission. Contestants with the most votes advanced to the finals and judges selected two winners, one domestic, and one international, to receive a year’s worth of Naughty Monkey shoes (1 pair per month). Though the contest took place on Facebook, a contest microsite was created as well, and entries and votes submitted via either destination were synchronized using a 3rd party application. To create excitement, the vote count was kept secret and users were limited to voting once per day per submission. This incentivized contestants to promote the contest to everyone they knew in a blind effort to generate the most votes. The buzz created around the contest was noteworthy, and 10 weeks after the contest, Naughty Monkey’s Facebook fan base had grown by a whopping 606%, with 1485 new fans since first launching the profile.

After the contest
Once contest winners were announced, we leveraged fan excitement with brand new content focused on celebrity fashion trends and the Naughty Monkey spring line and show. Likewise, we continued an open-door policy regarding customer service solidifying Naughty Monkey’s role as a go-to online source for everything fashion and shoes. Finally, we sustained 2-way conversations by staggering posts to give people adequate time to respond and engage before hitting them with a new post, maximizing the value of social profiles as genuine relationship-building tools

Results
The “Where Have Your Naughty Monkeys Been?” contest was a success in many ways; we established a dynamic connection between Naughty Monkey and consumers, a real-time outlet for leveraging buzz and creating demand, and an enthusiastic army of brand ambassadors in love with Naughty Monkey shoes and ready to tell the world. The brand’s social media profiles are active and growing, and online awareness of the brand has reached an all-time high.

The bigger picture
When it comes to social media, the focus is on relationships. Gauging success with traditional means like numbers can be difficult, which is why we focus on benefits. Still, looking at social media metrics in context can infuse them with new meaning, so to better understand Naughty Monkey’s success, let’s consider the case of ‘Brand X.’ One of the top 50 brands effectively using Facebook according to financial news site, TheBigMonkey.com, Brand X, already well-established online, ran a Facebook contest to 360,000 fans and amassed 8,000 votes.

Meanwhile, Naughty Monkey, who had almost no online presence prior to the contest, launched to less than 1,000 fans and still pulled in 68,000 votes. What did Naughty Monkey do that Brand X didn’t? Engage. Rather than rely on a household name to generate interest in its social media campaign, Naughty Monkey engaged users from the start by reaching out to influencers and likely fans, building relationships, and dropping hints to ensure high excitement levels surrounding the contest launch. It continued to attract users with compelling content and relevant updates throughout the contest, and when controversy unfolded, rather than intervene, Naughty Monkey let it percolate, allowing a buzz to form surrounding the controversy driving additional traffic to the site.

Save this Post!

Tags: Social Media
Posted in Client Profile | 3 Comments »

The Art of Community Management

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Building an online community is a delicate art form. Community development is not as easy as it may seem. The first step is to attract people to your social media profiles and engage with them. Not quite rocket science. However a new University of Maryland study indicates that many small businesses are still using social media primarily as broadcasting tools. Thus, the art of community management needs to be more clearly stated and emphasized.

“It’s all about the conversation.” This is what any social media professional will emphasize when speaking about their craft. You need to have an entertaing conversation with your community to truly build a successful social media campaign. Take the infamous cocktail party analogy. Would you rather be the person who attracts a crowd and is gregariously conversing to eight people at once? Or the person who parks in front of the punch bowl and has brief and awkward interactions with anyone who casually approaches the punch bowl? Obviously your company needs to be that person who is talking to eight people at the party. How do you become that person? Through genuine, meaningful conversation.

Engagement is the golden key to being the life of the party. As the University of Maryland study indicates, many small businesses are utilizing social media but far too many are just broadcasting their marketing messages. Too few are using platforms like Twitter to connect and use it as a customer service channel. Brands often ask, “Why isn’t anyone coming back to my fan page?” The answer: you’re not engaging them in an interesting and strategic manner. This is where the knowledge of an online community manager comes to play. It takes a skilled communicator to build a community and develop it in such a way that your connections become your brand evangelists.

There is no perfect formula to build a community. Each community is different according to the brand. It’s pertinent for the community manager to recognize the tone and behavior of the fan base. In turn, the manager must work with this information gathered through observation to build the community. How often are your visitors coming to your page? How much time in between posts? What types of messages are people responding to? The answers will help dictate the conversation, which will keep visitors connected to your profiles and returning in the future. There is a learning curve between manager and community at the start of every campaign. Through calculated trial and error a veteran community manager will find a groove that induces conversation amongst the online community. I’ll cite a previous post I wrote about sending people to your Facebook page as the reason why community building is so important. In short, the more time consumers are engaging with your profiles, the greater the positive association they have with your brand. Therefore, through fans’ news feeds or physical word of mouth, your community manager’s efforts will result in larger numbers, greater awareness, and more dedicated consumers and brand ambassadors. This connection with your online community is the true value of your social media campaign.

In order for your brand to be the life of the online party, resist the temptation to simply broadcast your marketing messages. Have a knowledgeable community manager who can develop, engage, and manage your online community so that in the long run your community will work for you. Community management is an art that many fail to adequately grasp. If you think your social media campaign is like talking to a wall, contact Wpromote’s social media team and we can help you properly manage your online communities. smo@wpromote.com // www.twitter.com/wpromote

Save this Post!

Tags: community management, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

GrowCo & SES NY Recap

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Greetings! Well, the last two weeks have been a whirlwind of hotel rooms, conference centers and networking events. In the end, however, it was well worth it, as we met a ton of prospective and current clients and partners, gave several amazing talks and spent some great time with the thought leaders of our exciting industry!

We kicked things off two weeks ago in Orlando as a sponsor of Inc. Magazine’s GrowCo conference, enjoying it’s second terrific year. Though it was designed as an educational conference for companies more in the bootstrap phase that with the right guidance make it to the flagship Inc 500/5000 conference, we were thrilled by the caliber of companies and people at the conference (not to mention the growing turnout of just under 500).

We capped off the conference with a boisterous day at Disneyworld and Epcot center, a destination that sadly eluded me for the first 29 years of my life. However, the Wpromote team present at GrowCo more than made up for this childhood deficiency with a full day of rides, amusement park food and St. Patrick’s day debauchery (which amazingly fell on the same day as our visit).

After a screaming-baby-filled flight from Orlando, we happily touched down at JFK and headed into New York City where we were met by the best weather of the year and the kick-off of one of my favorite conferences, Search Engine Strategies NYC. Over the next three days the Wpromote team met with hundreds of potential clients, industry friends and partners, as we showed off our brand new Wpromote booth, months in the making.

On Day 1 of the conference, Mike Stone (Wpromote’s VP of Sales & Strategy) and I keynoted a presentation entitled “10 Things To Supercharge your SEM Campaigns in 2010”. Covering a little bit of everything from PPC to SEO, landing page optimization to social media tactics, this hour-long session with a little under 300 in attendance was a blast to put on, but even better were the glowing reviews and even a few (hopefully deserved!) comments that it was the most valuable session of the conference. Either way, our egos are sufficiently padded to warrant a definite return to bring back a session like it next year!

On Day 2, I was thrilled to be asked to join an amazing panel moderated by Online Marketing Connect CEO Aaron Kahlow, which included SEO guru Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz.org and Harry Gold from Overdrive Interactive titled “Real-time search and Twitter”. It was a terrifically fun panel (is it too apparent that I love this stuff?) and the other panelists were truly incredible. For any of you that got to enjoy this panel, it was one of the best I have been a part of on either side of the dias.

After one final night out on the town and a much-anticipated flight back to LA, I reunited with normalcy, my own bed and (perhaps most importantly) a washing machine, and returned to the office, which I don’t think I have ever been so happy to see.

That’s all for now… Next stop: Adtech San Francisco April 19-21. If you are in the bay area or planning on attending the conference, it should be great. Come stop by our booth (#5340) and say hi to the team!

Save this Post!

Tags: Internet News, Social Media, Wpromote
Posted in Trade Show Recaps | 3 Comments »

What is Your Social Media Impact?

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Social media is changing the behaviors of potential consumers. By combining traditional advertising principles and the features of today’s social networks, brands are able to reach a large audience and disseminate their brand. Through social media, brands bring value to their audience and broaden their viral reach, which in turn impacts consumer’s behavior and attitude toward the brand for the long-term.

The impact social media has on consumer behavior highlights the fact that social media is not a fad but rather a stepping stone to the future. Social media is bridging the gap from the previous generation’s marketing/advertising philosophy with today’s technology which heightens the effectiveness. Before there were social networks, smart phones, and blogs, advertisers used print. They designed beautiful ads that had the right information, branding the company through visuals. They could estimate how many people would be directly exposed to the ad (i.e. subscribers) but they couldn’t determine how many sales they made directly because of it. That didn’t mean those ads didn’t work. People who were exposed to the brand, felt connected with the brand through their visual ads and when the time came for them to buy product X, Brand X popped into their head. The ad did it’s job, but calculating the ROI is nearly impossible. Social media’s value overlaps this older advertising ideology.

Justifying social media’s value is the great debate. Traditionally, the ROI would be calculated rather quickly by plugging figures into a neat equation. Social media’s value extends beyond raw numbers. Word of mouth is the most coveted type of marketing. A personal referral is much more trusted than an unsolicited marketing message. If you read my “The #1 Reason to Send Traffic to a Facebook Fan Page Rather than a Website” post, I argue why you should send people to your fan page. The main point was the online ripple effect through news feeds. People can see an individual’s association with a brand. This residual and indirect brand affiliation is the SMI (Social Media Impact) of your social media campaign. This SMI is what separates social media from print ads despite their obvious, underlying overlap.

The Social Media Impact is the reason it is pertinent for companies to have their presence on social media sites. These interactions and associations consumers have with brands online are what is changing their purchasing behavior. This is the value of social media. Like print ads, social media presents information, connects emotionally with prospective consumers, and builds awareness for the brand. Again like print ads, it’s difficult to

quantify exactly how many direct sales result from the ad/profile because many of the purchases will occur weeks or months after the online encounter and possibly offline. Unlike print, social media’s clear, online viral spread perpetuates the brand’s message and reach without much effort (Analytics can calculate visitors from social networks to final purchases, but those numbers are not comprehensive due to SMI). Companies are doing themselves a disservice by not assimilating with today’s online climate. Achieving a high SMI will alter a greater number of potential consumer’s purchasing choices, thus benefiting your brand long-term.

Social media impact doesn’t magically occur. Merely signing up for a social profile and posting a message doesn’t help you either. There is no SMI with a static page. With so many people online, you need to give people a reason to come to your page. This is not an easy task, contact Wpromote’s social media team for help integrating your brand on social media. smo@wpromote.com // www.facebook.com/wpromote // www.twitter.com/wpromote

Save this Post!