Many companies have already realized the benefits of implementing Social Media Marketing, but for those who have not yet come to terms with this idea, now is the time to get with it!
It is a proven fact that during difficult economic times, startups with semi-grounded footing flourish, because they can see opportunity where others see turmoil. The cosmetics industry was formed in exactly this way. During bad times they saw that by simply providing a cheap luxury to women, they could turn a huge profit. Nice.
The same is true for marketing tactics. Social Marketing brings people together like no other previous marketing tactics- ever, and now people want to come together. Companies need to take notice, especially those who are just gaining marketplace footing.
There are a few simple ways (small) companies can take advantage of this cheap marketing strategy. No need to hire an expensive marketing firm here!
- Engage your audience with Twitter, but be sure and follow Beth Harte’s Advice.
- Write a company blog- this might take a bit of effort to get set up and looking nice, but it creates a conversation with your audience unlike any other. This gets the conversation started, and allows for comments, and for others to write about your blog in their blogs- oh and then there are trackbacks and pingbacks, very useful.
- Add links to your blog for your audience to digg, stumble, float, or add to technorati, reddit, xanga, or del.icio.us.
- Engage in local Social Networking events by hosting a group like RefreshDallas, or some other Social Group in your specific industry- they are out there, try looking on Upcoming.org or Meetup.com
- Monitor your success through such Social Media Monitors as Google Alerts, Google Trends, BlogSearch, Twitter Search and others.
- Create a forum for your users to talk about your product, ask questions, ect.
- Take full advantage of your website, and put it to work for your brand and your company. Represent yourself well, and hopefully you will be well represented throughout the blogosphere.
- Email Marketing- I know I know, you are saying this is not a social media, but think about it, if your reader clicks into your landing page and fills out a contact form, they are socializing with you, because you first reached out to them.
There are many other options for creating a Tribe of followers for your company. Check out
Seth’s book Tribes.
Posted on 20 October '08 by admin, under My Favorites. No Comments.
We are seeing the trend of using Viral Marketing concepts such as Social Media take a dramatic turn upwards with the economic downturn. It’s virtually free, and is fairly easy to track- and best of all it is reaching more and more folks than traditional marketing media, such as advertising, and analyst reports.
Tracking social media is rather simple using an RSS reader, and a few subscriptions. Just take a look at the list of Social Media Trackers below:
These three offer the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed of any search. By simply entering in your company name/product name, (or your competitor’s name) and subscribing to the search feed, you will be automatically notified every time an article appears which contains your search criteria.
You can use this tool to search Tweets for those mentioning your brand or company- and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the search criteria.
Searches through the blogosphere for mentionings of your brand or company name, and allows you to subscribe to the RSS feed for the search criteria. BlogPulse also has a great portfolio of free tools such as BlogPulse Profiles (beta), which allows you to enter in the URL of a specific blog, and get information such as their recent blog posts, trackbacks, common keywords, blogging trends, and find similar blogs. BlogPulse Trend Search allows you to search for a specific criteria, and see the “buzz” surrounding that brand/item/company.
Allows you to compare multiple search terms’ recent trending. This works a lot like BlogPulse Trend. I searched “Apple” and “Windows”, and found that the search term “Windows” has consistently higher volume of search than does “Apple”.
Google searches the blogosphere for blogs containing your search criteria. This is great even for those of us who arent social marketers, but who would like to stay up to speed on product releases ect. I am using it to track Adobe Thermo, which has been in Adobe labs existence now for over a year.
Alerts you via email every time your search criteria is mentioned. This can help you to watch for copyright infringement, as well as monitor your brand’s reputation. I prefer the RSS feeds to daily/as-it-happens emails, but for some this is the way to go.
And rounding out this week’s list is:
This is one handy tool! It allows you to track the Stats of up to 3 sites at a time in one chart. Very handy for, well, spying on your competition!
Stay tuned for more… I will be releasing the other half of this list in the next week or so…
Posted on 17 October '08 by admin, under My Favorites. No Comments.
