This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Social Strategy: Why You Aren’t Getting What You Need Out Of Social Media Monitoring… Yet.
• Open Social: Why Hide your Social Media Presence?
• How-to: Integrating Twitter and Facebook Marketing in your Business.
• Social Budget: Giant Social Media Red Flag: Is Your CMO Tuned Out?
• Flashback: 6 Painful Social Media Screwups.

• Functionality: How Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions Work.
• Balancing Act: Larry Page Just Tied ALL Employees’ Bonuses To The Success Of Google’s Social Strategy.
• Analytics Tips: Use Google Analytics to Develop Social Media Strategy.
• Lesson: Ten Things We Can Learn About Google SEO – from Angry Birds.
• SEO Tips: How to Optimize Your Images For Search Engine Traffic.

Video of the Week YouTube Recasts for New Viewers. Google Plans to Organize Site Around ‘Channels,’ Fund Original Content as TV and Web Converge.

If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.

A growing number of companies are jumping on to the social media bandwagon, with Facebook Pages and Twitter streams helping them reach out to worldwide markets and supplementing traditional blogs and media handouts, with a community of followers that can be reached quickly and cost-effectively. Companies are also discovering the risks of outsourcing the “engagement” bit of their social media strategy.



There are several pitfalls to be avoided with social media, and we will cover them in detail soon. When it comes to engagement, however, with social media usage being a relatively recently phenomenon, it is clear that there is no single established “best strategy”, but rather, a collection of strategies that work together while approaching the medium in different ways. A recent Forrester Research report delineates the most important steps companies can take to better engage their social media audience:

…In 2011, success and differentiation within social channels will come from distinctions in strategy and not just tactics. Being present in your customers’ preferred social channels may be a best practice, but superior social media marketing results will only be delivered by:

Brands are moving from simply being present on social networks to taking a more active role on social media. Here are three recommendations for businesses to effectively leverage their social media assets:

Involvement and Crowdsourcing

Get your current and prospective customers involved in providing feedback or improvements to your products and/or services. Take advantage of the interactivity of social media sites by conducting opinion polls and actively helping your fans use your products and/ or services better. Crowdsourcing, or involving large numbers of people to generate ideas, suggest improvements,

According to social media strategist Robert Ball, “Study their behavior, listen to their thoughts and comments and learn how your products and services can help solve a problem they have. This will determine how you will engage. Good engagement leads to sales or improved customer service, everything else is just noise and clutter. Remember: Customers don’t want to be “messaged,” “pitched,” or “positioned.” The days of “spray and pray” are coming to an end. There’s a reason it’s called interactive advertising.”

Everyone can appreciate a company going the extra mile to provide a superior experience with your brand. Examples:

• Dell’s IdeaStorm is an interactive site dedicated to collecting suggestions from its worldwide customer base and allowing viewers to promote or demote ideas. Members can even see some of the top member contributions that were implemented by Dell.
• Nokia’s Beta Labs offers early-adopters and tech-savvy users a platform to use, test and provide feedback on unreleased features and often innovative new ways of using mobile telephony.
• Pepsi Cola’s Refresh Project pays out approximately $1.2 million every month as funding to support innovative ideas proposed by contributors that improve the state of the Arts and education, as well as enhance community participation in reducing crime, drug use and access to healthcare.
• Clorox’s Dr. Laundry blog is chock full of useful laundry tips and tricks that were contributed by users as well as Clorox’s fabric care specialists.

Offers and Incentives

Whether it is a simple discount coupon, a rebate on a new product, or some other benefit offered to loyal customers and future prospects, everyone loves to get a good deal on a purchase, and such offers can keep a customer coming back for more.

According to a recent survey, when asked what types of interactions new media users look for when they engage with brands and companies online, the response breakdown was as follows with a single tactic far exceeding the rest:

• 77% = Offer incentives such as free products, coupons, and discounts.
• 46% = Solve problems and provide product or service information such as customer service.
• 39% = Solicit feedback on products and services.
• 26% = Develop new ways for me to interact with their brands, such as widgets, mobile apps, online games, and contests.

A few examples where brands have seen success using incentives:

• Logos Bible Software has worked hard to build its email list of 300,000. So choosing to shun that email list for its Black Friday promotion says a lot for the chosen alternative – social media.
• Microsoft promises attractive discounts and rebates with its Incentives site to help cement customer loyalty and bring in new customers.

Transparency

Firms must try to become more open in their interactions with customers and the media, rather than being secretive. If there is a problem with a product or service, they need to own up to it and get in touch with affected parties to resolve the problem. This will increase trust in your brand and improve customers’ experiences with your company, which will inevitably propagate via word-of-mouth and affect your bottom-line down the road.

• Dell’s recent social media initiatives, such as setting up their Command Center, were set up to improve customer service, in response to disgruntled user stories widely reported and blogged, such as this one, or even this Guardian article, though not as poetic as the rants in this sailor’s blog.
• Bing has apologized on Twitter for a tweet that many viewed as a way to gain exposure in the name of raising money for victims of earthquake in Japan.
• A “drunk” tweet was accidentally sent from the American Red Cross Twitter account. The Red Cross handled the situation pretty entertainingly–something that doesn’t happen much these days–and released a charming followup tweet.
• Sitecore uses social media as one of their customer support channels to respond to customer questions and upgrades.

Tapping Into Collective Behavior Helps Engagement

According to Gartner, Inc., many social media efforts are failing because some enterprises just don’t understand how to employ social media to facilitate collective behaviors. The study concluded that “Enterprises can employ these collective behaviors as the link between business value and social media technologies. They can use them to examine a target community and formulate new ways that people can interact to achieve enterprise value. By understanding the most prevalent technologies, collaborative behaviors, business use cases and business value for six collective behaviors, enterprises can more effectively plan for successful community-based social media initiatives.”

“Social media is not an end in and of itself– it is an enabler. Social media technologies are tools and, like any technology, it is how people use those tools that delivers enterprise results” said Anthony Bradley, group vice president at Gartner.

It is now only a matter of time, indeed inevitable, for businesses to have a social media presence. For many companies, though, much of the current engagement efforts barely consist more than the occasional product update. There are exceptions to these generic business “follower” pages, of course, proving that enlightened and interested business owners and managers can successfully engage with their prospects and customers.

• Tracking The Buzz On Apple’s iPad (1)
• Tips on How to Engage Your Audience on Social Media and much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• Expanding Your #Social Media Mix: Why #Twitter Alone Is Not Enough (3)

The Internet was abuzz with the launch of Apple’s iPad. While the world was busy reacting to the iPad, our team set out monitoring social networks to track iPad buzz. We tracked activity from January 27 through February 28. The results are here to see!

Priced modestly at $499 for the 16GB base version, the iPad packs in quite a punch. Compared to e-readers, this sleek unit has a stunning screen, wireless broadband connectivity, a touchscreen and the ability to run over 100,000 iPhone apps. However, the iPad has received mixed reactions online. Critics have written about missing features like a camera, flash and the fact that it cannot multitask. You cannot listen to your favorite Pandora station while writing an email. At the same time, with winners like the iPod, iPhone and iMac, it’s hard to count Apple out.

Below is a summary of the tracking study.

Number Of Mentions – Apple iPad

Among social networks, there was an explosion of Tweets with over 5.2 million posts. There were 70,796 news articles, 199,979 forum posts and 246,886 blog entries. Rarely would you see so many articles about a product launch, even an Apple one.

Overall Popularity



After a burst of posts on January 27, iPad social media mentions had its normal drop in popularity. What is more interesting is how there is a steady stream of posts even over a month afterwards. There are still around 50,000 mentions per day for a product that has not shipped or advertised on TV. That is, until the Oscars on March 7th. The ad is worth watching.

Sentiment Analysis Of Blogs

In the blogosphere,

• The overall sentiment was split into neutral at 47%, positive at 41% and negative at 12%.
• After an initial burst of positive sentiment, it turned more negative as critics commented on missing features.
• Towards the end of February, positive sentiment has been rising as negative sentiment is dropping. More people are making decisions about the device. It will be interesting to observe sentiment once advertising picks up.
• Among countries, U.S. blogs commented most about the iPad followed by U.K. and Germany.

Features

• It’s a light-weight device with a 9.7 inch display
• iPad’s multi-touch screen makes gaming and navigation an experience like no other
• The new iBook app transforms the iPad into a digital reader
• For a modestly priced gadget, the iPad has a long battery life of 10 hours
• The app store with 140,000 apps make the iPad a real steal

The Verdict – Lines At The Apple Store?

With lines at the store for upgrades of the iPhone, the answer is… definitely. The Apple iPad launch demonstrates the power of consistently strong marketing and product development. Loyal and vocal followers drive the mix as well. The initial buzz has translated to consistent mentions over a 30 day period. Sentiment has varied with time because experts were expecting more features and functionality than what was announced. At the same time, positive sentiment has risen consistently as people are digesting a new product category distinct from the Kindle or Tablet PC. The power of Apple’s positive brand equity is clear when news stories are reporting on TV ads released during the Oscars. It’s clear that Steve Job’s company is a master at marketing. While we do not know whether the iPad will be a high-flyer like the iPhone or a relative dud like Apple TV, we’ll continue to track the buzz.

Methodology: We compiled results from Sysomos as well as the Google AdWords keywords tool, to arrive at a keywords set for the Apple iPad.

Keywords: “Apple iPad”, “iPad”

Contributed by Sanjeev Dhanaraj, Social Media Marketing, Position²

• Harry Potter Finale Stirs Up Social Media Magic (0)
• Expanding Your #Social Media Mix: Why #Twitter Alone Is Not Enough (3)
• Tips on How to Engage Your Audience on Social Media and much more… | Best of the Week (0)

Social media has been the buzzword for quite sometime now. It’s here to stay. In simple terms, social media is the usage of social networks, blogs, social bookmarking, videos etc to facilitate social interaction. The main aim here is engagement through conversation. Content is king when it comes to social media because it is user-generated. Social media is more like a dialogue unlike traditional media where communication is one-way.

Social media and its importance in website promotion:

Social networking websites include Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn etc. Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon are examples of social bookmarking tools. YouTube and metacafe are popular video sharing sites. Sites like Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad are blog hosting sites. Twitter is an excellent example of micro-blogging. It is also one of the most viral platforms on the web.

Social networks like Facebook are popular social media tools. With more than 300 million active users and more than 70 translations available on the site, Facebook is kind of a big deal. It is a huge social media platform where companies engage users through fan pages, groups and events. Facebook also allows businesses to create ads.

Microblogging platforms such as Twitter are viral platforms. Twitter facilitates instant interaction. It can also be a great place to announce contests, events and even a new new blog post.

A Blog is the simplest and most effective way to build an online presence. It’s a place to discuss, debate and share ideas about your company, products and services. With a blog you can control what information you want to display. A blog also means better search engine ranking and greater visibility.

Social bookmarking tools are effective in promoting websites. It gets you backlinks and traffic. It’s a great way to share interesting and relevant links, which in turn leads to better search engine ranking and higher visibility online.

Contributed by Jade D’costa

• Social Media Strategy, Social Media Integration, Analytics Tips and much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• 3 Recommendations for Effective Social Media Engagement (0)
• Tracking The Buzz On Apple’s iPad (1)

According to some of the statistics compiled by econsultancy writer Jake Hird in August 2009

• Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week.
• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.

It has become imperative for companies, big or small, to have social media campaigns. It is predicted that the social media spending by companies will increase dramatically in the coming year. The statistics look impressive, the social networks are growing at a geometric rate, and marketers have taken notice and are incorporating social media as an integral part of any online marketing initiative.

It’s all sunshine, but the most important element that online marketers forget is that social media marketing is all about conversations. It’s a two way communication channel, not the traditional online marketing channel. While creating groups, pages, accounts and forums, marketers forget that they need to connect with the people online. They create groups and just inundate users with the offers and deals. They do not listen or engage the users. Social media is all about connecting and collaborating. Not many people appreciate being flooded with a whole bunch of offers and being assailed with marketers online. This is not only invasion of privacy but it is also detrimental to the firm.

Listening and Engaging are the two most basic rules of social media marketing. People are on social media to connect, collaborate and gather information which might not be easily available otherwise. Listening to the users talk about what they want in a product, engaging them in conversations and understanding their requirements increases the brand influence and brings in traffic to the website which can be converted into sales.

Not only will this increase brand loyalty, but a company might get some great ideas and can innovate better. When a company develops a service or a product keeping the customers requirement in mind, it can seldom go wrong. Positive word of mouth marketing is the best kind of marketing a company can ever get.

Online marketers should understand the social media demographics and ‘socialnomics’ before starting a social media campaign. Social media marketing should be used cleverly and skillfully to achieve the best results online.

Contributed by Maanasi R K

• 3 Recommendations for Effective Social Media Engagement (0)
• #DMA2010 – Event Summary (0)
• Tracking The Buzz On Apple’s iPad (1)

It is an established fact that Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites today. Some social networking sites are personal and some formal, but Facebook is a mix of both. It has a major impact on business primarily because the creating pages and groups as a marketing/educational/promotional aspect is free and effective compared to some of the paid advertising methods. Facebook can be used effectively to build a business presence and influence the target audience.

Get Started

1.    Join Groups: Search for groups in Facebook related to your business and join them. Do not exceed a limit of four groups a day. This amounts to spam and is not taken lightly by Facebook. Facebook has a stricter set of guidelines as compared to others. So network wisely.

2.    Post: Post a short description about the business on the wall of each group you joined. Creativity is allowed but a few guidelines to be followed before posting
a)    Don’t market your business when you first introduce yourself to people
b)    Provide valuable information that your target audience can use
c)    Don’t communicate as a salesperson
d)    Keep your conversation short

3.    Add friends: Pick one of the groups each day and add between a few friends a day. Keep the numbers as low as possible. Too many messages are considered as spam and a violation of Facebook rules. Write a short message addressing the member you are sending out a friend request clarifying why you would like to connect to them and how they will also be benefitted. Wait a couple of days before you start again. Facebook will always warn you if you exceed the numbers, stop when a warning is given. Too many warnings will lead to the account being suspended.

4.    Create a Group: You can create your own group and send an invite to everyone in your friend’s list to join your group. Repeat this for every100 friends that you add to your friend list.

5.    Create a Page: You can create a Facebook page for your business. Create a page so that it reflects the logo of the business and give a short description. Fill in all the information under each section that you can, and update the page’s information box because this is displayed on every section of the fan page. Send invites to the friend list to become a fan of the page. The main advantage is, when there is a wall post to page’s wall (also known as a status update) the post is submitted to every fan’s homepage feed.  This means every “fan” of the page will see all posts made on the fan page.  This can generate a lot of interest towards your page but remember not to spam your fans with status updates because it will spam the wall of the members and they might just cease to be fans.  Another great feature about fan pages is the discussion boards. Every time anyone talks on a discussion topic on your Facebook fan page, it will send a notice to their profile “wall” saying they have participated in a discussion on “topic title” at *fan page name*. This generates interest and also creates visibility leading to higher brand recall.

6.    Interact: Interact with friends in the list. Comment on their photos, updates and ask questions. This creates trust among members. Facebook is a networking site; remember networking is a two way communication channel.

7.    Share information: Once an identity and expertise of a business profile is created on Facebook, people will seek advice and inputs from the ‘persona’. Always respond to queries, ask questions in return, continue to educate yourself as you go, and help everyone you can.

Facebook’s influence is continuously exceeding other online communities thus making it a popular site for businesses and brands to connect with their audience.

Contributed by Seethalakshmi

• Tracking The Buzz On Apple’s iPad (1)
• Tips on How to Engage Your Audience on Social Media and much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• Marketing to Women Online, Facebook Marketing Tips and much more… | Best of the Week (0)

Communication is a two-way process of exchanging thoughts, opinions and ideas. It can be verbal or non-verbal. While communicating with another person, we keep in mind the content, the expression, the medium of communication and whether the receiver will understand the message intended by the sender.

Communication is vital for any business and should be sent through effective channels in order to reach the target audience.

The most common form of sharing messages these days is via the Internet. There are various networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, blogs and forums; where people from across the globe participate in discussions and share their thoughts and opinions.

Any business in the Social Media industry should consider the following points:

Two-Way Channel

Messages need to be two-way communications. For instance, if a customer or client wants to send feedback, ask further questions or engage in further conversation, they should have that opportunity. A good way to enable this is to ask open-ended questions.

Awareness

With these two-way channels, you have to be keenly aware of what people are saying about your brand. One way of doing this is monitoring your two-way communication channels effectively, and responding to feedback/comments immediately.

Grammar and Semantics

Grammatically correct sentences are becoming less important each day, but are still relevant in corporate and other formal settings. Although text messaging and services like Twitter promote a culture of short codes and SMS slang, this type of informality trivializes the message.

Brevity

Need I say more?

Contributed by Neeta Madiraju

• 3 Recommendations for Effective Social Media Engagement (0)
• Tracking The Buzz On Apple’s iPad (1)
• Engagement – The cornerstone for social media marketing success (2)

We have been a part of the social media phenomenon since its advent. We’ve seen social media evolve and become an established marketing discipline.

Currently, we develop strategy and manage social media marketing (SMM) campaigns for most of our clients and our activity in this area has doubled in the last three months. The interest inSMM was coming to a head, and this burst in business has afforded us opportunities to experiment with various forms of SMM and strengthen our capabilities for the future.

At the onset of SMM we started with blog commenting, PR submissions and social bookmarking. We quickly moved on to executing micro-sites, widgets, multiple blogs, Twitter campaigns and viral techniques.  We have taken our clients to a higher level of social media. We have dedicated Twitter experts, social networking strategists, and designers who specialize in building applications for social media. We’ve grown to have a strong sense of confidence in this discipline and now feel that we can guide any client in achieving its business and marketing goals through our social media marketing practice.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a vital part of any online marketing strategy. Most of the time, our clients are initially unsure of how to approach social media marketing and whether they should get into it at all. We get a lot of questions from marketing managers about how to start off with social media, what the benefits are, and how to sell it to their bosses.

Earlier SMM was seen as an addition SEO efforts, with it being a part of traditional link building and blog commenting. Position2’s strategy and competencies grew in tandem with the evolution of social media and it became clear that SMM was more than just link building and commenting. It was about conversing, interacting and engaging with influencers and customers at various stages of their decision making and buying cycles. We also deployed a host of tools—free, paid, and custom developed in-house—to track, measure, revise and lift social media campaigns. Clients who were not convinced about the value of SMM began to realize that qualified traffic could be increased through SMM alone.

An SMM client of ours—a leading medical alert system provider—was one of the clients whose faith in SMM grew when traffic to their website increased considerably along with conversions. They said “Position2 has helped take our company to a new level. The team has demonstrated a level of expertise and that has not only increased my ROI in the online marketing space but also elevated our entire web presence.” In this case educating the client and delivering on the right expectations have been key in achieving client satisfaction.

• Social Media Strategy, Social Media Integration, Analytics Tips and much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• 3 Recommendations for Effective Social Media Engagement (0)
• Tracking The Buzz On Apple’s iPad (1)