Posts tagged ‘social media marketing’

Social Media Marketing & The Fallacy of Going Viral

Written August 26th, 2011 by

Last week I was a speaker at SES San Francisco on the audience choice “Like Me” panel.  The panel discussed the intricacies of viral marketing and the fallacies around it.  Viral Marketing is not really something that is cookie cutter in nature.  Most of the time the nature of a video, game or even fanpage or twitter account that has “gone viral” is completely by accident.

Instead creating a social media strategy through audience analysis and figuring out how to become not only a valuable asset to your audience, but solving some sort of problem or issue for them is the better target to hit rather than that ever illusive “Viral” moniker.  Viral is short lived and usually not the quality audience you are working to engage with.  Becoming an asset to your audience not only creates a loyal following but a highly engaged community as well.

So with that in mind, we wanted to share our deck from the session at SES San Francisco.

 

The Jarboe on YouTube at Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 19th, 2011 by

Greg Jarboe may be my most favorite speaker at Search Engine Strategies and in San Francisco he wow’d us with how to use YouTube as a smart marketing tool in the NextGen YouTube Marketing session.

The Jarboe and Li Evans

After a funny introduction by session moderator, Li Evans, teasing whom we loving refer to as “The Jarboe” about his love for the RedSocks, he stood and told us that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world – but we never think of it that way.

It gets 22 billion searches a month. (And its not a search engine). We spend all the time optimizing for Google and Bing, neglecting the reach of YouTube. It’s also the second most popular site in the world, with the first being Facebook.

YouTube gets 149 million visits per month.

Facebook gets 129 million visits per month.

Greg "The Jarboe" Jarboe of SEO-PR.com

Twitter comes in at 32 million, with Linkedin 21 million and Flickr getting 22 million visits per month.
Where should you be spending your time and money investing in social marketing?

The natural sequence by users in YouTube – people come to discover things. Who seeks what in which channel with what effect? People need to find the video first before they can watch it and then share it with others.

The trick to going viral is to be discovered and be shared.

Make use of the YouTube Keyword tool. It finds relevant keywords for you (but can be quirky sometimes so use your logic.) Use these keywords in your in metadata such as title, description, tags, (Google ignores tags but YouTube loves them).

Read the rest of this entry »

Social Marketing on a Budget Brings Millions in ROI: Search Engine Strategies San Francisco 2011

Written August 16th, 2011 by

Social media solutions on a budget was the topic today at 11am for the Social Media track at Search Engine Strategies in San Francisco today. The biggest proof of a low cost approach that rocked was presented by Jeffrey Harmon, of OraBrush.

Harmon, the Chief Marketing officer for OraBrush, told his tale and shared several humorous videos about the surprise success of marketing OraBrush on a tiny budget. Invited by a 75 year old man, who had spent several years trying to market it, without success, Harmon believed he could create a social media campaign that would work. It began by the creation of a $500 video that was released to Youtube about the tongue cleaner product.

Prescribe If You Like Tongue

At the time of the launch of the first video, YouTube had offered a promotional program that where the video would be promoted for $30 a day. The hope was to sell $35 worth of the product for each day the video was promoted. In record time, they got 422.153 million views and in 6 weeks sold out of 10,000 units of the OraBrush. Some of his key points:

Read the rest of this entry »

Foursquare and Your Small Business – A Quick View on Advertising your Brand

Written August 15th, 2011 by

So far we have talked about the basics of Foursquare use and the new features for businesses. What I would like to go into today is your Business Page on Foursquare.

For over a year businesses would fill out an application, supply graphics and then wait for Foursquare to approve their application. Once the application was approved, Foursquare would create the page rather than the business.
This process could take weeks and even months of back and forth communication before completion. With varying results in the last year they have helped over 3000 businesses by building pages for them on Foursquare. Originally this feature was first only offered to companies like Intel, MTV, the New York Times, Tiffany & Co. and NASA to name a few. This summer, however, the decision was made to open it up to all small businesses. What we are going to focus on today is a 25,000 foot view of business pages and how they can help your business succeed.

Creating Your Page

Firstly, creating a business page takes less time than it does to brew a pot of coffee. (Seriously) The directions are quick and easy to follow. To create your own Foursquare page, you will need the following:

  1. A Foursquare user account – if you don’t have one, you can sign up here.
  2. You need to agree to the terms of Service
  3. A twitter account for your business. Your new page’s link will be Foursquare.com/twitter_name

Once you have these you can go here to create your own page by following their directions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Audience Research: Don’t Fall for the Counting Trap

Written August 3rd, 2011 by

Traveling and speaking at many conferences, I’m often asked, “How do you come up with a successful strategy for a client? Do you use Twitter, Facebook or YouTube?” I reply that it all depends on my client. Now that may sound like I’m side stepping the answer, but to be perfectly honest, that is exactly the right answer.

There’s No Cookie Cutter Solutions

Photo credit Flickr user coljay72 I know everyone would love to have a “rip open the box and install” solution to creating the perfect online marketing strategy, especially when it comes to social media. However, while a few tactics can be considered to be standard, i.e. securing profiles in social media communities like Facebook & Twitter, how you engage in them can be a totally different story. That’s why research is so vitally important to an integrated marketing strategy in today’s world of marketing to consumers.

There are a variety of different tools you can use to help you with your research. From free to paid, you will get what you pay for. The more expensive the tool, the more information you are going to receive, in both the amount of records and the type of data. From sheer ‘counting’ to actual sentiment analysis, some tools can be very overwhelming in what they bring back – let alone being able to pull actionable insights from that data in order to build a sound strategy for a marketing plan.

Don’t Fall for the Counting Game

When you are beginning to do your research it’s very easy to fall for the counting game. What I mean by the counting game is looking at the sheer number of conversations going on about a particular keyword. Looking at the sheer number, and reporting those numbers as the volume of conversation out there, can be a fatal miss-step if you are planning a strategy around engaging actively interested and motivated audiences.

Read the rest of this entry »

8 Common Social Media Myths to Avoid (Free eBook)

Written June 23rd, 2011 by
Social Media Myths

Social Media Myths – Free eBook

We’ve recently released our second  FREE eBook entitled “Social Media Myths“.  We offered it first to our email & thought leadership subscribers (Hey there are perks to joining our email list!), and now we’re offering it to everyone.

We developed “Social Media Myths”  as a guide for anyone in marketing who’s stepping into the realm of Social Media Marketing and could use help when asking the right questions of any so-called “expert” – agency or individual – to see if they really are a good fit to help you research, plan, implement and measure a social media strategy.  There’s a lot of people and agencies out there that claim to be “Social Media Experts”, but are they really?  How would you know?

Social Media Myths eBook is in Adobe PDF formatThere are eight social media myths covered in this eBook that any Director, Vice President or Chief of Marketing should be well aware of when interviewing potential vendors or social media partners.

  • Social Media Myth 1:  It’s Just “Marketing”
  • Social Media Myth 2:  Anybody Can Do Social Media Marketing
  • Social Media Myth 3:  It’s Easy
  • Social Media Myth 4:  It’s Cheap
  • Social Media Myth 5:  If You Build It They Will Come
  • Social Media Myth 6:  Viral Spells Success
  • Social Media Myth 7:  Cookie Cutter Approaches Work
  • Social Media Myth 8:  It Can’t Be Measured

You can also read more about what’s in the book in our Social Media Myths press release. (.pdf)

Search Engine and Social Marketing Strategies Help Tourism Industry

Written March 12th, 2011 by

We all long for vacation. Everybody dreams about it.  They want to have it where they can and when they can. Sadly, we all have jobs that prevent us from being on a permanent vacation. Lately, we are finding ourselves more and more longing for something as close to that idea as possible.   These days travel destinations, no matter their size,  are resorting to hiring tech-savvy “Heads of Tourism” or in the case of a resort, “Head of Special Events”.  They’ve learned the value of expert Search Engine Marketers.  Since word of mouth advertising is limited, online travel search and social media marketing creates new strategies for any travel destination hoping to reach out to those who dream of a chance to relax and escape.

Beach

Travel Search Marketing Pays Off

Let me give you an example. Home for me for many years was the small island of Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles. Ever heard of it? No? But I am sure you’ve heard of our sister island, Aruba. The reason was simple.  While for many years Aruba embraced the American tourist, Curaçao decided to sit back and complain about how Aruba had sold it’s soul. We didn’t even had a legitimate tourism bureau till about 1988. Read the rest of this entry »

Lessons From Egyptian Social Media Use

Written February 18th, 2011 by

I’ve been thinking a lot about the group dynamics of Egyptian protesters. I had a sense when peeking in on conversations via Social Media, especially Twitter and YouTube, that those with mobile access were not alone with their phones. The phones became part of the crowd.

They were relaying and documenting messages about the crowd, walking around with iPhones held in the air, lots of them: “So-and-so is in trouble over there, who can get there and help? Have you seen @screenname, I heard was he arrested – who knows for sure?” For most of us, our cell phones become a private island – completely different.

A YouTube video of a popular song about the protests was circulated, freely, with encouragement to translate and re-post, or simply to re-post so that more people would see it. Radiohead would be proud.

What lessons can we absorb from all that passion?

Social Media Platforms are not Created Equal

In a much-retweeted statement, many Egyptians said, “We use Facebook to schedule the protests; Twitter to coordinate and YouTube to show the world.”

Twitter is great for passing little notes back and forth, but not so hot for presenting big ideas. YouTube is, by far, the most visual. Facebook has a hub-like Read the rest of this entry »

How to Tell if an “Expert” Sucks at Social Media Marketing

Written January 31st, 2011 by

Last week I compiled a big list of Social Media marketing mistakes. I asked each of our staff to contribute five or more, thinking there would be enough overlap to choose a top ten. Not so! Out of over 30 contributions, there were no exact matches, and, even when they were close, our approaches were a little different.

measuring results

Which measurements are meaningful?

For instance, our Analytics Manager Erik Ricassa wrote that “experts” who don’t know what they’re doing think that “the only measure of success is the number of followers they have.” Da Li Social’s Search Marketing / Usability Manager Kim Berg shared this related take on follower numbers, “Some ‘experts’ think the number of people who ‘follow’ them is what counts, despite not knowing who those people are. Social is not a popularity contest.” Taken together, these two present a broader picture.

In this example, to say that having lots of followers is not “the only measure of success” brings in the importance of analytics – knowing what to measure and what denotes success. Saying “knowing who these people are” suggests in whole set of possible measurements and behaviors, and I’m not just talking clicks and Read the rest of this entry »

Social Marketing, Story Telling and Finding Content Relationships

Written January 28th, 2011 by

ancient story tellingHumanity has come a long way since the days of cave living and hunting mammoth.   No matter where we traveled, what technology we developed, or how many monuments to the stars and gods we built, we kept one small, vital practice intact.  Story telling.

We were once quite cozy.  Cave and small dwelling living created tight quarters that left no room for modesty or secrets.   Everyone knew everybody’s business and that’s how we lived.  All anyone had to do was to glance over to the next fire ring to gain new information by sight, sound or scent.  Later, tribes and sects, clans and small societies of people gathered around fires to talk, teach and decide important matters.  These meetings  and fire-side observations were how we communicated large amounts of information.  Today we have a World Wide Web.

Storytelling is at the Heart of Social Media Marketing

The Internet swung the door wide open to a much bigger hearth.   We can pick up a laptop and suddenly be gathered around the Grand Fire.  It’s no longer necessary to dress appropriately in the right colors, or paint your face with tribe stripes.  You can show up stark naked and nobody Read the rest of this entry »

« Older Entries

Free Marketing Resources

Categories

Free Marketing Resources

Categories

© 2011 - Da Li Integrated Social Media Marketing, LLC
Scroll to Top