Social Marketing
“Social Traffic” - Why this book topic:
“Social Traffic” - Event Marketing in a New Media Scape
Why this topic:
In 1958 Licklider saw universal networking as a potential unifying human revolution, which many years later resulted in the creation of the web. Till 2000, all we needed was a website to be considered ‘on the web’. The definition and usage of the internet has changed so drastically since then, that it’s imperative to think about it in terms of your “complete” web presence - which includes your profiles, followings, social networks, life streaming, blogs and much more. People, who aren’t part of this new social media landscape, are in essence, not really considered ‘online’ at all.
According to a research, as of today; it’s a fact that approximately 73% of online users read blogs. It’s a fact that 57% internet users are on social networking sites. It’s a fact that Facebook just recently hit their 100 million user landmark within months. It’s a fact that people are tuning in to Youtube more than mainstream TV with approximately 83% internet users having viewed online videos. Almost 40% of all the people on the internet subscribe to RSS feeds. On an average 16,500 tweets (twitter) are sent each hour. Most astoundingly, there is a massive shift in company brands when 36% of internet users claim to think more positively about companies with blogs. Should these stats matter to us as business owners, event managers or marketers? I just want to achieve one goal today - make you understand that being ‘present online’ and building a powerful business network isn’t as difficult as it seems. In fact, the principle ideology for online success in today’s world is much closer to your offline mind set than most exponents of online networking can see.
If I can convince any of you to take the leap, to take what you do naturally offline, online…then everything that I’ve done so far in my career would become worth it.
With its huge potential, Web 2.0 has opened up gateways for businesses. There are more than 400,000 entrepreneurs and developers on the Facebook platform - And this is just a SINGLE social networking site. Imagine if you tap into several, how big and profitable it can be for you. The key is to channel the intelligence and savvy of the collected group and make your space a user-friendly place for people to meet, connect and share. Online event marketing also has a huge potential now, more so than ever before, thanks to Web 2.0 techniques. People are no longer an audience who are “just a witness to the event taking place on stage” but are actually a part of planning and promoting it. Your audiences, customers or markets have the most influence in making your events or launches a huge success. Social media has taken things to the next level and the division between “you” and “them” has blurred and “we” has emerged. This book is about channelizing this force to your advantage.
Welcome to Social Traffic - Event anchored Marketing in the New Media Scape.
Book launches Wednesday November 5th. You Can Sign Up Here.
I hope you enjoy the book, as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Google Friend Connect – A game changer
The way internet usage has evolved, we have been introduced to some interesting products recently. Google’s Friend Connect is one of them that is still in test mode but will be launched any week, in fact the Microsoft funded Facebook took everyone by surprise last week launching their new Facebook Connect widget. It seems Microsoft are fighting back, taking Google head on in a Social Media turf war that has just been stepped up a notch. Both widgets serve as plausible tools that are using the power of social media effectively.
With Facebook and Microsoft testing similar social connect technologies these days, it seems to be a new direction for the industry to focus on. We’ll find out more about this open-social based power play in the weeks to come, but for now, suffice it to say that these little innovations will go a long way for small and large website owners and social networking tragic’s alike.
When website owners add the widgets onto a site or blog, it will allow the website to act as it’s own social networking destination for users of Google or Facebook to join and invite their friends from any other social network to come and join them. From a website owner’s perspective, the good news is that you can customize the widget according to your interests, generate the code from Google or Facebook and insert it into your website without any hassle of programming. Furthermore, for analysis purposes you can generate “reports” and check the growth of your social network that has joined your site through these widgets.
When I say social network I mean a mini network of people who are all interested in the content your site offers, who have joined through either the Facebook or Google widgets placed on your website or blog pages that are directly connected to your members Facebook or Google Friend connect accounts. All this happens in only a few clicks and barely a few minutes.
Now as a user, you can sign up for any website with these widgets using your Gmail ID or Facebook ID. Interestingly enough, all the accounts that you have on social sites that you have ever joined, whether (Orkut, LinkedIn, hi5, Plaxo, Facebook or any other), will appear within the widget and you can source friends from those accounts asking them to join you at whichever website across the net you have joined.
Additionally, you can also publish activities that you perform on that website into your social networking profiles. This may help in the big boys aggregating together people with similar interests. You can keep a track of your friends who have joined the site and also keep others updated on your actions on that particular website through feeds & bookmarking.
If you publish content on your social network through a Friend Connect widget, friends sharing similar interests would be more inclined to check out the site. In this way a solid contact base can be aggregated into the social website. Also, you can initiate topics, share media, add photos, have polls or any sort of discussion on the website to interact with people who have similar interests as you.
The new “Open Social” developers code has been written into most big social networking sites, including our site Events Listed . Now, I am not a techie person, but from what I understand having been involved in the development of my application that has this functionality, is that this code slaps AA tags on text fields where there is communication between different members of any site. This text is stored in the Google word database with our names tagged against it. Now, privacy isn’t an issue because if we want to continue to have access to these multi-million dollar applications for FREE , we do it on their terms.
What this means is that this database knows who has commented on my wall and notes and what words they used. This is enough information to be able to know who I am, who my friends are and what I am interested in by the time I sign up through my Friend Connect widget on any website.
In this way, every blog or site can form a community around it. Communities where people of similar ideas and interests can interact, collaborate and socialize. Some people may think that this is what they do already. Nope, this is more like you visiting my blog about event marketing , you can join my community through either the Google Friend Connect widget or the Facebook Connect widget (we have integrated both and will be one of the first websites to have done so), once in your widget account (a pop up window whilst still at our blog) you can invite friends to join you from plaxo, Orkut, Gtalk if using the Google Friend Connect and if join through the Facebook widget all your Facebook friends. You can send them a message like, “hey come and join Events Listed its got some great event marketing strategies.” Your friends accept so are now a part of the Events listed Friend Connect community that is connected by not only the Events Listed community, but their common membership through the widget, gmail accounts, gtalk and the RSS feed from our blogs is automatically fed into their Google Feed reader. This means that if our blog represents great value it’s members can continuously invite more friends from other networks to join, the cycle of interacting and learning would continue to grow amongst like-minded people who are already connected in the bigger social networking communities - giving birth to a much easier form of interacting with people who share your interests.
Now, if we stopped providing great quality content, our community would start talking about leaving, amongst themselves through the chat function on the widget, in Facebook or through gtalk and quicker than we can say WAIT, our social audience has gone off. Marketing websites in the future will all be through word of mouth, we need to attract people who have contacts that listen to them so when they invite them to join a site, they will come through a common interest and trust factor.
To put it short, it adds the facility of having everything in one place with the comfort of being linked to everyone in multiple mini networks scattered across the internet. Considering we are all members of such social networking websites, it’s about time we integrate it effectively to attract people to our blogs and websites.
It also gives you the opportunity of increasing your social circle in the niches that count for you, you can anchor your general social network to Facebook whilst spending more time in the niche networks amongst consumers and friends who all have the same interests. Finally, for newbies who haven’t ever gotten their heads around RSS feeds and feed readers, don’t worry. You won’t need to any more because if you sign onto a blog social network through Google Friend Connect, you automatically receive that blogs feeds into your Google Reader that comes with your Google Friend Connect account.
For 130 pages of cutting edge information about object orientated, Event Marketing through Social Media, put your name down for my new book “Social Traffic”. There is no such thing as a FREE lunch but for those people who act early, the cost of the book will rhyme with hero.
The Final Countdown: Firefox 3.0 Launch evaluated
Without discrediting any of Google Chrome’s efforts, I just wanted to talk about how Mozilla Firefox planned its v.3.0 launch mixing the perfect marketing elements.
The myth behind event marketing asks for a decent amount of finances for an effective marketing strategy to be executed. However, Mozilla launch of Firefox v.3.0 proves quite the contrary. By setting up a Guinness World record of the most amount of software downloaded in 24 hours, Mozilla has proved that a good marketing strategy can get you what money can not. The download of 8 million in 24 hours confirm to this theory.
The basic driving force behind the success of this strategy was the involvement of the users. By clearly outlining the objectives of the campaign and defining the key features of the new browser, they managed to create a lot of hype amongst the people. They created a good promotional website, spreadfirefox.com. Their key features provided attraction for the users and in fact prompted him to spread the word.
The seeds had been sown. The army of supporters had gathered. So how did these evangelists show their diligence? Mozilla encouraged the community members to paste Firefox buttons, wall papers and links on their personal websites or even on their blogs e.g. on myspace and twitter. The advantage outlined here for the user was the idea of earning the maximum points on the “Roll Call”, through which Mozilla would direct the traffic on to the websites of the “top 5 climbers” and the “top 5 affiliates”. See, how along with fulfilling their own purpose, they also catered to keeping their users satisfied.
Even though Mozilla made perfect use of the phenomenon of “global village”, the spread of firefox was not just confined to the web; they involved print media in the picture too. Flyers, posters, banners, stickers of firefox were provided to the evangelists for marketing amongst their own social circle. Organic marketing through the evangelists also helped to encourage non-firefox users to switch to firefox v.3.0 as their default browser and participate in the Download day.
Furthermore, word of mouth marketing was also applied as a credible technique, as Mozilla encouraged its enthusiasts to speak up in conferences and interviews. By involving the end-user in to their marketing campaign, Mozilla was able to secure the success of the latest version of firefox. The community marketing website was a prudent step taken by Mozilla to keep the user involved and informed about the on-going promotional campaigns.
The harvest is infront of us: Over 8 Million downloads in the first 24 hours and the rate does not seem to drop. Thus, it proves that your strategy and involvement of your end user is the pre requisite for success; and not just money. At this very moment the number has mounted up to 654300882! Success speaking for itself!
The power of Word of Mouth Marketing
Does W.O.M Marketing instigate informed consumer choices? Today’s consumers are not as prone to exploitation as they were in the past. The prime reason for this being the exposure to all different products and services – thanks to the evolution of the internet. Along with search engines, social networking sites, such as bzzagent, facebook, my space and twitter have aided in making the once ignorant consumer , well-informed about the variety of services and products available in the market; providing them the opportunity to make a wise choice suiting their needs. While on one hand social media is facilitating the consumer, on the other they are serving as a plausible marketing tool, primarily with regards to word of mouth marketing.
Word of mouth marketing functions through an individual’s personal recommendation regarding specific services and products. The biggest advantage it has for the event marketers is the maintenance of the trust level amongst the consumers, while your purpose is being fulfilled to the utmost. “Harry Potter” is perhaps the best example of how effective word-of-mouth marketing is. So, why not utilize this top guerrilla marketing technique along with others to give a boost to your business?
As I mentioned before, social media tools are serving as an event marketer’s right wing. Add informed consumers publicizing and reinforcing your product amidst their social circle, and you have the best marketing strategy lined up! By becoming a part of the online social utilities, you can have a one-on-one interaction with your customer; learn what they want and formulate the best possible option you can give them. Have the trend setters of a community recommend your product and soon you will have an army of enthusiasts marketing for you. By introducing an element of “surprise and exclusivity” you can further attract more customers to what you are offering them.
In a nutshell, having informed consumers recommend your product is a great way to boost up your ranking amongst the consumers. Why, we all would prefer purchasing a product which is being recommended to us by one of us, rather than all those flashy advertisements showing only one side of the story.
Meetup wants us to MEETUP!!
Meetup.com has recently been promoting and encouraging us (internet junkies, techies, twitter addicts, and of the likes) to go out and see the sun. This brings us to an interesting question: Have people actually stopped meeting real people and socializing or has the social media landscape increased our social lives considerably. I guess the answer would vary from person to person and experience to experience. But generally, I have to admit that online interactions can get people carried away. I have been covering how virtual events are suddenly on the rise, but I had no idea its something for us to stop and seriously think about. Will our future generations know of no other means of communication rather than micro-blogging, text chatting virtual meetings? Is that the direction we are taking our kids future lives towards? OR are real events still the core of human needs and interactions?
Lifehacker has a good post on this here.
Testing your audience’s patience
Marcel has a great post on the importance of planning for backups, emergencies and contingencies. Although it applies to all marketing folks, the weight of it is far heavier for event marketers and managers. People don’t care about excuses, problems, issues when they arise - the idea is to prepare for events knowing how to tackle things when and if they go haywire.
Do check out Marcel’s blog post. Its a good read. Here’s an excerpt:
“You’re watching a movie in the cinema & the projector breaks down, leaving you in the dark for 10 minutes.
You’re watching a play at the theatre & suddenly, due to a technical problem, the curtains can’t be raised.
At an important presentation, the wireless microphone’s batteries go ‘flat’ & you wait for ages while the technical crew looks for new batteries.
The laptop doesn’t open the Powerpoint presentation; the speaker arrives late; a guitar string breaks right in the middle of a solo.
What do all of these have in common? Who cares?!”
Coral Tree Wine Bar - you have to be kidding me
When I read this in upcoming.yahoo.com I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“You see someone you are attracted to on the other side of the restaurant. You want to approach that person but what do you say? Now its all about a simple click and hello. At our mixer, EVERYONE will have a device with their personality embedded in it. You approach someone you want to meet, press a button and point it to each other. The next thing you know is you are talking! Great ice breaker.”
No, really!. They claim to have an audience comprising of late 20s to early 40s. A mature age. An age when starting conversations or breaking ice isn’t always such a big issue. Or is it?
Even if it is, two valid issues:
1- the idea of pointing devices at people at a real event in the real world, and waiting for them to quickly read your “profile” and then decide how to react to your introduction is rather silly. This can work in virtual worlds, but not in real life - not in this way atleast. Perhaps they could have built devices that track people of similar interest for you - that would’ve worked better.
2- “device with personality embedded in it.” - Um, your entire personality embedded on a tiny screen that people can read from afar? Are we really that shallow?
Its good to see that people are trying to bring technology and social media into their events, but its not always so interesting to see how they fail to bring the right value out of it.
No offence to any excited attendees.
Send out Video Invitations for your events
Most people watch movies based on the anticipation built by trailers. Hollywood has mastered the art of building hype and curiosity, even for movies that end up being a waste of time and money. The trailers hit on the right emotional triggers - they give out just enough info about the movie to make us want to see it - they hide the information that adds novelty for the movie-watching experience - they copy write the words and choose the tone for maximum impact. All in all, the sneak peeks actually help us make our go-no-go decisions. Some public places have kiosks for downloading trailers, ring tones of movies. Here’s there rationale:
“We want to push for new and innovative channels to reach our movie-goers, to give them ways to interact with our movies before and after they enjoy the films on the big screen,” - Fox Co-Director Marketing
If not that, then a striking 54% of movie-goers watch trailers online.
Up until a few years ago, events were a stark contrast. You’d have posters, invitations, telephone calls and all, but no real “pull” factor. The pull is usually a play at the emotions using visuals, sound, music, tone, words and images. Today, with the help of social media, you can actually create quick, short and powerful videos for your event invitations. They can make private event invitations more personal and public events more interesting. They can add that human to human connection that you want your audiences to feel.
There’s no limit to the ideas that you can explore while preparing the video invitations. If you are planning a reunion party of some sort, you can have a musical collage and slide show of photos, video clips all streamed together into a wonderful video. If you are planning a new year’s party, you can put together the best moments of the year and add an emotionally rich narration to it. Some video making tools don’t even require a lot of technical expertise to put together a good piece.
Your video invitations can end with a link to your RSVP process. If you’re using special RSVP tools like MyInvites, you can add their link right into the text description of the video invitation.
Here’s a quick interesting video invitation for you to enjoy (its decisively made in a handy-cam home video style):
Gaining visibility for your event pages
Getting the event pages up is much simpler than getting attention to it. If you have been building communities and networking properly, then you’d have long lists and followings. But for those people who don’t have such followings, its often difficult to get noticed in the crowd.
Immediate and instant attention in the online world helps get your rankings and visitor numbers up by a mark. Consistency in quality content and social networking is going to be your best bet, but if you want to try out some quick spikes in traffic then link baiting is another option.
What that means is simply to make content meant to spread and add your website link to the description. Nobody likes corporate issued content, so you’ll have to use your personal profiles to do this. I don’t recommend creating spamming or pointless content, but just something which may be interesting or useful for your targeted audiences. You can create videos and picture mashups. If you have an animator you can get some snazzy flash animations made. Anything that can hit the right chords in the viewer can become a potentially viral video. Play on the emotional triggers we’ve discussed before. If its something which makes them think, or something that makes them feel special, or something that makes them laugh - they might pass it on to their friends… The idea is to get people to notice you. Some of the viewers of the content may actually visit your site to find out more about you - and thats when you close your sales cycle. Get them to sign-up or opt-in or buy tickets or tell their friends.
If your content is good, other people may start promoting it for you. There is nothing better than free promotion. If someone big and popular talks about it - you’ll get the attention of their followings as well. So these are good targets to have for your content.
When creating the content, don’t just put something without proper research. See what kinds of content works. Find out who is already active in your niches communities. Who identifies viral videos most. Who has bigger followings. What kind of content makes it to the top.
Can sharing be a marketing technique?
Who would have thought a few years ago that sharing content with others would become so easy? Now we have blogging software for sharing ideas, Youtube for sharing video clips, Flickr for sharing photos, and great services like del.icio.us and stumbleupon that let us filter the best content from the web in groups.
But a common question I get asked is this - how do we manage content that is our IP, content pertinent to our event and businesses? Do we just publish it into the public domain freely?
Brad Fallon stated at a recent STOMPERNET conference that in the next 12 months alone, more content will be published for public consumption than has been published the history of time. The reason is that everyone can publish now days and not just the media barons.
That said I think its fair to say that whatever it is you are doing it’s been done before. The question you need to be asking yourself with the surge in open (social) media and content sharing is this; If you do keep what you are doing for your events (business) locked behind a firewall and your competitors don’t. Who is going to prosper over the next 5 years.
I know who I would be betting on and invite readers to comment on who they would put their money on. We will delve into this further in future posts.
I believe sharing content is very important - at a recent conference we discussed the fact that over 60% of media content being consumed by the new generation of people is content that was discovered and shared by their friends.
Sharing information that would be useful to people and to their friends is not just an important emerging way of promoting events or getting the word out about something, but to create credibility among people who would want to find you and follow you over time. The social web makes it incredibly easy to find the truth about a person - if a person wants to be perceived as an expert, that expertise will truly be tested with the strategies employed when sharing content.
Here are some of my own recommendations on content sharing:
1- Be Authentic and Consistent. This is incredibly important - the best strategy for sharing content is to genuinely want others to grow to understand and appreciate the space in which you are an expert. If you keep focused on this mindset, and on the subject matter that you want people talking about, you will find yourself sharing very relevant material about that subject consistently.
2- Share incredible content. Having content by yourself doesnt make you the expert - your expertise comes from how you have interpreted, thought about, and applied that content over years. So its ok to give your content away - this is the best way to build meaningful relationships with your potential consumer base.
3- Share content meant for learning. You should think about sharing both content which represents the cutting-edge stream of thought in your subject, but also content that allows newbies to get excited about what you’re talking about. This will not only increase the community of people who follow you but also enable you to start conversations with the experts on the best paths of teaching new comers. A community of participants starts to evolve from these interactions.
4- Time your multi-media content. What you are sharing at any given time is going to be perceived as how you are thinking about the subject at that time. The content starts becoming what you are exploring or what you are excited about, and that in itself gives your audience a hint about who you are. While creating a full roadmap of how you will “unfold” content may not be a nice idea, it is very important to share similar content across all mediums. E.g. if you are sharing links on del.icio.us and also videos on youtube, then make sure they are all touching on similar topics at any given point in time.
How do these techniques tie back into marketing and promotion? What you are trying to aim for here is to become a reliable source of good knowledge about a subject matter - if people can begin to expect good things from you, they are likely to invite their friends to follow you as well.
You will over time become the go-to authority on your subject, and if people trust the content you share to be good, they are also likely to trust you when you talk about your events, your services and your products.
MySpace
FaceBook 
BeBo
Linked In
Pownce
Twitter
Friendfeed
Tumblr
Second Brain 
Wink
Live Journal
Simpy
Get Boo
Net Vouz
Yahoo
Disqus
HelloTxt
Google Sharing
Flickr
YouTube
del.icio.us
Digg
Stumble Upon
Technorati
Furl
Reddit