Social Marketing
How to get other bloggers to pay attention?
The blogosphere is fascinating - on the one-hand it is an open environment of people sharing interesting ideas between micro-mediums of influence, and on the other blog-based business are making bloggers increasingly more political in how they interact with others.
The best analogy for blogging I have heard is that its no different to a dinner party where all the guests were knowledgeable on a particular topic. Throughout the evening conversations, comments, retorts, statements, stories & lessons would be traded. As the night wore on it would become evident to all those present that the knowledge base and more importantly the ability to articulate this knowledge was not equal across all participants. In fact it would be most probable that one or two of the parties at the table will have established themselves as unrivaled authorities on certain subject matter.
Blogging is, in my view, a very large dinner party that spans the world and it never ends.
So if you have an event you’d like to promote, what is the best way to get other bloggers and influencers to engage into a conversation with you about it? You have to be in a conversation in order to be considered an authoritarian contributor to it, right?
Here’s a few tips:
- Dont be anonymous to a blogger - get to know them. Bloggers dont like being used as a promotion tool. You cant make that as a premise of knowing them. Most bloggers write because they want to meet interesting people and share ideas with them, they too are looking for conversations with other bloggers who can challenge them and their views. So to begin with try to establish a relationship with bloggers you respect by participating as a commenter and also otherwise.
- Make it easy for the blogger to research you. Bloggers have a lot of demand on their attention from people trying to get in touch with them. They will try to make very quick decisions on whether or not they want to get to know you. So make sure you are active enough in social media that it is easy to discover who you really are. Consistency in your online activities will help other bloggers form quick opinions on who you are and if they want to enter into a conversation with you or not. Remember, cream always rises to the top if it’s in the bottle.
- Request, dont ask. Even if you know a blogger well, dont ask or expect them to talk about your event or product. What you want to focus on is just talking to your friend, the blogger, and talking about your new product to that friend alone. Whether that person chooses to share it onwards with his friends or community is entirely his or her choice.
- Make life easy for the blogger. Again, bloggers have very limited attention to give to your product, so if there is a set-up time involved in them getting into your product (for example, maybe people need to sign up and set up their profiles to use it) try to spend the time to do that for them. Other bloggers will appreciate that and then pay a little more attention to what actually matters.
- Refer to interesting incidents from the blog. Each blog has interesting incidents happening in it - E.g. maybe they wrote about something that was controversial and there was a big debate on the topic in the comments. Only people who follow that blog would actually remember such things, and if you can refer to one of those incidents (maybe to show which side of the fence you stand) the blogger would appreciate that and understand that you are not just an anonymous one-time visitor.
- Refer to the bloggers thesis. Every blogger talks about a particular subject, and every blogger has a core set of beliefs related to that subject. Maybe that bloggers has a particular definition of conversational marketing. Maybe he or she has invented terms they use frequently in posts. Only people who follow a blog frequently would understand this. When you are communicating with another blogger, make sure you touch on those important parts and give your position on them. This would also help him or her treat you like a regular reader.
- Feel free to polarize, but make sure you can. If you also have a blog, feel free to take something that another blogger wrote and polarize yourself against it by arguing a point against his argument. But do this only if you really have something to say, because doing this will not only give you a critical eye from that blogger, but also his or her audience. If you survive their critical analysis of your counter-argument, though, you will win to earn their respect in future interactions.
Most importantly, though, remember that the aim is for all your interactions in the social media space to create additional value to the overall sharing of thought. Dont be evil, and play fair, and people will be fair to you when you need them to be.
Making Friends in the online Social Networks
If you can remember the first time you signed up for Facebook and you had no friends or very few. You hear all these strategies for utilizing these platforms but with few friends to start with, its kind of hard to be taken seriously.
I am often asked where to start?
Social marketing is all about getting the most out of social networks. Here are some important friending techniques to be aware of:
Step 1 - Creating your networks
First of all, create your presence on different social networks like facebook, MySpace and Linkedin. Set up your accounts and customize your pages.
Step 2- Adding people to your network
Once you have your pages all set up, you need to get people onto your network. First of all make sure you can distinctly define what kind of people you would want to add as friends. These will be people who can benefit your business in any way. People who are part of your market segments, people who are domain experts, people who can benefit you through synergies, people who are influential in the industry, people who look up to you as an expert.. etc
There are different levels of potential friends on social networks: First of all, add all of those people that you know directly. If you know someone, then approach them in an a way you would to a real human being and not a robot. That is, introduce yourself.
I get friends requests all the time from spammers who use automated software for friending or cut and paste the same message to hundreds of people they find in other people’s friend networks. Be realistic - thats no way to befriend people. Be warned that if you do this you can be locked out of the platform for spamming, your IP address can be blocked from ever accessing the domain again. Recipients can click a link in each request that says, “report as spam”. A few of these reports against your name and you’re out of the game.
So when finding old acquaintances out of the blue, approach them like you would if you had seen them in a crowded bar. I’m assuming that if you come across them after a long while; you would walk over, re-introduce yourself and engage them in brief conversation after which you would initiate a desire to share contact details to remain in contact.
Its no different in these online networks, except that the crowded bar extends across the globe and its open 24/7 and you don’t need to exchange contact details. You simply send a friend request.
Next, you can introduce yourself to the friends of your friends by letting them know who you know in common. It’s not recommended to say “hi, I am a friend of John Smiths do you want to be friends on Facebook” - although a lot of folks do adopt this tactic.
I prefer to look at the persons profile to find something in common. I then introduce myself on the basis of our common friend and try to reference the topic that person seems interested in. Its an idea to be positive and complimentary where you can and end your comment with a question so it’s easy for the recipient to reply. If done right you can come back at their reply and before you know it you’re no longer strangers - so at a convenient time you can ask them if they would like to hook up as friends.
Thirdly you can search for groups in whatever niche you’re into and invite the people in these groups to become friends. Its recommended to join the group first and always contribute to the conversations in the group in an intelligent way before attempting to friend its members.
Expand your network as much as you possibly can.
Follow and be followed:
Find people that you want to have on your lists and follow them on twitter and other social network sites. Later, send them invites - a good percentage of them will accept. Social networking is all about following and being followed. Its about giving first and then expecting something in return. The more you follow and the more you contribute towards adding value to the more you will be followed in return.
The rule of thumb is the more value you bring to other people’s daily lives by what you do and say; the more people will follow you. Its no different to life offline, really except its far less forgiving than real life.
Web2.0 platforms take life as it has always been and makes it possible to maintain relationships with far more people that the offline world ever could. It takes away the factors of space, distances, traveling and communication logistics - and viola, there is no limit to the number of people you can befriend online. Um, yes, you will need high-speed internet though. This changes the social dynamics somewhat, which I will go into in another post but the thing you need to be careful about is that in the online world everything is recorded.
Everything you do leaves a footprint so there is less room for error. Offline if you say something you regret to someone, the damage can be limited to those who hear you say it first hand, those that hear what you said second hand and to a lesser extent those who hear it third hand.
Make the same mistake online and what you did or said can haunt you for life, so be careful.
A good writeup from the blogging world around us…
What Social Networking Can Do For You - Social networking is literally the way of the future.
Facebook 1- setting it up for your business
At first I thought the FaceBook hype and romance would fade away as newer and better social applications kept trotting along - until I used it myself. For businesses, FaceBook has a lot of revenue potential as it is a wealth of deep relationships based consumer data.
Having said that, its important to note that you can’t just jump into the bandwagon and start marketing there - its a gradual process.
Facebook Profile: Your first step to creating a presence there is your facebook profile - this is a personal profile of ‘you’ not your business. You need to have a personal element to your business if you want room in these social networking sites. This personal touch makes your business seem more human and thus likable. So, in Facebook, your personal profile should be about you - the image that you want to share with your networks. Eventually, when people start following you, they will also become interested in your business. But initially, make sure you get your personal profile right. Here are some tips for that:
- Add aspects of your personality that may seem interesting to your market or may help build credibility. You have to make people want to be your real friend.
- Make your profile visible and open so that people that you know can easily find and contact you. E.g. its a good idea to list down your colleges and school names so that you can find your old classmates from there. Same goes for past work experiences. Old friends can become great resources for your business.
- When you are filling out your profile, make sure you take special care to fill the activities and interests sections.
- Enlist your websites in your profile, so that people who are interested in finding out more about you know where to go.
- Make it as personal and real as possible. Put up a real picture of you instead of an avatar or a cartoon image. Get real - get focused.
- Your profile can later have multiple facebook pages for the different aspects of your business. But you have to make sure that you have just one Facebook profile for you as an individual.
Facebook Pages:
Next off, once you have your Facebook profile all set up, you can build as many separate pages as you want for your businesses, products, events or launches. You can customize and design your pages around your business and position yourself as an expert, if you want. These pages are meant for businesses, so they have ‘fans’ instead of ‘friends’ in them. I’m going to discuss how you can find and make friends and bring them to your pages later on.
Facebook pages are an incredibly powerful tool for marketing. They’re free platforms and spaces for your business right in the middle of your targeted customers. A few pointers about Facebook pages:
- To build a Facebook page, go through the simple process of creating a new page (facebook.com/business) anyone can view Facebook pages and can search for them using search engines.
- You can make as many Facebook pages as you want - theres no limit to the number of pages you can create for your business(s). Although, keep in mind that pages have to be for real entities.
- You can make your pages interesting by adding pictures, applications, posts and links (to your sites). Whenever you change something on your page, an update is sent to all of the fans of the page in their news feeds.
- When you have your basic page set up, allow the community to build around it. Let people join, become fans, upload photos, write on the wall - make them feel like its their space. All of these activities become incentives of their friends to join, when they get to read about the activities on their news feeds.
- Make everything an experience. Make the pages interesting and interactive so that they appeal to or empower your targeted audiences. If you’re launching an event, make an event page and get the prospects to contribute to the event setup. You have to give people reasons for being a part of your community. This goes back to your initial relationship building strategies and techniques.
The other elements of Facebook like their walls are simple enough to understand once you have the basic profile and pages set up. Walls are just places where you can communicate with others with messages or comments. Now that you have it all set up, in the next two posts I’m going to talk about how to network using Facebook and how to Promote your products or launches on Facebook.
Networking like a pro
Networking results in sales and deals and is therefore important for all businesses. Most of us are so tied up running our businesses that we hardly take the time out for professional networking. The good thing is that even a few minutes everyday for online networking can go a long way.
First of all, make a mental distinction between the two types of network groups: a- your peers, colleagues, like-minded folks, could-be partners, vendors, industry authorities etc. b- your potential clients, potential customers, potential audiences.
There are many things that you can do to network;
1- Linkedin is great for staying in touch with your professional networks and to share business advice. It’s a social networking site where you can manage your contacts and find other relevant people to connect to. I call it the massive business card holder. You can choose who to add to your network and have intellectual discussions over the platform. Just like in real life, you can meet people that your friends know (second degree connections). The power of this community is great, because you can find a lot of business opportunities there.
Make a good profile for yourself and add connections to increase your visibility. Add links to your website or blogs so that you can redirect traffic to you through your Linkedin Page.
2- Create a following online. Networking is all about being in touch with your contacts on a regular basis. If you choose to follow relevant people on their microblogs, blogs and sites; chances are that a good percentage of them will follow you in return based on internet etiquettes. So, choose your contacts wisely.
3- Correspond regularly with your business contacts through email or other online mediums. You can set up reminders for emailing or sending cards if you have a busy schedule, so that you don’t forget about one of your biggest asset, your network.
4- If you think you are too busy to manage your contacts, participate in discussions, send emails or put up status updates, you can choose to outsource this work to virtual assistants. I have some friends whose businesses depend entirely on networking but have their hands full 24/7. They’ve successfully distributed a reasonable part of this work to reliable assistants and are comfortable with the way their work is being handled. If you think you can do that as well, give it a try. Otherwise, allocate time from your weekly schedule to network.
Twitter away
Lee Oden did it again with a great post on a microblogging survey that they conducted.
According to that survey, the maximum percentage use (almost 30% of the people who use twitter) use it to share links to items of interest. That really got me thinking…
Imagine if YOU were the item of their interest. Yes YOU! Lets suppose you’re about to launch your product and have rolled out an elaborate marketing campaign. Your launch has create a stir in the market and people interested in knowing the progress. The interest makes them start to update each other using microblogging tools, such as twitter, about whatever piece of news they can find about your launch. (“I think they’re going to launch a phone this time. imagine that. they call it the iphone or something..”). The microblogging aspect of it significantly increases the hype curve. You can launch when the timing is perfect and people are most receptive.
Now, during the launch event, keep the excitement rolling. Don’t stop there. Use their third party tools like LiveTwitting to give live updates on the event. Have competitions over these platforms if you want. Get creative. You have all the tools that you need to offer mind-blowing launches - all you have to do is find creative ways of using them.
I’d say. This is a great tool, so twitter away. Psst. Follow me?
More Twitter Insights, Opinions & Even A Nice Video Introduction To Twitter From The Blog World Around Us…….
Twitter Waffles On TOS, Treats It Like A Game of Darts - The Twitterverse was all aflutter over the past 24 hours or so as Twitter was used as a venue for online harassment. As soon as I started seeing the harassment accusations flying across my screen in Twhirl (my desktop Twitter client of …
Twitter Series B Funding: Done. Raises $15 MM - I spent most of the day digging up more information on Twitter and its Series B round of funding that I reported last night. The update is that Twitter reached an agreement with investors today to raise $15 million in funding at around …
Video: Twitter in Plain English - This 2.5 minute video is a result of feedback from our fans. We’ve received a number of requests from people who want their friends to use the micro-blogging service Twitter, but can’t seem to explain it well. We hope this video helps. …
Twitter: A community or a utility? - I’ve been kind of out of the loop thanks to the mesh 2008 conference, so I’ve missed the furore over Ariel Waldman and her attempts to get Twitter to ban a user that she says has been harassing her. According to her account of the …
Twitter begins to communicate with their users - Today Twitter began to communicate with their users, which they are to be commended and congratulated for. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, there’s a long road ahead, and everyone’s going to learn a lot as we …
Exploratory topic: Are clever ways of marketing events online ethical?
This is more of an open discussion, rather than my thoughts. There has always been an endless debate about ethics in marketing - and I feel that it very important for all of us to draw a line between whats right and what can be considered manipulative.
I actively advocate good practices for online marketing and sometimes come across people who have very different opinions about internet marketing. If event marketing is about; creating a brand for your event, telling the brand story to your community, finding ways of using social marketing tools to increase the outreach of your message - it seems ethical.
But what about things like creating scarcity to increase the sales of tickets? Or using emotional triggers to help people make go-no-go decisions? I feel that if these things are done properly, without the intention of manipulating your audiences, then they are good internet marketing practices. By ‘good’ here, I mean that they really work!
An example of this is how certain companies send out emails to their lists asking for testimonials - except that they subtly write out a carefully worded sample testimonial with it to lure them into saying the same kind of things. Should that also be considered unethical, or just simply careful planning? I’ll leave this prerogative to you. It will be great if you can share your thoughts on this.
Creating traction online
One of our commenter asked a very valid question, Do social applications (like Facebook) only begin to help in marketing events after a critical mass is already achieved in your following?
In my own experience I would agree that greater hype is built when more people are talking about it. However, having said that, the powerful thing about social media is that you can attract “more people” to your page without even knowing them. Initially when you’re just starting out, it doesn’t matter how many people you have on your Facebook network, what matters is how you get through to the people who could potentially be interested in attending your event.
For example, let’s suppose your target audience for an event are college students and frequent travelers (25-35 age-group) in Florida. We already know that the market demographics on facebook are skewed towards college students and professionals. So the potential of your market size is considerably huge. Theoretically, all you need to do is reach out to these people!
I’ve noticed that when events are built into fun activities, they can turn into great powerhouses for generating hype. You can build a page on the social networking apps with customized navigation and add applications over it to get the people involved in the pre-launch stage. You can get them to plan some elements of the event, or have competitions (e.g. poster design competition for the event). These competitions can be linked to real-life prizes like “accommodation discounts”, “free tickets”, “free drinks”, etc. You should also be able to show a list of other people who are attending. That will make them want to be there as well. There has to be an incentive for people to participate and refer you to their friends.
I believe that once you can find your potential customers, they will market your event further for you. In many ways, it depends on how you are branding your event. You can read our thoughts on event branding here.
So, to sum it up, I feel that even if you are a small shop or are planning a local club party, you can create movement and traction online if you play your moves well. Hopefully, we will be discussing these little tips, thoughts, ideas and strategies in this blog and our other Launch Strategies Blog over the next few months. Stay tuned!
Management qualities harnessed with social media - a recipe for success for event managers
The Event Manager Blog had an interesting discussion on the qualities of good event managers. I’m just briefly going to extend that discussion with a perspective on how to marry those skills to social marketing tools and techniques in order to be the best at what you do.
Amongst the different thoughts shared by a wonderfully active Linkedin community, one caught my attention the most. James Minella summed it up nicely into 5 attributes: organization, bigger picture, multi-tasking, interpersonal skills, creativity and flexibility. Event managers who already have these skills are already a step forward, but these skills can go to waste if they aren’t linked to powerful online mediums. Here is how that can be done.
1- Organize work with productivity tools. Keep a track of comments on your blogs. Keep a track on what other people are doing/saying. Know what your customers are thinking/doing. Keep track of schedules and collaborative planning softwares.
2- Keeping a bird-eye view of the bigger picture using different online tools, such as mind-mapping softwares. You need to be in full control over your plans at all times - mindmaps and other similar softwares help in allowing that.
3- Multi-tasking 24/7. Lets face it, we have to deal with countless stakeholders at all times. We have to deal with managing, planning, implementing, collaborating, envisioning all the time. If only we had 4 clones to work simultaneously, eh? If you can multi-task well offline, you will be able to work even faster on the internet. This is a fast-paced business and you need to be ahead of the game - twittering, googling, planning, blogging, commenting, tagging, marketing. Social media offers countless tools to choose between and saves the time to switch between them.
4- Interpersonal skills to build relationships of trust. Building credibility isn’t as simple as imparting knowledge - it goes much deeper into the foundations of personal interactions. How well you can build relationships with your community online will directly effect the success of your business or services. In my POV its one of the most important skills to attract larger audiences to your events.
5- Creativity in interacting with the markets and flexibility in how they are handled. When finding or approaching your customers, you can get as creative as you want. Hold competitions, ignite heated debates, spread viral campaigns, etc. Flexibility is also important when handling customers or prospects - remember that it is an open platform, so chances are that people may complain, bad-mouth, or disagree with you. Never react to such things negatively, but handle these situations with tact. Remember, whenever someone complains to you, a part of them already wants to be on your side - a part of them wants you to improve - a part of them wants you to become more relevant to their needs. Thank you, James for the good pointers. Here’s what James wrote:
“I think, just like any position, each person has to identify their strong points and accentuate those assets while identifying their areas of improvement and addressing those on a daily basis. In general, I would say any successful Event Manager is:
1. Be Extremely organized - overly so
2. Maintain a big picture philosophy at all times, meaning you work on ever detail while keeping in perspective the larger impact and goal
3. Be a good - no great - multi-tasker. To successfully run any program you are going need to ensure that 50 things are getting done at once, whether it’s in preparation or execution of the program.
4. Possess strong interpersonal skills. You need to be comfortable realting to and dealing with high level executives, government officials, vendors, co-workers, sponorsor representatives, customers,supervisors, suppliers, full-time staff, part-time staff and more.
5. Be Creative and Flexible. I think these two go together because in the event business things are always changing. Which requires you be flexible to develop a solution and solution comes about as a result of yoru creativity.”
Social bookmarking. What is it good for?
A background of my relationship with bookmarking: I remember the old days when I’d have a set of fancy rectangular bookmarks (something I got for myself from Barnes and Noble) lying on my desk at all times. I’ve always found it natural to organize myself while I’m working or researching with simple yet effective techniques. I used to color code the bookmarks with tags like “to show to clients”, “interesting event ideas”, or “vendor lists”, etc. Of course this was the “pre-web 2.0 era”. The era when we had to figure little productivity things out our self. Come web 2.0 and I was perhaps one of the first few to adopt online bookmarks. This is not because I’m tech savvy but simply because the concept of bookmarking is very natural for me. I do most of my research online, maintain my contacts online, I brainstorm online, I plan online and I even market my events online. What better way to manage my content than using these tools to organize the work.
Social Bookmarking: Now this is where it gets interesting. The online world thrives on sharing and community-centric approaches. So, I can tag things on my browser, cluster them up into categories if I want to, share them with other like-minded people or just open up the web feeds of the bookmark lists for public view. How does that benefit me as an event organizer? Well, I get to learn from other people, I get to rate and comment on other’s bookmarks, I get to collaborate to form richer information sets and, most importantly, I get to meet people interested in the same topics. That, to me, is invaluable for business; since my business is all about networking and relationships. Shifting bookmarks from my home computer to the office computer; or from my laptop to my team’s pcs has been as simple as exporting and emailing a single file.
Using “article marketing” to build credibility
While article marketing may work for building credibility over time, it shouldn’t be used for one-time event promotions. In the current internet world, there is an onslaught of online content and it becomes difficult to parse through and find valid information. If you are an event manager or promoter by profession, you would want to first build credibility before expecting people to hire you or attend your events. This is a natural process also followed offline, where consultants give away free advice for gaining authority.
I would personally discourage people to write articles just to improve their search rankings or to guide traffic to their websites. While good articles lead readers to your business (through contact information or website links), it is imperative to make sure that your intentions are clear. The bonus is that if you can get insightful articles out for free distribution (through different websites) it is likely to get you credibility and clients. So I’m not advising you to dismiss it completely, but to write wisely.
We talked earlier on how to build relationships with your community, writing informative articles to people who are already interested in hearing you is one such way to invest in that relationship.
Find the right places to write to, expand the reader exposure via RSS and then put your writing skills at work. If you want, you can hire people to do the writing bit for you on freelance platforms, such as oDesk or Elance.
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