Social Media Marketing Resources

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As a result of its online customer community, a company can get much more than basic product feedback. It gains deep insight into the needs of customers, and creates ever-greater customer loyalty by embracing customers as co-designers. Most importantly, the company goes directly to the source for product enhancements, pulling new innovations and ideas directly from the minds of the customers who use, buy, and recommend its products. This is the holy grail of customer-centered product design. Online customer communities can enable the connections, host the conversations, and facilitate the processes that make routine innovation possible.

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Today's technology offers ample opportunities to start conversations with and among customers, fans, foes, competitors, and the press—any person or group who cares to listen and, perhaps, act on the messages received. By some estimates, 85% of the information companies collect is not in a form that they can access or analyze—it is unstructured. The Gartner Group reports unstructured data doubles every three months while seven million web pages are published every day. This cacophony presents the one of the biggest challenges companies face today.

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When Bob Lutz of GM or Jonathan Schwartz of Sun set up their blogs, they probably didn't worry too much about the review with Legal. But how does, say, a midlevel corporate marketer or product manager set out to create an "official" blog with the sanction of Legal?

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Today we discuss some SEO tactics that may or may not be Black Hat, and how to deliver a dope smack to commenters who don't add to the conversation. All that and more in this Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program sponsored by MarketingProfs that covers classic marketing tactics and what's new on the technology front.

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Here's the story of how Best Buy built an internal social-networking forum for its 140,000 employees, and how its original goal to get more information about customer likes and dislikes through the sales associates on the floor morphed into something else entirely.

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If the Internet community didn't know its place in politics back in 2004, it certainly does today. Its "place" is to engage and educate us, promote candidates, help with fundraising and more... all through the use of new social-media tools that are increasingly vital to a candidate's overall marketing strategy.

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Despite all the talk, the mainstream media coverage, the conferences, courses, and books on social media marketing, there's quite a bit of ambivalence, fear, and (sometimes) outright hostility directed toward social media by CMOs, CEOs, and CFOs. All of this leads to the dreaded "we just want to stick our toe in the water, and see what this stuff is all about" and "we want to do a small, low-budget social media project and track the ROI."

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Marketing with Twitter, Google Docs for SEO, who the Connectors are and why you need them... all that and more in this Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program sponsored by MarketingProfs that covers classic marketing tactics as well as what's new on the technology front.

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Are you LinkedIn? Do you Spoke, Ryze, Jigsaw, or ZoomInfo? In 2008, will you get a Second Life? If these social-networking concepts are not on your radar, you are ignoring a dynamic trend that could have a profound impact on key areas of your business, such as revenue growth, talent acquisition and development, and operational efficiency and effectiveness.

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Learn what Metcalfe's Law has to do with marketing and networking, hear some best practices with PURLs, and why January is Tech Geek Nirvana. All that and more in this Marketing Over Coffee, a weekly audio program sponsored by MarketingProfs that covers classic marketing tactics and what's new on the technology front.

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In the face of mounting competition and hype from rival networks Facebook and MySpace, LinkedIn has stayed true to its mission of creating a network for business professionals. I've been a member of the service for years, but until recently it had not had the critical mass necessary to get traction. Over the last six months, however, I've seen a flood of people using the service to connect professionally. As I said, LinkedIn doesn't pretend to be MySpace or Facebook. The design is clean, but a little stark, and it could use a little more personality to make it more engaging. In this video tour, I focus on what LinkedIn does well within its network and how you can apply the same logic to your own community.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

There's a new air of excitement behind the mobile Web. Initiatives like Verizon's recent announcement to open their network, Google's Open Handset initiative, new wireless auctions, and the iPhone have energized users. For the intelligent marketer the question must be, "Is mobile the right medium to reach my constituencies?"

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Work of any kind requires an understanding of the appropriate tools for the job, and social media is no different. Here are some suggestions for a starter set of social media tools. The actual applications will change, over time, because technology tends to do that. But the basic functions should evolve a little more slowly.

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Customer conversations are everywhere today—social networks, blogs, forums, and other social-media outlets. These are unbiased, unfiltered interactions that can deliver rich information about how your customers talk about topics that are relevant to your company and brand. Though it would be nice if people were to use your company's messaging in their everyday interactions, the reality is that for the most part they don't. Social SEO—tapping into how they talk about you and your industry so that you can determine how they will search—is the most effective and foolproof way to master that art/science/guessing game of picking keywords.

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Whether or not you completely understand social media or social networking sites, the one aspect you must understand is that they are going to change the way businesses advertise. Facebook, in particular, is constantly evolving and improving its users' experience with new features and applications. As a result, Facebook is trying to change the way businesses market and advertise their products and services to potential consumers.

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What do you get when you combine video, social networking, micromedia, and a very savvy French entrepreneur? You get Seesmic. Seesmic is a social network where the primary content is video. Users record video, post it to the site, and other users reply in video. It's new and it's red-hot. It's also a glimpse of the future.

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LinkedIn doesn't pretend to be MySpace or Facebook. In the face of mounting competition and hype from rival networks, LinkedIn has stayed true to its mission of creating a network for business professionals. In this video tour, Matt Dickman focuses on what LinkedIn does well, and how you can leverage its strengths.

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In a recent blog post, Cymfony's Jim Nail wrote about a study that provocatively proclaimed that spending on conversational marketing will outpace traditional marketing by 2012. Is that even possible? To find out, Paul Dunay chatted with Jim and Pete Blackshaw, executive vice-president at Nielsen Online Strategic Services. What ensued was a very lively debate about whether marketers are prepared to support conversational marketing—and the answer isn't very pretty. As Jim and Pete point out, not only are marketers not using Web 2.0 tools to create a conversation, but to even listen effectively they need to overhaul their infrastructures—big time.

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Podcasting can give your company a new image and personality. And, increasingly, podcasting offers the promise of being another highly effective way to reach and develop potential customers. That's only if you can produce compelling, "buzz-worthy" content, of course.

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If you are someone who is partially or wholly responsible for the long-term direction of your Web site, or the Web sites of your clients, you have to be able to explain Google's OpenSocial in clear and concise terms. So what is OpenSocial? And why does it matter?