New Media
Three Rules of Social Media Marketing for Businesses Large and Small
Aug 9th
Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have put the power of the media in hands of the average citizen. Entrepreneurs, information marketers, and college students have learned that they can be the media for audiences both large and small. They have also learned that the nightly news and the traditional print media will share their stories. This shift in the “power of the press” carries with it three rules of social media marketing for businesses large and small. These three rules are:
Silence is not golden…it’s guilty.
· The first story told is the story most retold…and the story most believed.
· Buzz is the bomb…it can propel you to the top, or blow up in your face.
Silence is Not Golden…It’s Guilty
In high school science, we learn that nature abhors a vacuum. Well nowhere is this truer than on the Internet. If a business fails to comment on an event, good or bad, then the social media will rush in to fill the void around the corporate brand. It’s very simple. The construction of search engines and social media is such that there will never be silence associated with any brand.
Whether the brand is the iPhone, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Disney, Universal Studios, or an unknown convenient store on the corner of Smalltown, USA; if something happens, somebody must comment. That is the nature of the Internet and the social media in the 21st century. With the advent of internet enabled cell phones, YouTube enabled smart phones, text messaging and location enabled Twitter, everybody is not just a news reporter; they are a video historian. Watch the evening news in any market, anywhere in the world, and you will see YouTube video broadcast about a news event that has happened that day. Nothing is more powerful than eyewitness testimony, both in a court of law and on the six o’clock news.
It is important to remember that is not the occasional user of the social media who is making these reports; it is the regular blogger, the regular Twitter broadcaster, and the regular YouTube poster, who is making these reports. They have followers and their followers have followers. The average reach of these individuals is over 20,000, and their audience is reliable. This means that corporations cannot just broadcast a message in the social media when something happens, corporations must have a presence 24/7. The social media presence of a corporation must be part of an ongoing plan and deliberate social media optimization process that ensures that the corporation has an audience, and that the corporate audience is larger than that of any client or customer who may come through their door.
The First Story Told is the Story Most Retold and the Story Most Believed
The social media is a cultural phenomenon based on a conglomerate of social norms and behaviors that span age groups and demographics. And as a result, the rules are difficult for many entrepreneurs and executives to negotiate.
But one of the rules that is constant across all social media platforms is the first story told is the first story believed. Further, in the social media, the first story about a major event, positive or negative, will be retold, retransmitted and shared among social media users. The first story told in the social media will be converted to email and resent. The first story told is also the most likely story to make the transition to traditional media, in other words, it will become news. Because of this, it is not enough to respond when a message appears on one of the popular social media platforms, such as Facebook for Twitter. Instead, when an event occurs, a business must have a prepared statement ready to transmit immediately through an established social media optimization program to ensure that the corporate message is first story told. Ideally, this corporate message will even precede those messages, blogs, tweets, and YouTube postings that may be coming from those customers actually involved as participants in the event.
And don’t believe for a second that blocking cell phone communications, disconnecting Wi-Fi, shutting down Internet or in some other fashion, disrupting access to the social media will delay negative social media messages. This has been tried by major governments around the world and in every instance, not only has it in fact accelerated the rate that these messages have been transmitted, but increased the negative sentiment attached to the event. Ironically such attempts to block social media messages actually expanded the reach of every message that the perpetrators attempted to block.
The great Vince Lombardi once said, “the best defense is a strong offense.”
In the social media, nothing could be more true. The only way to counter a negative message is to send your positive message, even before the first negative message can be transmitted.
Buzz is the Bomb…It Can Propel You to the Top, or Blow Up in Your Face
W.C. Fields once said, “I don’t care what you say about me, so long as you spell my name correctly.” In the social media, W.C. Fields’ advice would be disastrous. What is said absolutely matters. The sentiment surrounding the brand determines the degree of influence that a message has and it determines the action taken by those who receive the message. The goal of all marketing is to influence potential clients and potential customers to make a purchase. In the social media, that means that they must be influenced to reach for the mouse, reach for the credit card, reach for their wallet and make the purchase.
Buzz is the bomb. A positive buzz, means that there is positive message activity around your brand. There is positive buzz when people are sending your message to their friends, their friends are sending your to other friends and it all influences someone to make that positive buy decision.
If the sentiment surrounding your message is negative, buzz can blow up in your face. Research shows that a negative message will be sent on four times more frequently than a positive message, thus doing four times the damage, influencing four times as many people not to buy.
W.C. Fields was wrong, it is not good enough that your name is spelled correctly, something good must be said as well. The easiest way to ensure that something good is said, influence those who influence others to say something good about you. Again, this is done by having a constant positive presence in the social media, even before anything noteworthy happens at your company, at your place of business, in your brand.
There are three rules of social media marketing for businesses large and small. Turn on the news any night and you will see big business that have failed to follow these three simple rules. Whether it is a cruise ship with a passenger falling overboard and 124,000 tweets telling the story of how they left him behind, or it is a major amusement park with the most anticipated themed ride in a decade breaking down, trapping riders for 45 minutes and generating 50 YouTube uploads. To succeed in the social media
remember: Silence is not golden, businesses must be in the social media early, regularly, and constantly. The first story told is the first story retold. To be the one telling your story, influencing others to retell your story, businesses must take ownership of that message, or someone else will fill the void and tell your story for you from their perspective. And finally, buzz is the bomb. That buzz must be positive, so that the bomb does not blow up in your face.
About the Author:
Dr. Maurice A. Ramirez is founder of the consulting firm High Alert, LLC. He is a renowned speaker on the importance of social networking and has presented to national organizations. As a consultant, Dr. Ramirez assists companies to align business continuity plans with personnel and customer behavior during adversity. Dr. Ramirez is founding chairperson of the American Board of Disaster Medicine and a Senior Physician-Federal Medical Officer. Please visit www.high-alert.com
The Power of Place
Jul 13th
If you’ve had doubts location-based social networking services were going to really catch on, you should know that Foursquare whizzed past the one-million member mark back in April and just passed 1.8 million; and raked in $20 million in venture funding just a couple of weeks ago. That buzzing sound you hear is the Power of Place, about to go mainstream.
Other location-based services, including Gowalla, Loopt and Where, are also being actively embraced by mobile-device owners to shop, communicate, socialize and play games. Their total number of members runs in the millions. “None of us have 30 million users, but we’re just at the beginning of breaking into the mainstream,” says Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt, which has 3 million users. Meantime, Google is—of course—ramping up an aggressive push for it’s own mobile social network, Latitude; and Facebook is expected to announce new location-based features later this year. Foursquare, however, is the brand leader in this fledgling arena. Earlier this year, there were rumors of an acquisition brewing with the likes of Facebook and Yahoo, with Foursquare leaders deciding that it was just too soon to sell.
Expect location-based services to play a starring role in the rising wave in mobile advertising, poised to rocket to $3.1 billion in the U.S. in 2013 from $320 million in 2009, according to market researcher BIA/Kelsey. Driving that growth is the rise in smartphone sales, expected to account for the majority of U.S. phones by the end of 2011, according to Nielsen. About 5% of the more than 225,000 iPhone apps out there are location-sensitive.
Analysts say the appeal of location sharing goes far beyond game-playing and seeing where your friends are. “Location is such an important tool for local merchants and marketers to more deeply connect with customers,” says Michael Boland, an analyst at BIA/Kelsey. Expect an increasing number of merchants to capitalize on this loyal customer base as they become more familiar with the apps and discover new ways to use them to interact and more profitably engage with customers.
Since it began last year, Foursquare has established partnerships with more than 15,000 businesses, including Starbucks and CNN; and is adding up to 15,000 users a day. Loopt has signed advertisers such as Burger King and Gap. Where has deals with 20,000 small businesses in North America. “It’s not that these folks haven’t advertised before,” Where CEO Walt Doyle says. “They’re just changing who they advertise with—in this case, digital, instead of print.”
The services will only become more popular as consumers also share photos and content, says Josh Williams, CEO of Gowalla, which is up to 350,000 users. These consumers are also going to share their experiences, making location-based services an invaluable opportunity for merchants to both get to know their customers better and to encourage them through incentives, contests, and other engagement programs, to act as brand ambassadors.
To find out more about location-based social networking and how to put it to work for your company, check in to The Power of Place, led by Jodi Gersh of the Gannett Company (whose networks include CareerBuilder.com, USA Today, Metromix.com, and more) part of your Social Media Optimization Summits agenda! We’ll see you there!
What’s All the Buzz About Mobile Marketing?
Jun 18th
Remember the good old days? All you had to worry about was whether or not your website looked great on a 17” monitor and worked in Internet Explorer and Firefox, and if somebody said they couldn’t get your site to load just right in Safari, you asked “what the heck is that?!?” And then—just when things had settled down a bit—came the mobile web … and that huge collective groan you heard was the sound of a million digital content designers saying “Let me get this straight … you seriously want me to make this work on a three-inch screen?”
So why do those three-inch screens even matter? Because right now, it’s estimated that more than 40% of US consumers use smartphones, with the number growing rapidly as mobile hardware and software functionality becomes more and more sophisticated and enticing. You probably know somebody (or more likely several somebodies) who can hardly wait to get their hands on the new iPhone 4; and a friend of mine recently joked that while “Wanna see my Droid?” has always been a hot pickup line among Star Wars nerds, it’s now a perfectly mainstream question asked by people who don’t even adhere to the Jedi Code.
Here in the US, iPhones, Androids, and Blackberries are leading the pack when it comes to mobile data use, in that order; and access to mobile data is projected to grow by 40% over the next five years. So if those numbers matter enough to you to begin thinking about reaching your audience via their smartphones, here are a few tips and considerations to keep in mind:
- Go small or go home. While it’s possible for mobile users to access your “regular” website on a smartphone, it’s also possible for their heads to explode from the eyestrain alone, not to mention the frustration of sliding the page around to get little glimpses of what you have to say. If you’re serious about delivering content to mobile users, create a mobile-optimized site.
- Think on your feet. The information needs of a user on the go aren’t the same as one at a desk. They want quick access to only the information they need most; so repurpose your existing web content for the mobile web by zeroing in on the portion of your product, service, and message that are most important to a user on the move.
- WWWWH. You’re limited by both space and time thanks to the size of the screen and the user’s need for immediate info; so keep it simple. Who (you are), What (you do), When (you’re open), Where (to find you), and How (to contact you). Simply covering those five bases will go a long way toward making your mobile website a powerful marketing tool.
The world of mobile content is growing and changing like crazy, and the factors that should be considered in reaching your mobile audience are far too many to cover in one blog post alone. If you want to know how to make the most of the tremendous opportunity that mobile marketing represents, join us for “What’s All The Buzz About Mobile Marketing” presented by Tim Grace on September 17th at our next Social Media Optimization Summits event. In this four-hour workshop, you’ll see and hear how to use mobile marketing to attract new customers and build the loyalty of your existing ones, including: integrating mobile marketing into your existing campaigns and strategies; how to optimize your existing web presence for mobile devices; when native apps are needed (iPhone, Droid, etc.) and what’s involved in building these tools; leveraging the power of texting and location-based services; and put your new skills and knowledge to work as you join in creating a mobile-optimized site and an iPhone app while the workshop is underway!
Blah, Blah, Blog
Jun 4th
Blogging can be a great way to attract and engage customers and communicate your brand; but say the word to a lot of small business owners, and you’ll find yourself talking to the hand. For some, it’s a tech thing, and building and managing the administrative end of a blog (OMG, there’s code in there!) is a problem in itself. For others, the prospect of putting themselves out there in writing just isn’t a comfortable idea. Some people just aren’t sure exactly what benefits a blog can have, so why invest the time? But here’s some encouraging news: it is possible to create and manage a blog with just a little inspiration and very little technical know-how, that’s actually worth your while.
Point of Fact #1: The vast majority of those slick-looking blogs that you see out there weren’t built from scratch and didn’t require much expertise or expense. They were created using one of the more popular (mostly free) blogging platforms available on the web. These applications—including WordPress, TypePad, and Google’s popular platform, Blogger—will take you step-by-step through the creative, letting you point and click your way through a menu of available formats (themes) to decide how your blog will look, then easily customize the various elements of the theme (header/title, sidebar, links, main content blocks, images, etc.). With time, some experimentation, and a little self-education, you’ll get more familiar and comfortable with the creative/management end (the “dashboard”), and find that you can make more customized adjustments to your blog’s layout, including changing out images, colors, headers, and more; and add custom elements (sometimes called “widgets”) that perform specialized functions like displaying your Twitter feed in a sidebar, scrolling testimonials, a photo gallery, and more. But it’s important to know that a blog’s quality isn’t determined by the number or widgets you can cram onto the page. Even if the old adage that “Content Is King” were to die in relation to every other form of expression on the web, when it comes to blogs, it will always be fundamentally true.
Point of Fact #2: You don’t have to be Shakespeare. If you have any doubts, take a minute now to visit www.WordPress.com, www.Blogger.com, and www.TypePad.com and start clicking around. You’ll see blogs of all shapes and sizes and levels of literary capability; and you’ll very quickly realize that pretty much everybody these days has a blog, and if they can do it, you can, too! (You’ll also realize that there are way too many people out there who think it’s a great idea to put a cat in a dress, but that’s a topic for another day). Here’s what you need to know about composing for a blog—and about writing pretty much anything, when you get down to it: write what you know and the words will flow. If you’re at all good at what you do, then you know your customers and prospects fairly well. You’re familiar with their questions and their needs. You know exactly what you have to offer and how to communicate that to them in a way they can understand. Fall back on those real-world skills and channel them into blog entries that say it like you’d speak it, and you’ll be more than halfway to blogging success. For a fabulous example of all of the above, visit http://sethgodin.typepad.com/.
Point of Fact #3: When it comes to blogs, success is a seriously subjective thing, and it’s admittedly more than possible to totally waste your time. As with every other business effort, it’s important to have a plan that states what you hope to accomplish, delineates how you plan to get there, and identifies all the appropriate measures of success. If you want to get the word out about your products and services, then you’re shooting for high stats so focus on all the available opportunities to pull in more eyeballs by promoting your blog URL everywhere you can, and make sure you have tools in place to measure the visits you get. If you’re looking to boost brand loyalty, then focus on ongoing ideas like special rewards and “how to use our product better” features that focus on developing continuing relationships with the people who’ll visit your blog. I’ve had more than one person tell me they blog simply to get the ideas out of their head and into a place that helps them analyze things more objectively, which is a completely worthy goal in itself. The target here is incredibly broad, so just enter into the endeavor with your own idea of success as fully formed as possible if you care about making the most of your effort and time.
And finally, Point of Fact #4: There are so many more possibilities in blogging than we could ever fit into one article, so if you want the whole scoop on building a blog, make sure your plan for our next #OptSum event includes Scott Ellis’ workshop on WordPress 101: Build a Website in 4 Hours; and if you’re ready to go beyond the fundamentals, don’t miss Jason Falls’ workshop on Practical SEO for Corporate Blogs, and Mike Merrill’s workshop on Social Media ROI in the Real World just to name a few. We’ll see you there!
5 Business Models for Social Media Startups
May 18th
Jun Loayza is the President of SocialMediaMarketing.com, a company focused on building social media campaigns for companies. He is also the co-founder of Viralogy.com, which measures and ranks your social influence online. He loves to meet other young, motivated entrepreneurs, and can be reached though his personal blog. Jun will be leading the How To Implement Ambassador “Experience” Campaigns workshop on September 17th 2010, at the Social media Optimization Summits.
During the first Internet (
) boom, the most common business model was probably, “get a ton of traffic, then figure out how to make money” — which savvy readers will note isn’t a very good business model. Often, the way those businesses attempted to make money on that traffic was to use display or text advertising. Making money from advertising is still possible, but it’s no longer as easy as building a site and putting some ads on it. Fortunately, there are a number of business models to choose from.
Today’s social media startups are finding unique ways of generating revenue from the very beginning. Here are a few of the revenue models that they’re using and how you can apply them to your company.
1. Freemium Model
Description: This business model works by offering a basic service for free, while charging for a premium service with advanced features to paying members.
Examples of the Freemium Model: UserVoice, Flickr (
), Vimeo (), LinkedIn (), and PollDaddy
The biggest challenge for businesses using the freemium model is figuring how much to give away for free so that users will still need and want to upgrade to a paying plan. If most users can get by with the basic free plan, they won’t have a need to upgrade. For example, I’ll probably never upgrade my LinkedIn account and because I don’t shoot high definition videos, I’ll never need a Premium Vimeo account either.
I spoke with Marcus Nelson from UserVoice about their use of the freemium model and how it works:
1. Is UserVoice profitable?
We’re “ramen noodle” profitable, but have recently taken funding to accelerate our growth.2. How long did it take UserVoice to implement a business model?
Eight months, though I would not recommend that as a new startup. I talk a lot more about this in an interview on Mixergy.3. How long did it take to get your first customer?
Depends on your definition of customer – we had sign ups immediately and grew by 30-35% a month. What we had built was core features, so as we spoke with customers we began asking what would they pay for on our UserVoice page. Once we had some premium features in place, we went back to those customers and began doing paid pilots to test out the service. The first paid customer arrived in November.4. How many users do you have right now?
16,652 as of June 5, 2009.5. What percentage of users are paying members?
Since moving to paid plans, our conversion rate is around 5%.6. What are the biggest obstacles that UserVoice has for getting members to pay?
The same as most businesses, providing value that customers want to pay for, and overcoming objections for implementation.
2. Affiliate Model
Description: This is a model in which a business makes money by driving traffic, leads, or sales to another, affiliated company’s website. Businesses that sell a product, meanwhile, rely on affiliated sites to send them the traffic or leads they need to make sales.
Examples of the Affiliate Model: Illuminated Mind, ShoeMoney, DIY Themes
Like businesses that rely on advertising, high traffic sites predictably have a much easier time making money using affiliate links than sites that are just starting out. High traffic means that even low conversion numbers can equal big bucks. However, in just a year since starting his blog, Jonathan Mead from the Illuminated Mind generates enough income from affiliate links that he has been able to leave his full-time job. This is a dream of many bloggers and this is how he did it:
1. When did you start your blog and how long did it take you to generate enough revenue to be a full-time blogger?
I started blogging in February of 2008, so it took me a little over a year (15 months) to become a full time blogger.2. How much revenue are you generating through affiliate links?
I earn roughly $2-3k per month from affiliates. It depends on the month though, some are better than others.3. How many page views per month do you have to receive in order to generate the status of a full-time blogger?
I don’t think page views really played a critical role in my success. I think creating a community based around living on your own terms and making self-development palatable, was really the key to my success. You can have tons of traffic without anyone really caring enough to value what you have to offer.4. What is the best way to get your readers to click on your affiliate links?
I’ll try to break it down into what I think are the three most important factors.1. You have to have your reader’s trust. If they don’t trust you, they will not buy what you recommend.
2. You have to target the products to your readers. Speak to their interests, personality and emotions.
3. You need to be able to write decent copy and communicate in a compelling way why they should buy what you’re recommending.
5. What are the best kinds of affiliate links: Low price point and low margin, or high price point high margins?
I only aim for $20 and above range, so I’m not sure how the lower priced products convert.6. What are the biggest obstacles to overcome when generating revenue through affiliate links?
Reader trust and proper targeting. These things seem so simple, but it’s amazing how many people don’t get this part right. It’s worth the time researching those in your niche selling products and starting conversations with them. Ask them why their readers buy and then use that in your copy.
3. Subscription Model
Description: Sites using the subscription model require users to pay a fee (generally monthly or yearly) to access a product or service.
Examples of the Subscription Model: Label 2.0, Scrooge Strategy, Netflix
I talked to Greg Rollett, the founder of Label 2.0, a marketing school for musicians that sells its services for a monthly membership fee. The service teaches musicians how to use online tools to help further their careers, find more fans and navigate the business of music.
1. Why did you decide to use a subscription based model over a one-off sales model?
When Eric [Hebert] and I decided to work together I was actually presenting him with an offer to promote a product that I had created and he was working on something similar. Instead of offering a one-off sale for both products and fighting for the same niche (our sites have nearly identical target audience and traffic). We decided that coming together and creating a long term relationship with the people we were helping would be better for our business in the long run. We have enough content and features that every month will be an exciting new journey. The business model was pretty simple. We took the features that we liked the best and least from popular internet marketing strategies for membership sites, continuity programs, etc as well as different ways to run the membership software and found what was going to be the easiest for us to use and easiest for our members to digest2. How did you prepare to have a successful launch to your service?
Luckily Eric and I had been building up trust and a user base for years through our blogs, Twitter (), live speaking events and client work. We have both worked on high profile projects and that helped us secure a great position in the market. We both posted teaser blog posts and within a few days we had over a 100 musicians testing it out and providing feedback for our public launch. We expect 300-500 paying members within the first 2 weeks.
3. What are your price-points and how are you maintaining a personal touch with your subscribers?
Our pricing model is high for the industry we are in and we know that. At around $50 a month and $400 a year we have priced ourselves to only work with those that really want to see an impact in their careers. If you look at the bigger picture and see that for consulting we typically charge $100 an hour, you are getting a great deal, but losing that one-on-one feeling. That is why we are having bi-monthly conference calls, webinars, walk-throughs, Q&A’s and really doing our best to ensure that every musician gets their bang for their buck.4. What are the biggest obstacles in the subscription-based model?
1. Price – Musicians are used to free. MySpace is free, YouTube (
2. Stereotypes – Musicians do not think of themselves as marketers. They feel like that is what a manager, record label or promoter is supposed to do. We are helping them turn that stereotype upside down by teaching them how to market themselves to create better relationships with their fans which is going to help their business in the long haul.
3. Monthly membership sites have a high attrition rate – The reason is after their 1st or second time they login, they forget about it and never come back. We are doing everything that we can to ensure that there is always something going on, from new lessons to trainings to calls and webinars to activity in the forums to leveraging the community to make everyone stronger.
4. Virtual Goods Model
Description: Users pay for virtual goods, such as weapons, upgrades, points, or gifts, on a website or in a game.
Examples of the Virtual Goods Model: Acclaim Games, Meez, Weeworld, Facebook Gifts
Virtual Goods come in all shapes and sizes. Hot or Not was one of the pioneers of virtual good in the online dating industry by allowing users to send virtual roses to other users that cost from $2 to $10. The beauty of virtual goods is that margins are high, since goods essentially only cost as much as the bandwidth required to serve them, which is generally almost zero. I spoke with Ali Moiz from Peanut Labs, a social monetization company that focuses on virtual goods and currencies.
1. What is the margin on each item sold?
Very high. There is little or no marginal or production cost once you setup an economy, so for game companies this is in the 90% or higher range.2. What percentage of your users actually buy virtual goods?
10 – 20% buy it using credit cards, another 30 – 40% get it for free by doing surveys and offers through Peanut Labs Media and companies like us.3. What are the biggest obstacles in selling virtual goods?
Creating something that users want and need, and that is relevant to the community.4. What are the most popular types of virtual goods sold?
3 main categories: functional, status items, decorative. All 3 play a major role.
5. Advertising Model
Description: Sites that rely on advertising, sell advertisements against their traffic. In basic terms: the more traffic you have, the more you can charge for ads (additional demographics about your site’s visitors, such as age, gender, location, or interests, also affects the amount you can charge advertisers to place ads on your site).
Examples of the Advertising Model: Yahoo! (), MySpace (), Tweet Later
I spoke with Dewald Pretorius from TweetLater, whose site relies on a unique variation of the advertising model in which users are able to bid on daily sponsorships on his site. When researching the site, I found that the average bid amount for a completed auction was $50-$80. Predictably, most of the users that won the sponsorship auction also linked out to TweetLater web site from their Twitter profile — driving more traffic and potential bidders back to the site.
1. Is TweetLater profitable?
Yes, absolutely! I run my business with very low overhead costs, and TweetLater has been profitable since the very start when I monetized it in February 2009.2. How long did it take TweetLater to implement a business model?
I started TweetLater in April 2008, and ran it as a completely free service until February 2009. That period allowed me to build a solid user base, which was very willing and keen to dive into the paid side when I released it. Personally I think some people are too anxious to start making money immediately and underestimate the value of being patient and first building a reputation and user base.3. How long did it take to get your first customer?
After I announced TweetLater Professional? If I remember correctly, it was about 10 minutes after I made the announcement that I got the first subscription. I might be wrong. It could have been 5 minutes.4. How many users do you have right now?
TweetLater has around 71,000 users, and is steadily growing by around 600 users every day, seven days a week.5. What are the biggest obstacles that TweetLater has for getting members to pay?
It is never easy to monetize something that sits on top of a free service. I have done that successfully, and logically it is because folks feel they get real value for their money. Maintaining and increasing the value proposition is one of the things I think of every single day. I believe that giving people a free trial of TweetLater Professional has contributed to its success. People can test-drive it with no commitments and no catches before deciding whether it is the right service for them. I believe it demonstrates respect for the users, as well as confidence in the value that the service provides.
Conclusion
Before you launch your startup, make sure you have a clear business model in mind. You will most likely have to change and tweak your business model as your startup progresses, but at least you will be focused on cash generation from the start, which means you’ll be ahead of the game.
This post covered just a small number of the many business models available to web startups. Please feel free to use the comments below to discuss these models and others that you may be using or considering for your startup.
Top 8 Ways to Generate Even More Exposure with Online Video
Apr 22nd
Maximize your marketing efforts and reach more prospective customers with online video. Highlighted below are the top eight ways to generate even more exposure through various social networking avenues using your community video.
1. Email Signature:
Including a hyperlink to your video in your signature allows prospective customers easy access to virtual contact with your community.
2. Facebook® Status Updates:
Posting the YouTube ™ link in your status update provides a measurable distribution channel allowing syndication of your video through fans’ newsfeeds. It affords customers the opportunity to share with family and friends who are potentially searching for products and services, leading to increased views and positive sentiment.
3. MySpace ™ Status Updates:
Posting the YouTube link or MySpace video link to video in status updates creates consistency across platforms and encourages employees and customers to post. It affords customers the opportunity to share with family and friends who are potentially searching for your service or product, leading to increased views and positive sentiment.
4. LinkedIn® Status Updates:
Posting a YouTube link to statuses allows for exposure among influencers and other contacts and encourages employees and customers to post, increasing relevant viewership.
5. Twitter ™ Status Updates:
Tweet your video through work and encourage customers to tweet. This affords followers the ability to resend to their followers, allowing promotion of the community and increasing the probability of your video going viral.
6. Embed Video on Blog:
Embedded code to your blog coupled with written and video content provides prospective customers a comprehensive overview of what to expect. Embedding can easily be shared with friends and creates another distribution channel, which maximizes viral potential.
7. Embed Video on MySpace Profile:
You can embed video on your profile through albums and tagging friends, allowing consistent branding across platforms. Embedding video also enables feedback from prospective clients.
8. Facebook Page URL Options:
Posting the video link allows prospective customers to find all the necessary information in one place.
Erica Campbell has experience across multiple industries including automotive, real estate, heavy equipment, travel, sports and entertainment. Campbell joined Dominion Enterprises in 2004 and currently serves as the Senior Manager of New Media Marketing for For Rent Media Solutions. Her experience includes developing, executing, optimizing and analyzing social media strategic plans across multiple channels including blogs, social networking sites, video sharing sites and other conversational media. She spends a great deal of time building relationships with social media influencers, bloggers and new consumer business to generate awareness of clients and products. Campbell is also responsible for managing the email marketing campaigns. In addition, Campbell is an industry speaker and conducts added value Webinars for customers as well as training for For Rent Media Solutions employees nationwide.
erica.campbell@forrent.com | www.ForRent.com
Find Apartments For Rent on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube!
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Blog: http://blog.forrent.com/
What is the Opportunity For Brands Using Social Media? Is That all? Part 3
Apr 16th
Optimization Summits founder, Tami Siewruk, speaks with (from left to right) Duncan Alney, Mark Juleen, Christopher Penn, Tami Siewruk, Mack Collier, Geno Church, Erica Campbell, Jason Falls and Jay Ehret about trending topics in social media.
What do you think the opportunity do you see for brands using social media?
Where Is Social Media Really Going? Part 2
Apr 13th
Optimization Summits founder, Tami Siewruk, speaks with (from left to right) Duncan Alney, Mark Juleen, Christopher Penn, Tami Siewruk, Mack Collier, Geno Church, Erica Campbell, Jason Falls and Jay Ehret about trending topics in social media.
Where do you think Social Media is going? We look forward to hearing your views!
Looking for a Better Web Strategy?
Apr 9th
Looking for a Better Web Strategy? Spy on Your Competition
By Heather Lutze
As a Web site owner, you wear many hats: webmaster, content writer, e-mail manager, and marketing guru. Keeping up with all the demands of managing a Web site can be daunting and keeping up with competitors near impossible.
How do you manage your time and resources as well as keep your site equal or above your competitors?
The answer is simple – you spy on your competition. In fact, with a little covert intelligence gathering, you can see what other Web sites are doing better, equal, or worse than you. And best of all, this spying is perfectly legal!
If you’re like many Web site owners, you may feel that your site is not meeting its full potential, causing you to lose revenue as well as repeat customers. Additionally, finding new customers may be challenging and you feel like you are spinning your wheels without moving forward. If any of this sounds familiar, rest assured you are not alone…and you can do something about it.
Gather Competitive Intelligence – “007 Style”
You can find many tools online that will enable you to assess your site’s Findability compared with your competitors. While you won’t find anything as exciting as a missile firing from the hood of a brand new BMW, you will find some cool tools that are free or low cost and that will give you an edge in marketing your site. Following are the essentials of your Spy Tool Kit:
· Tool #1 – SEOmoz.org
This tool measures the strength of pages, blogs, and entire domains based on factors inherent to popularity, influence, and ranking ability. This allows you to see your impact compared against others in your industry.
· Tool #2 – Websitegrader.com
This free SEO tool measures the marketing effectiveness of a Web site. It provides a score that incorporates things like Web site traffic, SEO, social popularity, and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the Web site can be improved from a marketing perspective.
· Tool #3 – SpyFu.com
SpyFu.com is a free Pay Per Click tool that gives great intelligence on how competitive certain keywords are in Google. In addition to giving insight on the cost per click and average number of clicks per day, SpyFu also displays the ad text for the competitors in this space.
After running all three tools on your site as well as the sites of your three major competitors, you can see how you rank in comparison and where you need to make some changes. You may very well find that the competition is stronger in terms of SEO, that they have a better Web site strategy than you, and/or that they are using Pay Per Click more effectively. But don’t give up. You can use the data you gather to make some key strategic changes, become more competitive online, and start to match or exceed your competitions’ high scores.
The Perfect Recipe for Success…Shaken, Not Stirred Knowing the spy intelligence data is one thing; now you have to act on it and make some positive changes to your Web strategy. Following are some common changes many Web site owners make after spying on their competition.
As you’ll see, it’s time to take your reconnaissance spy mission – and your web presence – to the next level.
Tip #1: Blog as if your company depended on it.
It’s very likely to find that your competitors don’t have a blog, or that they’re not blogging often enough to be beneficial. Therefore, by simply setting up a blog and using core keywords in your blog posts, you can gain a tremendous competitive advantage.
Tip #2: Have the best pick-up lines at the PPC cocktail party.
For many Web site owners who do Pay Per Click advertising, one of their biggest frustrations is having a low conversion rate. The key to running a successful Pay Per Click campaign is having solid ad text (the four-line entry that will display on the results pages in the area of the page called Sponsored Links). It is extremely important to understand the ad text landscape when you write your ads; otherwise, your competitors may have an identical or more compelling offer than you.
SpyFu shows what ads your competitors are running in PPC, as well as how competitive a keyword is. Using this tool, you may decide to select a longer tail keyword that has fewer competitors. For example, the term “video surveillance” has 21 competitors, while “Video surveillance security system” has only 7 competitors.
In addition, when crafting ad text, look at the key ad message of your competitors. If everyone else is advertising “low prices,” you should stand out by making a different offer, such as “Best Quality” or “Free Shipping”
to differentiate yourself from other advertisers.
Tip #3: Select your Spy Team.
While knowing what your competition is doing right now is great, you also need to monitor them for the long-term. But what if you don’t have a lot of free time to constantly scan the web for what your competitors are doing?
Wouldn’t it be great to have a team of spies crawling the Internet for you and sending you an email as soon as your competitors post anything?
It’s time to meet your spy team: Google, Yahoo, and MSN Alerts. Setting these alerts can keep you abreast of anything posted under your competitor’s names, Web site URLs, and core keywords.
- Alerts.Google.com – Sends you updates to any targeted keywords from Google
- Alerts.Yahoo.com – Sends you updates to any targeted keywords from Yahoo
- Alerts.MSN.com – Sends you updates to any targeted keywords from MSN
Simply create your account with each alert system, list the keywords you want alerts on, and then sit back and watch the alerts as they come in.
Setting alerts can help you stay on top of your competitors without having to spend hours searching and reading the competitive landscape in Search Engines.
Mission Complete
Using these tools and tips, your Web site stands a much better chance of beating your competitors to gain valuable new markets of consumers.
Remember, for successful Findability, you must understand the Findability of your competitors and adjust your campaigns accordingly. By matching and beating the Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, and Social Media offerings of your competitors, you are setting yourself up to succeed on your Internet Marketing mission.
About the Author:
Heather Lutze has spent the last 10 years as CEO of The Findability Group, formerly Lutze Consulting, – a Search Engine Marketing firm that works with companies to attain maximum Internet exposure. A nationally recognized speaker, she is the author of, “The FindAbility Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach To Search Engine Marketing” (Wiley and Sons).
Heather is a lead speaker for Pay Per Click Summit, and previously spent two years speaking for Yahoo! Search Marketing. For more information, visit www.FindabilityGroup.com
