Archive for August, 2010
The Future of Marketing is…Social.
Audiences today do not want to be talked at. They want to be engaged in conversation. Social media gives us the power to do this, allowing us to define and control our brand. There is a shift from corporations and institutions to individuals and communities. Here are a few tips to take advantage of social media.
Facebook. To help spread the word about a new campaign, why not ask employees to change their Facebook status to announce your latest campaign? If you have 20,000 employees, most likely 10,000 of them have Facebook. With the average person having 100 friends, your announcement could receive over 1 million impressions for free. Ask employees to include their LinkedIn Profiles – now you have 2 million impressions for free.
YouTube. Create a YouTube channel dedicated to teaching people more about your industry. This channel would feature a series of short, focused videos that educate your audience on related topics that help position you as an industry expert. The videos could highlight benefits and features of your products.
Twitter. To help build and establish your company as an industry expert, top executives should create Twitter accounts to help position your company’s executives as thought leaders in the industry. Tweets should be business-related topics that talk about industry trends and forecasts. Zappos CEO has 1.6 million followers and is following almost 400K people. A total of 430 Zappos Employees have Twitter accounts. This presence helps Zappos engage and participate in conversations about their company.
Flickr. Flickr is a great way to help promote events that your company sponsors. Photos can be optimized to show up in search results and increase brand awareness. Using Flickr to increase branding opportunities for KeyBank’s sponsorship of a 10K race, the Key “Bank to Bay” gallery has alone received 6,000 views following the event.
The Po!nt
People visit social media sites every day, why not join them in what they are already doing?
Data Visualization Project for Case Western Reserve University
Data Visualization at the Kelvin Smith library at Case Western Reserve University. A case study and video documentary explaining how Optiem helped Case Western Reserve University implement a data visualization strategy for the Kelvin Smith Library.
Making the Invisible Library Visible from Optiem LLC on Vimeo.
Social Sharing on Twitter and Facebook
Including social media integration in websites has become common place. Often we work with clients to either include their Twitter or Facebook feeds or at least link to their social media accounts.
Yet it would be short sighted to only provide the one-way connection in your website. The social sharing sites “Add This” and “Share This” offer a simple alternative but the implementations for both can be bulky and overwhelming offering every… possible… social network… plus email.
Instead it’s better to focus on providing the most relevant or at least the most common channels to your users. This simplifies the interaction and makes it much more likely that your visitors will actually tweet your page or post it to Facebook.
In my recent post highlighting the Social Profiles tool we built for Exact Target, I attempted to showcase something that was both interesting and useful and had integrated sharing capabilities.
Because the tool was dome completely in Flash and we had a short time line, we opted to use a pre-configured link (example) to allow people to tweet the Social Profile that most closely matched them. This made the interaction very simple.
In an email I wrote promoting the tool I encouraged people to “…Tweet it, post it and send this out to whomever might find it useful or informative.” Because it was email, I could not include JavaScript as I would on a website or blog post. “Add This” wouldn’t work, neither would a WordPress Plugin. Instead I used the built in capability of Facebook and Twitter to take information passed in with he link.
Twitter recently began offering the Tweet Button. What makes this nice is that it customizes the tweet text, URL, and target language. Even better, it allows you to recommend up to two Twitter accounts after someone posts their tweet.
However, one of the best things about this technology is that it’s functionality can be achieved using simple HTML. The advantage is that you can give people the option of sharing your content not just on your website or blog, but in places that don’t allow JavaScript, such as some web enabled phones and your email newsletter. More info is available on the Tweet Button page of Twitter’s developer section.
Regardless of what social media channels you use, always consider how you are enabling people to share your content in their social circles and be sure the technology you use is compatible with your messaging platform.