Determine your Social Media Strategy

The appeal of social media is strong. According to Econsultancy, social media and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities, even beating out email. The mystery of social media is almost as great as it’s appeal, however.

There are a lot of social media terms thrown around these days, and sorting through all of the jargon can be tough. First, let’s differentiate between the “big three” social networks.

Facebook is a social network site that connects friends, family, and businesses. People can share updated statuses, pictures, personal information, links, and more. With more than 250 million users in the world, 120 million of which log on daily, there is a large market to reach here.

Twitter is another social network/micro-blog that allows users to to send and read messages (or “tweets”). Tweets can be up to 140 characters, and they are shared on your personal page and distributed to people who choose to “follow” you. In the last year, Twitter’s growth rate surpassed 1,000%. The potential here to reach customers is huge.

Wordpress is a personal publishing platform that works as a blogging service and as a web hosting service that is run on PHP code and a SQL data backend. Confused? Wordpress.com offers a free blog hosting service that requires no PHP code knowledge and a user friendly interface that allows easy updating, customization, and built in widgets to add to your blog. 77% of internet users actively follow and read blogs, so this platform also provides great opportunity to reach and engage potential customers. Wordpress isn’t the only blog hosting application out there; there is also Blogger, Vox, and more.

Now that we’ve covered some basics, let’s go into more depth…

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Union Street Media to hold a Seminar on How to Structure Social Media for Small Businesses

On the 11th of February at 11am Spencer Taylor, will be giving a talk at the CEDO Winter Business Fair on how to effectively utilize social media for small businesses. The talk will be focused more on strategy then on the actual functionality of various social media outlets. Taylor will focus on how to use Facebook, Twitter and Blogging in concert to gain visibility in the online marketplace and new customers. He will also touch on other business-specific social media platforms such as Yelp and Urban Spoon as well as the hyper-local Front Porch Forum service.  Participants will be encouraged to ask questions and interact to discuss their experiences for the group to draw on. We hope to see you there!

Managing Your Online Reputation

8/10 consumers trust brands that offer reviews, especially if there are bad ones too!

Sounds like an odd thing to say but the reality is in the consumer-to-consumer marketplace, the truth surfaces about products, services, ideas, and companies. For instance, when looking at reviews for bed and breakfast options recently, some friends of mine showed up with a very bad review from a disgruntled customer. I wondered, how could this be? This place is gorgeous and the hosts warm and courteous. I wanted to find out from them what happened so I asked them. They had no idea about this review but had noticed a dip in their bookings and when they looked at the review, they quickly knew what was going on and told me the other side of the story.

The reviewer in question had failed to book through the proper reservation system and assumed they would hold a room for him for the same time each year that he had been visiting during leaf-peeping season in Vermont. As the hosts were not aware of a booking they of course gave the room out to another party who had booked properly. He was furious and called them to complain. A few days later, some deeply unpleasant reviews began to surface on Trip Adviser and their bookings dropped during their most important season. Once they had sourced these reviews back, they went on the offensive and reached out to other long term guests asking them to provide some fair and balanced feedback on Trip Advisor. They came flooding and started to push the bad reviews down  becoming clear to others that there was a malicious hijacker at work rather than a bona fide review(s).

The lesson from this is that you will get bad reviews from time to time – it’s the nature of people’s sensibilities. It’s healthy in fact as it allows you as a business to learn from your customers to make your business better, much like test marketing. However you must keep a close eye on any muckraking and manage your reputation as best possible. Unless people break codes of conduct, then it is hard to have conversations removed from your digital footprint, but you can contribute to the conversations and provide more of the type of content that you want associated with your  brand. Encouraging customers to do the same is key, as people love user generated content in a trust based community as the web is.

How can you monitor your brand?

Two suggestions:

1. Set up a Google Alert on your brand, which means that whenever you are mentioned in news, other blogs, customer reviews etc you get emailed a list of these results either daily, weekly or monthly to your choosing.
2. Search you brand in Google with Google Suggest and see what Google is suggesting as you type. You will see any bad associations and be able to investigate the search results.

The blogosphere is an open and often candid forum, so being able to smell a rat and respond can help restore that trust that might have been lost either fairly or unfairly, as in the case of my friends at the B & B. Strengthening your community in life and online will inevitably help you create a strong business.

Tell me your stories on this. How you have had to manage your online reputation?

Blogging Businesses Experience 126% Higher Lead Growth

Lately our blog has been focusing on the benefits of business Facebook pages; but what about business blogs? According to a recent study of 2,300 HubSpot customers, the ones who had blogs witnessed an average 126% higher lead growth than those who didn’t blog.

Blogging can lead to other benefits for your business as well…

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Inbound Marketing: How to use Social Media to Direct the Flow of Online Information and Opinions to Irrigate and Grow Your Brand

First let’s define the basis of our conversation: the comparison of two models of marketing: inbound and outbound. Inbound marketing is a new online marketing model that uses website structure and high quality content to draw potential customers to it through search engines. This model is quickly replacing the old outbound marketing model. Lets compare the benefits and drawbacks of the two models:

Traditional “Outbound” Marketing is the kind of marketing that we all grew up with. It is essentially advertising and is based on quantity. You choose your message and then pay certain media outlets, newspaper, TV, radio, in your market area, to carry that message to potential clients. The more that you pay the more exposure you get.

This model had and still has many benefits; most notably it allows the advertiser to present a consistent brand with very little chance for criticism or feedback (you can’t effectively talk back to a television ad). It also allows for a very direct sales message. You present your brand and your value proposition and wait for inquiries to start coming in.

This model also has lots of disadvantages, most notably it depends on the strength of your chosen outside media outlet. This presents two problems; first, media buys are just that, it is the purchasing of space/time on someone else’s brand. The problem here is that all the capital that you spend on these outbound channels has a very short return on investment window. Once the issue of the paper or the round of TV advertising expires you’ll have no residual benefit aside from a small amount of brand recognition from your client base. All that money you have spent is gone and can no longer work for you.

The second, and perhaps more compelling problem, is this: paying for advertising through traditional marketing channels is based on the assumption that your customer base has limited channels for news and entertainment and thus the channel you have chosen has value to your customer base. You spend money with these outlets because you believe that these channels are where people in your area come for news and entertainment and thus your message will be seen.

This basic assumption of limited marketing channels is quickly changing. Twenty years ago a given market had a finite number of media outlets, it had its papers and its television stations and that was it. The population was totally dependent on these outlets for  information. Because of this limited number of channels, you could also get away with a relatively “hard sell” message. An extreme example of this would be Billy Mays’s infamous high impact product commercials, which were aggressive and totally based on the viewers investment in the media channel that they were watching. That paradigm is a thing of the past.

Today those traditional channels are only one of many options. Blogs, national news websites and online entertainment have released a torrent of information upon the population. This torrent has fundamentally changed the way people find and interact with information. The Billy Mays approach of pounding a message into an audience is no longer effective because the multiplicity of information sources has softened people’s tolerance for the hard sell. Now people want value instead of pitch.

Enter the “Inbound” marketing model. If the Outbound model is based on quantity then the inbound model is based on quality. Just as the outbound model grew out of the media that supported it, the inbound model is closely tied to the media from which it was conceived.

With the sheer mass of online information sources, people can pick and choose where they get their information and how they are entertained. The simplicity of the Google search page makes every user a pundit who can judge different information sources against each other and decide who to listen to and to send others to. This qualitative evaluation presents major challenges for any business or organization looking to attract attention to its message or brand.

The quality-based inbound model takes advantage of this individual punditry. In the old model a larger competitor with a larger marketing budget could drown out its competition. Now if a website and blog are well optimized and are the best source of information about their product or service, people are naturally going to come to them whether it be for widgets or world peace. The quality of a website and information will naturally draw people to it allowing them to make a decision on the message or value proposition based on the quality of the content. Because of the nature of online media individuals can then share their evaluation, whether positive or negative, with others.

The main challenge that this presents to any brand is the basic acceptance of the lack of control inherent in the Inbound marketing model. As the Outbound model allowed you to control your brand image and message the inbound model leaves you wide open to commentary and criticism from every angle.

Don’t let this fact frighten you away.  If you believe in your message and brand, there is nothing to fear from healthy conversation and constructive criticism. In fact criticism is great! It means people are interested. Getting a healthy dialogue going with your critics is a fantastic way to draw attention to your message.

Once you engage in this new model, a conversation will begin with your client base about the quality and validity of your brand. Quality and identity of your brand will be extended or snuffed out by this ensuing conversation.  The “quality” that this model is based on is not limited to the content generated by the brand. The content generated by the brand is ideally just a starting place for other people to add their own layers of meaning. This process will help you refine your brand and make it more pertinent to your client base. With this new model you can’t tell people what they need, instead you need to listen to them and adapt.

Essentially by building a solid web presence based on solid SEO structure that utilizes inbound principles and effectively engages in social media you can build a brand without spending a cent on traditional advertising.

The growth of your brand will most likely happen slowly at first, as it takes time to gain traction with Google. However, in this system your brand will be evaluated and improved as you communicate with your client base. In the outbound model a brand had to pay an advertising agency to conduct focus groups to find out what their target market wanted. Now all you have to do to get a pulse on your market is engage with the resources that you already have. By doing this your brand will be refined every step of the way by the very people that make up your market, for free.

Inbound Marketing Model concepts can be put into action by anyone with the attention of a few hours a week using an effective website, on-site blog and twitter account. Of course having these tools in not enough, the tools alone are useless, what gives them power is the skill and passion that the user brings to them. So dive into the flow. Start the conversation and  you will find that your brand will come alive with a more competitive stance and a community of supporters and critics that will drive you to improve your message and brand as your brand grows.

USM’s Spencer Taylor to speak at Thursday’s “Ask the Expert” Session at the Northwest Vermont Board of REALTORS

The headline pretty much sums it up… at 8:30 AM on Thursday January 21st, Spencer Taylor will speak to the members of the Northwest Vermont Board of REALTORS at their conference space in Williston, VT.  Curious what’s real estate web site tidbits will be covered in his presentation?  Listen to Spencer and NVBR’s Mary Ward talk about it!

Facebook vs Blog: Where Should You Post Your Content?

This is the third installment of the Facebook for Business series.

As the number of businesses using multiple social media platforms continues to grow, the question frequently comes up:  Which content should go where?

The two platforms that provide the biggest source of confusion are blogs and Facebook. There is a purpose for both, and each is ideal for particular types of content. It is important to understand the intention of each of these channels.

So, should you put your next update in your blog or on your Facebook page?

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8 Ways Facebook can Unlock your Business Potential

This post is post #2 of the Facebook for Business Series.

Facebook this, Facebook that… You can talk all day about what you can do with this tool, but before getting into the details of how to use the site, we should first establish why to use it.

There are a number of areas where this social networking platform can help your business on and offline. Here are 8 reasons why you should take advantage of them.

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Facebook for Business

The Social Media boom may be bigger than you think; Facebook is at its forefront. Our “Facebook for Business” series will help you make sense of this powerful tool. You’ll learn how to tame the beast and harness it for your business. Follow our series during the next several weeks and:

• Learn Facebook basics
• Learn how to leverage Facebook to underscore your brand
• Learn how to get fans (and what to do with those fans)
• Learn how to optimize your Facebook page
• Learn about applications and FBML (Facebook Mark up Language)
• Learn how to measure your Facebook traffic
• Learn how to effectively link your networks

With over 300,000,000 Facebook users, 120,000,000 of whom log on daily, the business opportunity Facebook presents cannot be ignored. According to Socialnomics, social media has claimed the number one web activity spot over the previous “less acceptable” contender. Facebook is a free way to improve your online presence. To increase your success online, your business must be part of this popular activity.

Leading companies have joined the crowd and are successfully using their Facebook pages to keep their customers happy and connected with with their brand.

Look at who is making the best of Facebook: 10 Successful Facebook Business Pages (from the Penn Olsen Social Media blog). With due diligence, and focused hard work, your business could be among the leaders.

A business Facebook page is different than your personal Facebook page.

• You have “fans” instead of “friends”
• It represents your brand, not you.
• You have access to much more information about your traffic.
• There is more customization for privacy settings.

The business page is built off of your personal account and gives you plenty of tools to reach the growing network of individuals using Facebook. You can run ads on the Facebook sidebar, track the demographics of your page traffic with Facebook Insights, create a badge or fanbox to promote your page, start discussion boards with the fans, add company information and events, and much more.

There are many ways to use these features and many ways to optimize your page; but to start, how do you create a business page?

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Twitter + Meetup = Tweetup

I recently came across another powerful use that Twitter provides people with last week. It not only provided an awesome place to network, but it supported a new local business. Last month, I began to see a trend start to rise with something along the lines of this: #btvfall2009tweetup. Curiosity got the best of me, and I started researching what this was all about. Turns out, a new local bakery, August First was hosting a “tweetup”. A tweetup is a gathering of people who use the social-networking tool, Twitter. The event was organized through Twitter by using a third party app, twtvite. This application allows you to organize an event by giving details such as directions to the event and a yes/no/maybe RSVP option. This had been the second invite I had seen in about a month and I was ready to join in on the fun.

The event was organized by John Connors (@JohnCVermont) who specializes in Information Technology at Saint Michael’s College. Upon arrival, I was handed a badge with my real name and twitter user name on it so people would know if we had crossed paths on Twitter previously. Surprisingly, most of the faces in the cozy bakery were familiar. Everyone seemed very content with their coffee in-hand and talking technology. August First was a great location to have this event with their welcoming environment and their variety of tasty treats.

I will now be making an effort to attend every tweetup I can, not only for the geek-talk, but for great time all around.

If you’re on Twitter and want to see what’s going on with the team, you can find us on our Twitter List here. Also, you can follow August First here.

Cheers,

Matt Sisson

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