Tag Archives: social

Free Clean And Simple Social Media News/Press Release By HowToPhil

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on Marketing Conversation, but I return bearing a gift!

I was setting up a social media news release for HowToPhil and decided to try out Bootstrap from Twitter as a framework. After a few hours I constructed my SMNR and then also stripped out all the HowToPhil branding to make a template I could release to all of you:

Check out the HowToPhil SMNR

Download the Clean And Simple Social Media News/Press Release By HowToPhil

Take a look at what the Clean And Simple Social Media News/Press Release Template looks like before you modify it

You can quickly set up a social media news/press release using this template if you have a fairly decent understanding of HTML, CSS, javascript, etc.

The latest version will always be available on HowToPhil.com.

Let me know if you have questions or suggestions for making the template better. I’m also interested in links to sites that are using my template and just good old fashion compliments.

Never underestimate the power of a Blog

Have you ever questioned the level of influence a single blog can make? 70% of blogers talk about brands on their blogs, as well as 38% of bloggers post brand and or product reviews. Now for a person that is looking into purchasing a product he/she/it/they/them/we will definitely do some thorough research, may it be talking with a friend or looking at other shops or alternative, but say if the person does not have any friends or does not want an alternative, the next step would be to do some research online. Looking at personalised non-biased reviews for they “The people” want to have a users point of view and not the sellers point of view.

With blogs in general being accessed by mostly people from all over the world you can imagine how much opinions and personal experiences may influence a potential buyer’s purchase decision.

Willis Lee-“ They (Bloggers) are more likely to speak their mind and lash out about/at brands through online means(omg) – every 1 in 5 people are likely to do so. With social media, users can easily speak their mind without having to do it face-to-face.”

Blogs are certainly a voice of some kind that people like to read well roughly about 77% of internet users mainly read blogs as stated by Phil Bradley’s weblog. Many companies become better known through their blogs and is slowly becoming a firm business practice in some companies.
Using blogs for a company or firm, will humanise your company more give your company a face and this also helps create two way communication with potential buyers that may have questions or doubts of your products and even certain requests.

So it would be most advisable to go out there and get a company blog, give some good/non-biased reviews (perhaps from an external source/consultant). It is a great way to give a company a solid firm base and great structure for any company big or small.

FaceBook to FaceBusiness?

Facebook is clearly one of the most popular social network sites on the planet at this very moment having 500 million users on facebook and logging in on a daily basis. In addition Facebook has more than 70 translations available making it a truly global social network site. This is certainly a hot spot when it comes to sharing of information and keeping in touch, making the world just that much smaller.

So when it comes to making a business on Facebook fortunate and unfortunately you are not the only one trying to make some business with the help of facebook, there are more than 700000 local businesses that have active pages on facebook, so if you plan to start creating a site for communication lets just say that you have a bit of competition, global and local (according to what are you stay in). It is not only in the States that Facebook has made social media content waves of data images communications in the big social network sea it is said that 70% of facebook users or Facebookers are in fact outside the USA.

So seeing that the popularity is super high, and facebook is extremely global this is the perfect battlefield to use for marketeering one’s business and getting the oh so important exposure to the world, which in most practices its said to be one of the most important aspects in business. Fb having implemented more than 80000 websites since December 2008 and has engaged more than 60m Fbers to external sites. Who said that marketing was meant for creative hippies?

Now to obtain this exposure will take a lot of hard work, creativity, relative and recent updated content, valour, honour and courage (scratch the last three actually) Due to the fact that the pure majority of FBers(a clever blend of Facebook and users) do not really log on to purchase things in general, but their main objective is to keep up to date with friends/family and catch up and many other reasons i’m sure. As for the advertising is concerned, a company would need to have some very creative and exciting approaches and content must be updated as rapidly as possible this what keeps new readers/fans/followers/stalkers interested the value of content must be present to keep fbers active to your site/fb account.

Matt Lawson~

People use Facebook to interact with friends, share their photos and play games, not to look for products and services. Your ads need to grab their attention. Facebook users are inundated with content and typically scan images and text quickly

Now this is good to keep people visiting your sites and become fans and what not however, business is about other things than just exposure, we want to change visitors into purchasers(or buyers would have been way more simpler) this requires a lot of attention to detail, for it would be important to customized pages that clearly, affectively communicates your message that you wish to send. As well as strong calls to action on the landing page giving a bit of a non-physical push to the users/visitors and finally some good and engaging media on the landing pages make it attractive interactive(if possible) and shiny.

The facts, statistics and ideas/concepts have been happily provided by Econsultancy
as well as Mashable/business with 4 ways to Improve Ad Performance on Facebook

The Goal of Social Media Marketing

The first thing you need to understand in marketing is that, you are giving what the customers like and not what you want to give them. It should always be about your target, which is in this case, your prospect consumers. Brendan cooper stated on his article “Social Media Marketing:it’s not about you”:

Marketing isn’t about you. It’s about your audiences. But it’s surprising how often people get this the wrong way around.

These phrases crop up fairly often:

” No one will be talking about us online”

“I really like sites with lots of animation on them”

“I don’t see why anyone would want to follow X”

The important words to notice here are “I” and “us” – because it really doesn’t matter what you think.

First, your individual preferences. OK, so you might like websites with lots of animation on them but you’re just one person. You have a gender (presumably), an age, a demographic. And it’s highly unlikely that your preferences match those of your audience. So if you’re running a structural engineering consultancy and you’re saying you like animations then that’s fine – but not if you’re a 20-something woman who thinks a polished brand is everything, while your audience is overwhelmingly 40-something males who just want facts.

Second, your expectations. Look, the web is really really big, and diverse, and weird, and getting bigger, more diverse and weirder all the time. I’ve totally given up predicting what I might find when I go online for a client. I’ve found entire Facebook pages dedicated to absolute all-c0nsuming hate for clients, and I’ve come across endearingly amateur videos singing their praises. You just cannot make any assumptions until you go out there and look.

The real goal of social media marketing is to attract consumers, and show them what they need that you could offer, not to show them what you wanted them to see. You should take every opportunity to advertise in any way possible not confiding in what you just wanted to do in the first place.

Pepsi To Combine Super Bowl Ads, Social Media, And Crowdsourcing

Last year Pepsi decided to forgo any Super Bowl advertisements and instead go all out in social media campaigns. This year they’re plannign to combine the two for an even stronger ad presence. According to Jack Marshall in his article Pepsi Returns to Super Bowl With User Generated Ads:

Following the decision not to buy ads for its beverage brands during the 2010 Super Bowl, PepsiCo yesterday said it will air a total of six :30 spots during this year’s game, all of which will be created by consumers for a chance to win a total of $5 million in prize money.

Entrants will submit creative for PepsiCo’s Doritos and Pepsi MAX brands via a dedicated site at crashthesuperbowl.com, from which ten finalists will be selected and announced in January. Consumers will then vote for their favorite ads to determine two winning spots for each brand, with PepsiCo executives selecting a further two. Each of the ten finalists will receive $25,000 in prize money and a trip to Dallas to attend the game in a private luxury suite. The six winners will be awarded a maximum of $5 million, depending on the success of their ads in USA Today’s Ad Meter panel, and a contract to create additional ads for the two brands in 2011.

Commenting on the campaign, Lauren Hobart, CMO sparkling beverages for PepsiCo, said the brand was “excited” to return to the event, adding, “We believe that great ideas can come from anywhere and we’re excited to give Pepsi MAX fans the chance to showcase their creative talents on one of the world’s biggest stages.”

I think combining old school marketing with social media marketing and crowd sourcing can only work out well for Pepsi.

The Colbert Report On Social Media Privacy Issues

Good old Stephen Colbert gives us some of the best advice for social media ever disseminated.

The Colbert Report

Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word – Control-Self-Delete

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

2010 Election

Fox News

Control-Self-Delete is the word on the street now. Apparently all you have to do is:

Never make a mistake
Change your name when you’re an adult
Change your face with invasive surgery
Replace all of your friends
Replace all of your family

The clip is awesome.

Remember What We Thought?

Nicholas E. Kinports over at Admaven wrote a great piece reminding us all to remember what we used to say about social media:

Sometimes it’s useful to look back and remember what we were all saying about social media and the future of advertising. I was reminded of an article I co-authored in early 2009 that eventually made it’s way to Bloomberg-Businessweek.

Here’s an inspiring TEDx video from David Armano covering his current views on the topic:

It’s a great little piece and a nice call to think about our goals, ideals, and actions as we move forward.

Ning Is Pulling The Carpet Out From Under Its User Base

Ning is ending its free social networks service and forcing all of the free network users to either upgrade to a paid service or get out. This is going to cause major blowback for the company in the real social media sphere (facebook, twitter, and blogs).

Ning is going to find itself dead in the water rather than increasing profits. The better way to handle this would have been to make the premium services more appealing and leaving the free networks as they are, or not allowing any new free networks while leaving the existing free networks alone. Yanking the carpet out from under your users is always going to work out badly.

I for one am going to let my Ning networks die. I’m also out of reasons to suggest that anyone use Ning instead of just setting up a facebook fan page. The Facebook fan pages grow faster and instantly appeal to people already invested in a strong social media platform. Ning can’t really stand up against that if they’re not getting the added buzz of providing free social networks.

Jason Kincaid posted a copy of the letter that Jason Rosenthal sent out to the Ning team:

Team,

When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.

My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.

As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers. Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies.

I’ve never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months.

We’ll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company. Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus.

Thanks,
Jason Rosenthal

I’m sad to see Ning go out like this, but I can’t see how it will survive with this new model.

Ning Is Pulling The Carpet Out From Under Its User Base

Web 2.0 And 3.0 Video Blast From The Past

I was looking back at some of the discussion of web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 in videos from 2006 and 2008. These three are the best that I could find.

In 2006 people were concerned that web 2.0 (the social web) was just a bubble and that it would burst. I think we’re all well past that:

August 10, 2006 – A couple of weeks ago Michael Arrington got together with a number of startup CEOs and executives to video a discussion about Web 2.0. Participating in the discussion were Aaron Cohen (Bolt), Scott Milener and Steven Lurie (Browster), Keith Teare (edgeio), Steven Marder (Eurekster), Joe Kraus (JotSpot), Jeremy Verba (Piczo), Auren Hoffman (Rapleaf), Chris Alden (Rojo), Gautam Godhwani (Simply Hired), Jonathan Abrams (Socializr), David Sifry (Technorati), Matt Sanchez (Video Egg) and Michael Tanne (Wink).
The topics discussed included:
What is Web 2.0?
Are we in a bubble?
What are the business models that will work on the web today?
What is the role of publishers in a user generated world?
How important and how big is the early adopter crowd?

Kevin Kelly had some of the best visuals and looked ahead pretty clearly. Some of it is still to come, but I think he’s got it down pretty pat:

March 27, 2008 – Northern California Grantmakers & The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Present:
Web & Where 2.0+
Feb. 14th, 2008
Session #11
Kevin Kelly
“Web 3.0″

This is one of the best animations/short documentaries describign the evolution of web 1.0 to 3.0 that I have ever seen:

September 28, 2008 — The Dutch ICT think tank EPN (recently merged with ECP.nl to ECP-EPN) has produced this short movie, clearifying the Web 3.0 concept. Which possibilities and implications for society does this next phase of the web induce?
The EPN foundation sets the agenda and approaches web 3.0 from various points of view and draws attention to it’s implications for society.

With our geotagging phones, rfid tags picking up pace, increase in the production and purchase of smart phones, etc – Have we arrived at web 3.0? What do you think?