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4 Ways to Use Social Media in Promotions – Online Brand Marketing

Mike Valentine — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:16:08 +0000

Social media marketing has earned its place as one of the fastest-growing, most competitive marketing fields in the history of advertising. People are gathering online in record numbers, finding and socializing in groups that cater to their interests; often, these interests neatly intersect with marketing and branding opportunities. The best social media tools combine simplicity with an extensive reach, allowing messages to target thousands of people in seconds, thus serving as an outstanding tool of brand promotion.

Briefly, here are a few of the more interesting and simple ways you can use social media to arrange a short-term promotion for your brand.

#1 – Flash Mob

A flash mob is an impromptu gathering of people arranged by SMS. Originally popular on message boards, the advent of texting and SMS powerhouses like Twitter has made flash mobs even easier to arrange. In the simplest terms, the originator of the mob sends a message to his audience, arranging a time, place and theme for a quick meeting and/or performance. Famous mobs have included zombie walks, unannounced pillow fights at major business centers and other assorted fun events.

As an example of using a flash mob for a brand, consider the following scenario: You own a café with a respectable Twitter following. You tweet out a time and place – say 2 p.m. in the park – and a short promotion code like ParkFrap. When everyone arrives, you’re waiting with a selection of your newest frappe drinks, and everyone who can give you a copy of the code gets a drink and a coupon for the next time they drop by the café.

This kind of arrangement takes a bit of preparation, of course, but the idea creates instant buzz, sticks out in people’s minds and can be an enjoyable time for everyone.

#2 – Couponing

People like to save money, and businesses like to make it. If your brand is tied into a business that offers product, you’ve probably already considered how to go about offering coupons to people. Social media offer many avenues to getting coupons out to people. Again, Twitter is an excellent tool here; in fact, there are several sites out there that are tailored to helping use Twitter for couponing. For example, http://twtqpon.com allows you to combine a short tweet and an image into a coupon for your customers.

However, Facebook is also a good tool for distributing coupons. If your brand has a Facebook group associated with it – and if it doesn’t, why not? – you can leverage the service as both a coupon and a promotional tool. For example, post a message with a new coupon that’s only valid if a follower brings a friend along. In this one step, you get two people into the store, sell some product and have a chance to sign up a new follower on Facebook.

#3 – Cross Promote

Sometimes you don’t necessarily have a large following of your own. This is obviously the case in brands that are just developing their online identity. They’ve signed up for the various social media services, but haven’t really gotten a big splash together.

This is where research and legwork come in. Let’s continue with the coffee shop analogy, since cafés seem to be a defining feature of the modern set. You could look up a group that tends to associate with cafés, such as writers. If you find a local writing group on Facebook for your area, consider posting a friendly message on their board, inviting them to come in for a weekly “writer’s day” in which members of your newly-formed writing club get a discount.

Remember, of course, the key rules of social media: be polite and respectful. These are people you’re talking to, people with their own agendas and desires, and they can sense insincerity like a shark smells blood in the water. Your offers must be interesting and credible.

#4 – Picture Perfect

Images are powerful things. A well-done image can excite the imagination and catch peoples’ attention in a way that text sometimes fails to grasp. Consider sending images designed to give people an association with your brand.

Returning a final time to our café example, consider taking a picture of some fresh cinnamon rolls that just came out of the oven and quickly uploading them to your preferred social media service. This requires a bit of work to make sure the picture looks appetizing and appealing, but isn’t too difficult. Post that picture up along with a message about how they come with a free cup of coffee between 10 a.m. and noon, and you just might have a rush on your hands.

Even if you don’t have mouth-wateringly delicious pastries to offer, any brand benefits from visual associations. When you go to make a post in your blog or SMS, include a link to a relevant picture as often as you can. This will help people associate your brand with colorful thinking, with interesting things to look at, and the like. Text can appear awfully drab, so do what you can to brighten it up a bit.

— Enzo F. Cesario is an online branding specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at http://www.iBrandCasting.com/

Five Reasons Your Blog Needs a Ghostwriter: Building Brand Identity

Mike Valentine — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:00:14 +0000

A ghostwriter is any writer who creates content for a project that will be presented under another name. As you are traveling in a bookstore, you might marvel at the sheer volume of works certain names such as Tom Clancy put out. In many cases, these books weren’t written by a single writer but rather many and then published under the big name. This arrangement is a good one for many writers, as it allows them to get work and valuable writing experience, while also benefiting the larger name by allowing more work under their aegis to get out.

Your blog might just benefit from hiring a ghostwriter for the same reasons. Every blog needs a writer to direct it, and blogs do best when guided by one or two voices in a consistent direction. Sometimes, however, the originator of a business or idea isn’t the one who can best capture that direction, and that’s when you should turn to a ghostwriter.

In no particular order, here are five reasons that many blogs choose to hire a ghostwriter for their content.

Reason #1 – They Can’t Write Appropriately

This isn’t referring to whether their content is polite or not, it simply refers to whether the “idea man” behind a project can generate content that fits the aim of the blog. Suppose, for example, you have someone who knows all about the world of competitive cooking as seen in Iron Chef. He knows the competitors’ ranks and accomplishments and wants to use the blog to promote interest in competitive cooking – even, perhaps, in his own cooking school.

The problem is, he can’t write in a way that catches the eye. His writing might be too technical, or rely on obscure factoids that don’t really do much to inspire the reader’s imagination. A ghostwriter, on the other hand, is all about the writing, and one of the best talents a writer can have is the ability to take someone else’s ideas and rephrase them in exciting, evocative language.

Reason #2 – Lack of Time

Many of the big blogs seen on the web weren’t startup ventures, but rather grew out of a company that already existed. Many companies have seen the success of blogs in other ventures, and have chosen to add one to their own site, much the same way they chose to add a website to their business when the web first got popular. This is a natural evolution and response to a changing market, and is not a bad idea. On the other hand, the owner is usually concerned with other issues and does not have time to devote to writing a blog.

In such cases, the natural step is to hire a ghostwriter. You want the articles to continue to go out in your company’s name, since the idea of the blog is to promote the company, but don’t have time to do it yourself because you are justifiably busy. A ghostwriter can build a solid blog post in about an hour of work, and then move on to their other projects.

Reason #3 – Intermediate Perspective

There is a great deal to be said for being familiar with your product and your brand. You get to know subtleties and rhythms of the business that no outsider could appreciate. The problem is, your perspective is entirely different from that of your customers. They can’t get into the nitty gritty of your brand in a way you can.

In cases like these, the value of a ghostwriter lies in linking the outside views of your audience with the inside views of the company. You can communicate your passions directly to this writer, who can marry them to a perspective of those on the other side of the glass. Their intermediate presence crucially bridges the gap between brand and audience.

Reason #4 – Brand Protection

Writers are a notoriously prideful lot. Some of the fiercest legal battles are over intellectual property rights, and justly so. Creating a written body of work is a tremendous effort, and having it stolen or infringed upon is a terrible offense. On the other hand, a branded blog is not about the individual writer, it’s about the brand and what the brand represents.

By definition, a ghostwriter doesn’t take credit for their work. The work is put out in the name of the brand, or the site’s owner, as a means of projecting the brand forward. The ghostwriter is willing to take their pay without putting their own creative name on the work, which will benefit your brand because there isn’t an intermediate step. If you let one ghostwriter go, either because they move on to new things or you decide you need a new creative direction, there isn’t necessarily an indication of this to the outside world, and the brand’s voice continues.

Reason #5 – Flexibility and Freshness

Ghostwriters in the plural sense can do a blog good, too. If you maintain more than one at a time, you can ease the wear and tear that is associated with writing on the same general subject. Writers are like horses; you don’t want to ride them to death on the way there if you expect to get home. And since writing can be done anywhere, by anyone, anytime, you can cast your net far and wide in search of the two or three writers you need to best communicate your message.

– Enzo F. Cesario is an online branding specialist and co-founder of Brandsplat, a digital content agency. Brandsplat creates blogs, articles, videos and social media in the “voice” of our client’s brand. It makes sites more findable and brands more recognizable. For the free Brandcasting Report go to http://www.BrandSplat.com/ or visit our blog at http://www.iBrandCasting.com/

FaceBook Recommendations Plugin for Blogs

Mike Valentine — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:57:05 +0000

FaceBook has a feature that is not talked about much compared to The “Like” feature and that is the “Recommendations” plugin, which lists out pages your visitors are likely to be interested in on your website. This is incredibly valuable in that it puts pages from your site in front of users based on the pages that have been “Liked” most on your site. The problem for me is that there is no ability to comment directly about those pages – so it take another plugin to post comments into the status updates of all friends connected to everyone who makes those comments. Seems like the two should be connected.

Small Business News via Social Media: BizSugar – Sweet!

Mike Valentine — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:43:28 +0000

BizSugar is a small business social media news site that encourages members to share small business resources as can be seen in the video below.

Digg 4: That’s How Social Media Should Work! Video

Mike Valentine — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 23:53:43 +0000

I got an invitation to the new Digg and jumped on it because I’d heard about the beta test of Digg 4 on Leo Laporte’s “This Week in Tech” when Kevin Rose was a guest this past weekend. I’m excited to see if this makes Digg more popular among the people I’m Connected to on FaceBook and those I follow on Twitter because, for the most part, they all share interests with me.

The exciting part to me is that this now makes Digg less about trying to get followers on Digg and then campaigning those followers to Digg your submissions than about leveraging connections you already have from other social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to share what you care about.

I joined Digg back when it launched (under a different username) and was disappointed that it took campaigning to get my submissions considered. I wasn’t willing to both submit AND promote my submissions, so I dropped off and was never very active.

Here’s hoping that Digg 4 makes Digg more democratic and stops or slows the Digg Teen & Geek Cartels from dominating the home page.

Follow me on Twitter and if we’re already connected on FaceBook, I’ll see your Digg submissions and you’ll see mine. That’s how it should work.

Here is Kevin Rose in a video discussing the latest iteration of Digg – and here’s the episode of TWIT with Kevin Rose if you’re interested.

Big Business Can’t Understand Social Media Augmenting Advertising

Mike Valentine — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:11:49 +0000

The following was one of the most popular Business stories of the past few days, retweeted often and quoted widely. The author talks about the differences in big brands vs small start-ups in growing a business- based on a conversation with an un-named serial entrepreneur she knows on the effectiveness of using social media in place of big brand advertising.

Joe presented his theory of the future of online advertising empowered by social media. He articulated a future where traditional media and big brands were dead, and, just for good measure, he postulated a consumer-controlled, self-selected future of infinite choices of goods and services. His monologue was pervaded by phrases like, “advertising doesn’t work” and “people don’t want to be interrupted.” And, my favorite, “Social Media marketing is the only possible future … brands are completely out of control and marketers have to realize that. Consumers control everything! Besides, everyone wants targeted, measurable messaging, it’s all going to be online.”

via “You’re Too Into Real Business to Understand Advertising and Social Media”.

The Truth About Twitter’s Promoted Tweets

Mike Valentine — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:00:29 +0000

Since Twitter’s launch in 2007, it has seen huge growth and has become one of the dominant players when it comes to social media. If you’re trying to establish an online presence, and have no idea what Twitter is – or aren’t using it in some way to promote your brand – you haven’t been paying attention. Shame on you.

“Twittering” has become a national phenomenon with its use trailing slightly behind Facebook’s. Recently Twitter shared some interesting statistics at “Chirp”, the Twitter developer conference.

105,779,710 Registered Users of Twitter
Approximately 55 million Tweets being sent daily
180 Million unique visitors monthly
Signing up 300,000 new users daily
Twitter’s search engine getting 600 million searches daily

For more stats, see http://tinyurl.com/2b8749v . Another Report, “Twitter Usage in America: 2010″ by Edison Research, who presented three years of tracking date from national telephone surveys, found Twitter’s awareness has exploded from 5% of Americans in 2008 to 87% in 2010. Another stat shows that 51% of active Twitter users follow companies, products or brands on social networks. For the complete report see: http://edisonresearch.com/twitter_usage_2010.php

Having said that, the problem all along has been how to take all of this growth and turn Twitter into a service that generates revenue. It has always been free to use, but like any company, Twitter’s objective is to make money. Enter “Promoted Tweets”, Twitter’s new advertising program. It’s very similar to Google Adwords. Advertisers bid on keywords and when a search is done on Twitter, triggering one of those keywords, an ad will be shown at the top of the results page – at least in phase one of the rollout. Only one promoted Tweet will be shown on the search results page.

In phase two of the roll out, the plan is to incorporate the ads into users Twitter streams, of course only when they’re relevant. Eventually, the ads will be syndicated via third party apps too. This is important considering a huge amount of Twitter users access the service using various types of software.

The ads are clearly marked as such, and at the bottom they say “promoted by advertisers name”, as well as being highlighted in yellow.

So what’s the plan for pricing? For now, advertisers will bid on keywords based on CPM’s (cost per thousand impressions), viewers who will see the ad. Twitter plans on using something called “Resonance Score” to help determine how well the ads are being received by viewers. This score includes factors such as number of clicks the ad receives, how many times it is “retweeted”, number of people who reply to it, and how many people decide to follow you as a result of seeing the ad. A low resonance score will result in the ad being removed.

Twitter’s pricing model will eventually use the “Resonance Score” in some way down the road, but they first need to collect the data so they can “better understand the value of promoted Tweets”.

Before you get too excited, understand that the initial launch of Promoted Tweets is limited to a handful of customers. The Initial test group includes customers such as: Starbucks, Bravo, Virgin America, Best Buy, Sony Pictures. These are big companies with very deep pockets.

Advertising to Twitter users is not a new concept. There are other third party advertising programs already in place, such as http://www.SponsoredTweets.com and http://paymetweets.com/, among others, who have been selling ads in Twitter streams for a long time. How will Twitter’s new ad program affect them? Twitter recently announced they will not allow third parties to inject ads into timelines. A bold move on Twitter’s part, and putting them in a good position to be the dominant player when it comes to Twitter ads. For more see: http://tinyurl.com/2b3wpp6

Everyone will be holding their breath to see how Twitter users respond to this new advertising program. Some feel it’s an invasion of their privacy, and other loyal users fear Twitter has sold out to “Commercialism”. Whatever your feelings, ads are coming to Twitter – and who can fault a company for trying to earn a profit.

Twitter is a valuable tool when it comes to promoting your brand and/or products online. Those who understand that won’t mind a few ads, those who don’t – well, they can just take their ball and go home .

— Merle’s Mission Blog- “Rants, Raves and Random Acts of Kindness” a self proclaimed “Internet Junkie” with a passion for net marketing, affiliate marketing, social networking. An avid Blogger and writer with several niche sites to her credit. Find out more at http://merlesworld.blogspot.com/ Follow me on Twitter @msmerle

Building a Facebook Application for Business

Mike Valentine — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:04:18 +0000

Small businesses rarely have unlimited access to programmers who can code their ideas for Facebook apps and implement them. The sad fact is that many more people would jump in and create useful applications if there were a simpler way to build apps than outlined here, including learning FBML (Face Book Markup Language).

Several services have come and gone that attempt to make the process easier for novices or those without programming background. But if you have no coding ability, it may be best to hire others using sites like eLance or Freelancer.com or CyberCoder to bid the project, once you’ve decided what your app will do.

This is done by some sites by offering embeddable widgets that operate within templates like polls, feeds or external API’s pulling data via their own Facebook developer accounts and not yours. There’s also an app on Facebook called “Facebook Application Builder” which is actually an app – that allows you to to customize their app in a few simple ways.

You will need to sign up as a Facebook developer to begin app building for your business. The tutorial here shows a very simple Facebook application created in less than five minutes. The developer in the video below uses the shell (black screen in the video) to edit and upload his work, but this can be done with any FTP program, Notepad or Dreamweaver.

The point here is that it should not be hard to do. The video tutorial below walks you through each step on Facebook and then on the server side (outside FB) where the php files will be hosted. This means you need to have a web server that can run PHP and process javascript, then serve it back to Facebook.

There are several assumptions made by the developer in the video tutorial below.

You know how to work in the Shell via a command prompt
You know that FBML is Face Book Markup Language
You know how to code HTML, javascript and PHP

The point here is that it is easier than many people think to create a Facebook application, even though you do need to know more than the average webmaster to do so. We’ll look at the individual pieces in upcoming posts, but those of you who can follow the video should jump in and create a simple Facebook application or two.

How to Use Social Media to Market B2B or Niche Business

Mike Valentine — Sun, 23 May 2010 16:04:06 +0000

Every once in awhile, everyone takes a look at little guy success stories to compare the effectiveness of what massive companies are doing on a global scale to illustrate how it also works for the small players in local or niche markets. I’d like to suggest that there are two distinctly different ways the social success scenario blossoms. Both come from mimicking success by others, rather than from being a leader.

Small Business are always the leaders in Social Media and corporate behemoths only notice once they see the effectiveness of a local business engaging dynamically with their local audiences – saying, “Hey, let’s do that on a massive scale!” The little guys got noticed on a global scale precisely because they did such effective local and niche marketing using social media.
Small Business B2B operators or niche sellers resist using social media, pointing to the corporate big boys success on a massive scale and say, “Why bother with that when I have only local business or work only within a very tiny and restrictive industry?” It’s an excuse to avoid being social – so they don’t engage until they see it working for other small or niche players.

The real way this works -(regardless of company size or market):

A social business finds unique ways to speak to their own audience
They become successful
Then everyone notices

It’s not the size of the company. The story is instructive however you see it progressing.

This week Mashable did a popular post titled “5 Surprising Social Media Success Stories” with examples of unique B2B or Niche business uses of Twitter, Facebook and blogs. The video embedded here came from the article below.

Chances are, most of the businesses you interact with as a consumer are on social media. Your local restaurant is blogging, your grocery store is on Twitter — even your favorite candy is on Facebook. Companies in mainstream, consumer-facing industries are all over social media. But how about other businesses? … Are they experimenting with social media? You bet. Here are five examples, all at different stages of their experiments, and all indicating the breadth of business use of social media.

What is the next big thing in Social Media?

Mike Valentine — Sat, 22 May 2010 13:13:24 +0000

What is the next big thing in Social Media? Here’s Venture Capital Investor Michael Eisenberg being interviewed on CNBC about small businesss making connections via social media services.