Recently, I’ve been hearing ads on the radio for a national company that provides email distribution software for small businesses. This company has made a name for itself by spending big bucks on traditional advertising promoting their online software to send email newsletters. Now I’ve heard their ads before, but this one stuck out in my mind, for one big reason.

The leading statement in the commercial says something along the lines of “Now we can help you harness the power of social media to really give life to your email newsletters.” Well this sounds pretty great, until you listen to the explanation of their “social media integration”.

The commercial goes on to explain that this breakthrough new technology allows you to “place a button directly in your emails that lets your users share your newsletter with all their friends on Facebook or Twitter.”

Really?

That doesn’t sound like social media integration to me. It sounds like copying and pasting the code from Facebook for their “Like” button into the body of an email. What they’re missing is that most people are comfortable enough with online services/software to achieve this on their own. Copying and pasting a snippet of code from page to another is a tangible skill that anyone should be able to quickly master. And just putting a “Share” button in your content is no guarantee that anyone will find your content worth sharing. What about the intangible aspects of integrating social media with email marketing? Those areas are much more valuable to your business and overall marketing success.

How much time do you spend crafting a compelling subject line for your email, to encourage more opens?

How long do you dedicate to writing intriguing content that will encourage your readers to share?

Are you spending just as much time developing relationships with your community on Facebook or Twitter, so that when you do send out a newsletter, you’ve become a trusted voice to them?

These are just a few questions to consider which, I would argue, are much more valuable to your business than a technology feature. New features and functionality are easy to put into commercials, because they can be condensed down into a bullet-point list. But most of the time the more abstract concepts, and the real expertise that comes along with understanding them, are infinitely more valuable to your business.

We’ll cover the concepts listed above in future blog posts. In the meantime, consider the strategies and methods you can employ to encourage better integration between your social media and email. You won’t hear them promoted in a commercial, because they’re much more valuable than a “Share” button!

by Daniel Hadaway

If you’re planning to begin marketing your business online, there’s a chance you’ve got a plan laid out for all the different types of marketing you’d like to utilize. It’s important to note, however, that while most businesses will see success from all online marketing channels, different types of online marketing lend themselves more favorably to specific vertical markets.

Remember, that at the end of the day, the purpose of marketing is (most of the time) to generate sales for your business. The best way to do that is by finding users who may be already prepared to buy your product or service. With this in mind, we can look at how the behavior of consumers in specific verticals is uniquely influenced by online marketing and popular website formats.

Mashable recently posted an infographic called How to Influence Purchasing Decisions on the Web, which outlines how consumer behavior is affected by different online channels. For example, we can see that the top influencer in the automotive category is brand websites, followed by search results. So, if you’re an auto dealer you might want to consider focusing your initial efforts on creating an awesome website, optimizing it for SEO, and investing in paid search ads. The influence for baby products is much more social, with the top influencers being forum comments, Facebook, and blog posts. So if you’re ready to launch a new line of baby pacifiers, you might want to invest in reputation management, off-page SEO (inbound links, etc.), and Facebook advertising.

Your business category may not be listed in the infographic, but it’s important to start your marketing efforts armed with some knowledge of the buying behavior of your target audience. The best source for such knowledge will be an experienced digital marketing company (hint hint!) who is willing to help educate you based on their past experience in your vertical market.

Starting out your marketing efforts with thorough knowledge of your target audience, and then acting based on that knowledge is the best method to ensure success from your digital marketing efforts!

by Marcus Snyder

The year is almost over and that can only mean one thing – list season. Every one who is anyone is busy creating their lists of 2011 and Facebook is no exception as they recently posted the 40 Most Shared Articles in 2011.

Most of the headlines jumped out as being extremely familiar. After all, who could forget the announcement of the 13th Zodiac Sign or the homeless man with a golden-voice? Not me.

As I browsed through the list, I noticed a not-surprising commonality to it all. Almost every story is a human interest story, chock full of emotion and highlights tragedies, social issues and unusual news. The fact is, people are inherently attracted to other people, and they’re very open about it.

That said, if you’re looking to improve your link-building campaign, or to promote shared content in general, your best bet is to write with a human interest slant. Not only are people more likely to read your content, but they’re much more likely to share your content with others. Perfect!

Consider this: the average user on Facebook has around 130 friends. By tapping into Facebook’s social graph, a single person can influence 130 other people. When one of their friends shares that same story, it’s pushed out to 130 more people. If the story is good, it won’t take long before it’s flooding news feeds everywhere, rapidly spreading your name/brand and content.

The next time you write something, keep this post in mind and let us know how it worked out for you – we’d love to hear about it!

On June 28, 2011 Google rolled out their own social media platform called Google+. The demand, excitement and potential for this new service was HUGE.

10 million users joined within the first two weeks. In October, the number of unique users grew to over 40 million. This pales in comparison to Facebook’s 800 million active users, but then again, they’ve got seven years and mainland China on their side.

For a couple of months, users added their friends, lumped them into circles and then sat back waiting for something magical to happen. It didn’t take long for interest to wane and people began to go back to their old haunts, Facebook and Twitter. Google+ was quickly becoming a social graveyard.

It wasn’t until 132 days after their initial launch (but, who’s counting, right?) that they allowed businesses to register their pages. I had hopes that this would act as a social defibrillator and would get people re-engaged with the platform. Google+ had a real chance with this one … until it fell on its face.

So, what happened? Here’s a couple of things about the new business pages that disappointed me:

• No multi-user support. To borrow Facebook’s terminology, only one person is allowed to ‘admin’ a page. This means that a business will have to select a single person to create and maintain the page or they will have to create a new account that will be shared amongst their social media marketers. If your business goes with the first option, know that the page cannot be transferred (see also: if that one employee leaves the company for whatever reason, you’ve also lost your page).

• No vanity URLs. Right now our URL looks like https://plus.google.com/u/0/112902429086367330249. It’s not very sexy and it’s definitely not very marketable. Of course, you could use a service like http://gplus.to/ to create something presentable (for example, we’ve created http://gplus.to/southcentralmedia), but this should be built into the platform itself.

It’s not all doom and gloom for Google+, though.

The most important feature (I think, anyway) is circles. Fortunately, these are also available in business pages and they could be a game-changer in your online marketing strategy. Unlike Facebook, Google+ allows you to sort of act like a person. You’re able to follow people, you’re able to put people, or customers, into different circles depending on your marketing strategy (group your followers by location or product-type, whatever makes sense for your business) and from there you can send each circle a targeted message.

Is this single feature enough to significantly shift your businesses social media strategy, though? Maybe.

by Daniel Hadaway

Search Engine Land just posted an infographic based on some research they recently wrapped. The 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report provides some key insights into how marketers are viewing the roles SEO, Search and Social Media play in effective marketing:

SEO currently has the biggest impact on lead generation. Marketers (both B2B and B2C) currently view SEO as the most effective tool for generating leads, which isn’t surprising considering the positive perception and emphasis the digital marketing world has placed on it during the past 5 years. But, the current emphasis and “trendiness” of social media as a marketing tool is driving change on this front…

Despite SEO currently generating more leads, social media will receive the biggest increases in spend next year. This marks a significant sea-change in the digital marketing world. Generally, marketers will find out what is generating leads, and plan on spending more on that next year. But in this case, almost as many marketers are planning to maintain their spend on SEO as are planning to increase. Compare this to 60% who are planning to increase spend on social media vs. 36% who are maintaining, and you’ll see an industry that believes social is the future of marketing.

Even though the allocation of spend is shifting to different mediums, people are most interested in learning more about comprehensive, cross-promotional digital strategies- which is a great sign for the future of digital marketing! A comprehensive plan, spanning not only SEO, social media and paid search, but also landing pages, email marketing, display advertising and more is key to effective long-term marketing.

Based on the infographic, the state of digital marketing is as strong as ever- but look for social media to become a more prominent aspect of comprehensive marketing strategies moving into the future.

What time of day should I post? How long should my status messages be? Is it okay to ask followers to like something?

These are just a few of the question that every page administrator faces daily. There are a lot of “best practices” floating around out there that helps with these inquiries, however, there isn’t a whole lot of data to back them up … until now.

The people over at Momentus Media analyzed the top 20,000 Facebook pages to find out which posting techniques really work and placed their findings online for the entire world to see. For each analysis, they dissected 10,000 – 250,000 posts to find out exactly what drives interaction, and more importantly, how to replicate it.

1. When is the best time to post something?
Weekends and off-peak hours. Most posts are made during the week with the greatest number of posts on Thursdays and the lowest number of posts on the weekends. The engagement graph looks exactly the opposite. The more posts that are out there, the lower the interaction rate is going to be. Want the best chance at being heard and engaged? Post when other people are not.

2. How many times per day should I post?
As many times as you want. Not surprisingly, the more often you post, the more interactions you can expect. Keep in mind that some people may perceive posting more than 3 times a day as being “spammy.” Unsubscription rates rise as page admins post twice or three times a day, however, these rates tend to level off at higher frequencies. Here’s the bottom line: Post as often as you like, just be sure to keep a close eye on your subscribers.

3. What type of content elicits the most interaction?
#1 Photos. #2 Statuses. Fact: Photos generate 200% more interaction than links. The most shared content type on Facebook is links (which also happens to be the most ignored content type). Photos obviously have a visual draw and connect to people on an emotional level. Starving for some quick interaction? Try posting a photo.

4. Should I ask fans to like and comment on my posts?
Yes! Asking fans to like increases interaction 216% It’s not uncommon to see posts asking for comments or likes. There’s a reason for this: it works. Simply asking your audience to like your post can significantly boost your interaction rate. Asking them to comment produces slightly higher engagement than a post without a call-to-action. The takeaway? Be shameless and ask for a like!

5. Should I ask my fans questions?
Questions don’t increase interaction rate, but they do increase commenting rate. Ask fans to answer your questions with a comment. It’s thought that being conversational and asking questions on Facebook would increase your interaction rate. Ends up that question and non-question posts have about the same interaction rate (the sum of the number of likes and comments, divided by the number of page likes at the time of publishing). If you simply post a question, you’ll have about the same interaction rate as you would if you posted a fact. However, if you post a question and ask that people comment on it, you’ll find that your number of comments will go up!

6. How long should my status messages be?
Long or short. There is no found correlation between length and interaction rate. There’s a slight uptick in interaction as Facebook posts get longer, but it’s not enough to base your strategy on. Post however much or however little as you like – people don’t seem to care.

7. How long do my posts last in the newsfeed?
50% of clicks happen within 1 hour. 90% happen within 9 hours. It’s hard to say how long posts last in the newsfeed. It depends on how many people are in your feed as well as the frequency at which they are posting. However, the data shows that the majority of the clicks that an update will receive happens within the first hour of posting. After two hours, you start to see a gradual decline in interaction. Remember that posting during off-peak times increases your chances of being seen.

by Daniel Hadaway

It really is an inevitability: At some point in the life of your business there is bound to be someone who has a bad thing or two to say about your company. Even if you always do everything right, someone isn’t going to like you, and they’ll be determined to tell the world about it.

More often than not, the first place people go when they have something negative to say about a company these days is Twitter. Of course, they do this because all of their friends are on Twitter, but they also do this because they know your company is most likely on Twitter too!

Twitter (and social media at a higher level) have become the main medium for expressing dissatisfaction with a company or brand. So you need to be prepared to deal with the negative posts when they start showing up. Here are a couple of ideas for how to do that:

Address the issue in private, and ask the poster to remove the negative post.

Finding a way to address a customer’s complaint via the medium he or she used to express that complaint can do a lot to solve negative feedback. Doing this says “We’re paying attention to you and your criticism and will meet you where you are to resolve this for you.”

Once you’ve resolved the issue, it may be appropriate to ask the person to remove the negative post. This should only be done when you perceive the original post to contain factual inaccuracies or exaggerations about your business. The idea is not to erase the incident from existence, but to ensure the truth is being told about your brand. If someone says “I came to XY Restaurant yesterday and my sandwich was horrible”, you should leave it be.

In situations like the one above where it is not appropriate to ask someone to remove a negative post, you should encourage him or her to create a second post, highlighting the positive outcome and how you addressed their complaint. In the above scenario it may be “Big thanks to XY Restaurant for contacting me and giving me 2 free lunches in the future, in order to make it up to me!”

Many times addressing the issue directly can turn a negative into an eve bigger positive!

Provide an alternative location for customers to voice complaints.

It never hurts to attempt to prevent a negative comment from being posted about your brand in the first place. Create a page on your site, and link to it from your social media profiles, that is dedicated to accepting critiques and feedback from your customers.

Many times this will be enough to encourage the customer to communicate via this direct channel as opposed to a public social media post.

Of course, once you receive the negative feedback via this page/form, make sure to address it! Customer service is still important to your customers and your business, so don’t neglect it!

One thing to never do: Get into a public argument.

The last thing you want as a brand is have your audience become polarized by a public battle with a disgruntled customer. Avoid confrontation in public like (insert scary disease here)! No one wants to see that in their social media feed and it won’t turn out good for you, no matter what!

Negative critiques of your business will eventually happen. It’s important to keep an eye on what’s being said about your brand and stay proactive! Stay on top social media platforms and communities and remember: Your reputation exists whether you choose to control it or not!

David Berkowitz recently posted an article on Social Media Insider that, in exactly 906 words, called Google+ dead in the water. While his perspectives are interesting (and at times, entertaining), they’re flawed. This service has yet to be fully released to the public. Calling this platform irrelevant and bereft of life is premature, at best.

Let’s be honest, adding another social media platform into the mix may be a bit overwhelming for some. Managing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, etc. can be exhausting, and initially I too questioned the demand for another major hitter to enter the game. I was wrong. Everywhere I turned, there was someone pleading for an invite.

This begs the question: Why is everyone so eager to hop on the Google+ bandwagon? Well, it depends. However, here are a few common reasons:

• Remaining relevant by keeping up with social media as it evolves.
• The desire to be a social/digital pioneer. It’s human nature to want to be first.
• The social media reboot. Sometimes it’s healthy to want to leave all of your former high school classmates behind and start over.

Whatever the reason may be, the end result is the same. People WANT this service and they’re flocking in droves to get there.

Berkowitz’s main flaw is that he’s stuck in an old mentality that is deeply rooted in the principles of abandonment. This made perfect sense during the infancy of social media. People left LiveJournal and Friendster and flocked to MySpace. After a couple really good years for MySpace, everybody migrated over to Facebook.

Fast-forward to the present. The Age of Abandonment is now over. Integration is the new black. Generally, people are not leaving Facebook for Twitter and people are not leaving Twitter for LinkedIn, or FourSquare. Instead, we’re bringing all of these different tools together and are leveraging their power collectively to tell a more complete story about who we are.

I don’t believe that Google+ was developed to be a replacement to any one of the aforementioned services. Rather, it’s meant to be a compliment to what we already have. I say let’s give this thing a chance.

Don’t call it dead before it’s born.

FlashXML.net wrote an interesting (and useful) blog about the reasons employers look at your Facebook account.

The article lists 10 reasons that are unique in some ways, but all pretty much boil down to this: Are you an honest, upright person? To put it another way: Are you the kind of person that employers want working for them?

This article got me thinking, and not about my secret life as a lip-dub star and the voice behind the Bronx Zoo Cobra Twitter account. No, it got me thinking about how your business is no different than an employee in this article. And your employer is every person who has ever considered doing business with you.

Think about that… Every person… Ever.

Have a look at not just your Facebook Page, but at all of your social media (and your web presence as a whole). Are you putting off the vibe of a reputable and authentic business? Or are you putting off the vibe of the equivalent to an employee who calls in sick and then spends all day posting videos on his friend’s walls?

Keep in mind, that your web-presence should always be an accurate representation of your business. If your business really IS the equivalent to our bad-employee example, there are other issues to address first. But assuming your business is legit, you owe it to yourself to have a second look at your online reputation.

First impressions are certainly memorable and often lasting depending on the approach, and in the case of sustainable social media, the process for that first hello and handshake is quite similar when you break it down into simple, actionable steps.

Following these 5 simple steps will provide you, your brand, your cause and your conversations a platform to engage like-minded communities with the intent of forging sustainable relationships:

1. Listen
2. Introduce, not self promote
3. Engage and comment on conversations
4. Start conversations (think “helpful”)
5. Offer free advice and favors without expectations

The first step is where most of us fall flat on our faces. Once you dip that first toe into a social community, rather than leaping in armed to the teeth with promotional information and product sales sheets, take a step back and observe – Focus on conversation trends, identify the most popular or thought leaders in community and try to understand the temperature of the community (will they be receptive to your message and why/why not).

The second step is a natural follow-through to the listening process. Once you’ve listened and determined the temperature of the community and who the thought leaders are and how they are engaging each other and the community as a whole, offer a personable introduction with the caveat that you are there listen, learn and participate.

The third step requires active participation in ongoing conversations. By providing thought provoking commentary, you’re working to establish yourself as a trustworthy member of the community. You’re not self promoting, but asking questions, engaging and guiding the conversation into new avenues without expecting it to land on your site.

The fourth step is an extension of the active participation process. Once you feel comfortable enough to venture out on your own, offer an olive branch to the community by providing helpful advice, information, tips, etc.

That leads to the fifth and final step in your journey to sustainable social media. By offering value to the community without expecting favors or rewards in return, you’re legitimately focused on the long-term positive evolution and not the personal, short-term gains that your engagement could provide your business/brand. While the word “free” may make some of us cringe, it’s not about losing out on a sale in the immediate that you should be concerned with. It’s the “everybody wins” mentality from focusing on the relationships that will net much greater rewards down the road.