Amazing Grace

It’s Christmas time and I don’t feel much like blogging about marketing. Somehow it seems to me that marketing is so much smaller than Christmas. Even if you don’t celebrate the birth of Jesus as I do at Christmas, it’s still a magical time of year. I remember growing up in New York City riding the buses and subways during Christmas time and the people were actually nicer to each other. Grace was in the air. The season has that affect on people.

Amazing Grace

Christmas is all about grace. It’s about appreciating everything you have and sharing it with others. It’s about giving people a reason to smile even if some things aren’t going your way. It’s about being happy even if you have no reason to be happy. It’s about bringing happiness to others. It’s about being a light.

When marketing extends grace, it doesn’t get any better than that. This video has been viewed by millions through the simple act of sharing it on the web.

Amazing Grace Techno – Computer Controlled Christmas Lights from Richard Holdman on Vimeo.

May the majesty of the Christmas season and its grace be a light that shines in you every day of the year.

Bernie Borges
@berniebay

What Are You Grateful For?

What Are You Grateful For?

This Thanksgiving I, once again, marvel at how much I have to be grateful for. I have a wonderful family who loves me unconditionally. I have a loyal staff that loves me (nearly) unconditionally. I have a client base that probably loves me a little bit, too. I have many friends who put up with me. And, I have Tweetsgiving to thank for using social media to build classrooms in Tanzania.

If you’ve never heard of Tweetsgiving, get ready for goose bumps as you learn its story. Stacey Monk founded EpicChange, a 501c3 U.S. “that amplifies the voices and impact of grassroots change makers by sharing their stories in ways that raise visibility and funds to support their extraordinary efforts to create hope in our world.”

In Thanksgiving 2008, Tweetsgiving was launched two days before Thanksgiving as a 48-hour celebration of gratitude, and it became the number one trending topic on Twitter and raised over $10,000 to build a classroom in Arusha, Tanzania. Anyone who contributed to Tweetsgiving had their Twitter name displayed on the wall of gratitude.

Tweetsgiving 2009 will repeat this marvelous display of gratitude only on a grander scale. This year there are more sponsors and people rallying around this wonderful cause.  This year’s event will raise funds to build an orphanage, a classroom, a cafeteria and a library at Mama Lucy’s school in Tanzania.

There are three ways you can get involved in Tweetsgiving 2009. 1) Attend a gratitude party in a city near you.  2) Spread the word. Tell your friends online and offline about it @tweetsgiving 3) Host a party. Have friends over to raise funds for Tweetsgiving 2009. Of course, you can always donate some of your hard earned money too.

The best part of Tweetsgiving (besides the smiles on kids’ faces in Arusha) is the role that social media plays. Strike that….The best part is that people (you, me and anyone who cares) can have an impact simply by using social media to spread the word. Just by a few clicks, we can help educate poor kids in a far away place.

If you don’t have goose bumps yet, you haven’t clicked through to Tweetsgiving.

Happy Tweetsgiving!

We Skip Because We Can

Billie Ginther: Marketing Manager and PR Optimizer

We will soon be gathering around tables laden with feasts from traditional Thanksgiving fare to menus filled with a variety of regional and exotic foods in tribute to our diverse cultures, history and geographic backgrounds. But we will all have one thing in common; the opportunity to share with family, friends and give thanks for all the blessings in our lives.

My daughter and her husband went on a medical mission to Africa this past summer. Her photos of the trip are a constant reminder that no matter what economic or daily trials we have in our lives, we still have one of the highest standards of living on the planet. We take for granted simple conveniences like running water and electricity. The idea of a village hole in the ground for personal hygiene is unimaginable. And whether you look across the street or half way around the world, there are millions less fortunate than we are through no fault of their own.

Technology has changed our daily lives, and social media has done even more to focus our attention upon a myriad of causes where we can make a difference.

Skip1.org is a non-profit with a simple idea. Skip doing just one thing for a day…a coffee, a car wash, a pack of gum and give the money you would have spent on that small luxury to help fight world hunger.

Skip1.org is part of Children’s Hunger Fund, a Charity Navigator 4 star non-profit organization, and it has a record of efficiently using donated money: more than 99% of all donations go to programs and feeding children in the US and around the globe. While both Skip1 and Children’s Hunger Fund are social media marketing driven non-profits, Skip1.org is a poster child for how to create good works where all the money is going to…good works.

Skip1.org’s simple message is everywhere on the web:  “We skip because we can.” Over one-sixth of the world’s population is malnourished.  It’s powerful to know that by skipping one small item for just one day, we can all help save a child from dying from hunger or hunger-related causes every 6 seconds.
Skip1 doesn’t have splashy billboards, ads, commercials or any of the traditional trappings of branding campaigns. Skip1.org uses social media to spread their message by engaging people and building relationships. @Skip1 is on Twitter. Skip1dotorg is on YouTube. Skip1.org has a fan page on Facebook, an active blog, and numerous page 1 Google rankings of its web pages and of blog posts by everyday folks to celebrities about the charity’s good works.

Skip1’s social media strategy centers on engagement and interaction with donors beyond inducing them to give up one small item or luxury. For example, Skip1 Facebook fan page offers a badge that Skip1 fans can put on their own websites.

Skip1.org’s success is based on the very socially-oriented concept of  “pass it along.” And all of the charity’s social network tactics make it easy to do so. During Thanksgiving, please think about just one small thing you can skip, donate the money to Skip1.org., and “pass it along”.

Marketing Insights…. 10 Little Lessons on Content Propagation

Billie Ginther: Marketing Manager and PR Optimizer

The two pillars of social media marketing are delivering excellent content to your intended audience and building great relationships. A crucial aspect of building upon these pillars is how you share your content with others. An effective content strategy has to include a well-thought-out bookmarking strategy to propagate your content.

1. It Is All About Them
Focus on your target audience. Joe Pulizzi, CEO of Junta42, a content vendor and project matching service preaches that delivering consistent editorial-quality content means that you must think less like a marketer and more like a publisher. This means your content should not be a thinly-veiled company brochure but must be consistent editorial-quality content that addresses your audience’s needs, offers value, and helps begin a relationship that may eventually make them customers and friends.

2.    Quality over Quantity
There are hundreds of bookmarking sites, such as Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Mixx, Propeller, Technorati, Newsvine and Twine, that reach broad audiences. However, bookmarking sites like Smallbusinessbrief, Sphinn, Kirtsy and Slashdot are tailored to more specialized audiences. Research and choose bookmarking sites that are relevant to your audience. A specialized bookmarking site with a smaller audience that is interested in your content may have more value than a mega-site where your content may not be as easily found or read. In most cases, six well-chosen bookmarking sites will generate more engagement than 24 randomly chosen ones.

3.    Content Propagation Means Sharing
Social media content propagation is more than just submitting your content to a variety of bookmarking sites. Effective content propagation requires being social. When you sign up for a bookmarking website, complete your profile, add friends that may already be members, and participate so that you build a network within the site. Most important, submit and vote up other people’s content that you find meaningful, interesting or funny. Don’t confine your participation to promoting only your content. Comment on articles, tweet and micro-blog about the content contributed by others.

4.    Bookmark What Is Meaningful
Be sure the content you submit is relevant to the community within the bookmarking site. Submitting “How to Toilet Train Your Cat” may be wildly popular in an animal or pet community within Digg, but it might get you deactivated in a SEO bookmarking website like SlashDot. Some bookmarking sites like Newsvine will deactivate you in a heartbeat if your content contains any self-promotion or advertising. Learn the boundaries of the bookmarking websites and stay within them.

5.    Don’t Be a Manipulative Cad
The objective of any good bookmarking website is to create communities that share valuable content organically. The more an article is read, commented on, voted, forwarded, emailed and shared, the more authority that content acquires. Sharing, voting and commenting are good. Setting up multiple profiles so that you can vote up your submissions is a black hat tactic and will get you deactivated.

6.    Anything Worth Doing…Is Worth Doing Well
Content propagation is time consuming. As long as you are generating high quality content, the results will justify your time. While automated bookmarking software can speed up the process,  I have not yet found a program that works well on all platforms or allows for sharing, commenting or any of the other aspects of being…social. Investing the time to participate the old-fashioned way yields the best results. That is not to say that you should not use the tools that are at hand. Using the bookmarking or share widget found on many blog sites helps build authority for the author of the article. Helping others gain authority on great content is another powerful way to build relationships on the web.

7.    Tag…You’re It
Be sure to tag your articles when submitting to bookmarking websites. Tags are keywords that help your audience find your content when they conduct a search within the bookmarking website. Tags need to be keywords your audience uses, not your company’s jargon. Think like a member of your intended audience and use tags that will help them find your content.

8.    Patience Is a Virtue…but  Devising a System Can Speed Up the Process
We work with many clients on their social media strategy and our browsers are often opened to dozens of URLs. Too often my browser does not automatically log me in when using the share widget feature within various blog sites. Setting up a separate login on your computer startup for your bookmarking project can save you time and simplify propagating your content. Set up your browser’s automatic login feature and only use the additional computer login for bookmarking. This small step will cut the time you spend bookmarking content.

9. Measure Results
Which articles resonate with your readers? Track your content, visitor traffic, traffic sources, content reach, clicks, sentiment and voice through Google Analytics as well as other marketing software systems, such as HubSpot and ScoutLabs. Discover which content has the most value to your audience and refine your content strategy accordingly.

10. Knowledge Is an Ongoing Learning Experience
Every bookmarking website has its own social network, rules and procedures. Learn the strengths and idiosyncrasies of each one.  And do not be afraid to make mistakes…it will eventually improve your bookmarking results. If you get deactivated from a bookmarking website, find out why, reread the rules and contact the website to get re-instated. And, of course, don’t do the same thing again!

Developing and taking the time to effectively implement a content propagation strategy that broadens your footprint on the web takes time but the results are well worth the investment.

Search This… Making Twitter Work for Your Business

Jackie Weber:  Inbound Search Marketing Analyst

There are 14 million Twitter users in the United States today. By the end of 2009, Twitter is projected to reach 26 million users worldwide.

Twitter is a very powerful tool. Used correctly, it can be extremely beneficial to a company of any size.

If you look at Twitter as a marketplace and choose a strategy that makes your presence nothing more than a series of automated sales offers, you’re missing the whole point of Twitter. You become the cocktail party guest who can’t stop talking about himself. Pretty soon, the room empties.

If you see Twitter as an opportunity to join a conversation and connect with a community of like-minded people and share content which is genuinely useful to them, you will find Twitter’s rewards.  You can become the graceful party guest who mixes listening with stories and draws a crowd or at least blends in harmoniously.

If you are ready to join the Twitter party, first set your goals.

Yes, Twitter requires a strategic approach. Without clearly defined goals, your business isn’t likely to make the connections or build the relationships that Twitter offers.  Don’t be like the video comatose cartoon people floating aimlessly in the Twitosphere.  Identify what your company wants to accomplish on Twitter.

Sample Goal:
“Reach out and engage with people in our industry and potential customers, monitor brand sentiment, provide product support, and spread content of interest to the community.”

Once you have defined your goals, you need to map out your plan of action.  Identify the actions needed to accomplish your goals. Define your community. Establish a content strategy. I find that mixing business and some fun makes for a more interesting content strategy.  Your plan should address staffing concerns like protocols and time demands. And most importantly, research, research, research.

It’s a good idea to bring all your key players together to brainstorm and identify your goals. The most important aspect of any social media effort (including Twitter) should be to build relationships.

In order to be effective on Twitter, your business needs to be real and be transparent. Set up your Twitter profile in such a way that anyone visiting your Twitter page gets a glimmer of your personality. Twitter backgrounds can also give your followers a sense of who you are.

There are several tools that can help you find the people to follow on Twitter. It will take time to identify and follow people of interest, and to find influential thought leaders in your community.

Two of my favorite tools for finding followers are WeFollow and Twellow. Another way to find followers is to do a topic search in Twitter Search. Twitter’s search function is very powerful.

If someone follows you, you should consider following them back! Yes, there are some people on Twitter who I don’t follow back. You know the ones who aren’t really people and who spam your Twitter stream with way too many posts. If they want to follow me, that’s fine. But I am not going to follow them.
If someone follows you and you find their content offensive, just block them using Twitter’s block feature. That way you don’t have to see their content, and you won’t show up in their follow list.

No Twitter strategy would be complete without the ability to measure results. How you measure and what you choose to measure depends on the goals you have set.

You can listen in to conversations about your brand and be in a better position to let customers know that they are important. You can measure sentiment about your brand by tracking positive and negative Tweets.

All of these goals turned to actions can be measured. Not only can you measure the number of followers your Twitter account has attracted, but you can also measure reach, geographic interest, SEO value and even brand sentiment.

Twitter works like most other social media: You get out of it, what you put in to it. For small and medium-sized businesses with clear goals, an effective plan, and the right metrics, Twitter can be full of rewarding relationships.

As I See It…. Ready, Aim, Fire

Bernie Borges

How many times have you heard the expression “ready, fire, aim?” This cliché is used often in business and sports when making reference to a plan that gets executed without much planning. It’s an oxymoron. Either a plan is a plan or it’s not a plan. You might as well admit that not having a plan is just winging it.

Unfortunately, many marketers have taken a “ready, fire, aim” approach to inbound marketing. Whether it’s not doing extensive keyword or competitive research for SEO, or not planning out effective PPC campaigns and ad groups, a lack of planning is sure to negatively impact your results.

We find this is especially true and prevalent in social media marketing. With such growth in popularity in social media platforms including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, many marketers have jumped in with one or both feet without a plan.

Ask yourself these questions: What is your content strategy? What is your content hub on the web? Does your content strategy have C-Level support? Are enough resources allocated to your content strategy? How are you measuring results?

I’ll introduce another very common expression – the 80/20 rule. I passionately suggest that 80% of a marketer’s success on social media is directly correlated to the strategy, in particular the content strategy. And, 20% is correlated to the web communication channels you choose to implement your content strategy.

Did you notice I just renamed blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn “communication channels?” Don’t allow that to get past you. If you buy into this 80/20 rule of planning versus execution, then you quickly understand that the social media channels you use are your communication channels.  You understand the importance of developing a strategy – a content strategy.

In developing your content strategy, focus on your target audience. Don’t limit your target to your most immediate target demographics. Expand that circle to include demographics that interact with your target audience. Depending on your industry, that may include analysts, consultants, resellers, etc. The point is to not limit your target too narrowly. Your content should engage people in your industry in a compelling way.

What happens when you don’t plan and you just implement (ready, fire, aim)? You might have some success. If you do, consider yourself lucky. But, you have a much greater chance of making some costly mistakes. You may attract the wrong people. You may not be prepared to direct people to the right place in your communication and create a wrong impression. For example, if most of your communications point people back to your website’s home page, and it’s not well designed to engage visitors in a way that is consistent with your social media strategy, you’ve blown it. Would you throw a party without preparing for the guests?

Marketers should avoid the temptation to dive into social media without a plan that includes research. Just as in creating any business plan, conducting research to determine whom you’re targeting, where they are, and what topics are of interest to them is crucial. Then, determining a content strategy that addresses your audience is the next step. Then, and only then, are you ready to use the popular social media tools to implement your social media marketing plan. Ready, aim, fire!

Tips for Bulls-Eye Blogging: Getting Your Content Found

Dianna Kersey: Information Architect

Since the beginning of time, humans have been searching for ways to communicate.  From sign language to cave drawings to paintings, humans have been trying to tell their stories.

In fact, we humans have protected, copied and preserved the written word since its inception.  From Dead Sea scrolls to naval captain’s logs to newspapers to the blogs written by the world’s 70 million bloggers, people have been (and continue to be) obsessed with communicating what is important to them.

So, you say you are clean out of parchment, your hammer and chisel are dull and you don’t own a printing press?  How about we move into the 21st century and we learn how to communicate with not only other humans, but search engines as well, so those other humans can find the words on your blog that express what’s important to you.

So let’s start with the basics….

Loading the Rifle:  What is a Blog?  Here is a short video to explain:

There are 8 types of blogs that can be a part of how you choose to communicate what’s important to you.

Here are examples of each kind:

1.    Linkblog – Social bookmarking, such as del.icio.us
2.    Moblog – sending pictures from a camera phone or mobile device, e.g., Flickr
3.    Podcast – audio recording in MP3 through RSS feed – iTunes
4.    Videoblog/Vlog – video recording in MP4 through RSS feed – YouTube
5.    Microblog – short text message, popular with mobile users, e.g., Twitter
6.    Miniblog/reblog – content is mostly from a third party in a post versus creating original material,  e.g., stumbleupon
7.    Liveblog – covers a live event, such as a sporting event or press conference.  Engadget is an example.
8.    Blog – A collection that can include all of the above.

Once you choose which format is inspiring to you, it’s time to bring it to life and be found on the social web. When choosing a blog strategy, first you will want to choose a blog platform (such as WordPress or Blogger) and create a themed look and feel appropriate to what you want to talk about and what you feel will appeal to the type of audience interested in your same topic.

Now that you have a blog hosted and up and running…. now what?  You need great content. Period.  Your content must be interesting, informative, educational, or inspiring in a way that compels your readers to engage with you.  Most important, be creative and have fun with the voice of who you are.

Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz has written a great article that details 21 tactics to increase blog traffic, but we are going to cover just a few highlights.

Talking to Humans: Taking Aim at Your Target

Here are a few items to help keep your content fun, inviting and engaging to your audience:
-    Great content – first and foremost.
-    Link to your sources and data information. Don’t be afraid to link to resources valuable to your readers.
-    Invite guest bloggers to be featured on your blog.
-    Interview influential people who address the topic covered by your blog.
-    Use rich media – e.g., video, charts, images, graphs, podcasts, bullets, etc….
-    Use community sharing software such as ShareThis or Tweetmeme to allow visitors to share your content easily with others through Twitter and Facebook and many other bookmarking  platforms throughout the web.

Talking to Search Engines: Bulls-eye

Okay, so you have great content. Check.  Now it’s time to be found in the search engines and share your content with readers.  You have to socially broaden your footprint on the web and get your content out to communities that are interested in what you have to say.

How do you do that?

Here are some simple tips to help search engines identify and “read” your content and properly index it so that a person searching on the topic that you posted about can find your blog. By using these plug-ins (or many others like these), you can help tell the search engines what your posts are about.

-    Use a SEF (search engine friendly) plug-in, such as headspace2, to insert title tags, smart URLs and descriptions into your posts to help search engines index the posts for the right keywords.
-    Tag your content with keywords relevant to what that post is about.
-    Make it easy for someone to subscribe to you with RSS feeds or subscribe with email.
-    Use an interactive WYSWYG word processing plug-in, such as Tiny MCE Advanced, which allows you include images, video and a myriad of other functionality to make your content engaging.

You’ll be loaded for bear if do your research, choose the type of blog that’s right for what you want to communicate, educate yourself on your chosen topic, learn from other bloggers, create a community by broadening your web footprint, and use the 21st century tools to help humans using search engines find your blog content when they search on the keywords that are most relevant to it.

Good luck!