Online Marketing Blog

This Halloween do you think social media will bring you tricks or treats? For some marketers, every day is Halloween when it comes to social media marketing. These marketers expect the bogeyman to be hiding behind every piece of consumer-generated content and assume their customers and the public only use Facebook and Twitter witchcraft to create bloodcurdling tricks. Yet the reality is that most of the social media conversation about your firm isn’t scary.

For your Halloween treat from TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog, here are the top five tricks in my social media goodie bag you can easily integrate into your marketing efforts.

I’ve been liveblogging conferences since about 2005 ranging from ad:tech Chicago thanks to Steve Hall to a brief time working with Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable covering search marketing conferences. Since then TopRank has liveblogged nearly 100 events from SES Hong Kong to Intel’s first Social Media Summit.

When Mack Collier asked me to join #BlogChat to talk about liveblogging in anticipation of the upcoming BlogWorld Los Angeles conference, I had no hesitation. Liveblogging has helped TopRank Online Marketing and myself personally achieve numerous business and marketing goals at a fraction of the cost and far more effectively than many traditional marketing, advertising and content creation tactics.

As an Internet marketer I am always on the hunt for new content marketing tools that can increase my efficiencies and improve engagement with my audience.  I cannot begin to express how valuable content curation can be if done right.  It will allow you tap into and respond to what people are searching for, what they like to read and share, what influences their buying decisions and so on.  In my search for a new means of marketing I came across a tool called Scoop.It.  Below I have detailed my review of this tool including some of it’s cool features.

[Note from Lee: The next in our series of Wednesday guest posts comes from no less than the Godfather of Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi. I’ve known Joe since he published his first book, Get Content Get Customers, and have been amazed at his relentless efforts to lead the charge towards better marketing.

What I like best about Joe is that he’s a “Walk the Talk” content marketer with Junta42, Chief Content Officer magazine and the largest annual content marketing event, Content Marketing World. Joe is also co-author of Get Content Get Customers and Managing Content Marketing plus he writes a content marketing blog.  For this post Joe focuses on what businesses need to know about smarter planning for content marketing into the coming year.

Does Your Inbox Look Like This?

We’ve all received them and we’ve all sent them. They can be given but they can’t be taken back. It’s a single action that can cause people to unfriend, unfollow, or unsubscribe.  What are they?  Emails!  Emails can inspire, engage, or excite your prospects or customers but can have the opposite effect of what you were aiming for if you don’t follow some simple rules.

Creating an effective email marketing campaign is not always an easy task.  However, there are a few things to keep in mind that may help take some of the fear out of launching your own campaign.  Not every campaign will be successful but if you’re good about analyzing results, admitting shortcomings and making changes, who says you can’t learn from your mistakes?

After a successful Blog World Expo New York, I’m very much looking forward to BlogWorld Los Angeles in just under 2 weeks.  Judging from the conference agenda, there’s an impressive roster (275+) of experts, pundits and long time bloggers presenting on just about every relevant topic you can think of.

Blogging has been cited as one of the most effective forms of social media marketing for achieving top visibility in search and on the social web and corporate investment in social media is growing significantly. This is as true for agencies like TopRank Online Marketing as it is for any business with a good story to tell. We’ve promoted blogs as the centerpiece of a hub and spoke model that has been adopted by many other agencies and corporate marketers.

By now you know I’m as sold as one can be on the intersection of Social Media, SEO and Content Marketing. It’s the essence of the core principles of information Discovery, Consumption and Engagement that I talk about in Optimize and at conferences like PRSA International in Orlando this week.

Information production, sharing and consumption is accelerating faster than marketers (or consumers) can keep up with. A lot of that information is user generated content from social sharing and networking sites. Internet Marketers have long been savvy about creating, optimizing and promoting content that’s findable and relevant for target audiences.  Marketers aren’t the only corporate departments creating content in need of an audience though.

[Note from Lee: Social Business is everybody's business when it comes to modern internet marketing. IBM's social business efforts are really at the forefront of this trend. Ben Edwards is the VP of Digital Strategy at IBM and leads the strategy, design and development of IBM's marketing and communications in the digital realm. Ben joins us today to share his insights into the journey of not only embracing the social web for external marketing, but to adapt and adopt social media tools internally to empower socialized marketing.]

Companies of all shapes and sizes, in every industry, are increasingly adopting social media strategies and technologies for their marketing efforts, using Facebook to reach out to customers or YouTube to demonstrate new products. These are good first steps, but there is so much more that “social” has to offer. The era of social business is here and it is becoming clear just how transformative it will be for B2B marketers.

There are some things that you can’t take back: including what you release on the Internet.  With over 93% of B2B marketers using social media, online sales has very much become a social business. As marketers we need to do our best to present as well online as we do in person (if not better).  Creating an effective online marketing plan amongst all the changes on the social web isn’t easy, but here are a few things you may want to avoid.

#1: Flying By the Seat of Your Pants

A “lets throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” approach will only take you so far in social media.  Consider your internet marketing plan to be just as essential as your traditional sales and marketing plans.  Below are some questions you may want to ask yourself when creating your social content marketing strategy:

[Note from Lee: While I fervently pursue the home stretch of writing my own book "Optimize", I've asked a few friends to share their thoughts on topics such as Content Marketing, SEO and Social Media. This post comes from Rebecca Lieb, who I've known since her days at ClickZ, then Econsultancy and now she is digital advertising and media analyst at the Altimeter Group. Her new book, Content Marketing: How to Think Like a Publisher to Market Online and in Social Media comes out this week.]

Content workflow is the point at which content marketing gets tactical. It’s nuts-and-bolts process: content calendars, creation, approvals, style guides, templates, and tools.

Get this part right and you’ll be ready to run a newsroom.

In my quest to find a more efficient and effective way to leverage Twitter, I’ve come across a plethora of new and interesting social media tools.

Recently, I’ve been testing two tools that surfaced in my research, Timely and Buffer, which I classify as tweet timing tools.  Timely is a product of the folks at Flowtown and Buffer is from the co-creator of OnePage.

This relatively new and emerging class of tools helps users schedule their tweets based on the best time of day based on the probability of click or a re-tweet.  They both appear to use an algorithm that is able to discern what time of day the majority of your users will see your tweet, increasing the probability that someone will re-tweet it.

Photo from our interview with Avinash at SES Hong Kong

The morning keynote speaker for the 2011 MIMA Summit was none other than Avinash Kaushik co-Founder of Market Motive Inc and the Digital Marketing Evangelist for Google.  Avinash was a very funny and engaging speaker.  Nothing was off limits during his keynote.  Caught in the crosshairs of Avinash’s presentations were what he called “small” local companies (General Mills, 3M, etc) that dared to provide a “less than ideal” user experience.

Innovation was the topic of the morning’s keynote, ranging from which companies are a good (and bad) example of implementing innovation to proper metrics to show success.

What Are the 3 Definitions of Innovation?