Online Marketing Blog

Do brands care whether they have influence in social media? They certainly should, said members of the three-person panel on social influence at NMX Monday.

Jonathan Dick, Director of Business Development at Klout,  kicked off the conversation with his thoughts that brands do care, though they may struggle to understand or measure their influence.

Andy Levey, Senior Manager of New Media & Analytics at Cirque du Soleil, believes social influence is incredibly important for brands to connect with and engage fans. “It’s all about them; if we don’t have fans talking about us, we’re not in business,” he said. Cirque du Soleil are lucky, Levey admits. Their brand is creative and entertaining; many businesses lack this stroke of good fortune. What can you do if your brand isn’t inherently entertaining or you’re not in the media space and therefore informative by nature?

If you had to put a value on the UFC, what would it be? You wouldn’t be remiss to put it in the hundreds of millions, or even billions. Dana White got into the UFC for $2 million and people thought he and his partners were out of their minds for paying even that much. Yet today, UFC is a multi-million dollar business, with over 9 million fans on Facebook and 800,000 Twitter followers. This is a highly engaged community White has built; currently, there are over 400,000 people talking about UFC on Facebook alone.

They had an uphill battle from the start; porn was allowed on pay-per-view TV, yet ultimate fighting wasn’t, he points out. White joined Forbes Managing Editor Bruce Upbin on stage for the second keynote Monday morning at NMX Las Vegas to share the story of his organization’s incredible rise from little more than an idea, to an international on and offline cash machine.

My friend of many years, John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker and author known the world over for offering practical marketing advice to tens of thousands of small businesses. This week he’s launching a new book, The Commitment Engine – Making Work Worth It and I asked if he’d share a peek for our readers here at TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog. 

With growing popularity, more companies are becoming aware of the importance and impact of content marketing. But many are unsure how to create content that customers actually want and that can have an impact on the business bottom line. In this guest post, John Jantsch offers practical advice that any business, small or large, can implement today for less mechanical and more meaningful content creation.

This week at the PRSA Digital Impact Conference Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of Leader Networks talked to attendees about the benefits of online communities as part of a B2B social media strategy.

According to DiMauro, nearly 2/3 of organizations surveyed are engaged in private, online communities hosted by companies that sell them computer hardware, software or services.

The average visit in an online B2B community is 10 minutes, with 1 visit every 5-7 days.

What B2B organization wouldn’t want roughly 40 minutes of time per month with members to help solve problems, learn how they are using tools and what topics they are most interested in?

Building an online community gives organizations an opportunity to strategically connect with its audience in meaningful and sometimes deeper ways through private interactions.

A while back I had a Twitter discussion with a few smart Minnesota based marketers, @cbensen, @albertmaruggi and @bestbuyCMO about the importance of customer service and community building that turned to a variety of ancillary benefits. Connie mentioned that community building is a long term investment that continues to pay dividends. Albert pointed out that SEO & community building can be 2 separate tactics with SEO having nothing to do with community. Barry wanted more of an explanation, which motivated this long overdue post.

An increasing number community managers have become visible within social media sites like Twitter, on blogs and Facebook from various sized companies. We’ve even interviewed people with those types of responsibilities from Dell and Comcast.  I’ve been thinking about how the content creation and outreach efforts of a community manager can also be of benefit to an organization’s search engine optimization efforts.