Online Marketing Blog

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.

A social media panel at a bowling alley? Yes, that’s how I started my Thursday morning this week, thanks to WCCO Radio (Minneapolis/St, Paul) which was host to a panel on Social Media for Business at Pinstripes in Edina.

Esteemed panelists included several familiar faces and brands including MIMA Board members: Brent Shiely (@brentshiely), Technology Director at General Mills; Ryan Arnholt (@arbenangstrom), Director of Interactive Marketing at OptumHealth; Jill Gutterman (@gigutterman), Director of Interactive Marketing at Rasmussen College; Tim Brunelle (@tbrunelle), CEO of Hello Viking. Bryan C. Del Monte of the Del Monte Agency (a sponsor) was also on the panel.

An informal poll of the audience revealed that just about everyone in the audience of 250 or so was on Facebook and LinkedIn had even better participation. There were far fewer people on Twitter and only a handful had “checked in” on Foursquare.

What happens on the internet in 60 seconds? 1,500 Blog Posts, 60 New Blogs, 98,000 Tweets, 20,000 Posts on Tumblr, 600+ New Videos Uploaded to YouTube, 6,600 Images Uploaded to Flickr, 79,000+ Facebook Wall Posts and over 695,000 Facebook Status Updates. What does all that activity have in common? It’s content, it’s social and presents a ripe opportunity for optimization.

Content Marketing is a hot topic and deservedly so.  According to an AOL Nielsen study in May 2011, 53% of all time on the internet is content consumption. In the U.S. alone, 27 million pieces of content are shared per day.  In the Junta42 and MarketingProfs B2B Content Marketing study, it was reported that 90% of marketers use content marketing and 51% plan to budget more than the previous year.

As companies seek to understand where and how social media fits, one of the key questions asked is: How can you move beyond branding with social media and directly affect business outcomes?

At Dreamforce this week, Robert Wollan – Global Managing Partner for Accenture CRM, attempted to answer that question with his presentation: “Making $ocial Media Pay – With (Really) Fast Followers.

Most C-level execs are finding that traditional channels are not delivering the results that they had in the past. At the same time, they’re trying to capture new growth potential through disruptive forces and emerging channels like social. Conversations need to happen about social in the boardroom and at C-levels in order to affect real change in the organization.

At Intel’s first Social Media Conference in Portland this week, 100+ Intel social media practitioners from all over the world came together with about 20 industry subject matter experts to share and engage social media best practices.

One of those speakers was Lionel Menchaca, the Chief Blogger at Dell and a real pioneer in the world of blogging and social media for the enterprise. Lionel told the story of Dell’s initial blogging efforts that turned the tide of Dell Hell as well as other practical insights. Here are his tips on best practices blogging for the enterprise:

1. Write about topics that matter to your customers, especially the tough ones. Dell has a social media command center to track topics and inspire ideas, issues to deal with.

My friend Bob Knorpp has a good piece on AdAge this week:”Why Marketers Should Break Free of the Digital Content Trap” about the fallacy of content. He makes some good points about companies going through the motions of creating and promoting content on social channels with motivations of retweets, likes, shares and links over real engagement. I have to agree where he says, “content alone is a dead end for ongoing engagement”.

While many savvy online marketers don’t see content as a shortsighted substitute for social strategy or simply as a SEO tactic, but a proxy to creating customer experiences, there are even more who do.  Content is a vehicle for discovery, engagement and sharing.  Content is the mechanism for storytelling and if social and search optimization are also involved in a qualitative way to aid in discovery and sharing of those stories – then all the better.

I received an invite to CrowdFactory’s “Driving Social Media & Customer Acquisition Throughout the Customer Lifecycle” webinar yesterday with Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter Group and  Sanjay Dholakia, CEO of CrowdFactory and decided to liveblog it.

Jeremiah has pioneered a lot of the social media thinking found in progressive companies today and his blog, Web Strategist, is known to senior business and agency marketing executives world-wide. I’ve been reading it for many years. This webinar addressed several key issues from a social engagement and commerce perspective and promised to share how marketers are using social media to engage customers and prospects across the entire lifecycle.

Engage or Die

1. Our opportunity with social media is to do something more meaningful than just “marketing”.

2. Social media is not here to save you. It’s not here to make your business matter again. That’s your job. Social media are the tools to help you connect and engage.

3. Each social platform is its own community. What we do on the social web isn’t about social media at large, but cultivating community within each distinct platform. If this was easy, we wouldn’t be here.

4. Where to start: What makes you/your business so special?

5. This is not a social destination situation. On the social web, you’ve really go to be compelling to engage or visitors will just leave and go somewhere else.

After a great opening keynote presentation by Arianna Huffington, I was drawn into the nearby speaker ready room and ran into the always inspiring Brian Solis. Brian’s Marketing Masters track at ad:tech San Francisco was on my list for live blogging and as always, he shared a great mix of insights and inspiration about business on the social web.

I haven’t live blogged in a while, so forgive the rough edges

How do we improve the game for social media in business?

Why have people begun to hate the term “social media”? It’s about what social media is not. Social media is neither one to many marketing or many to many. It’s about 1+1=many.

B2B marketers have joined the social media marketing movement in droves. In fact, Forrester Research predicts that B2B firms will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009 (eMarketer B2B Social Media Marketing Heats Up).

Unfortunately, many of those efforts are entirely tactical, methodical and without a true understanding of the “social” aspect of social media marketing.  B2B marketers that are early in their social media marketing maturity level tend to focus on message distribution such as Tweeting or posting Facebook links mostly to their own content vs. engaging with customers on a human level. That one-way communication profile doesn’t engender discussions and sharing, so social traffic level increases tend to plateau pretty early.

It’s easy for early adopters and social media enthusiasts to get caught up in the latest and greatest tool available but many companies are still seeking a basic foundation. According to Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, only 12 percent of companies surveyed felt their organizations were using social media effectively.

Exploration and experimentation are viable steps when entering social media marketing for the first time. However, the key to successful social media use is identifying how a brand will use each social channel. Once the approach is set, it’s an ongoing process of testing and refinement to achieve the objectives that will make a difference to each business. A great place to start in sorting out a process for companies is our  social media checklist which provides questions to consider before jumping head-first into the deep end of the social media pool.

The widespread use of social media has fundamentally changed how people communicate and share information. According to recent data from comScore, Facebook now accounts for 12.3 percent of the time spent online in the U.S. versus 7.2 percent just a year ago. Twitter now counts approximately 200 million accounts and over 110 million tweets per day.

This downright addiction to social media has made an impact in virtually every industry as companies seek to create strategies to engage on the social web. Public relations is certainly no exception as practitioners seek to communicate with, and hear from consumers, as well as using social channels to share information with key audiences.