I currently have the fortune to experience two different fronts of digital marketing. Under Plural, I work with brands and, with SocialMouths I mostly jam with small business, personal brands, and bloggers.
One of the reasons I absolutely love this setup is that they are two different worlds in how the social web is approached, how it’s handled and how success is measured.
So I’m here to tell you that, despite the ridiculous budgets and unlimited resources, small business has a huuuge advantage over brands when it come to social media.
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Guest post by Brad Shorr from Straight North.
Everybody knows social media and SEO are connected, but how? The better you understand the nature and strength of the various connections, the better you can focus your efforts on activities that get results.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to sort things out because the social-SEO relationship is becoming more intertwined (some would say, muddled) all the time. In this post, I’ll bring up a few points we’ve been discussing at our agency as we try to respond to the changing environment.
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Guest post by Sookie Shuen from Zoober Inbound.
Something big has happened to social media.
In case you hadn’t noticed, social media is big – and getting bigger all the time. What was once the domain of just a small number of people is now everyday currency in and outside of business. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc are now familiar channels for many of us. Now 23% of all the time we are online takes place on social networks and blogs. Internet users are now spending more time on Facebook than on any other web brand combined (Source: Nielsen).
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One of the first thing I quickly realized when I started my first business was this: I do NOT want to chase business.
I’m not that old by the way, that was 12 years ago. The landscape was completely different even though it wasn’t that long ago. I think I shared this with you before, I got started by doing some small print ads on local magazines and ended up producing my own TV spots and running them on national networks. I had to learn everything from writing to casting, producing and even doing my own media buys and running all kinds of reports.
I did all that just to avoid chasing business. The end result was about 600 incoming daily calls.
I did learn how to generate a lead through Inbound Marketing. But there was something I figured out besides making the phone ring 600 times in a day. The quality of the lead generated through inbound is much much higher than outbound, where you are pretty much trying to convince a person about something they did not ask for.
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Some of you have experienced customer service from brands via social media. Of course with different outcomes. And some of you have never taken advantage of this medium to get product issues solved.
Sure, I’ve had my share too. When I was stuck in a Delta flight waiting to departure for 45 minutes and tweeted my frustration (just being an inpatient jerk, really), they got back to me almost immediately. Some time ago when my site was hacked, I contacted Network Solutions customer service department over the phone and they said it would take about 48 hours to get my site back up, I turned to Shashi Bellamkonda on Twitter and had my site back up in less than 2 hours.
Of course you can also run into issues with companies like Time Warner Cable that will completely ignore you no matter how nasty your tweets are.
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It’s no surprise to me that one of the most asked questions I get from clients and readers is how to get content shared more and pull new traffic.
Of course we know dropping valuable content, being consistent with that content, put some focus into blog post SEO and effective social networking are some of the key elements at the top of the list. But today, in this hyper-competitive blogosphere, those things are kind of a given. Everybody does that.
That’s why sometimes focusing on the little things is where we can make a difference over our competition. One of those things is providing great sharing options, at least I know it made a huge difference for me.
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Guest post by Erika Napoletano from Redhead Writing.
Aside from the fact that you’re staring at this post’s headline with a healthy dose of WTF right about now, it’s 100% true. How often do you think about what you’d give up in order to get more?
And in many cases, it’s not even about more. It’s about better. More loyal. More committed.
We’re going to talk about four ways that you can – starting today – lose traffic to your website or blog, yet still come out ahead in the long run.
Clean Your Room
You are a dirty (dirty, I said) little social media user, aren’t you? When’s the last time you cleaned out your Twitter account? Purged your Facebook friends? Took a really long, hard look at your LinkedIn connections.
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I know what you’re thinking just by reading the headline of this post: Of course LinkedIn is better for B2B marketing and Facebook for B2C.
But wait, that is not necessarily the case. I have to admit I’m not as active on LinkedIn as I am on Facebook, or even Google+. That’s probably because my focus on this blog is to talk to entrepreneurs and small business.
But when it comes to approach Corporate America, I automatically think I need to get out of these networks and go to LinkedIn. Some of you probably don’t know I’m also a partner at Plural and Partners, a digital agency in Los Angeles and Chile that works with brands and big ad agencies.
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