Do You Know Your Customers Enough to be a Social Media Hit?
Guest post from Susan Baier, a 20-year digital marketing strategy veteran with an MBA in Entrepreneurship. Her company Audience Audit provides strategic marketing support and audience segmentation research that helps organizations understand their customers better. Being relevant to customers isn’t about just using their first name in an email. True relevance grows from a […]
6 Required Competencies for Social Organizations
Now, marketing is the center of American business. Why? because through social media, customers are praising and criticizing companies in public in a way that requires marketing to triage and respond. Three years ago, if Kevin Smith would have been kicked off a Southwest flight for being too fat, he would have yelled at the gate […]
Is Your Social Strategy Proactive or Reactive?
Is your social media program about asking, or answering? Like Sonny divorcing Cher (or was it the other way around?) there’s a schism coming in social media between companies using it for marketing, and companies using it for customer service and CRM. Thus, one of the first questions I recommend you ask about your social […]
Turn the Tables on Social Media with NutshellMail
Keeping tabs on your social media connections these days is like bar hopping, without the cocktails or pool tables with stained felt. You run over to check your Twitter account. Then you dash to Facebook to see what’s going on there. Then Linkedin. Maybe your blog. All the while you’re feeling like you’re playing catch-up, […]
The 39 Social Media Tools I’ll Use Today
Subscribe to our new Definitive newsletter: High grade digital marketing guidance, topically sorted, and curated to the max. You pick the categories, we deliver the content. The best content from around the web, on topics you care about and need to be an expert in. Amazingly, it seems like there’s more social media tools than […]
Social Media and Email – More Alike than Different
From a business objectives standpoint, isn’t uni-directional social media more similar to email than it is different? Social network connectivity is becoming the post-modern email newsletter. A way for consumers to stay up-to-date with the brand, hear about special offers, and occasionally advocate to their friends. This puts significant pressure on email to be more […]
Is It Curtains for the App Store?
Guest post by Bob Dennis, freelance Web designer with experience in everything from audio production to social networking. After two-and-a-half years, iPhone app developers are getting fed up with Apple’s lengthy and often inconsistent approval process. Also, $0.30 may not seem like much, but the fact that Apple is taking 30% of all app profits […]
Integrating Email and Social Media with Flowtown
Aren’t social media and email more alike than they are different? Both seek to keep your brand top-of-mind with customers and prospects, communicating in a relevant, timely way that ideally is measurable and testable. But the problem with email and social media is that too many people are positioning it as an either/or scenario. Several […]
The Social Impact of Friendships and Lies
Do you trust me? Social media relies on the premise that we’ll believe what people tell us more readily than if we were told the same thing by a nameless, faceless company. That’s why brands go to great lengths to humanize themselves on the social Web. But, a new study by Edelman (whose digital arm […]
Please Help Me Pick a New Look For My Blog
I’ve been making a few tweaks to Convince & Convert recently, with the help of my friend (and WordPress/SEO ninja) Chuck Reynolds. We’ve added Disqus as the commenting system. Changed the sharing tools to incorporate Sexy Bookmarks plug-in (Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner turned me on to it). We’re working on tweaking the subscription […]
11 Mind-Blowing Reasons Your Company Needs Facebook
Do you have your copy of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help not Hype? Visit Amazon or Barnes & Noble to get your copy now! Wow. Remember when MySpace was the dominant social network? Seems like a long time ago, as the past three years have seen Facebook approach, catch, and blow past MySpace […]
The Chicken and the Egg Social Media Conundrum
There are many ways social media differs from traditional marketing. It’s approachable and human. It’s a two-way dialog, rather than unilateral declarations. It treats the customer as a teammate, rather than a target. But there’s another big difference. In social media, the audience comes after the message, not before. Remember that when you buy a […]
Is Your Company More Interesting Than My Wife?
If you’re going to succeed on Facebook, you don’t just have to be more interesting than other companies, you have to be more interesting than my friends and relatives. Are you prepared for that? My friend Jeff Widman runs BrandGlue, a consultancy that helps companies better manage their Facebook fan pages. He told me recently […]