Social Media Guide

Posted on 30pm00k by o2task

Small Business News: Small Biz Social Media Guide

Social media is such a huge part of small business marketing these days, we just can’t resist sharing the latest whenever we can. This roundup is arranged with the latest news and opinion, but also as a guide to help you figure out the latest trends and where your business needs to be looking in the near future. Do you have a plan for using social media? If not, we hope this roundup will get you started. Please leave any additional thoughts you believe might help other business owners in the comment section below.

News & Opinion

State of social media today. How is your small business affected? Are you using social media to market your company online? Like other aspects of your business, the world of social media is evolving almost daily. How is your business responding? Today’s effective new trend could be tomorrow’s old school. Be ready and be aware not only of where social media is but also where it is headed. And what this means to your bottom line. Business2Community
Why even bloggers need a business plan. Is there more to being a superstar blogger than just sitting down at your laptop and blogging your way to fame and fortune? You bet there is! That’s why many of the greatest and most successful bloggers out there have a surprisingly well-developed business model backing them up. Want to know more about how the social media universe works? Read more from Christine McCarthy on strategic business planning for your blog. Christine.com

Research

Social media is boosting small business everywhere. And there’s data to support it! Of course, a lot depends on what expectations you have for your small business in the first place…and how you use your social media campaigns to connect with your community and customer base. But be assured, social media will attract more attention to your brand and lead to better leads in the process. Small Business Trends
2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. Here is the hard data from Michael Stelzner. Referred to in the Small Business Trends article above, this is the full report on how social media is evolving. There is a list of highlights, a video overview hosted by Stelzner and, of course, the report itself free for download and perusal. Stelzner asks that everyone who reads and finds the report helpful share it via social media with a friend. Social Media Examiner

Trends

How to avoid marketing with social media? Of course, marketing your business or personal brand is the whole point of social media…or is it? To use social media best, perhaps we must first change how we look at marketing versus building relationships and sharing information in a more authentic manner. If marketing means talking about yourself and your product 24/7, then maybe it’s time to rethink what marketing means to you AND your customers. BizSugar Blog
Social media makes your small business look bigger. But use of social media is not about presenting a false image of you business. Instead, it’s about being able to reach more customers quickly and in a different way than has ever been possible before. As Ramon Ray of Smallbiztechnology.com explains in the article above, “With the rise of social media and ubiquity of online software the time is NOW for small businesses to reach a big business audience…” Nuff said! Inc.com

Tips

Using technology to thank your customers. Sure, you’re using tools like Twitter and Facebook to spread your brand and to share more about your products, services and company. But, if that’s all you’re doing, could you seriously be missing out on a big opportunity? What about customer service, thanking your customer and making them feel valued and special? Put your social media efforts to work in this area, and discover a whole new range of possibilities. Smallbiztechnology.com
Why you don’t need to be social with everyone. Social media may be all about reaching out and getting in touch. But could there be some folks you don’t want to associate with so much out there in social media land? Oh, there sure are and have we got their number! Just check out the post above and see if you’ve already met some of these characters on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere. And if you have, consider avoiding them in the future. Small Business Trends

Tools

Startups developing new social media tools. Maintaining your social media presence can be a daunting task, especially added to everything else you’ve got to do in your small business. So how do you monitor and take part in conversations about your business out there on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms while still creating the incredible products and services that make your company great? We’re glad you asked. Fox Small Business Center

Book Shelf

The Social Media Survival Guide. With everything going on in the social media space, the bottom line is that small businesses must begin to take these powerful tools seriously. There are a lot of great resources out there to help, but when it comes to creating a campaign that works, what’s a newbie to do? If there is one book that can lay out some simple answers small businesses can use immediately, Ivana Taylor has this suggestion…and a detailed review. Small Business Trends

>How To Set Up A Facebook Deal For Your Business

Posted on 31am00k by o2task

Image via Wikipedia

How To Set Up A Facebook Deal For Your Business

by Niall Harbison in facebook

Looks like Facebook have started insisting on a minimum Ad spend of £50,000for brands. I’m writing this post because this blog has a decent audience of business owners and I want to give them a kick up the ass to start offering Facebook deals. I’m doing it part out of selfishness as I want to see more deals appear but also to open people’s eyes about just how simple it is to do and attract real physical punters in to your premises. The information is out there already and Facebook are trying to encourage people to offer deals but businesses seem oblivious to the possibilities so now with no more excuses here is the complete guide on how to do it yourself. The benefits are that you can get more customers in to your premises and if they do check in to claim your offer they are telling all their friends and raising awareness of your business and the deal to their own social network. The best part is that all of this is free (for now!) and you can have a deal set up in minutes. 250 people access their Facebook account from mobile devices now so you would be a fool not to tap in to that huge potential. Get cracking with setting up your own Facebook deal now…

Claiming Your Facebook Place

So the first thing you need is a knowledge of Facebook places. Facebook places essentially allows users to check in to physical places using their mobile phone. Once they check in somewhere it publishes an update back to their Facebook page. Your Facebook business page and and your Facebook place can be linked up and to do that you will have to find your Facebook place and look for the “is this your business” link on the left hand side. Clicking on that will bring you through a step by step process that will allow you to claim that place and become the owner of it.

Adding A Deal

Once you have claimed your Facebook place you should go to that place and you will see a button that asks you if you want to create a deal. Clicking on that will bring you on to the image below which gives you a selection of deals that you ca offer your customers. As you can see the deals are fairly self explanatory and you can tailor a deal based on what you can offer to incentivize your customers with.
Once you’ve added your deal you’ll be able to define it a little further (first 20 people to check in get the deal, 20% off, check in 10 times to get a free coffee etc etc). You can set a time limit on deals and all deals need to be approved by Facebook which can take up to 48 hours. In just a few simple steps though you have created your very first Facebook deal and can now sit back and wait for customers to find you while they are out and about using Facebook.

How Do Customers Find And Claim Deals?

In an ideal world I walk in to a shopping center or shopping street and find all the deals that are in my area by opening “nearby places”. Deals are marked with a little yellow tag and you can flick through them. In countries where this is already well established like UK and USA there are more and more deals but here in little old Ireland I have only been able to spot 2 (hence writing this post). Customers who spot a deal can claim it by simply walking in and showing that they have checked in on their phone.

The Benefit Of Deals

It’s pretty obvious that you would want people to find your deals because not only would it bring more people physically in to your premises but it also pushes that information back to the users Facebook profile alerting their friends. If you are smart about it you can get groups of people checking in to your premises (bars, nightclubs and restaurants take note) or even use deals as a cheap loyalty card solution. The future of deals is going to evolve even further as group buying comes to Facebook in a couple of weeks and it’s well known within the industry that hyper local advertising like this is the future. You have a chance without Facebook deals to dip your toe in the water and give this a shot for free so please please start offering some deals!

Related SimplyZesty Posts:

>How to Use Amazon Cloud Player

Posted on 31am00k by o2task

How to Use Amazon Cloud Player for Android

by Sharon Vaknin

Amid rumors of Google and Apple launching their own cloud music service, Amazon.com quickly released the Amazon Cloud Player. The service lets you upload up to 5GB of music to the cloud for free, which can be accessed from any other computer or Android device.
Sadly, iOS and other mobile platforms were left out–Amazon did not release an app or Web compatibility for them.

http://www.cnet.com/av/video/embed/player.swf

With the Amazon MP3 app for Android, you can play, edit, or download music stored in the cloud. Music you purchase from the in-app store can be automatically backed-up onto your cloud and won’t count against your storage capacity. Clear up some storage on your Android phone, and keep your music safe with this quick guide:

Sharon Vaknin

Full Profile E-mail Sharon Vaknin

Go-to intern Sharon Vaknin blogs for CNET News, tests MP3 players, and coordinates inventory at the CNET Labs. She’s a broadcasting student at San Francisco State University who’s unashamedly addicted to social media and sushi. E-mail Sharon and follow her on Twitter.

>HOW TO Add Clickable Links in YouTube Videos

Posted on 31pm00k by o2task

by EarnBlogger

Have you tested LinkedTube? LinkedTube is simple but smart flash widget tool that will enable you to create clickable links over YouTube videos with your own embed code. The created link appears as a floating button over the video and can be used to link directly to your blog, website, product page or anything else. Even other people can get the code and share it on their websites.

With LinkedTube, you can create custom YouTube video link widget in less than a minute. It has a simple form where you can enter the YouTube video id or URL, your own link text, link URL, hover title and hover text. That’s it! Your video link is ready. Just save and get the code to embed it on your blog, website or anywhere on the Internet. This simple tool also offers an option to specify how the link button appears. You can set it to show always, show on hover or never show.

In my view, it is the simplest third party solution to insert a link layer above YouTube videos. You can use it to make your videos more viral, as unlike ordinary YouTube videos, the embeddable video created with LinkedTube links back directly to your site. And when other people shares your video, they all will link back to your site!
Got it?
Why don’t you give it a try?

>O2 HUB >> THINKING AHEAD: The New Small Business Marketing Landscape Of 2011

Posted on 31pm00k by o2task

Digital marketing has become VAST:
Marketing techniques constantly have to evolve and change with changing times; as the consumers evolve, so do the means of reaching out to them. Today’s consumers belongs to a digital age.
Talking about spends on digital marketing in 2010, approximately $154.4 billion was spent on direct and digital advertising in 2010, up 2.7% over 2009 levels. Of that amount, digital spending accounted for $27.7 billion, driven by search and targeted display advertising.
When we talk about digital marketing the pool of options available to a marketer are vast. From the latest mobile marketing to online display, there are numerous tools that can be used. However, the key lies in using each tool strategically to get the best results from the campaign.
Businesses cannot ignore their ONLINE FOOTPRINT:
Internet has become an integral part in businesses as well as homes. Internet users form a huge audience which marketers cannot afford to ignore. What people talk online can have a direct impact on sales. With search engines becoming ever more powerful, even the smallest remark on a blog or twitter status update, can be fetched and put forth in front of an information hungry web user. This has increased the need for continuous online analytics, not only of your own website, but also the entire web, wherever your name is mentioned.
Altered PR CYCLE:
As market dynamics change the age old means of driving publicity and PR also have to evolve. Today PR has evolved from merely pushing news to the media to a stage wherein content and messaging has taken center stage. Competition mapping, giving out the right message, and closely mapping industry movements helps build a strategic PR campaign. One that not only talks about your company but also helps you position your company in the industry as a thought leader. Monitoring conversations and real-time coverage clearly speaks about how PR has been altered to develop an intelligent messaging strategy.
The CONSUMER has gained substantial power:
Consumer is king!! Today there are a number of factors that influence a buying decision; from purchasing power to influencers that surround the consumer, have a huge role to play. Hence influencing the influencer is the new marketing mantra. With social media emerging as a huge platform to connect and network, this has led to the emergence of a certain set of individuals who are considered as opinion makers. These people have considerable clout because their thoughts, insight and opinions are highly valued by a large network of followers, friends, fans and readers. As a marketer you must identify who these individuals are and devise an influencer marketing strategy to reach out to them.
DIALOGUING is better than push marketing:
Consumers today have a mind of their own and are smart enough to identify push marketing strategies. The new age marketing technique has moved away from ‘in the face’ marketing to subtle and more conversational style of selling. We live in a connected world where engagement, interactivity and dialogue play a huge rule. To converse and interact with your potential customer is essential to sell your product.
AMBIGUOUS marketing efforts have no future:
Marketing campaigns need to be structured and targeted. Any marketing effort that does not have a defined objective and a desired result in place is destined to fail. Ambiguous marketing campaigns that do not have a roadmap or a step-by-step roll out plan that leads to a pre decided conclusion will not achieve the desired results. Many businesses are rushing into social media marketing without knowing what they are getting into and how they will maintain it. Ill planned campaigns will lead to no or poor results.
Consistent MEASUREMENT and ADJUSTMENT is the key:
Any campaign that is launched needs to have a measurement matrix in place. At the end of the day, marketing is aimed at supporting and increasing sales. A campaign needs to be measured in terms of some quantifiable metrics. Especially in the case of social media marketing, a measurement criterion is essential to gauge the success of the campaign. Also it’s important to have the necessary flexibility in place. There should be room for changes and modifications in the strategy to achieve best results. There are times when market dynamics cannot be controlled. The marketing campaign should be made flexible to accommodate last minute modifications.

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>A Networked World is a More Random World

Posted on 31pm00k by o2task

A Networked World is a More Random World

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

By their very nature, networks – of customers, Web sites, weather patterns, evolutionary systems, or economic competitors – are subject to random and unpredictable movements.
Networks of interrelated things, whether we are talking about the Web or a collection of stock and bond prices, often grow in a kind of “cascading” pattern. For instance, because one person buys a stock, others think it must be valuable, too – so they buy it. Influential customers become more influential at a faster rate than those who aren’t already influential. The most visited Web sites gain visitors faster than others, and wealthy people become wealthier at a faster rate than others. The reason this kind of cascading occurs is easy to understand, but the effects of cascading like this can be quite random. Cascading means that two systems could be set up with nearly identical initial conditions, but even very slight, almost undetectable differences between them will inevitably escalate into major differences after just a bit of time, creating what has come to be known as the “butterfly effect.”
All reality is, in fact, time-dependent. Everyone’s life today is a culmination of all the sometimes random events that have shaped it. Think about how you met your spouse, for instance, or why you chose your college major, or how you landed your first job, or how you just missed an important flight, or how you got rear-ended by someone. Each of these events is memorable to you and will have had an important role in shaping your life, but many of them could easily have turned out differently, in which case you might have a completely different life today, with a completely different perspective.
One consequence of network structure is that periodically a whole system will go through a very significant change for no obvious reason. For instance, while current thinking is that the dinosaurs and many other species were apparently eradicated by a catastrophic meteor strike, it is in the nature of evolutionary networks that periodic massive species extinctions will occur with a certain predictable probability, with or without massive externally generated disasters. This is simply the way complex systems behave.
As technology brings increasing “connectedness” to our world, the volume and speed of the various feedback loops that link human beings and all economic actors are increasing. Our system is speeding up, in other words. It is cycling into different states at a faster pace, so the butterfly effects of minor changes and perturbations will be felt even faster and more significantly in the future.
While we can all try to pin the blame for the current financial crisis on various factors – deregulation or over-regulation, greedy business executives or cynical politicians – the fact is that any economic system as complex and interconnected as ours will almost certainly go through occasionally comprehensive and wrenching changes.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to repair and upgrade our economic system once in a while, in order to try to avoid the catastrophic consequences of these ups and downs. But it does mean that no matter how good our efforts are, they will be temporary at best, and the next cycle hit us with just as much surprise as the current one has.

>A Networked World is a More Random World

Posted on 31pm00k by o2task

A Networked World is a More Random World

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

>The 4 Es of Social Media Strategy

Posted on 31pm00k by o2task

Jill Dyché in her Information Management Blog “The 4 Es of Social Media Strategy” contests that companies

are pretty vague about the drivers for the new “Social Media”initiative.

Apart from the usual platitudes of “getting closer to employees, partners, and customers via lower-cost channels” it turns out very few business leaders can answer my question about the desired outcome of social media analytics.
In our experience, there needs to be at least one prevalent driver for social media.

She calls these the “4 Es of Social Media Strategy.”

There are already some great examples of companies that have zeroed in on one of these areas used it as a foundation for other drivers. For instance, J.C. Penney offers its Facebook fans—now over half a million strong—unique deals and discounts, clearly leveraging the social media channel to Engage a younger demographic of apparel customers. Earlier this year the retailer leaked its Oscar ads on Facebook before the show aired, mixing a little Entertain with a lot of Expose.
Indeed, many on-line retailers remind shoppers about shipping rates and return policies on their websites and through their blogs. But web strategist Jeremiah Owyang wrote this week about how Levi uses social media to Educate shoppers to “like” a product and to tell their friends about it.
Del Monte has leveraged the power of social networking with its “I Love My Dog” community, in which dog lovers can interact with the company and with each other. Del Monte gets 40 percent of its revenues through pet products (Snausages, anyone?). Who knew?

And that’s the point. Del Monte has gone from Expose as its primary driver—ensuring that pet owners ($2 billion a year strong) know about its various brands—and moved to Engage as its workaday model. The packaged goods company enlists its ready-made social community in surveys—using it to test marketing campaigns and get feedback on new product ideas—and occasionally moving over to Educate when it comes to product ingredients. In the meantime Del Monte is collecting information that can inform new campaigns and product ideas.
Over time your company’s social media strategy can incorporate each of the 4 Es, but there is usually a single prevailing need that will likely justify the initial effort, and provide the foundational platform and skill sets for subsequent social media activities. The key is to avoid making social media a “research project” or, as a Chief Marketing Officer pronounced it recently, “an intellectual exercise with no tangible benefits.” In a word, Ouch!

Jill also blogs at JillDyche.com.

>The 4 Es of Social Media Strategy

Posted on 31pm00k by o2task

Jill Dyché in her Information Management Blog “The 4 Es of Social Media Strategy” contests that companies

are pretty vague about the drivers for the new “Social Media”initiative.

She calls these the “4 Es of Social Media Strategy.”

Jill also blogs at JillDyche.com.

>Social Business Intelligence: The Pipeline Dream

Posted on 31pm00k by o2task

James Kobielus in his Information Management Blog “Social Business Intelligence: The Knowledge Management Connection” contests that Business intelligence (BI) has always had a “pipeline” orientation– known as “simplex” information transfer; in other words, a primary focus on the one-way flow of data, information and insights from “sources” (e.g., your customer relationship management systems, enterprise data warehouses, and subject-area data marts) to “consumers” (e.g., you).

However, many real-world intelligence flows are full-duplex, many-to-many, and person-to-person in orientation. This fundamental truth will continue to drive the spread of “social” architectures in core BI and advanced analytics…

Forrester has recently seen a growing interest in “social BI,” and in fact my colleagues and I recently social-blogged our collective thinking on this topic. Since then, we’ve seen vendor announcements, such as TIBCO Silver Spotfire, that invoke this new industry catchphrase. We’ve seen considerable discussion within the analyst community generally about this release and about what this and other vendors are doing in social BI. In this present post, I’ll be repeating some of the points from my inputs to the earlier Forrester blog, but am extending my observations to call out a broader emerging context.
For starters, social BI is no fad, nor is it an entirely new phenomenon. As I pointed out more than 3 years ago in the pages of Network World, many BI vendors had already added collaboration functionality such as instant messaging, human workflows, and shared analytic project libraries to their solutions. The trend has deepened since that time, as evidenced by the steady convergence of social networking into BI product architectures, as well as by the demonstration of shared discovery and visualization features in analytics initiatives such as IBM’s ManyEyes project. Yours truly alluded to what we now call social BI when I stated, way back then, that we should “expect to see such interactive Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX, blogs and wikis revolutionize the BI experience.”
As I noted in the recent Forrester multi-analyst blogpost, the move toward fully social BI implies all of that plus the following features, which, we predict, will find their way over the next few years into a wide range of commercial BI solutions:

Social BI interactivity: We’ll see growing incorporation of Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and kindred models of user-centric development, publishing, and subscription into the heart of the interactive BI user experience. Accelerating the trend toward pervasive BI, we’ll see more solutions that enable reports, dashboards, charts, and other BI views to be embedded in social media. You can regard today’s collaborative BI mashup offerings, discussed in my Forrester report from a year ago, as pointing the way toward this style of self-service team-based development, as do BI solutions from Lyzasoft, Tableau, JackBe, and other social-focused vendors.

Social BI content marts: We can expect to see more BI solutions that support extension and/or replacement of traditional data marts with vast user-populated pools of complex, mashed-up, subject-oriented analytic content and applications. It’s not inconceivable that what I’m calling “social marts” will incorporate and build on content repositories that many enterprises have built on platforms from today’s enterprise content management (ECM) vendors.

Social BI information integration: Users will be able to choose from a growing range of BI solutions that support discovery, capture, monitoring, mining, classification, and predictive analysis on growing streams of social media content, much of it coming in real-time from both public and private sources. Essentially, this is where advanced analytics features such as social media analytics, social media monitoring, and social network analysis, subject of another recent blogpost of mine, will converge into the growing social BI stack.

Pardon me for tooting my Nostradamus horn yet again, but I’d like to call attention to another long-range trend that I glimpsed then, and which the movement toward social BI shows is coming to pass. In 2007, I said “over the next several years, expect to see the BI, collaboration and knowledge management (KM) segments converge.” Some may have considered that a stretch, if not a bit far-fetched, considering that these are all large, well-established markets providing solutions that many enterprises, to this day, deploy in separate siloes. However, with the growing incorporation of social networking architectures in enterprise collaboration, content management, customer relationship management, and other tools, it’s only a matter of time before these market segments blur into a seamless cloud of social KM solutions.
As an enterprise IT professional, you’re probably watching all this with the usual combination of bated breath and healthy skepticism. Obviously, social BI is far from a mature marketplace. The industry is groping for a common approach toward which to evolve. BI vendors are still trying to get their collective heads around the vision of social BI. Just as important, vendors are, in their various ways, striving to differentiate through innovative new features that are aligned with the sorts of capabilities many of us enjoy through our personal dabblings in Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
As your current BI vendors roll such features into their products, you’ll probably start using them when you upgrade in the normal cycle. To the extent that you adopt small-scale BI solutions for particular business units, branches, or teams, those deployments might benefit from social BI that either supplements existing collaboration and KM tools — or eliminates the need to acquire those other, stovepipe solutions.
Social’s the thing, all right. Once you — and your BI vendor — are ready to move toward a more social-oriented capability, it would make sense to socialize those plans with some significant others inside your company. Start with the people responsible for your company’s collaboration, KM, and ECM initiatives.

Like what you see? Click here to sign up for Information Management’s daily newsletter to get the latest news, trends, commentary and more.

Jim also blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/james_kobielus/.

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News & Opinion

Research

Trends

Tips

Tools

Book Shelf

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Claiming Your Facebook Place

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