Social media is a relatively new internet marketing tool, it is very different from traditional methods like email marketing. Lots of businesses have shied away from social media, afraid of change or not sure how to use it. Some businesses that are involved don’t know how to implement a functional social media strategy, let alone gauge their social networking success. Luckily, our internet marketing company is here to take care of all of that for you, and our blog is here to share marketing strategies and tips!

Source: Perfect Customer Experience

What does success look like in social media?

Thought leadership? Better SEO? Increased sales? Better customer service? Better customer experience? All of the above?

Nearly every marketing manager, director or VP who is attending my MBA class in International Marketing tells me that increasingly larger percentages of their budgets go to digital over traditional marketing. The primary driver is social media and the urgency to stay on top of what is going on with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the relentless need for content to fuel their corporate blogs. The students in my class are divided on the value of corporate blogs however; some see it as critical for defining thought leadership and others use them purely for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While they are split on this issue, the class is unanimous that the era of digital marketing driven by social media is here and moving very fast.

What does Success Look Like in Social Media?

Just based on my class alone, only one in ten social media programs today is delivering on the goals they were designed for. That’s just 10% of social media programs attaining the goals they were originally funded to achieve. We’ve spent a good two to three hours debating this in class, looking at success stories of BestBuy, Comcast, Southwest Airlines and many others. What I really like about teaching at the MBA level is that you can have these debates in class and everyone gets very engaged, even passionate about their beliefs. It is a great learning experience for everyone to just hear the varying opinions. Based on these discussions and analysis of our own companies, the following ten ideas for improving social media strategy effectiveness emerged.

1. Be original and define key performance indicators that closely capture progress to your awareness, selling and service goals. The most successful social media programs the students had run and we studied were bold and defined their own key performance indicators and metrics of performance. Those managing these programs were not afraid to define their own unique metrics, creating an entirely different approach to defining success.

2. Realize that defining success of social media strategies on popularity and clicks alone, followers and fans is like watching mile markers disappear in your rear view mirror as you speed down a freeway. They are both comforting as they show velocity and distance – they are great measures of progress – but what’s more important is the direction and time to the goal.

3. Give each social media channel you explore a good year of effort to understand prospects’ and customer’ expectations with regard to how and what information is delivered. Personas emerge from each social media application or platform over time; watch for the nuances of differences as they will show how prospects and customers vary in how they choose to get information. Behavior varies widely across social media channels as does participation. Take a good year to track that and understand it, with no expectation of payback. Once insights are gained by personas, making strategies work is much easier.

4. The best content is compelling and evokes strong emotions through stories. This is a major point and a secret that emerges from the analysis our class did of successful social media strategies. The companies charging out of the recession right now appear to have found a way to use stories to change the frame of reference and priorities of potential customers.

5. The best social media marketing campaigns tend to be run by people more on a mission of service than salary. You can definitely see this in the case studies and the inspiring stories from the marketing directors and VPs in my class. Better to hire for passion and find someone who wants to excel at this, and who has social networking innate skills including communicating, collaborating and conflict resolution.

6. Planning for customer complaints by giving front-line social media strategies control over escalation paths and budget to solve customer problems is a win. The companies we reviewed in our case studies that range from BestBuy to JetBlue, Southwest Airlines to Comcast all defined escalation paths for dealing with customer problems. Customers choose which social media channel to learn from, they also choose which to complain through. Anticipating and planning for that, and creating escalation paths as part of a social media plan pays off in responsiveness and customer satisfaction.

For the full article by Louis Columbus, click here.

Since the onset of the social media age, businesses have had to evolve in order to stay relevant and survive. If your business is still using more primitive business methods and clinging to life, it is not too late to convert to more social business methods. The article below that I found on Convince&Convert provides the foundation for evolving your business into a more tech savvy one. If you have any further questions about making your business more internet friendly, our internet marketing company has the answers.

Written by: Michael Brito.

Building a business is easy. Start with an idea. Find a wicked developer who is willing to work 80 hours a week for small paycheck and equity. Spend some time on Sand Hill Road. Hire smart people and then watch your bank account grow.

Building a social business is not so easy. It requires people to actually communicate — processes and governance models that help shape employee behavior online — and technology to facilitate collaboration across the organization.

A social business is built upon three pillars – people, process and technology. All three need to work independent of each other, yet need to be completely integrated into the DNA of organizational culture.

1.Change Management is the foundation of a Social Business

The foundation of a fully collaborative social business, whether for a small or large firm is the company’s most valuable asset, its people. It addresses the need to drive organizational change in an effort to shift employee behavior, communicate more effectively across job functions and geographies and tear down organizational silos.

All the technology, collaboration software and community applications deployed behind the firewall will not be effective unless there is a fundamental shift in the way employees think, interact with one another and communicate. These change management initiatives have to be driven by organizational leadership and practiced at every level in the organization from senior leadership all the way down to a customer support agent. Otherwise, change will not occur. This means that executives must not only talk about changing the organization but exemplify the behaviors that really do facilitate and practice change.

The end result is an increase in trust among all employees at every level; trust of employees and empowering them to engage externally; an increase in budget investments to social business initiatives, collaboration and more effective social organization models.

2. Creating Processes that Create Organizational Consistency

Process cuts right through the entire fabric of the organization. It ensures that every job function in every business unit and within every geography is consistent when performing certain tasks. For example, when a new employee joins a company and wants to start blogging or Tweeting on behalf of the company, a process should be in place that governs training, certification and social media policies.

For the full article click here.

For more tips on how to improve your business’ social media presence and other internet marketing related assistance, please feel free to contact this internet marketing company.

Google has been attempting to compete with Facebook and other social media sites for a number of years now. Past attempts have failed, but their latest attempt Google+ is looking pretty promising. They have learned from past mistakes and made the appropriate changes to finally offer something that could turn out to be the Facebook killer. Although Google+ still doesn’t offer social media for businesses just yet, they soon will and that will lessen the edge Facebook has even further. This internet marketing company is keeping a close watch on Google+ so we can determine if it is a good marketing service to offer to clients.

Source: Soshable

Speculation often causes people to talk out of both sides of their mouth when passing judgment or expressing an opinion. This is not one of those times. While expressed as opinions, everything I’m about to post is true about the Google+ Project. The only speculation is in how Google will proceed and if Facebook can make the moves to fight them off. In reality, much of it is out of Facebook’s control. Their success or failure is, for the first time, almost completely out of their hands.

Modern Interface

One of Facebook’s biggest challenges has been making changes at a platform level. Even minor interface changes are often met with hate. There are 1.5 million members of the Facebook group We Hate The New Facebook, so STOP CHANGING IT!!! Keep in mind, the group was started based upon changes made nearly 3 years ago. It’s so old that it’s scheduled to be archived.

Three years ago, Facebook was the modern interface fighting against another huge social network of the day: MySpace. Facebook offered things that MySpace could not. It represented a way to simply connect with friends and family while MySpace was more about accumulation and bling. MySpace failed. Facebook took over. Could we be seeing the same thing happening again?

Google’s interface, what little we’ve seen of it, is extraordinarily superior to Facebook. Most of the things that annoy people about the Facebook interface have been addressed and corrected with Google+. Circles, for example, is something that technically can be done on Facebook, just not nearly as easily. A group of Facebook engineers have already hacked up an app that mimics it.

Google+ solves challenges that Facebook has never addressed. Huddle, for example, allows for quick group chats across all devices that consolidates texting and chat into something easier. Each individual element of Google+ is more integrated with “real life” than the Facebook counterpart (or lack thereof). To one blogger I discussed it with, Google+ “opened my eyes to what I was missing with Facebook.” Needless to say, she can’t wait.

Mobile Focus

The iPad is over a year old. The iPad 2 is 3 months old. As of today, there is still no Facebook iPad App, though they say it’s coming shortly. This is the kind of slow development that is normally associated with, well, Google. The iPhone App works fine for most circumstances but there is certain to be better functionality in the new one (which CEO Mark Zuckerberg is rumored to be helping with himself.)

For the full article, click here.

Social media is quickly changing the way that companies do business and interact with potential customers. Even though social media is a relatively new medium, lots of companies have developed very effective social media strategies to harness the power of the social web. For a company just implementing internet marketing knowing where to start can be daunting task. Start with the larget social networking sites, like Facebook and Twitter, before going to smaller niche sites. Below are some helpful pointers to help you hit the ground running.

Source: HubSpot

The 7 steps below work for internet marketing, ecommerce, B2B and even publishers. I’m also going to share some examples from each as well. However before we get to each of the steps, I’d like to make sure you can manage and impact your Facebook Fan conversion rate. I urge you add Google analytics to your Facebook page so that you can get better insights into who is visiting the page and how they are getting there.

1. Offer a Custom Welcome Page

Many of the most highly engaged Facebook fan pages have leveraged the ability to take non-fans to a custom welcome page instead of taking them directly to their wall. If you don’t know how to do that my friend Mari Smith can walk you through adding this custom landing tab to your Facebook fan page.

2. Remind Them Why

I am hoping you have built a customer experience that is truly remarkable much the way Zappos has. People really do love Zappos. Notice how they not only remind them of that on their welcome tab but how they also remind them that by Liking them on Facebook they get access to exclusive content. If you are truly a fan then you’ll really want access to something exclusive. Zappos also does another brilliant tactic by highlighting their Fan of the Week in their banner. People might kill for money but they’ll more likely die for recognition. So don’t forget to recognize your top fans.

3. Offer Them an Incentive

People may need a little more to get them to click the Like button than just being reminded how awesome you are. So once they see your custom landing tab, you’ll want to offer them a powerful reason to Like you. What I love about the way HubSpot does this is that the offer regularly changes and that they promote it through their various channels as a seamless experience. Who doesn’t like getting something of value just for clicking a button?

4. You Don’t Get What You Don’t Ask For

If you don’t ask them to take an action with a good call-to-action then your visitors won’t take that action. Notice how L’Occitane combines an offer to win a free trip to Provence on their custom landing tab with an arrow pointing to the Like button and asking you to Like them.

5. Make it Interactive

The biggest advantage a Facebook Fan page offers is the ability to interact with your customers - the opportunity to dialogue. Make sure to highlight this interactivity on the welcome tab. Notice how BMW shows a video that features two of their fans. I also like the design of their call-to-action. Another way you can make your page interactive is by adding a bit of personalization to your Facebook Fan page and adding your visitors name to the page.

6. Tease Them

Depending on your brand and on what you are offering on your Facebook fan page you may not want to open your kimono all at once. I have seen many pages like Red Bull use a graphic that teases their visitors to like them first before they engage with your content. A note of caution here: A. people must have some really strong reasons to like your brand in the first place B. the content you offer after the tease better not disappoint them.

7. Give Them All the Info

Ultimately, people like to connect to people and Smashing magazine does a great job highlighting the staff behind their fabulous publication. I highly suggest you have an additional tab to talk about the people behind your company and don’t forget to fill out all the information on your info tab (including several links) and on your about us section.

Source: HubSpot

Today, we at Single Throw Internet Marketing, along with millions of others worldwide, celebrate the revolution of media becoming social. A date that honors the technological and societal advancements that have permitted us to have a conversation, to unite and to engage not only with the makers of media, but perhaps more notably, with each other.

It’s an entire day to commemorate the changes in digital media that have given us the power to stay connected to real time information, the tools that have allowed us to keep in touch from worlds apart, and the platforms that have given a voice to the voiceless and sufferers of protest injustice. It’s a revolution worth celebrating.

Large cities and small towns across the globe realize the importance of social media in everyday life and are adopting June 30th as the official Social Media Day. Popular sites like Mashable are organizing meet-ups all over the place to help get the ball rolling. Business and social media connected people are planning parties within their social networks and even with total strangers. That is the beauty of social media that we are celebrating, giving everyone a voice, connecting people together. Hopefully it catches on and we can be celebrating it across the globe together for years to come!

Single Throw Social Icon Krispies

Single Throw Internet Marketing would like to wish you all a very happy Social Media Day! Follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates on our SM Day festivities as well as our services and special offers. Also feel free to write on our wall, tweet at us, or leave us a comment telling us what you plan on doing on this awesome day! We look forward to hearing from you.