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St. Louis Missouri (MO) Small Business Social Media Marketing
St. Louis Missouri (MO) Small Business Social Media Marketing
Tag Archives: St. Louis Social Media Marketing Information
In order to change the context of customer relationships from trying to sell to seeking to engage and connect with customers, companies need to use various means, including sites like Facebook (
) and Twitter (
), to socially interact with people. The most popular brands in social media tend to post less about their products or services and more about things that help their customers get to know the people and personality of a company. Their goal is less about “selling” and more “engaging” — and, as a result, through such engagement people feel more comfortable doing business with those companies.
With sites like Facebook and Twitter, we all essentially have our own broadcasting network, and businesses are beginning to see that rather than spending millions of dollars on traditional ad campaigns, small acts can be more valuable because people will inevitably share such experiences through the social web.
Of course companies need to have employee policies, and there is such a thing as bad press, but look at the most popular companies in the era of social media, and you’ll generally find the ones that give their employees freedom to be themselves in online spaces. The goal should no longer be to create a very controlled and polished image that everyone in a company tries to reinforce, but rather to give employees the means necessary to be human beings that can put a friendly face on the corporation.
To engage with customers, it is no longer enough to have an email address and customer service number on one’s website. Today, people want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, or a feedback site like Get Satisfaction ().
In this new era of social media, companies are asked to be increasingly transparent and personal. Of course, traditional advertising and press releases will still have their place, but social sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow a whole new type of communication to take place that has previously been unknown to most businesses. Possibly more important for businesses than getting a large number of followers on social media sites, is following through on the opportunity to forge more genuine and direct connections with their customers.
Small Business Owners in St. Louis – Who’s Stealing Your Clients Using Social Media?
What does it cost to think?
The Original Post: What is the cost of thinking? Can be found at: http://www.relationship-economy.com/?p=5232
Your boss says”Our competitors are stealing our customers using this social media stuff. We need to use this stuff and do it better than our competitors and we need to do it NOW!”
You are then tasked with “doing it” but you have no experience or knowledge of what to do. So you look for help and find an outside resource whom supposedly has the experience and knowledge to know what to do. You bring the option of hiring this person to your boss and they ask about the cost and what will they get from using this resource. You tell your boss the cost but aren’t sure exactly what it is you’re going to get. Then your boss says “I know we need to do this but I don’t know what it is or what we’ll get from it”.
How can a company put value on something they don’t understand? How can they understand if they have no reference to “think about it”?.
What Is Required To Think?
Thinking about social media cannot increase understanding without the appropriate knowledge. Anything new or innovative takes time to understand and determine how to use it effectively. In order to think effectively one must first acquire the knowledge necessary to think about using social media strategically, tactically and with specific purpose. Without the knowledge thinking will only produce the wrong outcomes because your thoughts are limited to what you know, not what you don’t know.
The reality is that learning to leverage social media requires people and organizations to reThink everything. This thing everyone calls social media has serious strategic implications and to just “do it” without gaining the knowledge to think about what needs to be done is a sure disaster.
Think About This
A business runs on communications. Without being able to effectively and efficiently communicate you end up wasting time and money. Money represents time and cost in rework, fixing misunderstandings, setting the wrong customer expectations and not effectively and efficiently communicating to your employees, customers and your market.
The cost of not thinking about these issues is increased cost. However being able to “think” about these issues may require the infusion of new knowledge which may not exist in your organization. W. Edwards Deming once said “knowledge required to change the existing system to a better system must come from outside the existing system”. Why? Because the existing system is blinded by its own thinking. Get it?
Thinking About Social Media?
Who isn’t? The Corporate Executive Board said “Most companies are embracing social media—but too many are wasting their efforts through sloppy management”
More than 70% of companies are already using social media; many are planning to increase their spending on social media across the coming years. Whether for learning from customers, building their brands or a range of other hoped-for outcomes, companies are clearly diving in.
If you dive into the social media water without knowing its depth or where the rocks are you are likely to break your neck. To avoid breaking your neck you should first get the knowledge about that which your about to dive into. Without knowledge people, and entire organizations, perish. Think before you jump. But before you can think effectively you must first get new knowledge. Social media knowledge doesn’t come from self appointed gurus or experts who know how to get you followers and traffic. The cost of thinking increases when you don’t think. Get it?
What say you?
Effective Marketing for Small Business Owners in St. Louis Missouri: Social SEO & Channels of Distribution
Posted by Lee Odden on Oct 5th, 2009
Original Text and Post available at: http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/10/social-seo-channels-of-distribution/
At several conferences I’ve used the image above to illustrate how a blog can be the centerpiece to a social SEO effort where objectives are focused on raising brand awareness and improving customer relationships in a way that is beneficial to search engine visibility.
I see several key opportunities with a unified SEO and Social Media strategy:
1. Social media involvement produces content. Content that is optimized and linked to, does well in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Therefore, optimized social content and the digital assets that are common to social media (images, video, audio and widgets) are all optimization opportunities. Better search engine visibility means more traffic to social media content from customers that are looking for it.
2. Of the top 20 search engines according to comScore qSearch in August 2009, 3 are search functions within social media web sites. YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google. MySpace and Facebook are also in the top 20. In fact, Facebook’s percentage of increase from July to August was more than double any other search engine in the top 20.
The increasing popularity of search within social networks presents optimization and analytics opportunities. Marketers need to realize search doesn’t just happen on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Twitter is many things, including social network, messaging platform and search engine.
3. While great content is instrumental for great performance within organic search results, publishing in a vacuum is naive. Creating distribution channels for great content can drive awareness, traffic and inbound links. Optimized content with a quantity of quality incoming links results in superior search visibility.
Social networks and media sites that have social networking functionality offer prime opportunities to interact with communities of interest and can be particularly effective as distribution channels.
If there were ever a legitimate way to automate link building, it would be the RSS disribution and syndication functionality to promote new content to people who are interested. Those same people are often publishers in the form of blogging, reviews, comments and new features like Google SideWiki with the ability to link out to what they’re interested in.
The diagram above illustrates this situation well, where a blog is the central repository of content and social media sites around it are the developed networks of communities and channels of distribution for quality, keyword optimized content.
What other opportunities do you see with Social SEO?
I’ll be presenting on this topic today at 9:45 during the MIMA Summit, Salon C. If you’re attending the sold out event, I hope to see you there. If not, check out the live video stream on the MIMA Summit web site. We’ll also be liveblogging the event here, so watch for more posts later this morning and afternoon.
Twitter to Launch Lists Feature: A Benefit for St. Louis Small Business Owners
Coming Soon! Twitter to Launch Lists Feature
Nick Kallen @nk from the project lead on twitter lists reported that twitter is testing a new feature with a small subset of users.
Their idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends etc.
The Lists would be public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you create are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.
A Benefit for St. Louis Small Business Owners: Twitter Launches List Feature
The Twitter platform team started working on this feature because of the frequent requests they received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter. Of course, that means not just twitter.com—the Platform team will follow up in a few days with information on the Lists API. This will allow developers to add support for Lists into their favorite Twitter apps.
They’re just doing limited testing for now. But once they’ve tested the feature out a bit, they’ll launch it for all accounts!
St. Louis Missouri Small Business Owners Need to Know About the 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business
St. Louis Missouri Small Business Owners Need to Know About the 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business
Great article by Soren Gordhamer read the original here: http://mashable.com/2009/09/22/social-media-business/
Soren Gordhamer writes and consults on ways we can more creatively and effectively use the technologies of our age, including social media. He is the author of “Wisdom 2.0″ (HarperOne, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter at @SorenG.
Social media is helping to forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities. Gone are the days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers, often in an attempt to convince people that their products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed radically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.
Companies now face a clear choice: wall themselves in and become increasingly controlled and hidden, or use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers. The old game is undoubtedly over, and the question now is, “what can businesses do to transition and succeed in this new era?”
Below are the top four broad shifts that social media is causing in business. Please feel free to share any others you have observed in the comments.
1. From “Trying to Sell” to “Making Connections”
In order to change the context of customer relationships from trying to sell to seeking to engage and connect with customers, companies need to use various means, including sites like Facebook (
) and Twitter (), to socially interact with people. The most popular brands in social media tend to post less about their products or services and more about things that help their customers get to know the people and personality of a company. Their goal is less about “selling” and more “engaging” — and, as a result, through such engagement people feel more comfortable doing business with those companies.
Jeff Swartz, who is the President and CEO of the Timberland Company, is a great example of this. Swartz uses his Twitter account to show his personality by tweeting about his life and the social issues he is passionate about, rather than the shoes his company makes. He also links from his Twitter bio to Timberland’s Earthkeeper project that supports environmental awareness, rather than to the company homepage, in an effort to make a connection with people around something that goes beyond just the products Timberland sells.
Lesson: Release fewer “official statements” and more personal ones that help you make a connection to your customers and audience.
2. From “Large Campaigns” to “Small Acts”
With sites like Facebook and Twitter, we all essentially have our own broadcasting network, and businesses are beginning to see that rather than spending millions of dollars on traditional ad campaigns, small acts can be more valuable because people will inevitably share such experiences through the social web.
In the past, if we had a very bad or very good experience with a company, it could take days or weeks to tell all of our friends and relatives about it. Today, in a matter of minutes, we can let all our friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter know about what happened. When every customer experience can be easily and widely broadcast, small issues become super important.
Loic Le Meur, CEO of startup software company Seesmic (), once told me that one of the most important jobs of a CEO today is to hear what people are saying about the company’s product across social media channels, and to respond to them directly. In fact, much of his Twitter stream is @replies to people commenting on his company’s product.
Bigger companies, such as Southwest Airlines and Comcast are using Twitter in the same way, making sure customers’ concerns are addressed. Because bad experiences are broadcast just as fast and just as easily as the good, it pays for companies to pay attention to the one-on-one customer relationships forged via social media.
Lesson: Instead of only relying on big campaigns, make authentic, helpful relationships and communication the new campaign.
3. From “Controlling Our Image” to “Being Ourselves”
Of course companies need to have employee policies, and there is such a thing as bad press, but look at the most popular companies in the era of social media, and you’ll generally find the ones that give their employees freedom to be themselves in online spaces. The goal should no longer be to create a very controlled and polished image that everyone in a company tries to reinforce, but rather to give employees the means necessary to be human beings that can put a friendly face on the corporation.
I am not sure how NBC directs the social media efforts of their employees, but in watching NBC newscaster Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) on Twitter it is clear that she is not simply trying to get people to watch her shows. Curry is someone who speaks out about women’s rights, deeply cares about justice, and likes to quote the Persian poet, Rumi — there is a person there, not a company representative, and as such, I am much more likely to pay attention when and if she does talk about any of her television shows.
John Nack, the Principal Product Manager for Photoshop at Adobe, offers another great example. Adobe is a company that smartly encourages and provides the means for their employees to blog, and anyone who reads Nack’s blog will notice that Adobe doesn’t put many restrictions on what people write about. Nack’s blog is focused almost exclusively on his area of interest — graphic design and photo manipulation — but he doesn’t post solely about Adobe products. Many of the interesting art projects and articles he links to have nothing to do with Adobe and some may even have been created using software from competing companies.
Lesson: Forget the unified company image, give staff the freedom to be themselves, and trust that the relationships that they build will help the company in the long run.
4. From “Hard to Reach” to “Available Everywhere”
To engage with customers, it is no longer enough to have an email address and customer service number on one’s website. Today, people want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, or a feedback site like Get Satisfaction (
).
If I want to communicate with a company, I tend to look them up on Twitter first. Knowing that I can communicate with a company on the networks upon which I am already most active makes me feel more comfortable doing business with them, because I know that if I have an issue, there is someone at the company I can communicate with through those means.
Companies like Dell, for example, have fully embraced multiple channels of support. Their community site lists all the ways customers can connect with them through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr (), YouTube (), forums, blogs, email, and more. Dell wants people to be able to connect with them through whatever channel is most comfortable.
Lesson: Rather than expect customers to communicate through your chosen means, allow them to do so through their chosen means.
The New Business Paradigm in the Age of Social Media
In this new era of social media, companies are asked to be increasingly transparent and personal. Of course, traditional advertising and press releases will still have their place, but social sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow a whole new type of communication to take place that has previously been unknown to most businesses. Possibly more important for businesses than getting a large number of followers on social media sites, is following through on the opportunity to forge more genuine and direct connections with their customers.
Businesses who choose not to adapt to the new culture will be at an increasing disadvantage, as their customers slowly build personal relationships with their competitors. We are now in the age of open communication, engaged dialogue, and transparency, and business success may now have less to do with the size of ad budgets, but on the quality of interactions with customers.