What is it? What is it good for? Engagement.
One of the primary selling points of social media is the concept of engaging a potential customer or partner in your product or service. So how do you accomplish engagement on a personal level?
25 Ways to Engage a Potential Customer Using Social Media
1. Start a blog. This seems like an obvious one. This should be one of the first things you think about doing when contemplating using social media as a marketing tool. There should always be a hub where your contacts can interact. The so called “hub.” Wordpress is a great tool to start blogging. Get on it!
2. Join Foursquare and Use it during the business day. Foursquare is a service that allows you to update your location to the people following you on a regular basis. I do not recommend using this tool after business hours (could turn a little creepy) but it can help your contacts get an idea of what you do on a daily basis. Even if you are just sitting in your office for most of the day.
3. Join LinkedIN and recommend your partners. Most of us are already using LinkedIN (if you are not click thislink for great information on LinkedIN). When you start to recommend the people you love working with it will help spread Read more…
25 Ways to Engage Contacts in Social Media
By: Posted on: July 30th, 2010
Do It Yourself Online Reputation Management Toolkit
By: Posted on: July 26th, 2010
Listening to real time conversations for opportunities, leads, and reputation management is now a standard marketing item on the to-do list.
While there are services such asRadian6, Trackur and Jive Software (Filtrbox) that provide this kind of tracking for a fee, there are a number of tools that any do-it-yourselfer can employ to capture much of what’s being said about their brands, people, products, and industries in real time:
1. Google Alerts
This one is certainly not new, but I still find people who don’t tap into it. Google Alerts allows you to set up as many custom searches as you like and have Google alert you via email or RSS when any mentions of those search terms hits their radar. Not 100 percent foolproof, but very good.
2. Google Reader
Google Reader is an RSS reader, which means you can use it to subscribe, capture, read and display anything that produces an RSS feed. Most people use it to sort and read blogs, but anything with an RSS feed will show up here, so you can filter a great deal of content, including tags in bookmarking sites such as Delicious. Every customer and competitor blog feed should be in here.
3. MyReviews Page
Rating and review sites such as Google Places and Yelp have become essential marketing tools. Monitoring reviews is a big part of managing and building reputation on these Read more…
Misfit Entrepreneurs
By: Posted on: July 21st, 2010
Imagine Walt Disney at the age of nineteen. His uncle asks him what he plans to do with his life, and he pulls out a drawing of a mouse and says, “I think this has a lot of potential.”
Or Springsteen. In a concert he once told the story of how he and his dad used to go at it — how his father hated his guitar. Late one night, Springsteen came home to find his father waiting up for him in the kitchen. His father asked him what he thought he was doing with himself. “And the worst part about it,” Springsteen says, “was I never knew how to explain it to him.” How does he tell his father, “I’m going to be Bruce Springsteen?”
Someone interviewed me a few months back for an entrepreneurship project, and he mentioned that in his conversations the thing that stood out most was the willingness of great entrepreneurs to be vulnerable. It’s not the first association you’d make with an entrepreneur. Words like “driven,” “ambitious,” and “persistent” usually come to mind. But the moment he said it I knew he’d hit the nail on the head.
Vulnerability. It is the most poignant quality in every entrepreneur I know.
There’s a misfit in each of us, and it’s the most delicate, precious thing that we have. Sadly, Read more…
10 Steps To Design a Logotype
By: Posted on: July 19th, 2010
When designing a logo, you shoud know which type of logo would be the most fit for the client, type that will help you achieve a great solution. There are three basic types of logos, Iconic Logo, Logotype and the third is Combination Marks which combine between Iconic and Logotype, Each of these different classifications of logos have its own design challenges and features. We will talk about Logotype – also sometimes named Wordmark or Typographic logos -. Logotype is a standardized graphic representation of the name of a company, institution, or product name used for purposes of identification and branding. Type fonts that you are use or design come in thousands of possible sizes, variations, shapes and styles, each of them conveying a slightly different impression upon your intended audience.
In this article, we will talk about 10 points you should know as a logo designer and considering when you designing a logotype.
1. Begining with Reading
Undoubtedly, If you do not knew typography rules and how to works with letters, You can not design a professional logotype. Therefore i recommend you to read Thinking with Type book for Ellen Lupton. The book include three sections, namely Letter, Grid and Text. So it will helping you so much to design professional logotype. Read Most 20 Books You should read them
2. Sketching
Start the Logotype process Read more…
Ads That Follow You Across the Internet – A Twist on an Old Idea
By: Posted on: July 16th, 2010
Sometimes the most interesting innovations come from the simplest ideas.
Case in point: one of the hottest online advertising trends today is something called “ad retargeting.” Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch explains retargeting this way:
“The idea is simple. When you visit a retailer’s or other advertiser’s website, it drops a cookie on your browser and the next time it sees you pop up on another site it loads an ad from that retailer. You’ve already expressed interest in that advertiser by visiting their site, so they retarget you whenever they can. It may sound a bit stalkerish, but trust me, everyone is doing it.”
There are some variations of this definition, but for our purposes today it’s close enough.
Even Google is now offering retargeting of its Google AdWords, calling it “remarketing” and giving this example on its official Inside AdWords blog:
“Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked Read more…
Nine Keys to Getting the Most for Your Marketing Money
By: Posted on: July 14th, 2010
1. Ask your questions
Begin your agency relationship by sharing your business goals — as concretely as possible — with your agency. If you don’t have an in-house marketing director, your agency can translate your goals into marketing strategies and tactics that will be the blueprint to achieving your objectives.
If this is your first time working with an agency, go over the contract fine print upfront. We try to do an Agency 101 with new clients to explain how we bill, how the project will flow, what the processes are. Don’t be shy when asking about advertising terms, some of which are right up there with Aramaic.
2. Throw back that curtain
Once you have committed to an agency relationship, treat the agency as a partner. We are not the printer repairman; we’re an extension of your marketing team. An agency can help create some remarkable shifts in your business, but not if you keep us at arm’s length. Throw back that curtain and share what’s worked in the past and what hasn’t. Give us access to your team. Let us listen in on your customer calls and evaluate all of your touch points — your reception area, proposals, receipts, signage, ads and Web experience. A good agency wants to be challenged and held accountable for results.
3. Do your homework
Our vice president and Read more…
3 Social Media F-Words (and 3 Companies That Use Them)
By: Posted on: July 8th, 2010
There are many well-known examples of companies doing some wonderful stuff with social media and marketing.
Often, though, we hear about the usual suspects. Comcast, Zappos, Sharpie, JetBlue and Southwest are doing great things in the social space, but other businesses have many other fresh social media marketing ideas that you may not have heard about.
What sets them apart and makes them worth a look? These companies share the common traits expressed by three F-words: They are Friendly, Focused, and Fertile. Here’s what I mean:
Friendly. Social platforms and tools aren’t one-way broadcasting tools or mouthpieces to just talk about your own stuff. Instead, they are tools for engagement, and they give a business an enormous opportunity to put a face and personality and voice to the corporate edifice by communicating directly with their customers in a very real way.
In other words, the countenance of a Friendly company is human, genuine and sincere. It’s clear who manages accounts on various platforms, so that customers (or would-be customers) can easily feel the presence of an actual person (or persons).
Who does this well: Wiggly Wigglers, based in Hereford (UK), is a natural gardening company that sells to the backyard gardener. Founder Heather Gorringe is a lively, approachable presence on Twitter (Her husband, “Farmer Phil,” posts there, too.) I particularly like Wiggly Wigglers Facebook page for its friendly, Read more…
9 Things to do Before Entering Social Media
By: Posted on: July 1st, 2010
You’re going to give this social media thing a solid chance. You’ve heard that social media delivers leads, connects you with customers and you’re confident that you can avoid falling victim to the many social media myths. All that’s left to do is create the accounts hop in.
Wait! Not so fast.
Before you enter in the world of social media, make sure you’re presenting your best possible face. Getting things in order before you take your first public steps will help customers trust your interactions and get things start on the right foot. You wouldn’t show up to your wedding without taking some time to primp, right?
Here are 9 things to do BEFORE you enter social media.
Create a rulebook: Before you step onto that field, memorize your plays. Study the channels you plan to use, listen to the conversation, understand the behavior and create your rulebook for how your company will engage. Identify how you’ll handle common support issues, the tone you’ll take, how you’ll address negativity, how fans will be rewarded, etc. Work up fake scenarios and create a plan for how you’ll deal with them. Look at issues competitors have had in social media and map out how you’ll do it better. The more you prepare, the better off you’ll be. Negative commenters are a lot less imitating when Read more…
45 Rules for Creating a Great Logo Design
By: Posted on: June 28th, 2010
This list is an exploration of design principals used in some of the world’s most famous logos.
At the same time, the list was created as a way for designers to question themselves and the creative techniques they use when creating a logo design. Forcing the reader to reflect not only on the actual list, but also on their reaction to each listed insight, the last rule is the most important.
Do not use more than three colors.
Get rid of everything that is not absolutely necessary.
Type must be easy enough for your grandma to read.
The logo must be recognizable.
Create a unique shape or layout for the logo.
Completely ignore what your parents and/or spouse think about the design.
Confirm that the logo looks appealing to more than just three (3) individuals.
Do not combine elements from popular logos and claim it as original work.
Do not use clipart under any circumstances.
The logo should look good in black and white.
Make sure that the logo is recognizable when inverted.
Make sure that the logo is recognizable when resized.
If the logo contains an icon or symbol, as well as text, place each so that they complement one another.
Avoid recent logo design trends. Instead, make the logo look timeless.
Do not use special effects (including, but not limited to: gradients, drop shadows, reflections, and light bursts).
Fit the logo into a square layout if Read more…
10 Ways to Deny the Recession
By: Posted on: June 24th, 2010
I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said “Refuse to Participate in the Recession.” I have no idea if that driver had a job or was looking for one, but he was obviously electing to make the most of the challenges he faced.
Many say the U.S. economy is still in a recession based on the fact that unemployment is still high and consumers are continuing to temper their spending habits–two elements that define a recession. However, anyone with the desire to be an entrepreneur has to have the attitude of my friend with the bumper sticker.
So how does an entrepreneur succeed in a recession?
Become Indispensable
In a tricky economy, it’s natural for people to want to protect the security they still have. In the service industry, one way to prove that your product or service is part of the solution is to point out the consequences that could occur if the service was not around. Try “secret shopping” your customers and document the outcomes; then secret shop a business that doesn’t use your service or product. If there’s an obvious difference, use these stories to sell your businessback to your customers.
Invest in the Future
Most recessions last only a year or two. Companies that fail to continually invest in business improvements, training and marketing are way behind when the economy recovers. In terms of Read more…
