Chief executive officer

How to Make Your Event Successful

March 13, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Those who organize events know that the success of the event depends on many things, least of them the weather. The amount of options and the connections the attendees create in an event will dictate if they will join you next time or not. In other words “What would I get out of it?”

Even in our connected and social media rich world, business is still done face to face. The biggest hurdles business people have to overcome are psychological; how to introduce themselves to strangers, how to portray themselves without seeming cocky and how to make the most of the time in the event.

Pathable.com is a new program that aims to create a virtual gathering place before the start of the event. It is a private online community which aims to facilitate introductions and highlight common interests. They provide an interactive space for the attendees to gather and share information.

When one registers an event, all the attendees are asked to fill a profile. Those profiles are personalized with photos and links to other sites and all other web representations in social media; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more.

This has the potential of introducing the attendees to each other before the event starts. People can see who they would like to meet personally at the event and start a conversation beforehand. The program even makes it easier to spot them; people with common interests are highlighted.

Starting a discussion in forums is encouraged, and because people can converse, they can also set meeting to take place during the event. The software enables mailing schedules that will appear on all the chosen attendees’ schedules at the same time.

A personalized conference calendar is available for each attendee, so they can easily build their own schedules as well. The program enables attendees to save space for private meetings and has a diagram of the conference, including all the booths and private rooms to make navigating the event very easy.

Event sponsors can create their own pages and sponsorship tools that target specific channels. They can participate in the conversation and communicate with the attendees in a non-intrusive way. It provides another place for targeted advertisement.

All those features are available in a mobile app for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Windows and Android as well. Easy to use and quick to respond.

Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

Sources:

http://www.pathable.com/tour/

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pathable

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/profitable-growing-pathable-raises-cash-events-social

Inbound Marketing Summit NYC 2012 – 3 Important Tips to Take Home

March 12, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

new-home-feature-111 — Image c/o http://inboundmarketingsummit.com/event/new-york/

If you had the opportunity to sit in on the panels at the Inbound Marketing Summit in New York this year, you likely took away a few vital lessons that you can carry to your business. The conference itself has evolved over the last few years. It has held a focus on social marketing strategies, but has also begun a swift evolution to cover other vital elements such as social TV, touch screen devices, and mobile marketing, as well as defining what these technological shifts really mean for professionals utilizing engagement skills and strategies.

While many interesting points were made, there were absolutely three great highlights that every small business owner should consider when focusing on social media and fan engagement.

Social Media Advertising

Most social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn have opportunities for advertising at relatively affordable prices. While businesses are building and managing their content in order to break through valuable channels to achieve better engagement, they are finding that advertising can be easy when it is placed where people are hanging around the most. With the many Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn stats we are familiar with when it comes to time spent on social networks these days, there is no doubt that although more affordable than many other types of digital or traditional advertising, they are still highly effective. The IMS panels recommended trying this out on your Facebook Fan page since it is significantly easier to build an audience there.

Responding and Engaging

IMS2012 — Image c/o http://socialmarketingfella.com/

You have heard it before here at DBMEI, it is not enough to simply create formats for your consumers to interact with, you actually have to be responsive, and in a relatively short period of time for maximum engagement opportunities. Business owners can either use a team to ensure engagement in a timely manner, or they can use alerts and other monitoring programs to ensure their consumers or prospective customers are given responses before too much time has passed. They should also not wait until there is an issue to engage, even if a visitor just stops by to post or praise your products and services, give them a swift thanks a Like, and a special coupon code when at all possible. Make interactivity on your social media platforms a source of mutual positive reinforcement when at all possible.

Have a Plan

Business owners need to have a plan. You shouldn’t be rolling over, firing up the computer, and tapping your fingers until the content idea comes to you. You need a lot more of a forecasted plan than that. Using a social media editorial calendar can be a helpful way to pre-plan and map out topics so that they are optimized for distribution, coverage, and of course engagement. You should know ahead of time, aside from breaking or important trending news, what type of content will be created and when it will be set for distribution. Knowing your audience and what type of content they can appreciate, combined with a social media editorial calendar will help business owners to better manage engagement with current or potential consumers.

Many other vital points arose that are also swiftly becoming crucial elements in business marketing such as tablets and social TV and their respective places in a full-bodied marketing campaign. Since Americans still watch around 35 hours of TV per week, many now on touch screen devices and tablets, marketing professionals now need to begin to consider how to capture an audience’s attention across multiple devices simultaneously.

However, it is also important to recall that another lesson from IMS included understanding user behavior over in-depth knowledge about emerging technologies.

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Monitoring Your Social Reputation with Kred

March 1, 2012 by basilpuglisi@aol.com Leave a Comment

Social influence is gaining notice as more advertisers, marketers, consumers, and affiliates use it as a method of gauging the knowledge, credibility, and reliability of prospective new clients or business contacts. There are other systems of influence measurement, such TwentyFeet, Klout, and Peer Index. Between them all there is a whopping level of social influence analysis to be found. So which should you be using? From someone who has experimented and experienced a little of what each has to offer, I’d have to say, use each of them for the best option they offer for social influence measurement.

[slideshare id=9465635&doc=kredslidedeckv15-110928212859-phpapp02]

What Does Kred Offer?

Kred offers many of the same options as the others. A collaborative algorithm will allow you to enter your social network accounts to gather an overall score listing the highlights of your personal topics, and circles of influence. However, Kred does offer a few things that the others do not, or lack a particular focus on.

Analytics

Kred seems to have an analytics platform that is a bit more detailed than the others. Using a system known as PeopleBrowser, Kred has based their analytics system around the notion that they believe social analytics can depict accurately, how human behavior and influence can provide data to help businesses increase productivity, community, and growth.

Community

An important element to any brand is the ability to find the right community that cares about your services or product offerings. When you include the chance to pinpoint top influencers in your industry or topics, a brand marketer’s job gets a lot easier.

Transparency

Kred is unusually upfront about how scores are handed down, down to every mention, retweet, follow, like, and so on.

See what Scott Milener of PeopleBrowser has to say about their platform.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKTEXlGuxgM]

Influencer Reality

True influencer reality is not going to come from Lady Gaga, or a Kardashian. Although any company would be delighted to have one of those famous influencers tweet or share their brand, the true consumer is unlikely to run out and purchase relentlessly just because Gaga or Kim said they should. However, the true consumers, those that may buy your product or services, and then relate their wonderful experience with you to all of their friends, is the epitome of influencer reality. Klout and Kred both seem to have a good realization of what it means to base an algorithm and platform on the real consumers companies are clamoring for attention from.

Kred vs Klout – Fun Fact

If you think that the competition between Kred and Klout when it comes to providing the best tool for social influence, it may also be important to note that these two companies also share the same city and office space, not just the same views on social influence. However, as much as each company seeks to shed light on the same platform of social influence, they also appear to have different viewpoints on the true sources of online influence.

If you want to learn more about the basics of Kred, check out this helpful PDF.

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