@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

internet marketing

Did you try? A Look at the data from #SMWsmac [InfoGraphic]

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What can you do in 16 days? Try!

With just under a month before Social Media Week 2012, it came to our attention that NYC did not have a daylong event that was tailored to teach the small business owners and professionals how Social Media is and can be used. On Feb 1st, 2012 dbmei authors decided to launch Social Media Action Camp! The event which a few days later became an official part of Social Media Week was set for Feb 16th 2012 at the Roger Smith Hotel in NYC.

Data provided by Synthesio , and a few other sources .

The event tag #smwsmac generated over 1,000 tweets! Which represents about 5% of the social media activity in New York City. The Social Influencers reached over 116,000 followers and generated tweets in 15 countries globally!

In addition to the info from Synthesio, we also know that:

  • 102 people  attended throughout the day
  • 128 viewers at one time on LiveStream
  • 976 views on the Live Stream Channel
  • 1484 tweets to date #smwsmac
  • 71 check-ins on foursquare to the Roger Smith Hotel

The Official Social Media Week event page hosted on SocialMediaWeek.org generated 177 Facebook “Likes”, 250 “shares” on LinkedIn and 834 tweets that did not feature #smwsmac as a tag. Making the event the most socially shared event for ALL Social Media Week 2012 globally!

The Social@Olgivy Movers & Shakers platform supported by Kred featured organizer @BasilPuglisi as the top influencer for Feb 16th and both @BasilPuglisi and @dbmei as the top 5 influencers for the following day Feb 17th 2012.

The event was a mix of speakers featuring some of the digital names like Google, Klout, Synthesio, StumbleUpon, EmpireAvenue & Constant Contact. The event featured digital media professionals like David Meerman Scott, Amy Vernon, Mardy Sitzer, and Lujure’s Nathan Latka. Lisa A Burns, representing Corning Inc.,  spoke about the wonder of how a Fortune 500 Company used YouTube to capture more than 17 million views. Then the dbmei authors Bill Corbett Jr., Jeff Ogden, Craig Yaris and Basil C. Puglisi contributed their take on using social media to generate action!

The real success resulted from the response that the attendees reported.   The mix of content and style presented,  generated useful information in many areas with actionable advice and solutions.

“The diverse group of presenters offered extremely valuable best practices and actionable advice. It was also nice attending a social media event that didn’t cater to newbie’s or skeptics”  said David Gise

The event exemplified the point that “you don’t know till you try”, and while we have a long list of things we can do to make the next event even better, it’s an important point for dbmei as well as the individuals involved to say not only did we try, but we succeeded. If you take nothing else away from the article, we hope that when a opportunity presents itself, you be so bold as to try and make it happen.

 

Social Media Week Made Manhattan Move for #SMWsmac

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An attendee at our event submitted a wonderful poem about his experience at the Social Media Week Social Media Action Camp event. #SMWsmac

Social Media Week Made Manhattan Move

By Serge Zenin

Social Media Week made Manhattan move;
Networking and negotiating, we never grew numb;
Give out a business card and go with the groove;
I’ll friend you on Facebook, wherever you’re from;

Developers need diagrams drawn by art directors;
Bloggers benefit as they beckon a bigger crowd;
Consultants collaborate with crafty data collectors;
Programmers pick projects that make guru’s proud;

Puglisi Consulting prudently puts people together;
Implementing inactive ideas with inherent passion;
If a logo looks cold let’s lightly add a little leather;
If a fangate’s too flashy let’s frame it with fashion;

Social Media Week electrified the wire that conducts;
It’s about providing solutions, not selling products!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXfJQLVPsXA&feature=youtu.be]

Serge Zenin is the founder and director of BD at Media Contours, an NYC based PR and marketing company. When he’s not working, Serge enjoys writing poetry about relationships, love, modern phenomenon, and various other topics. If you would like Serge to poetically capture the essence of your business or your event, please contact sergezeninpoetry@gmail.com with your request.

New Facebook Ads Platform Goes Live on February 29th

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Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

Facebook plans to release a new ad platform on February 29th that may profoundly change the way business is done on this social media network. Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs, a social media marketing firm, recently said the following,

“The company expects the new ads to perform 40 to 8o percent better than its previous product”

That is a serious and significant increase in ad performance. Peter also posted a helpful PDF and Slideshow that seem to have come from Facebook that introduces the new ad platform.

Facebook Premium Ads Overview

[scribd id=82289675 key=key-1labfziiyerffsz1rkus mode=slideshow]

Facebook Premium Ad Guide

[scribd id=82289681 key=key-ml1e2c124st5qe456l0 mode=list]

Expected to be released at the fMC Marketing Conference, both documents reveal that Facebook’s plans to provide advertisers the opportunity to take any type of content and turn it into an ad. The new system will replace many of the classic premium options as well.

  • Premium Events
  • Premium Likes
  • Premium Polls
  • Video Comments

However, Marketplace Ads and Premium Ads will still be available.

The new Premium Ad platform will make content that is posted viewable to your Fan pages fans and subscribers, as well as adding the ability to target any Facebook user, even non-fans.

The slide above shows us that Facebook is directly sharing with advertisers that they can expect at least a 40% increase in user engagement, while gaining 80% in branding, with 16% in fan rate increase from the soon-to-be released Premium Ad platform.

Ways to Use the New Ads

Advertisers will be able to do a few more vital tweaks on the new ad platform.

  • Event Advertisement – Advertisers will now be able to create hype around their upcoming business events.
  • Update Engagement – Any update will be capable of conversion to an ad. Questions, polls, and other media updates can be very engaging ways to improve your ad campaign.
  • YouTube Love – Video ads can have very positive results. Send extra traffic to videos by building a comment base.
  • 90 Characters – Only the first 90 characters of the new ads will be visible to browsers. You will need to optimize on those as much as possible. Find a skilled copywriter if you are not sure how to do this.
  • Strategic Updates – Fashioning a fan page that helps to encourage followers to leave positive reviews on your products or services will enable advertisers to use those updates as ads. This provides a level of social proof in advertising.

It definitely looks like Facebook ads are going to undergo some improvements. DBMEi will stay current on the successes or failures that advertisers will experience once the new ads go live.

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.

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The Buzz about Pinterest

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Interest in Pinterest has been buzzing around on social networks for a while now. Pinterest now has buttons on many sharing sites that did not have them before last month.  So what exactly is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a tool for organizing and sharing images online. If you find something that inspires you or interest you, you can use your Pinterest account to create a visual bookmark to the link. These images are then known as Pins.  Users can place their Pins on their own boards that they can label with specific themes if desired.

Pinterest’s focus is to provide the means for a connection for everyone on earth through shared interest. Based out of Palo Alto, California, Pinterest is chock-full of notable investors and entrepreneurs.

  • Hank Vigil
  • Kevin Hartz
  • Fritz Lanman
  • Jack Abraham
  • Jeremy Stoppelman
  • Michael Birch
  • Ron Conway
  • Scott Belsky
  • Shana Fisher

Pinterest allows users to ‘repin’ the Pins of others. So what happens when you Pin an interest?

  • When you repin an interest you are allowed to categorize the image onto your own boards.
  • Liking someone’s Pin will add the image to your personal profile’s Like section. The image doesn’t get added to one of your boards.
  • Users can choose to integrate their Twitter and Facebook accounts with Pinterest.

Pinterest is another social networking opportunity for so many who enjoy this helpful new element of internet communication. Users can create their own gift wish list, or simply just share their personal preferences with the world.

Get Started on Pinterest

There are many ways to utilize and enjoy Pinterest.

  • Social Networking – Just like Facebook and Twitter, users can add each other through Pinterest’s system.
  • Profile creation – If you Google yourself, you will likely find the highest links are from your personal social network profiles. Pinterest gives you another chance to create one.
  • Create a wish list for your next birthday or anniversary. Share it with those you need to drop a hint to.
  • On that same note, your friends who are on Pinterest are already providing you with a potential gift wish list. No more sneaking around asking people close to them what they may enjoy as a gift.
  • Get inspired! Use Pinterest for inspiration for any number of things, including work!

Create your own vision boards on your favorite topics and trends with Pinterest.

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Twitter Tools: twithawk, a lead generation tool

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Another arrow in the quiver of the savvy internet marketer is Twithawk, a lead generation tool.

Founded in 2009, Twitterhawk, as it was called back then, had to do a name change because Twitter felt it is too close to their name. It didn’t deter Chris Duell, the Australian founder and developer, to fine tune his product and make it available to the World Wide Web. He just changed it to Twithawk.

Twithawk is a real time marketing tool which enables a marketer to find new people to connect with and increase his base. At the same time he is advertising his product.

Based on keywords and location, Twithawk will pull all the Twitter conversations mentioning the key-words or the location, and deliver them in real time. It enables the marketer to answer those tweets and interject into the conversation. Or he can have an autoresponder answer those selected tweet immediately.

Here are some examples: A radio station wanted to increase its base. They set up Twithawk, and chose as keywords names of rock bands they were playing.

Every time a tweet talking about one of the bands went into the Ethernet, it was pulled by Twithawk and the autorepsonder sent a message: “If you like this kind of music, why not listen to radio xxxx? They play what you like”.

Or, when talking about location, a coffee shop owner in Springfield Illinois can set the keyword to “coffee” and the location to Springfield. When someone tweets about having coffee in this town, he can immediately send a reply saying “Why not give Buck’s coffee a try? We have special deals for tweeters…”

Twithawk is pro-active. Instead of placing an ad on a site and waiting for clicks, the marketer sends a reply to a person who is already talking about what the marketer has to offer. If you can start a relationship, says the going wisdom, you can turn this person into a customer.

To prevent this tool from becoming a spam machine, something that worried most experts, the program sends only one tweet per day to the same person, and the number of tweets is sold in packages of 1000. Twithawk charges $0.05 for each tweet sent, and the marketer can monitor the marketing true CPC with link tracking and integrate it with Google Analytics. The site’s average CPC is $0.02, which is much cheaper than any other marketing method.

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Ways to Build Up Your Email List Using Facebook

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Internet marketing is not what it used to be, experts like Guy Kawasaki say. If you were dealing with internet marketing before Facebook, you know it was all about emails. Obtaining prospects, finding the leads and hoping for conversions.

Email marketing, when done right, is personal and not stuffed with ads and commercial. It does help build followers and stay in touch with them. The White House, Barack Obama and Michele Obama, separately are using this method. It works not only in commerce.

But Internet Marketing is changing fast, as do our habits and ways we connect with friends, family and business associates. Today we are building groups – extended families, tribes if you will. And we are doing it on social media.

And it goes without saying that the most popular place to do so is Facebook. As of the end of 2011, Facebook has over 800 million active users with more than 50% of them logging on to Facebook every given day. The question is how to use this resource to build a great marketing campaign?

It can take a lot of time and money to build a big following (100,000+). It is not as easy as it sounds and even when you do manage to build a huge base, it will not necessarily increase your profits.

A savvy social media marketer knows how to transform his following into a very responsive email list.

Here are a few tricks of the trade:

Facebook Connect – Using it on a Squeeze Page is worth a test against traditional Squeeze Page. It’ll show you if Facebook is a faster and cheaper way to build your community. Most of the traffic you’ll get will be from social media sources or paid ad on Facebook. It might be easier to get personal information through Facebook and have more people you can email and your articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos or webinars.

Like Button – Put a “Like” button on your Facebook ads, and the ‘call for action’ would be to press that button. This way, when they click on the picture in your new ad, you already have the Like.

One Time Offer – Drive people to your website page by posting a link to it instead of posting the video directly on Facebook. Give them a one-time offer that is really worth their while. Why? Because this way you have the “Like” and you have their name and email address. The deal you gave will pay for itself with the new customers you just got. Apply it to any special report or newsletter. After they opt in, explain they will be receiving an email very shortly and subsequent email with links to new videos or special reports.

Ads for followers – Making an ad to your Facebook ‘friends’ is very cheap. You should do it often. You’ll get more info very inexpensively compared with other systems.

The Blurred Method – Create something entertaining for your fans, a special – just for them for joining your Facebook page. Create a fan page for this purpose only. Blur out parts of the video, unless they input their information. Put a Like button with the content and a direct responder. When they press the Like button it will reveal a way to get access to the content, with an opt-in. That is how you get their contact info. After that, show them your content. Use Facebook to post information about what you have created. You can also create a Facebook ad for this purpose.

Autoresponder – You have to have a built-in auto responder for at least 30 days. Find out what you are most interested in; videos, blog posts, other Facebook groups or other created content. Be consistent. Write emails every day for 30 days and drop that into the autoresponder sequence. Add p.s. to your emails with your site’s address for services or products.

Direct Response Blog – Create a loop between social media, email, and Facebook. Your social activity will grow your email, the emails will drive revenue. But if you have a blog to tie it all in, you give them a whole new aspect of the business – it’s all about you. If you prove to be a source they like, a leader in your field, they will bring others into the group. More email addresses, more leads to turn into buyers.

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Radian6 – Cloud Based Command and Control of Social Media

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Radian6 provides marketing, communications and customer support professionals with a platform which enables them to see, in real time, what is said about them and their products in all aspects of social media; in tweets, Facebook, blogs, multimedia, forums, conversations and boards. By doing so, it gives the business the ability to manage, track, respond, report and analyze their reach and sentiments toward their products.

Marketing is no longer what it used to be, says Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com.   In his keynote speech at the Cloudforce Winter 2011 conference, in New York, he showed how it has become, in big part, Social Marketing. The ability to listen to customers, to reach out to them at the moment they are ready to buy or make a change, is what differentiates great and not so good marketing.

Introducing the New Radian6.

It used to be data-based marketing, when you have the database on premises and you segment it and turn it into your e mail list. But in today’s segmentation, your database can be the entire internet.

There are thousands of conversations going on social media channels every hour of the day. How do we make sense of all those conversations on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks? How do we reach the people that are already taking about our product and use them to spread the word? How do we put out a flame before it becomes a fire-storm?

Here is what Radian6 has to offer: A complete social marketing app that is cloud based. A social hub that includes monitoring, insights and reaction. Command and control everything that you do in social marketing from one place. Based on some criteria keywords that you put into the system, Radian6 will pull out every conversation that is going on, which includes your keywords. This cloud application will do it in real time.

You’ll know what they are saying, where they are saying it, and what is the sentiment.  You can drill into the conversations as they are happening and take action. You can set up automated rules that define how you want to handle criteria and route it to the appropriate people in the organization for immediate action.

For marketing campaign managers it means no more 30 day old focus groups, where you are reacting to information that happened 30 days ago. And you don’t need hundreds of people to gather that information and analyzing it. All you need is technology that allows you to scale the social media walls.

With drilling even further, you can find out all the available information about that customer that is asking a question about a service you provide. Where is that person present on social media, where he is located geographically and previous contacts you had.

And you can grab that information, route it to the correct decider and communicate an offers right back to that person through social media channels. Offer that might answer a need the market has at the moment. You can do it across all the channels. Even though the customer used Twitter for example, you can answer in any other form and even present the offer on their mobile device. 

Radian6 was acquired by SaleForce in March 2011

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bMim-uGOWY]

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Facebook Marketing Solutions – Staying Ahead of the Social Media Game

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There are so many Facebook Fan pages dedicated to marketing and social media topics that it can seem nearly impossible to zero in on those that actually offer true education and not just covert advertisements of their own products. When searching for an educational Facebook Fan Page, you may have already found that having one source for everything you need is nearly impossible.

Facebook Marketing Solutions may have found the perfect combination in Facebook Fan Page Marketing Education. It supplies more than one needed element when planning a full-bodied marketing campaign. It is proving a useful tool for helping internet marketers reach their targeted consumers.

Run by employees of Facebook, you can find an abundant wealth of information here that can directly benefit your business.

APIs

Through efficiency and innovation, Facebook’s marketing APIs can help marketers achieve success. The companies listed on the Facebook Marketing Solutions page have developed proprietary tools with various functions for reporting, monitoring, campaign management, and ad creation.

They also provide a list of managed services. Managed services generally support both business models but may, in some instances, use different brand names.

Some of the available API tools include:

Tools

Some of the managed services listed include:

Managed Services

Success Stories

With a long list of small and large business success stories available on Facebook Marketing Solutions fan page, users in any industry should be able to find a story similar to their own goals for business growth.

Here are a few stories we previous covred on dbmei, Facebook Success Stories

Endless List of Resources

Facebook Marketing Solutions fan page seems to have an endless list of resources.

  • Facebook Marketing Bootcamp U.S.
  • Facebook Marketing Bootcamp U.K.
  • Videos from Business Leaders like CEO, Chris McCann at 1-800-Flowers.com & Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.
  • Past and Future Events Listings
  • Business Boost for Beginner Small Business Owners

You can find resources and case studies available on their wall at any given time on such things as scaling, product development, and even a good buy or two along the way.

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Google+ Pages Open the Doors for Brands and Businesses

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This past June, immediately after Google launched it’s highly anticipated Google+ social network, internet savvy businesses like Ford, Dell and Mashable.com rushed to create pages for their brands. Only to have them removed a few days later. Google’s announcement soon followed: “In the meantime, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google+. The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. (Christian Oestlien Ads project manager on Google+)

One hundred days later Google delivered on its promise. On November 7, 2011 Google+ announced the grand opening of Google+ Pages worldwide.

Google+ Pages allows businesses, brands, and organizations create their own page and establish a circle of like-minded people who enjoy the brand and want to talk about it. Not only does the page allow having a conversation with brand representatives in a way of personalized customer service, it also allows the group of followers to have a conversation with each other.

As Google+ puts it, when it talks about the customers: “…we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about—from local businesses to global brands… this means we can now hang out live with the local bike shop, or discuss our wardrobe with a favorite clothing line, or follow a band on tour. Google+ pages give life to everything we find in the real world. And by adding them to circles, we can create lasting bonds with the pages (and people) that matter most.” (Google’s blog)

Not only brands and businesses are involved. Google+ wants to enlarge the circle of users to local business, products, corporations, institutions, organizations, arts and entertainment, sports teams and more. They have been working with businesses since the launch in June to understand the needs and requirements of brand names. You can see the pages of these businesses already active:

  • Dallas Cowboys
  • Macy’s
  • Pepsi
  • Toyota
  • Anderson Copper 360
  • X games
  • Zen Bikes
  • The Muppets

Having pages for brands and businesses is nothing new, but Google+ has a few advantages over the competition:

  • People can recommend the brand easily by pressing the +1 button, and start sharing immediately.
  • A brand can have more than one page. A car manufacturer, for example, can have a page for each of its models.
  • Although Facebook has over 500 million users, and Google+ has, so far, about 50 million, the biggest advantage of Google+ has to do with the billions of queries made every day on the search engine, most of them looking for businesses or services. Google will include Google+ pages in its search results.
  • Direct connect – The easiest way to find a band you like to follow or a product has been amended as well. Typing the sign + before the query will take the searcher straight to the brand page. (Try it with + Angry Birds)

The official announcement on Google’s blog ends with these words: “With Google+, we strive to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. Today’s initial launch of Google+ Pages brings us a little bit closer, but we’ve still got lots of improvements planned, and miles to go before we sleep. So stay tuned.

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Facebook Ad Campaigns – Are They Working?

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A World Obsessed with Facebook

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJXOavGwAW8]

With so many potential customers on Facebook, Facebook ads should be a profitable and beneficial to your business. With over 850 million users, and 225 million of those in the United States, there is quite an audience to target through the use of Facebook ads.

How Facebook Ads Work

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhn0-MrDR18]

The Facebook Ad Marketplace

Like other online advertising options, Facebook ads are a type of marketplace where the user bids on how much they are willing to pay to reach their prospective consumers and how much they will pay if those consumers take action.

Facebook has become a common place for businesses who are using customized Facebook Fan pages to increase the amount of fans on their page, thereby increasing their consumer base. Fans are simply customers waiting to happen. So how do you make sure you are getting a good ROI from the investment on the ads?

Basic Marketing 101 – ROI

To determine your ROI you should take your gross profit, subtract the capital spent on your Facebook ad campaign, then divide by the expense. This should give you a good comparative measure in which to determine which of your marketing expenditures are most effective for your business.

Has Anyone Had Real Results from Facebook Ads?

If you watched the video above, you heard from Bob Ford, a representative for Papa John’s Pizza. He describes how an ad placed on Facebook increased their Facebook fans by 130,000 fans overnight with a one day engagement ad.

Starbucks ran their own event on Facebook ads for World Aids Day and had an overwhelming 950,000 people who agreed to attend the event. Alex Wheeler, a Starbucks PR rep shares, “I think it (Facebook) is really effective because its part as the content experience that people have on Facebook. They can interact with it. They can actually participate. We can have these shared ideals with our customers.”

The Value in a Facebook Ad as Part of Your Marketing Campaign

The ultimate benefit, just as the Facebook developer in the video states, is that Facebook itself provides not only the venue to advertise to direct demographics, but that its very nature encourages other Facebook users to share the content with their network. This means that with an effective Facebook ad campaign, many of your connections could be made for ‘free’ in the form of users who willingly share your content with others. This digital version of ‘word-of-mouth’ advertising has proven to be highly effective for some.

“The conversations are happening, with, or without the brands participation.”

Do you want to be a part of the conversation?

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