Marketing

Social Media & Brand Monitoring: Collective Intellect

April 4, 2011 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Collective Intellect, a company out of Bolder Colorado, has been around since 2005. They provide software and services to help businesses monitor and analyze real time marketing intelligence agregated from a broad spectrum of web and social media platforms.

Similar to other companies (Radian6 and SM2 to name only 2) who provide software to monitor brand visibility and statistics on popularity and campaigns, their software searches the web, blogs, microblogging, images, and many social media sites for keywords related to your business.

Refining that search, they claim, is their advantage over the competition. Their solution addresses the inaccuracy and bluntness of keyword search and the abundance of results that have very little to do with your business.

Since all the vetting is done by machines (logarithms), those mistakes are bound to happen and clutter or skew the results you will be getting. Collective Intellect has developed a system that searches the web not only by keywords but by the semantic connection between words. Latent semantic Analysis (LSA) exposes latent contextual meaning within a large text.

They offer these programs plus professional advice for prices up to $1,000 a month. Here are some of their offerings:

CI:Insight – Tells you where you are as a digital brand. Using semantic search and analytics their software will tell you where you are on the “social maturity curve”, as they call it. You can review each phase and decide which tools and methods can help you achieve your goals. The software will automate the results to see the consumer consideration and preference, sentiments, demographics, and influencer’s profiles.
CI:Listen – Social monitoring – tracking online conversations about your brand.
CI:Learn and CI:Listen – Social Presence. Measure your market before and after a launch, take actions in real time, and improve your visibility.
CI:View – Social Research –analysis that is specially configured to your needs for more effective social engagement. It is set to be repeatable, and direct feeds are integrated into the dashboard.
Social CRM & Targeting – strategic guidance, professional services.
Social BPM Engagement – intersection between process automation and social networking

Their customers include PepsiCo, Western Union, CBS, iVillage, Viacom, Dole Food Group and Verizon Wireless, among many others.

The past 3 year growth of the company stands at 1505%. With 40 employees the company’s 2009 revenues were $2.7 million.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWJlTH6sSZU]

Sources:

Business Media Solutions: SlideShare

March 30, 2011 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Slideshare may be another aspect of online commerce and marketing that may sound like one of the little guys, for now. However, this site offers large varieties of business media solutions in the forms of documents, slide show presentations and even downloadable pdf files. Professionals from many niches upload their business content, while other viewers breeze through and comment on the uploaded media.

Features of SlideShare

Members can have their content uploaded to the site and embed their own personal website or blog
Content can also be shared privately
Can be used as an effective marketing tool in helping to promote or advertise an event

Additionally, SlideShare openly promotes users getting together to create their own groups so that they can interact with people who share the same niche interest as them.

Advantages of SlideShare Coverage

The single most important aspect and advantage of utilizing SlideShare is that every piece of media uploaded to the site can be viewed by their over 70 million viewers per month.

Users can niche network by creating or joining existing groups. This can help increase contacts, and therefore opportunities.

While being a part of a group can have many networking and marketing benefits, SlideShare user groups can also collectively modify and even enhance current online content.

SlideShare Media Creation Tips

Keeping a few helpful marketing tips in mind when creating content that you plan to upload to Slideshare can be imperative to having a successful business media marketing campaign.

Go Visual

Use a lot more visual markers and easy to understand symbolism as opposed to more text. Plain and simple, human beings prefer to be visually engaged if the other option is mounds of jumbled text.

Keep it Short

Try to get to the point of your content quickly. Rambling discourse and biased opinions are unlikely to garner increasing views or ‘word of mouth’ consumers.

Precision Tagging

At the end of each upload users are given the opportunity to choose their content descriptions as well as adding their tags, or keywords. Use keyword tools such as Google’s keyword tool to find the best keywords to describe your content or product.

Call to Action

If your content is one of your marketing tools you will definitely want to supply a ‘call-to-action’ at the end of each presentation. A link to click or short advertisement for your product is sufficient. Badgering your viewers with constant self-serving links is not nessecary.

Who Uses SlideShare?

There are a lot of larger corporations who have social strategist users on SlideShare to help increase awareness and promote their products or services.

A Sears representative, Vanina Delobelle, has uploaded a highly viewed and rated presentation on social strategies. With over 120 thousand views, Vanina certainly achieved a great marketing feat for any level of personal or corporate users.

Niall Cook of H & K has also been a regular contributor since 2006.

Alexa tells a detailed story of SlideShare user statistics. Global Alexa traffic ranking shows SlideShare at 264 with a U.S. ranking of 408. However popular it is in the United States, it is even more commonly used in Mexico. Overall site user statistics show that it holds more appeal for childless Hispanic females with postgraduate educations than any other group, with the age range of most users being from 25 to 44. They view as much from work as they do from home.

There is no doubt that SlideShare has huge marketing value for those who have the knowledge, or quick ideas on strategies that can be shared to garner attention and awareness of their particular products and services.

Here is an example of a Power Point Presentation done by Basil Puglisi on Search Engine Optimization Basics : SEO101

[slideshare id=7181167&doc=seo101-110307150053-phpapp01]

[slideshare id=7447762&doc=hubspotmarketingtransformationfinal-110330085430-phpapp02]

Sources:

What is a Brand? How Does a Small Business use Branding?

January 3, 2011 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

What is a brand? A brand is the sum of people’s perception of a name, a company logo, the products carrying the brand, and the packaging of the product. If you are in the business of selling, you are either selling your own brand, selling the brand of another or in most cases, doing both. Unfortunately, most businesses do understand the importance of brand. However, they fail to organize, or better yet capitalize behind it.

How do we know that Small Business Owners are failing?

“In a recent report, it was discovered that 47 percent of Small Business Owners either aren’t sure or don’t think their customers spend time on social media sites. Further, 24 percent of Small Business Owners don’t think their customers do research online before finding them” (Barone, 2011)

Branding Makes You Stand Out in the Crowd

Branding is also important in the marketing of services such as the Painless Dentist or the Computer Geeks. Branding attracts certain types of people and makes a small business stand out in the crowd. Branding may not make you seem to be all things to all people but it will make you important to some people.

When developing a business, you should find a need then tailor to that need. If you create a product and then hope people need it, your success will likely be short. Your brand should be treated the same way. Target a need or concern and meet an expectation.

Kohl’s has done fairly well with this, while much credit has been given to the brand in being a great “price for value”, the Kohl’s brand has started to shift from general value to specific. When Kohl’s started excepting any item for return at any time, they shifted from value when you shop, to value for life. In response would be casual shoppers started spending at Kohl’s like it was an investment.

Over time a company normally develops a brand identity, through customer experiences and the perceptions of others who are outside the business. Creating a brand identity is different but it takes a lot of the chance out of the situation since creating a brand identity is carefully thought out and carried out consistently across the product lines and services that are offered. This ensures that the effects of branding have a positive impact on customers and also attracts potential customers to your brand.

How Does a Small Business Use Branding?

Major brands have strong corporate identities; these companies spend a lot of money making you remember their name, their look, and their products. This is branding, and it is a carefully thought out process that is important for large and small businesses alike. Branding makes people remember you and hopefully put you on the top of their list which can make or break the success of a small business.

To be successful a small business should:

Discover what they do best and then do it.
Do what you do best over and over again.
Quality customer service is also important when trying to establish a brand.
Consistency in packaging, advertising, and quality will make your brand and your small business stand out in people’s minds.

Developing a specific identity and then communicating your identity consistently is key to creating a brand identity. Social Media has created a great new tool for Small Business Owners to capitalize on strategies used by the big boys for centuries.

More than just being on social media, consumers want a Small Business Owner to establish a real presence there. (Barone, 2010)

For example:

81 percent say it’s important for businesses to respond to a post.
78 percent want to see promotions.
74 percent want regular posts.
66 percent want to see pictures.

Summary:

Brand or Branding, is a crucial part of any business in any field, while you may be successful with what you do, without a brand strategy you will never reach your full potential. This may feel fine to you, just realize that your capitalization will be limited by the “brand” investment you have put into your concept, product or business.

Sources:

Fan Page List, retrieved October 28, 2010

Kohls.com retrieved on December 28, 2010.

Las Vegas Business Press retrieved on December 30, 2010

Small Business Trends retrieved on Jan, 2 2011.

Wenatchee Business Journal retrieved on December 30, 2010