@BasilPuglisi

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

Visibility

Social Brand Visibility: Plaxo

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Plaxo, launched in 2002, is a tool that enables users create and maintain an online contact list and have it automatically updated.

Users have their information stored on servers, so they can access it anytime from everywhere. When your contact information is updated it will be changed in all your contacts’ address books that are connected to you through the site.

You can reach your contacts very fast. Results start to show with the typing of the first few letters. Opening a record is fast as well, without delay, after double clicking the contact. You can categorize your contacts into groups and add your contacts to more than one group. This way you can create distribution lists and send messages to the whole group at once.

Another feature allows you to mark your favorite contacts and they will appear on the front page of your address book.

Since 2008, Plaxo allows its users to share content from different social media platforms like blogs, social networking and post photos. Plaxo can also track feeds from different social media. Users can share and view content they have chosen by categories; friends, family, business and so on.

Up until 2009, Plaxo offered sync-up service with Outlook, Mozilla, Gmail and Yahoo. This service still exists but it has become Premium (paid) service in July of that year. It allows people to keep their contacts, calendar and tasks up to date across many platforms.

Plaxo is ranked #1,752 in the world, and #985 in the United States, where about 40% of the users are located. It is also popular in South Africa and is ranked #682 among all the South African sites.

Statistic shows that this site appeals more to high income women over the age of 35 who use it for business.

How to Use Facebook to stimulate your Business?

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It is not just about creating your own Facebook page anymore; it is about maintaining it so you can be able to better connect with your existing customers and develop a connection with future ones. Being active on the site is one of the main things you should think about. How to be active? Here are a few ideas that can change you Facebook page from a dormant one to an active one:

Use your existing customers to promote your page. Once they connect to your page they are able to share it with their friends. That is the essence of Facebook, but for businesses there are some free tools you can use; Page Badge allows you to promote your Facebook page from your website and drive traffic to it so they can see what is going on and what’s new in your business. “Like Box” – implementing a “like” button on your website page gives your customers the ability to like your Facebook page from your website. Include a link to your Facebook page in your newsletter and e mails to encourage your customers to join your Facebook page.

Facebook Ads is another way to create a marketing campaign within a budget. You can do it yourself by going to the site and following the directions for creating a successful ad campaign.

Publish relevant information on your Facebook page, be helpful and giving. Write in your true voice, as a person, not a business owner. Talk about things relevant to your business.

Use humor and provide fun facts that will make them come back.

Update the site frequently. A few times a week is recommended. If you have nothing new to inform your customers, dig up some relevant information and post that.

Encourage writing on your page and respond to the comments. If you get favorite reviews about one of your products respond to it and mention a similar product you’ll have for sale soon. If you have a complaint, answer it even quicker. Show your followers that you value them and their feelings.

Use Facebook to ask customers what they think about a certain product or service. Creating a two way conversation, and finding out what your customers would like to have is very important.

Use Page Insights. It is a program which provides anonymous statistics about your friends including demographics and frequency of use.

Use photos and upload videos to make it come alive and fun.

Update your page using mobile technology. This is very simple today with the iPhone and androids. That helps you update your page if you are on the road and have no immediate access to your computer.

Social Media Monitoring – SCRM

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One of the biggest questions small business owners ask themselves is how effective is my presence in the social media circles.

A good word of mouth can go a long way, but in the same way a bad comment can have a negative effect on your business.

People are sharing their thoughts on blogs, forums, groups, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Somewhere in there, among all the social talk, there might be a piece of information that will be crucial to your business. To be effective, your reaction should be quick. You can’t afford to wait weeks for reports. You want to know what people are talking about in your niche. That can give you an idea where you should go next in your business.

That is what CRM all about?

CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. It is a strategy for managing interactions with customers, clients and potential clients. Using technology CRM helps you organize, synchronize and automate sales activity, marketing, customer service and support. Similar to Social Brand Reputation Management (SBRM) The aim is to find and win over new clients, retain those who the company already has, win back former clients and reduce the cost of marketing.

Social CRM does that with social media.

With the help of social media, people can now research a company and ask for recommendations about a product or service through social media channels and make their buying decisions without looking at the company, or the site, itself.

Social media is used to share opinions and experiences. Since social media is not monitored and censored like the mainstream media, people can say whatever they want, good or bad.

“Social CRM is the company’s response to customer’s control of the conversation” is how it is defined. Companies are looking for a way to gain access to those conversations and take part in the dialogue.

There are many systems that integrate the social media sites. Using online communities as a source of leads, finding out what clients are looking for to better target marketing and sales and responding quickly to customer’s complaints. All these things can increase interactions and win hearts. The goal is to make the relationship with customers more intimate.

Social CRM adds to the traditional view of customer relation management. The focus here is on people, not technology. It aims to join the ongoing conversation, not try to control it.

There are many companies offering software that allows the users to manage multiple types of information, lead aggregation, status updates, and offers community platforms. It allows you, the business owner to listen to their conversations and respond in a timely manner. It allows you to understand the influences that make them decide on a product. Happier customers, faster customer service, product development, more reach and spreading the word is what SCRM is all about.

Companies that provide SCRM software:

Jive Software, Lithium Technologies, Neighborhood America, Concourse, CrowdEngineering, Fuze Digital Soultions, Helpstream, Buzzient, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite among others.

A Few Quick Pointers For Building A Successful Business

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There are a couple things that I have learned over the years about being able to successfully start a small business from scratch and build it into something potentially special over the long haul. A few of these things are actually pretty basic when it comes down to it, but the others definitely take some precision and hard work for the business to get off of the ground.

Create A Promotional Message

One of the first important things that I learned is to make sure to use one simple message to promote the business that you are building and trying to sell. It can get quite confusing for a potential consumer if there are a bunch of mixed message being sent out by your business. Just keep it really simple and to the point that you are trying to make and hopefully that message will in time sell itself.

Create An Advertising Strategy

Strategic advertising is probably the most overlooked and unappreciated aspect to any successful small business plan. You need to make sure to set aside about seven to fourteen percent of your gross target for marketing and advertising. Also, make sure that the ads that you are putting out there for the world to see are tasteful and to the point. You do not want people getting the wrong idea about your company or even not knowing exactly what it is that you are trying to sell.

Always Be Available To Your Customers

It is vastly important to be able to be reached by phone or by email at any point in time to answer the questions of your potential customers. There is nothing more frustrating for a consumer than to have an inquiry or problem with a product and to not be able to reach the company in which they seek advice or the ability to troubleshoot the issue. Be easy to contact and you should be golden in the customer service aspect of your small business.

Keep Your Customers Interested

The last little bit of advice I am going to give you is to make sure that you create a little bit of curiosity amongst your potential client base by mixing things up a little bit and throwing a few curve balls their way. Try coming up with new and innovative ways to advertise your products and make it exciting for someone who is in the market to buy whatever you have to sell. Fresh and interesting things will keep your customers interested in your company.

I hope these quick pointers were helpful to you and your future business and I wish you the best of luck in all that you decide to do.

Making People Aware Of Your Business With A Small Budget

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There are quite a few simple and easy ways to get the attention of potential customers of your company with only a small budget to work with. This may sound like a difficult thing to do since the bigger companies have a lot more money and resources to work with, but it is in fact one of the original ways of doing business and works just as well now as it did way back in the day.

One smart thing that you can do is to make up a nice coupon book online or to give out to the local residents through the mail. This coupon book will offer discounts on whatever it is that you are selling and start to get people on your side about your products. Nothing makes people more excited than knowing that they do not have to pay the going rate on something that would normally cost them an arm and a leg.

Another really simple and inexpensive way to get noticed is to get your business phone number listed in the local phone books. This usually does not cost a thing, but make sure to use a land line because cell phones will probably run a little bit more money than you will likely want to spend on that type of advertisement.

Find Digital listings, there are a lot of comapnies and websites that provide listing services for FREE!!! Take the time to get an accurate listing, some even offere customization or updates for free.

You can also try to get your company enlisted at a trade show or some type of job fair scenario. This will get the public to notice you. As we all know, word of mouth marketing is probably the best and cheapest way to do business these days. As long as people are able to bear witness to an actual company and the products or services that they are selling, they will buy into it if it fits their needs.

Even though using a website to promote your company can get a little bit pricey at times, being able to split the cost with another company is a good way for both of you to save a little bit of cash while allowing the public to catch a glimpse of your company. This will also allow you to start building business relationships with other companies and show that you can be counted on to help out if you are needed to.

All of these things are cheap and easy ways to get your company off of the ground. Most people do not have a lot of spare money lying around when they start a new business, so it is best to find creative ways to work with what you have at the moment and build on it as you gain more and more income.

Google bookmarks

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Google Bookmarks allows its users to bookmark their favorite pages and save them remotely so they can be accessed from any computer with a use of a password.

Why is this service important? You do not have to have your computer with you when you want to show something interesting you have bookmarked.

If your computer crashes, you have a place to go to and retrieve all the bookmarked pages you had.

Lists are private by default, but once you’ve created one you can share it with specific friends or even publish it. Google allows the users to post their bookmarks and share them with others.

Sharing lists can help you collaborate with your friends on common interests or activities.

With Bookmarks, you can also organize your content using labels and/or lists. Like labels, lists let you organize your bookmarks into categories for easier retrival.

Social Brand Visibility: Tumblr at Your Service

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A different kind of social media can be found in a site called Tumblr. They declare themselves as being the easiest way to express yourself. How can you do it? By quick and easy blogging.

Tumblr was co-founded by David Karp and Marco Arment in 2007. It emphasizes its customization and ease of use, with a simple sing up and log on. No need for knowledge in the world of coding and computer language. Each user gets his own tumblelog where he can post his thoughts and feeling.

Posting can be done either by text, quote, picture, video, link, audio or chat. Participants follow other members’ tumblelog, just like it’s done on Twitter, for example.  Updates of the people you follow appear on the dashboard in one stream.

Users can “like” a post to let other users know what they found interesting and reblog it on their own tumblelog. They can comment on posts and start a conversation.

When it was launched, 75,000 bloggers left their previous platforms and converted to Tumblr almost immediately. Since then, more than 3 million users joined in. Tumblr has mobile apps that let bloggers blog from wherever they are.

As of the beginning of 2010, the site averages 2 million posts a day. With 15,000 new users joining every 24 hours, it is still growing rapidly.  What’s more, it has a retention rate of 85%, compares with Twitter’s 40%.

Tumblr is amazingly fast and processes 10,000 posts an hour. It lets you update post to your Twitter and Facebook accounts as well. All their services are clearly offered on the front page and are, as they promised, easy to use.

Social Brand Visibility: Do You Digg It?

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“A place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.” This is how Digg calls itself.

A user driven social network site, everything on Digg has been submitted by members. Other users can vote on the submission and the most popular stories go up to the top and are displayed on the front page. In its initial version, in 2004, you could also bury a story by digging it down. In later versions this feature has been deleted. Of course viewers can leave comments about what they saw.

If you want to know the hottest news and what people are talking about at the moment, Digg will provide that. “The power of breaking stories before anyone else”, is how one of the founders, Kevin Ross, calls it.

The front page of Digg contains the title of a story others have found interesting, a short description and a link. One click will get you to read the whole story. You can customize your home page by deciding which major news media you would like to follow and your areas of interest. The categories include business, entertainment, gaming, lifestyle, offbeat, politics, science, sports, technology and world news. A story that has wide interest and posted on Digg has been known to crash a site or two.

As of November 2010, Digg is ranked 125th in website traffic, with unique monthly visitors standing on 15.1 million. It is estimates that 34% of the site users are from the United States, where it ranks # 74 and it is even more popular in Pakistan where it ranks #18.

Visitors to Digg.com view on average 4.4 unique pages per visit.

How to Use social Media to Spread the Word – YouTube

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Many small and medium businesses try to engage their customers through Facebook and twitter. Another venue you might want to look into is YouTube.

Here are some examples of small and medium businesses who took advantage of YouTube and the results that effort generated.

Case Study # 1:

A hair care product company, operated by the owner a woman from Los Angeles, decided to increase her visibility by going on YouTube. While pocking around in the site, she notices a few questions posted by users of products in her niche. She offered support, advice and suggested trying her products. She urged the users to tell her if it worked for them.

The result? 2 years later there are over 5,000 videos showing people using her product. The attention has helped raise her sales by 40% and pushed her 7 year old company into profitability.  The products are now sold in Whole Foods and Target as well.

And she didn’t post one video of her own. She waited for the video bloggers (vloggers) to do that: “When dozens of different vloggers with their own unique hair types actually video themselves applying the product in the shower in one continuous take, it’s hard to dispute how it ends up looking” She says.

Recently she hired some of the vloggers to help her in her YouTube campaign.

The push shouldn’t be a hard sale. Forum posters can smell those a mile away, she says. Companies have to establish themselves as being helpful so their recommendation will be taken seriously.

Case Study # 2:

A knife company used the same tactic. They didn’t start a conversation about their knives, but they reacted to questions and offered suggestions. They interacted with the posters by sometime offering them to try a knife for free or for a limited time.

Today, there are almost 4,000 video blogs about their company. They make sure to stay on top what is being said. To provide good customer support, the company employees (all 5 of them) are alerted every time a comment comes in and they answer, sometimes from home and in the middle of the night.

Being accessible promotes loyalty to the brand, says their marketing director. Forums reflect that.

Case Study # 3:

Makers of a new, very small, digital camera learned the hard way how important it is not to hard sell. Their efforts to brand the camera on bike riding forums backfired. People were annoyed with them and pointed out foreseeable problems even without seeing the camera up close.

The company listened to the complaints and laid back. The result? 7,500 videos about their camera, done with their camera are currently posted on YouTube. More than 15% of their business comes from YouTube.

Listening to Vloggers helped the company to further develop their equipment into niches they have not thought of. When people talked about mounting their small camera on remote control cars and planes, they manufactured a kit for that purpose. It is one of their best sellers.

You can use YouTube for more than just posting videos. Using their channel system is a good way to find out what people are talking about, what they want and what they suggest. Then you can assess how it pertains to your business.

Word of Mouth Goes a Long Way

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What is social media, really? It is a way for people to connect without taking into consideration physical distances and limitations. It is a way for people to ‘hang out’ together without leaving their homes.

It is also a way to broadcast to the world, in 140 characters or less, how you think and feel at the moment and what are doing or about to do.

Social media can be also used to wade through all the sea of information that is at our fingertips. Peer recommendation narrows the playing fields. People can share things they have discovered, create lists which can be exchanged and used as a specialized search engine. Social media enables people talk about the events of the day, news or gossip, and share their expertise with other people.

That is where social media and small business interact. A good word of mouth can go a long way.

To be affective in a social media campaign there are few things you should know before jumping in:

Be relevant to your audience. If you are creating campaigns that are meant to be seen around the world, make sure it will be understood by the market you aim to engage. Look at the twitter campaign of a company like Dell, for example.

Build credibility and trust. Let people know you on those social circles, forums, blogs and groups in your niche before you jump into selling. Establish yourself as an expert in your field. Be consistent and answer questions in a timely manner.

Listen to what people have to say, adjust and improve. That is one of the great benefits of social media. You can hear loud and clear what your target audience wants and talks about. Whole Foods has a Twitter account that is very active and used to post actionable advice. (i.e. “Bring it back to the store and we will…”)

Be visual and fun on your social media pages, if it fits your brand.  Look at what McDonald did on their Facebook pages or what Carl Jr. does on their YouTube channel.

Show your customers you care about them and about your product. Convince them you are there to improve their lives. Provide tips, Q&A and advice. Look what Nike does on their blog as an example.

Transparency. Show people that you take their advice seriously. There might be ideas in those posts you haven’t thought of. Starbucks, for example, has a website for ideas and they show where this idea is at the moment; under review, reviewed, coming soon etc. People know they are not wasting their time posting. This is a way to build a community.

Consistency.  You have to keep the brand alive and create familiarity. You’ll have to be active and update regularly.

There are many examples of successful social media campaigns done by big companies. American express, for example, did a short campaign to win a few VIP Glee Experience Tour tickets and got 250,000 requests. Papa Jones is working with Facebook, creating competition for creating a new pizza that will eventually be sold at it stores. Pepsi Co. created a campaign to name their new Mountain Dew drink through Facebook. Virgin America offers promotions through their Twitter account (They offered 50% off tickets to the 500 first clickers). It sold out within 3 hours.

Easy for them, you say. They have PR departments and people devotes solely to social media. How can I, the small business owner do all this and still run a business?

Even though those campaigns are called “free”, you still need to invest in them – your time. There are ways to make it easier:

  • Your campaign is not as big as theirs. You will not have that amazing response the first time you try.
  • Delegate, if you can. Don’t try to do it all by yourself. Create a separate account for every employee, and share in the responsibility.
  • If you do not have employees, you can hire an off-site specialist who can help you set it up and update it, with your personal collaboration of course. A couple of hours a day should be enough.
  • There are programs which allow you to get all your social media alerts on one page, for easier navigation.
  • The next step can be to have software that will alert you every time your niche is mentioned in social media sites. It is a way to get early leads and establish yourself as an expert.

It is not all-or-nothing proposition. You have to put your toes in the water if you want to learn to swim. A good word of mouth can go a very long way.