Loving Apple

As I pulled up my VISA card I thought to myself, "I really don´t need an iPad, but I want one so badly". I already have 2 MacBooks, one iMac, 2 iPods, one iPod Touch and one iPhone 4 at home. Did I really need an iPad2? Absolutely not! Could I do everything I need on my other devices? Absolutely yes. But I can almost feel an urge to spend money on Apple products when I enter an Apple store. All the whiteness and cleanness wakes something up inside of me .
They feel like my friends, my amazing friends that make my digital life both easier an a hell of a lot cooler.

This is succeeding big time as a brand. Making people feel the urge to spend money on your products without them even needing them!

AS ALWAYS after having bought a new Apple product I came home, started it up and now I don´t know how I could have lived without this amazing beauty before. I just discovered some cool apps and I´m sure that within a week I will be even more hooked.
What makes this brand so incredibly great then? Simplicity, Design and Customer Service. Always easy to use, fast and smooth functionality. Gorgeous designs and the more the better, all products fit perfectly together. 10 point customer service. Always when I call Apple I start by telling them that they work at the coolest company in the world, respect.
Apple! If you´re listening I´m your brand ambassador number one.
Gotta get back to discovering all the fantastic features on my leather covered new friend :-)Tweet

How To Analyse Facebook Insights

If your goals and objectives with your Facebook marketing campaigns include Awareness or Loyalty, it's a good idea to know how to analyse the activities on your Facebook page.
Other social media platforms offer external tools, such as Hootsuite or TweetStats for Twitter. Facebook however offer their inhouse measuring tool, Facebook Insight. This is a powerfool tool and can be very useful. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook sooner than later will roll out even more stats for page owners or maybe an optional pay-for extra service. Facebook Insight could very well be a direct competitor to Google Analytics soon.
So, it's important to know how to read all these numbers and what to do with them.
Yesterday I asked Mari Smith, the Facebook marketing guru of all times to give me some tips how to best read the Facebook Insight Stats. Or maybe not so much how to read them but how to analyze them. She answered me that it's a complex subject and apparently she talks a lot about it in her book Facebook Marketing 1 Hour Per Day so I bought it.

Let me list up what I know now and then I will tell you what I learned more from the book once I receive it.
Lets first mention what is called Impressions which you can see under each post as an admin. This number is the times that that post has been seen in the newsfeed and on your page. ALSO it includes the times the content has been viewed in social plug-ins maybe on your webpage for example.

Next to Impressions you see Feedback. Now here is the math:  Lets say my post has 1502 Impressions, and 0,67% Feedback and 10 Likes. It all ads up by taking 0.67% of 1502=10.
For those of you who didn't do well in the math classes you can use this simple tool: Online Calculator Percentage

Monthly Fan growth. Document the number of fans the 1st of each month to see the growth cycle. Important to watch for are spikes and then go back to those dates and see what happened that day. Did you post something special? Did your company have a TV campaign run that week?
Go to Insight and click on the USERS section.

Number of Likes and Comments.
This is a number to measure engagement. Good tool to use to know what content works good and what does not work good.

Unsubscribes.
Important stat to use to go back and look at days when there was a spike. Did we post too much that day?

Total Tab Views (Under the Users section too)

What tabs get most views? This could help you determine your landing page and content strategy. If the Video tab gets a lot of views maybe that's where you should put your energy...

Another interesting metric is to find out how many of your fans actually come back to your page.
This is how you find out. Take the number of page views, subtract the number of unique page views and you will get the number of returning fans. In my example below I had 127 returning fans on May 14th.

Page Growth Rate is calculated by taking the number of New Likes (My case last month was 406) MINUS Unlikes which you can see here was 97.  My May number would therefore be 309. This number I would write down and compare to next months number.

Other things to measure could be mentions of your brand or demographics.
These are my points for Insight. Lets see what Mari Smith can teach me with her book :-)Tweet

ReTweet Tool

I just tried out the pro version of ReTweet Rank. It´s a simple tool to help you see who retweets you, what time people retweet you, best day to post to get retweets e.t.c. Also it gives you a percentage score on your influence, a bit like Klout does.
It´s neat little thing, simple and easy to use. 9USD per month for the pro version, there is a free version and also a 3USD per month version as well as the superversion for 50usd per month.
14 day free trial.
What I personally like most about this tool is the Most retweeted words as well as The best time to tweet stats.

More info below.

Retweet Rank looks up all recent retweets, number of followers, friends and lists of a user. It then compares these numbers with those of other users' and assigns a rank. So, if you get a retweet rank of 4,500 for instance, that means you are the 4,500th most influential person on Twitter.
What is percentile?
Percentile score indicates how do you score relative to other twitter users. It ranges from 0-100.

http://www.retweetrank.com

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How To Gain Facebook Fans or eerr..."Likes"

The number one focus for a brand shouldn't be just the number of Facebook fans. You would rather have 100 engaged fans than 500 who hide you in the newsfeed everytime you post something right?

But still, it IS one of the many ways you can measure success on Facebook and since the basic idea is to reach many people, of course we would like to increase our fan base.

Somebody who was going to start his Facebook Fan Page once told me his strategy was to invite all is contacts because for sure they would "fan" him and suggest to their contact and soon he would reach as least a few hundred people. That page has not hit 200 people yet and it's been up for about a year.

Also that option contradicts the nature of social media so let's not put all our cards in that bucket please.

I'm not saying you shouldn't send out an email to your email list though, tell people about your page and include the latest Facebook posts and links/Like button in your weekly E-letters.

Fisrt of all, just like the post How To Gain Twitter Followers you need to create visibility for your fan page. Embed widgets on your website, use the Facebook Social Plug-Ins and link from your blog, include the Facebook button in your email signature and integrate the LIKE button on various sites.

The Landing tab is another important thing that according to many people increases the "liking" ALOT. Make sure you have a nice landing tab and make sure it tells people to like you (and tell them WHY! for exclusive offers, contests e.t.c...)

Use Apps! Some are for free, some you have to pay for, but they spice up your page and make it more interesting. You can do simple polls, or maybe more advanced quizzes or contests.

Some examples below:

http://fanappz.com

http://wildfireapp.com

http://northsocial.com

With some apps you can launch Fans-only offers.

Use Facebook ads and make sure that by clicking on the ad the user likes your page. make sure to TARGET well. If you are in the education industry you may want to target people in a certain age rank and in certain countries.

If you publish a company magazine or something else that's printed, make sure to include an info box about your Facebook page.

If you have a store, include a little sign on the door or in the check-out counter and tell your employees to remind customers about your fan page.

Go to other pages that are in the same industry and comment on their post, sign with your fan page name (in the settings of your page so can choose to post as page or fan) IMPORTANT! Don't mis-use this. Be smart and clever and DO NOT spam pages and people.
Also, don't over post cus then people will UNfan you. Try to experiment with the timing, try posting on nights and weekends and pay attention to the Insight section of your fan page to see what is working and what is not.

If I would have to pick a good ending pgrase it would be the following:
Be a solution provider to your customers and craft GREAT content!

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How To Gain Twitter Followers

How do you kick off a Twitter presence? How do you gain Twitter followers? You sit there and you're ready to start but you don't have any or very few followers, what should you do?

A brand is usually on Twitter to be able to spread it's advertising messages, deals, support and offers to a large number of people.
The objectives you may want to ashieve could be retweets, more followers, click-throughs to other pages and of-course redemption of offers. You may want to be thought of as a leader in your industry, or as the company with the best customer support.
You sit there with your business or brand and you have carefully crafted a content-plan, you have listed your objective and started with Sales, Awareness or Loyalty. You have a tweet schedule and a structure about everything from Tweet timing and a content map to time limits of answering people and much more.
Now, how do you gain Twitter followers?

First of all make sure people KNOW you are on Twitter. Integrate the Twitter button on your webpage, on you blog and on your Facebook page.
Post Twitter buttons and perhaps a link to the latest tweet in your email signature, AND in your colleagues signatures too. Make sure the company is with you and support you.

Another smart thing you can do is to search topics that relate to your industry on Twitter.
Now my suggestion is to create search lists within Twitter and monitor them. Look for questions related to your brand or product, answer them and engage with them. Talk in a human way. Don't over market, don't focus just on your brand, talk about other brands and ALWAYS listen first and talk later.

Another part is to find Influencers which I would use Exportly to do. Find the people with the most followers and simply monitor them, retweet them and eventually contact them! Are they incredibly important? Make a deal with them, see if they like your brand and would be willing to collaborate with you. Reaching his or her followers can be a big deal to your brand.
You can also list your bran in so called Twitter Directories. It makes it easier for people to find you based on the sector/industry you're in. Popular Twitter directories are: http://justtweetit.com and http://wefollow.com

Tomorrow I will talk about how to gain Facebook LIKES!Tweet

Swedish Spotify + Facebook = True?

Swedish music service Spotify may very well partner up with Facebook sooner than later.

I've been thinking back and forth about signing up for the Premium account with Spotify but to be completely honest, I am so rooted into iTunes that it takes a big effort for me to change my music routines. Don't get me wrong, I love Spotify but I also love iTunes and I buy so little music these days that the once in a while 1 eur song doesn´t bother me.
Now the fact that the U.S still can´t enjoy this music service is so absurd keeping in mind that usually everything comes to the americans first.
Well, lets see if these rumors are true or not. A Spotify icon inside Facebook could very well be the turning point for me...
Facebook & Spotify To Launch Streaming Music Service Tweet

A Clear Guide to Facebook DEALS vs Check-In Deals

Yes there is a difference! A pretty big one.
It took me a few days to digg into this when both services were first launched. Couldn't they have picked slightly more different names?

Since I am a huge fan of location based services, both using them personally as well as really believing that this is an amazing opportunity for companies to INCREASE Business I decided to write a short summary of what this is about.
Deals go into the users news-feed and the news-feed is what you need to win as a business. Deals can't be ignored.
Facebook now has more than 250 MILLION mobile facebook users and they are twice as active as the desktop facebook users. Ignoring these people as a marketer is dumb.

Check-In Deals was first launched late last year and like all Facebook features it was first launched in the U.S and was quickly rolled out in 6 more countries.
Canada, U.K, France, Spain, Germany and Italy.
A check-in deal is basically you as a local business creating a DEAL within your PLACE page (NOT your fan page) and offering customers one out of four types of deals.
Individual Deals which basically is a one time offer for a person checking into your store.
Loyalty Deal lets you unlock a deal through repeat visits, anytime in between 2-20 times visits which you can select as the business owner.
Friend Deal is something I personally believe very much in. This lets a person share savings with 1-8 people. Let's say you and your friends are out having a drinks and dinner and you check in and this deal offers one free appetizer when ordering 3 drinks.
Lastly is the Charity Deal wich promotes a cause. It lets a company donate money everytime a client check in.
Facebook Check In Deals is equivalent to Foursquare while Facebook DEALS is similar to Groupon.

Facebook DEALS was introduced a few months ago but it's still in the beginning phase and only available in 5 U.S cities. Facebook takes a percentage on the deals purchased, there is no upfront cost and it's mainly focused on entertainment activities.
This works like this: You as a business owner decide that for example if 5 people purchase your dishwasher they will all benefit from a 30% discount. Setting up these types of deals is done through a personal Facebook representative.


Another tip is to COMBINE your Foursquare deal with your Facebook deal!
Install a Foursquare widget on your Facebook page HERE!














Read more about Check-In deals HERE! as well as HERE!
How do you promote your deals ON and OFFline?
On your FB Page, Through FB ads, on Twitter, in an email newsletter, in a blog post, launching a promotion, in the retail store on a window sign, in the menue if you are a restaurant owner or through sites like meetup.com.

Here are some further ways to find local people (through Twitter) and maybe be able to contact them about your local offers: 5 ways to use twitter to connect with local customers

By the way LOVE this site. As a marketer this lets you investigate your Facebook market: http://www.socialbakers.comTweet

Facebook Ads 101

One of the bonus sessions I listened to yesterday at the Social Media Success Summit 2011 was about Facebook Advertising! Below is my take-away.

The site gets apparently 3,2 Billion visits/month acording to compete.com. Facebook is growing and with Marc Zuckerberg now studying chinese and traveling back and forth to China it's just a matter of time until he has conquered the world.

Facebook advertising is available for everyone, regardless of budget. You can start with 1 USD per day!

It allows you to push customers to a page a contest an app e.t.c... Great way to earn fans for example.

The targeting combinations are endless and relatively inexpensive, well if you compare to Linked In or Google for example.

Another benefit is that it's an effective and fast way to learn about how your customers respond to advertising from your business. Learn about demographics, learn who really IS your customer. All easily done by reports and great statistics.

Popular alternatives: Google (more expensive, bitting on keywords have rised), 

Linked In (more expensive and not very effective), Twitter (more limited targeting criteria then Facebook by its nature BUT Twitter DOES present a certain type of targeting too)

What sets Facebook apart is the targeting. It's endless. Target by demographics, geographic, interests, gender, city, language, age, education, marital status, people not connected to you, people not connected to your competitors...

Cool future feature would be to target status updates, but we are not there YET.

There are basically two types of advertising through Facebook.
Quick info below!

* Self serve

Start with as little as 1 dollar per day

Impression based and click based 

Visible when user views fb profile, page, group or app

Can point to page app group or third party website

Clickthroughs CPC cost between 0,60usd-1.20usd

Impression ads CPM Cost 0,25-0.60usd depending on targeting criteria

Ideal for SMB

* Sponsored ads
Bigger budgets, large ad buys, more for bigger corporations. Considered PREMIUM.

Minimum spending of 5000 usd per month however this is often negotiable

Shows up in newsfeed usually when user logs in and also visible on a few other pages

Can point to page, app, group, or third party website

Direct FB sales rep contact

5-7usd CPM Discounts exist

Targetable by the same criterias as selfserv ads

More expensive

Read more about Facebook: HERE!

Not to be forgotten is Facebook Sponsored Stories which is similar to Promoted Tweets on Twitter.

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16 Important Tips For Bloggers

Use a blog to attract new customers, generate web traffic, open up new markets, lead generation, create and establish thought leadership or any other reason that is beneficial for your business.

First of all you need to decide the format. Is it going to be a corporate blog? What are the objectives with this blog? Increase sales? Be a story forum where people can leave their ideas (Like the My Starbucks Idea for example), is it to communicate press releases or stories?

Content is the main issue for many people. What do I blog about?

Important things to remember is to be a solution provider and do it in an easy and fun way/language.

Great content is:

Unique, useful, fun, well executed and it matches the media channel.

Also, from one piece of content you can pull out various posts. From 1 podcast you can for example make 1 tweet, one print article, 1 Facebook post, one blog post and one guest blog.

You can measure your blog with Google Analytics or Hubspot for example...

Here are some important bullet points to keep in mind.

• Create Valuable Content
• Leverage employees. Are there bloggers in the company?
• Create a "backoffice marketing team" with people inside the company commenting on the blog, retweeting certain posts e.t.c.
• Where are your customers online? GO to the customers and spread word. Pick the top 10-15 blogs in your niche. Read the blogs and start comment and provide info and links to your blog.
• Be the Linked In or Yahoo Answers expert.
• Use killer headlines!
• Focus on the customers pain point and deliver solutions
• Focus on keyword search (use Google external search)
• Use numbers in the title (Like I am doing here! People love "10 ways to blablabla"...
• Be specific. Find your niche.
• Use bullets and use short sentences as well as short paragraphs. Get to the point fast.
• Edit and use an experienced copywriter
• Guest blog and invite guest bloggers
• Promote key influencers
• Explore video blogging and embed on your website
• Create a Content Media Calender
  Ex:
  1/day -Twitter, FB, Blog
  1/week - newsletter
  1/month - Webinar 2/year Event

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Create A Facebook Strategy

Just finished another great bonus session from Social Media Success Summit. This one was called "Picking the right Facebook Strategy".
I just absolutely loved this session. A part of the reason why I keep consuming these sessions like I consume water every day is because it just makes so much sense. I'm all for sense making stuff, practical useful current things.
Jay Baer is the author of one of the best Social Media books I have ever read, The Now Revolution

I keep raving about this book and if I had to say one single reason it'd be the constant repetition throughout the book about creating the strategy BEFORE focusing on the tools.

That makes so much sense for me. Facebook and Twitter is what Jay calls "Rented Land". Do you as a company have any control if Facebook disappears for whatever reason? This is another reason why I always say the HOME base of your digital campaigns should be your website.

By the way, Jay also has a great blog http://www.convinceandconvert.com.

Anyway, lets get down to business here and talk Facebook strategy.

The biggest misconception of the world is that Facebook is free. Social Media is free, let's put an intern on handling our online property (because that's what it is, company property, although on rented land).
Is not free. It takes time. Time is money.
It takes time to plan, build and execute. It takes money to hire 3rd party consultants, create customized apps, responding to people and analyze the results.
How often do you update your company website? Not so often right? Now think about how often you are (or should) update and interact on Facebook.

So let's create a strategy!

Top 5 Tips from Jay:

• Know why you are on FB!
• Decide on a scoreboard. What is success to us?
• Focus first on "Likes" and custom tabs
• Create more content and more often
• Activate fans, don't collect them. Give people assignments, vote, buy, do a market research, answer a question...

Further more we should ask ourselves the following questions:

• Why are we doing this? How is having a Facebook page helping our company?

• Who is our audience? Who do we want to talk to? Is it customers, media, prospective or previous customers, competitors?

• What do we want them to do? What action are we trying to cause and how does that benefit the organization?

• How will we know if its working? If the CEO of your company asks you "So Jenny, how is this Facebook thing going?" What should I answer him?  What numbers do we use to make the case? THIS is something we need to establish BEFORE we get started. Because if not, how can we compare the results?

There are different strategies. Like I've mentioned in previous blog posts usually Sales, Awareness or Loyalty are the main points for your over all social media strategy.
When we look at creating a Facebook strategy we look at the following options:

1. Create awareness


Important:


- Newsfeed
-Ads

To create awareness on Facebook is to be in the Social Public Relations-business. The Like button is the most important thing simply because of the massive viral effect it gives you.
Creating a custom landing tab can double like rate according to many social media professionals.

Keep in mind that 95% of Facebook users use the Top New, not the Recent Post option.
The Top News is decided by the edge rank which takes in consideration things like:
Recency, The weight of the post, if someone comments or like on it, and then the score between you and the creator (how much have you interacted with the creator).
Your goal is to win the newsfeed. How? By the frequency of your publications, by thinking about the timing, spreading the posts out on nights and weekends, and most importantly create CONTENT that engages.
If you wanna post on weekends you can use tools like Hootsuite, SocialOomph, Objective Marketer. I have tried all three and personally prefer Hootsuite.

Use the like button on your webpage. For individual posts as well as on the top of the main page.

What metrics can we implement for the Facebook awareness strategy?

* How many monthly or daily active users do we have
* New likes
* Daily story feedback
* Daily Page activity (number of people interacting with your tabs and content)
* Visits from Facebook to your website/blog (use Google analytics)


2. Increase Sales

Important:

- Mix up calls to action and special offers into your newsfeed updates
- Use Fan-Only Offers ( one program you can use is Fanreveal look here to see how to use this program: How To Install Fan Reveal
- Add Direct Response and E-commerce options to your page (program Shoptab.net)
- Create a tab with signing up to newsletter This site provides you apps to do just that: http://northsocial.com

What metrics can we implement for the Facebook Sales Success Metric strategy?

* Sales and redemptions of offers
* Leads (how many filled out a form...)
* Conversation Rate (total fans divided in number of fans that took action)


3. Market research and Insight Generation

Almost all people on your fan page have already experienced your brand so this is a focused group of people that are already interested in your brand. Also keep in mind people love to share their opinion. Use this for your benefit.

You need to mix research with promotion. Don't over sell.
Remember that only 30% of consumers believe clicking the like button means "this company is allowed to market to me." Don't miss-use peoples newsfeed, it's very easy to Unlike your brand.

Important:
- Exclusive content and feedback.
- Engagement and Insight Apps
- Idea factory. Let your fans suggest ideas to the company for example.
- Gather feedback elsewhere and promote it on Facebook.

What metrics can we implement for the Facebook Market Research Success strategy?

* Daily story feedback for research questions
* Participation rate for polls/ apps
* Quality of ideas and insights
* Market research cost savings

4. Customer Service

Twitter is more well-known for CS but that doesnt mean you can't use Facebook for the same purpose.
Important here is to set customer service expectations. Tell them what hours you are there to answer, create possible discussion boards, Q&A tabs e.t.c
You can listen proactively. Kurrently is a tool that combines Facebook and Twitter listening, it's free and easy to use.

Something that not many companies do is to plan for worst-case scenario BEFORE the scenario actually takes place. Let's discuss openly about what we consider "The Crisis Of The Day" before it happens and what do we do when it happens, cus it will happen sooner or later. Maybe people gang up on your page and trash your content or a specific action for example.
Be clear about ground rules and communicate them on your Facebook page. Tell people what is OK and what is not. Then you can always go back and refer to the rules.
Provide a discussion outlet, maybe a specific tab. Then you can take angry wall-conversations off the wall and deal with them in the discussion tab instead.
If you delete posts, say so and explain why. Facebook has an option under edit page and moderation block-list where you can black list certain words and posts including those automatically get moved to the spam filter.

What metrics can we implement for the Facebook Customer Service strategy?

* Questions Answered/Resolved. How many problems did we solve?
* Customer Satisfaction Surveys. By phone or by email create a survey-follow up, what do people prefer?
* Customer Service Cost Savings

5. Increase Context & Relevancy

This is a bit more complicated and needs a bit of programming but it's totally do-able and will probably be done more and more.
Use Facebook's Rich Open Graph API to improve Experience on your other content
This is what we call: Influence Mining, Data Mining and Customization.
Amazon is a great example. You can actually connect your Facebook page with your amazon account and then get great birthday present tips for your friends based on what they have bought on Amazon.

Another interesting website is Likebutton.me which shows you your friends on Facebook and what content these friends have liked.

How can you use Facebook Data to Improve your content?
Here are some ideas. Blog Post Recommendations. If someone comes to your blog, can you program that based on what that person like on Facebook it automatically recommends 2 posts?
can we send out more relevant emails by using the same principle? Can we suggest How-To-Videos based on the specific interests of one client?

This sums up the session today and what I've gathered from it.
Have a good Tuesday folks!


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My Social Media Tools

There are so many tools for social media and community managers. Tools to track, count, manipulate and shorten or lengthen tweets, automatic updates, know who follows you, follow back automatically e.t.c...
I have tried a million but can argue these tools are the most important tools for me. This is highly personal.

Hootsuite (schedule tweets, see influencers, check keywords)
Exportly (map influencers)
SocialMention (Share of voice)
Bit.ly (url shortener that gives you stats on how many have clicked on your link)
Blogpule and technorati (blog info)
http://twitterfeed.com (Feed your blog to Twitter)
Twitter advance search (highly underestimated!)
Instagram (makes amazing photos)
http://forrester.com/empowered/tool_consumer.html (check the tech profile of your target group)

Tools and sites that I dont necesarely use on a regular basis but like are:
http://tweetmeme.com (makes it easy for your visitors to share your content with their Twitter followers)
http://www.hashtracking.com (tracks hashtags)
Netvibes (great dashboard similar to Google Reader)
http://inboxq.com (Find people asking questions about things you know)Tweet

YouTube Marketing

Facebook and Twitter in all honor but the third giant should not be forgotten. The majority of the people out there don't know the details of Youtube though, me included. But I have spent some time listening to a session on the Social Media Success Summit by Greg Jarboe and I learned a thing or two that I will share here.

Some facts!
Youtube accounts for 84% of online video.
Hulu gets 3,5% of online video visits.
Google video doesnt let you upload videos.
Conclusion: Focus on Youtube.

The typical video on Youtube gets 100 views. Keep this in mind and use the tools and tips to optimize your video for Youtube search which is different than Google search.
The typical video is watched for 60 seconds and then people tune out. This means your video needs to be extremely engaging and you need to include important info in the beginning.

USE the description and title field well and describe as much as you can. All words will help you get found.
Also use the Youtube keyword tool and make sure you include the suggested keywords in the tags, description or title.
https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool

Let people embed the video on their their sites.
Use the Insight section well, especially take a look at the HOTSPOT section which lets you see how a certain video is resonating with your audience.
Promote your video on other outposts such as on your website e.t.c.
Check out the Youtube blog for news and inspiration! http://youtube-global.blogspot.com and also Creators Corner: http://www.youtube.com/t/creators_corner

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The GREAT Power of Twitter Search

Another world-class bonus session today with Guy Kawasaki. 

How To use Twitter As A Marketing Weapon


I knew about Twitter search long ago, but there are some fascinating tips and small magic things you can do to use it really really well.

Twitter Advance Search. A powerfool tool. Let's show some examples that I did by myself imagining myself working at different companies.

Let's say you are a coffee chain brand, let's say your name is Starbucks just for the sake of everyone being familiar with the name. Let's say you have your office in Barcelona and you want to find out what people are ASKING about your brand to be able to answer them and engage. Only in Barcelona though because lets invent you are launching a new product just in Bcn for one week. I know I know, not likely being Starbucks but hey, let's just pretend for a few minutes.

Or lets say you are IESE, one of the biggest business schools in Spain and you wanna know what people are asking you in Madrid.

Lets say you have a company that sells soap-operas in the afternoons on a special channel and you only wanna target housewives. This is done by Google Boolean Search which Guy also explains but I have yet to try it more to be able to talk and write about it.
Voila!









Or a language portal focusing on language classes in Germany! Remember the question mark if you are specifically looking for people asking a question.

Or lets say your name is Sephora and you wanna find out the questions surfacing in Madrid to be able to answer them. Simply pur Sephora near:Madrid within:50mi ? and voila!

What should I tweet about? This is a question many new Twitters are asking themselves. At a first glance Twitter makes sence for just very few people. For most of us it seems meaningless reading about your neighbor who bought a new car.

Tweet about interesting stuff for your audience. Sure, if your name is Madonna, it's highy interesting to tweet that you got a new BMW yesterday but if you're a normal person you probably wont get many retweets on that one.
Guy tells us that what is interesting for normal people are good, useful and fun links.
If you are lets say Sephora you first need to decide what's the over all objective. Is it Sales, Loyalty or Awareness. Maybe it's loyalty and you wanna place Twitter within Customer Service, that would make sense.  Or maybe you wanna use it as a channel to communicate the latest hot tips and advices regarding makeup, perfumes, celebrities wearing Sephora mascara e.t.c.
Basically stuff that interests your target group. Let's say women 25-34 years old.
What we could further do as a marketer of Sephora is to use Forrester's tool to calculate our audiences social tech profile. Let's say we are Sephora in the U.K and our target group are women 25-34 years old. This lets us see that most of them are joiners and spectators. Joiners are fairly active people so here you could consider social media contests where you ask a person to like your page or leave your email address. Since you seem to have lots of spectators too, it'd probably be a good idea to include nice visual content that engages the potential client.

If you are a famous business school you may post links about students who have graduated and succeeded or about the latest government grants that future students could take advantage of.

People, Important note. This takes practice! Try Try Test and test again.

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How To Build A Successful Social Media Strategy

I've attended several sessions of the Social Media Success Summit 2011 and I have many take-aways, a note-book full of notes as well as lists of new tools to try out and people to contact on Twitter.

I also recently read an amazing book, The Now Revolution and one of the 2 writers, Jay Baer did a bonus session for the #SMSS2011 that was pretty much a summary of the book.
The session was called "8 steps to creating a winning social media strategy" and the points and slides are so straight on, 100% true and valuable that to literally remember every single word I need to write down my bullet points from this presentation.

First of all, it's what you do with social media that counts, not whether you have a FB page or Twitter account. Maybe in Spain this is extra interesting considering so many brands now are in panick mood "WE NEED TO BE ON FACEBOOK".
Important to remember too is that the tools ALWAYS change. We have no idea what will be the biggest social media platform in 3 years from now. Better not focus our strategy on Facebook or Twitter but instead how to create a scalable and sustainable social media plan.

Build an good team. A cross functional team from every corner of your company. Involve the most passionate people, to know and do social media well you need to genuinely love it.

Listen
Find the conversations taking place about your brand. What's being said about you AND your competitors? What's the sentiment? Do people love or hate your brand? What's the share of voice? Do we find 100 conversations about yoghurt where 43 of them are about our yoghurt company and 57 are about YoPlait, well then we have a 43% share of voice.
How? Google search or Social Mention are two ways I have personally used this.
Who is talking? Does Mr X who talk bad about us have 4 or 4 million followers? This makes a big change.
How? I use Exportly and I'm planning on trying out 1Influence soon too.
Where are people talking? Forums? Facebook? Twitter? Blogs?
How, millions of tools, everything from expensive professional tools like Radian6 and Meltwater Buzz to medium size tools like Trendrr or Exportly or many of the free tools like technorati, blogpulse, socialmention or icerocket.

What's the point?

I have written about this before but I will repeat. Are we trying to create Awarness for our company or product?
Are we trying to increase Sales?
Or, are we trying to increase the orders of our existing customers and make people come back to us? Then Loyalty is our point.

Jay tells us to pick ONE and focus on that point.

Now, who is our audience?
If we are trying to increase awareness then we should probably focus on the people who may have heard of our brand or maybe not even that. People who have yet to make a purchase. These people need to be influenced, informed and we need to wake up the curiosity within them to check us out more.
If Sales is what we are going after then we should try to find the audience who have possibly made a purchase or two and introduce more products to them.
And if Loyalty is what we are interested in here then we should find the brand advocates and contact with them.
The secret is to move the unaware people to the awareness and those to sales and then make them into loyal customers.

How do our audience use SM?
Are they creators? Bloggers, status updaters, critics, collectors, joiners and spectators (largest groups) or inactive people?
This helps us know where we should look on the web.
This tool is great to learn What's The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Customers?
http://forrester.com/empowered/tool_consumer.html
Why is this important to know? Well if you live in Japan and you wanna market to 55 year old women, then this too can tell you they are probably NOT creators which means it will make ZERO sence to launch a video contest asking the customers to create a video.
We have to give our audience the appropriate social media assignment.



Next thing Jay talks about is another thing I have mentioned many times and I will be happy to repeat this.
Don't talk about your product all the time. Brands talk way too much about themselves and my newsfeed and yours is being bombarded with mk messages.
Instead find a way to communicate the soul of the company, humanity, storytelling and bring some type of extra value to your customers.
The fight for attention on SM is fierce already, imagine what it will be like in 2 years from now when every company will have a social media presence...

Select Outposts
WHERE are you going to participate. Facebook? Blog? Youtube? Twitter? Linked In?
Select a home base, usually this is the website.
The goal should be to move people from outposts to home base.

Success metrics
If Awareness is our point then total mentions, Facebook fans or search volume could be some metrics.
if Loyalty is what we're looking for then we could see how customer service service through twitter is functioning and we will be measuring how many customers return to us.
If Sales would be the objective then metrics such as redemptions from exclusive offers through Twitter could be interesting to measure.Tweet

Mid Manager Level Community Management

Found a great post about the new type of community manager. The picture below shows how a community manager should be connected to different departments of a company.
On the top line are the the support activities where the CM should be involved but more importantly we see on the lower line the Primary activities.
We clearly see the educational part where a CM should be closely in touch with HR to coordinate possible workshops communicate social activities within the company.

Corporate Culture refers to the Social Media Policy and the tone of voice that the company should stick to.

The tech department clearly is involved with developing apps for Facebook or smart phones. This department is an important one and should also be involved with installing the right tracking tools so that the campaigns can be measured.

Then we have Inbound Logistic where a bit of crisis planning and just general Issue Management have been placed.

Operations could include communication according to this picture and communication is clearly one of the most important departments for everything social media related. How do we coordinate internal and external communication and are we all on the same page?

Marketing and Sales. Together with Comm this is the other extra important department. Everything from how to transfer traditional marketing campaigns to Twitter messages or Youtube videos to everything that has to do with online advertising.

Lastly we have Service where according to this picture we find the community management, engagement and creating important strategic relationships with influencers and trend-setters.

http://www.edelmandigital.com/2011/05/18/the-new-community-manager-profile/

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Shop Directly On Facebook

More and more retailers are letting their customers shop directly from a specific "Shopping-tab" on their Facebook page.
"We need to go where our customers are" says one very intelligent gentleman in this article.
Brand invests about 10.000 USD for a customized e-shop from their Facebook page and publish some great offers in the news-feed and Whoppa! Magic is made.

To read the full article Click here!

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Awesome Social Media Chart

...by our forever loved Hubspot. You can find the full report here.

My favorite slides below.

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The Art of ENGAGING Posts

The reason why I am so passionate about social media marketing is first and foremost because its something that feels so close to my own natural behavior.
I've always believed that to sell something to someone you always have to start with them, not with yourself. Now, I think how do brands get to ME? How do I find out about exclusive offers, events and interesting happenings? Well it's not in magazines, rarely on TV and even more rarely through advertising OFFline. Instead it's while I'm surfing, it's through the Facebook newsfeed and through interesting Tweets.
Of course it's through connections offline too, friends having a glass of wine on a friday afternoon talking about this or that, sure that works too. But it almost always start OR end online.

I read an interesting article about how to create the perfect posts and it struck me that I think I very rarely go back to brand pages after I like them. I simply trust that they will get my attention through the Facebook newsfeed. And then some of them go ahead and screw up so heavily that I just feel the urge to share this link so that brands can stop writing a NOVEL in each post. Brands TALK to much.
Seriously, community managers and social media managers need to write short, sweet and engaging posts.
It's like when you receive an email from someone and as soon as you open it you see it's gonna take you a day to read it, what do you do? Put it on hold right? With a star next to it hoping to read it when "you have some time later". Sure that emails stays in the "too read" folder forever. It's now or never people.

We live in a fast information society. Information flows faster than ever before and the long, complicated, asking-me-to-fill-something-out stuff doesn't interest me. I wanna be engaged in a powerful, exciting and fast way. Why should I register to comment on a blog when it's so simple to just post through Facebook through the social plug-in?
Worth noting here too is that social media management is a 24/7 job and should be handled by a person who doesn't mind posting outside normal business hours for example. By doing so you may very well increase the engagement rate.

Below I have listed some examples of good and bad posts in my personal opinion.
Pay attention to the length, language and interaction rate.


When we're talking about NASA it's probable that the PHD students out there actually prefer this type of posts and the blonde ladies like myself just skip it. But come on, 21 likes? I think they could definitely do better than that. To me this is just Zzzz....
What do I want from NASA? I want the Did you know-type of questions. Exciting information about planets that I could have never imagined, black hole information that makes me go Wow, that is fascinating!

 Red Bull Bedroom Jam. Is this information interesting? To 3 people it seems...

 Here we go! Guess gives me something valuable for me, not for them. Also they communicate this i just a few words. It catches my attention.
This is a fun video teaching me to tie my turband (scarf) in different ways. Fun information to have right at the beginning of the summer. 316 likes. Not bad.

Expedia. To me this post is way too long. I get bored. Yes it has achieved 308 likes but if you compare it with the next post which has a clear value. Win a trip! and in much less words, this first post fades away pretty quickly.

Pepsi uses 8 words to achieve over 2000 likes and over 400 comments. Short, sweet and in a speaking casual language even including a smiley face. We don't want brands to talk to us. We wanna them to talk WITH us.

Who doesn't like Nutella? Simple post that makes me go straight to the kitchen to get my favorite jar in the whole world. Almost 4000 likes in 6 words.

Last example. Carnival Cruise Lines. If you compare these two posts it's pretty clear what works best. An engaging post including a question (and a PERSONAL one even!) gets over 1000 comments while the less engaging post only got 57.

The article about the art of creating the perfect post can be found here! 

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Key Mk Trends

Hubspot is one of the worlds best companies, allowing us to read and share this report. Big thanks to them! Here are my 9 favorite slides.
To read and download the full report Click here

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