The Evolving Internet Marketer

Twitter Tabbed Top Social Media Site for Business

A social media survey of 200 social media leaders by Abrams Research reports that Twitter was selected as the top spot for business dollars by a 40% to 15% margin over Facebook. However, asked which site they’d be most likely to pay to access and Facebook got the most votes. LinkedIn showed well in both categories.

Highlights of Social Media Questions:

A total of 7 questions were addressed, these I found to be the most interesting…

1. Which social media service would you be most likely to pay for?

• Facebook 32.2%
• Linkedin 29.7%
• Twitter 21.8%

2. What social media service would you advise a business pay for?

• Twitter 39.6%
• Linkedin 21.3%
• YouTube 18.8%
• …

The juxtaposition in Twitter in Question 1 & 2 is a head scratcher for me. The Social Media gurus would pay for Facebook over Twitter but recommend their clients to pay for Twitter with Facebook not even in the top 3. Curious. (Comments on this?)

4. Which corporation has done the best job of using social media? …

1. Zappos (online shopping site)
2. Obama (campaign and presidency)
3. CNN
4. Comcast (“Comcast Cares”)
5. Jetblue
…

5. What’s the best way to monetize social media?

• “Freemium” use, i.e. a free basic model followed by a fee for advanced options (i.e. storage, analytics) 45.5%
• Targeted ads (e.g. contextual ads) 20.3%
• Research (polling, surveys, trend-mining) 8.9%
• …

Click the link to for the 10 Page (PDF) report of Abrams Research Social Media Survey.

The Death Knell for Blogging?

They sucked me right in on this one, didn’t they?

Consumers Using Twitter to Save Money and Solve Problems

The Sunday print edition of The Wallet, the personal finance blog of the Wall Street Journal, reports that Twitter users are able to save money, find deals and solve problems as more and more mainstream corporations sign on to the fast growing micro-blogging service. Airlines, such as JetBlue & Southwest are offering special fare deals to their followers. Dell and Amazon are offering ‘tweet’-heart discounts to their Twitter fans and corporate giants like UPS, Comcast and Bank of America are monitoring tweets (the term for the 140 character posts users make on Twitter) to identify possible customer complaints and offer their assistance in resolving those issues. Bank of America has helped over 300 customers resolve issues since they set up their Twitter profile in January of 2009. All in all a very savvy, smart approach…

How is your company using Twitter?

Let us now how your company is using Twitter, click on http://poll.fm/tuwt/.

Twitter – Show the Love; A Brief Tutorial on Twitter’s @Replies Feature

New Twitter users sometimes have a hard time figuring out some of the ins and outs of Twitter communication etiquette. For example, a very nice young woman and Life Coach, Carolann Jones (follow her at http://www.twitter.com/coachcarolann) was sharing an event she was participating in sponsored by Wealth, Success and Women.

Carolann tweeted about the event as follows:

Listening to call hosted by Heather Jumah-How to Set Up A Six Figure Blog, Free Teleseminar with Joel Williams the Blog Tech Guy.

Now I blog and I’m interested in a Six Figure Blog so I might be interested in Joel’s stuff and anybody who puts on cool events like this I should know about but, apart from Replying to (@CoachCarolann) or Direct Messaging ( D CoachCarolann) Carolann, I don’t have an easy way to find out more about Heather and Joel. And, if Carolann’s stepped away from Twitter or is busy, she may miss my tweet all together.

Using the @Replies Feature in Twitter

So, to make it easier for others to track fellow tweeters that you mention in one of your posts then all Carolann (and you) have to do is substitute names for Twitter names and precede these with the aforementioned @ sign. Her message now becomes:

Listening to call hosted by @HeatherJumah – How to Set Up A Six Figure Blog, Free Teleseminar with @BlogTechGuy.

The @twitterusername protocol creates a link between your post and that user’s Twitter page and  accomplishes two things:

1. It allows people who follow your posts to easily follow the people you mention thus adding even more value to your twitter post AND
2. It shows your Tweeps (Twitter Peeps) some love because when you use the @twitterusername protocol to identify your tweeps in a post then your post also shows up in their Twitter feed and it’s stored in the @Replies section of their Twitter home page.

When we use their @twitterusername in a post we’re expressing our gratitude for the value that they have provided to us and, after all, we all appreciate a good “shout out” now and again.

But I Don’t Know if They Tweet

Don’t know somebody’s Twitter identity? Use the Find People menu on your Twitter screen to find existing Twitter account holders or to invite people you know from other social networks or by email.

The easiest way, if you don’t know their Twitter name is to guess. To construct this little Twitter Tutorial, I guessed that Heather Jumah’s name might be ‘heatherjumah‘. I guessed correctly. I thought that maybe Joel would use his name. Nope, but I knew he was the Blog Tech Guy and sure enough his Twitter name is ‘blogtechguy‘. It’s not always this easy but in this case it was.

1. Click on Find People 2. Click on the Find on Twitter tab 3. Enter a person's name or tag line

Feedback Please

Give me feedback if you find this Twitter-torial useful and ask me any other questions you might have about Twitter or social media in general. Oh, and if you found this useful, don’t forget to ReTweet!

Get Free Publicity by Being HAROic

Are you an expert? Do you have a story to tell? Would you like to reach a larger, maybe even global audience with your expertise or insights? If you answered yes then you should consider subscribing to Peter Shankman’s HARO – Help a Reporter Out (TM) service.

Once or twice a day Shankman compiles a list of reporters looking for sources and sends it out to his database of subscribers willing to be sources. The format is simple. Each email lists all the ’source’ opportunities at the beginning followed by more detail later in the post. This details describes the type of source the reporter is looking for and the outlet for the story which could be a national magazine, tv, blog post, radio interview, book or other outlet.

HARO always lists a large number of reporters seeking sources (35 in the last email) so chances are you’ll find someone looking for someone who needs somebody with your expertise or story to tell. It’s a great way to get exposure on a local to global level without having to do a whole lot more than read your email and respond as appropriate.

Advertising Offline? Shift it Online to Reduce Spend, Increase ROI

According to guest blogger, Regis Hadiaris, in a Marketing Pilgrim post titled, 77% of Marketers are Reducing Media Budgets, 144 marketers polled indicated that they were taking ‘next steps’ to reduce the media budgets for their ad campaigns.

Key areas for savings were reported as 1.) reducing production costs and 2.) lean on their agencies to reduce costs and fees.

Internet & Social Media Marketing will Benefit

But the good news, for internet and social media marketers, is that in compensation savvy marketers intend to …

Shift offline media spend to online…

Invest in online production

The perceived benefit? “…more results from less spend…” and an increase in ROI.

Hmmm. Online Marketing costs less and delivers more? Wow! Who’d thunk it!

Google Likes Blogs; Why You Should Too!

Do you still wonder why (or if) you should be blogging? I’m going to give you 3 hardly comprehensive reasons…

1. Customers & Prospects like blogs with good, relevant content that addresses their interests, opportunities or needs.
2. You can engage those customers and prospects at a deeper level than through traditional marketing media. More importantly, you can engage them with value that often creates obligation.The value leading to obligation conversation may well look like this: “They’re the guys who told me about this … It’s obvious they know something about this … I have a need for this … I should add them to my list of prospective resources for this…”
3. You should have your customers (although they’re seldom aware of all you can do for them). Prospects are a different story. If they don’t know you from Adam where do they find you? Well, if they’re online, chances are they’ll find you through Google, Yahoo, MSN or another search engine. Which brings me to the point of this post. 

The more frequently you blog and the more relevant your blog post are to your expertise the more often Google (and other search engines) will visit and the quicker your content will be indexed, ranked and listed online where it can be found by those prospects (and customers) I mention above (and that we all so dearly covet!).

Yesterday (2/3/09) I wrote this post (1) talking about the growth in adult adaptation of social media networks and equating this to the new gold rush for acquiring customers. An hour later (2) Google had the post indexed and ranked for the keywords I’d used. While it’s a bit long-tailish, you can see that an hour after posting my article ranked #1 for (3) “social networks gold rush“. 

So here’s a question for you, have you ever talked to a search engine optimization company and they told you that the work they do today won’t bear fruit for 2-3 months depending on several factors? Yup, that’s what they’ve told me too. And they’re correct.

So why blog?

Because search engines equate blogs (and other forms of social media) with currency and relevancy. They also recognize that blogs tend to be less ‘commercial’ and more value driven from a content perspective. And, if you blog with any sort of consistency, focus and frequency, you train the search engines to check-in with you more often. A site like CNN.com gets spidered (a search engine term meaning checked out for fresh content) several thousand times a day. With frequent posting your site will get spidered on a much more frequent schedule as well.

And, obviously, the more frequently Google and other search engines visit, the quicker your content will be available for your next prospect to find you!

So don’t delay, start blogging today!

And, if you need some help you can always contact me (303) 882-8252. Afterall, you found out how effective blogging can be here!

Twitter – the End is Near … Not!

… funny stuff from Geek and Poke.

Social Media Networks: Still Think They’re a Fad?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that use of social networking sites by adults has quadrupled from 2005 to December 2008. In 2005 only 8% of adults reported having a profile on the social network sites while today that number exceeds 35%. Percentage wise adults still trail the 65% of teenagers with profiles but since the adult population is so much larger the reality is that about 4 times as many adults as teens have a social network profile in place.

Overall, around 100 million Americans of every age have profiles. That’s around a third of the total population with a social network profile. And, considering that the top 10 social media sites as reported by Nielson Online (source: http://mashable.com/2009/01/23/most-popular-social-networks-2008/) draw over 180 million visits a day, I’d say there’s little wonder that Twitter’s been valued at $250 million (growth in 2008; 664%) and apparently offered $500 million (owner’s reportedly politely declined, obviously believe can get more). 

By the Social Network Numbers

Pew reports the following age groups having profiles on social network sites (the question asked is mine):

• 75% of online adults 18-24 <– Are they your audience?
• 57% of online adults 25-34 <– Are they your audience?
• 30% of online adults 35-44 <– Are they your audience?
• 19% of online 45 to 54 <– Are they your audience?
• 10% of online 55 to 64 <– Are they your audience?
• 7% of online adults 65 <– Are they your audience?

The Social Media Gold Rush

Still think that you don’t need to a.) stake your claim on twitter, linkedin, facebook, et al, and b.) shouldn’t be consumed with understanding how to mine social media for connections, opportunities and revenue discovered in the gold filled streams of social media? You will.

Getting Started with Social Media

I ascribe to the Nike Methodology, Just Do It! Go to Facebook and setup a profile. Same with LinkedIn. Same with Twitter. Same with YouTube … and any other social media platform that tickles your fancy or that you’ve heard that your peers, colleagues or customers frequent. Sign up. Follow. Connect. Capitalize. (Social Network Tip: the best way to capitalize is to add value for others already there. Believe me, you’ll get plenty of value back!)

It’s as simple, to get started, as that.

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By the way, if you’re interested in a 3rd party perspective or assistance, give me a call (303.882.8252). I’d love to discuss social media networking and marketing opportunities for you and your business.