With more and more marketers jumping onto the social media bandwagon, a lot of questions come up. Is it possible to track metrics and ROI? What are other companies doing? Why isn’t it working? Being prepared to answer  questions like these can make a difference in how a company interacts with social media and if they can succeed.

How can we track social media?
Unfortunately, there is no one “most effective” social media tracking system. Marketers across the web are still working to figure out how to measure social media, how to attach ROI, and how to sell the benefits of participationon the social web  to those that don’t “get it”.

Social media marketing isn’t like an email campaign where you can track the number of emails sent out, the number that were opened, the number of clicks, visits, leads and conversions all in one process. Much of what happens in the social media world happens behind a login and the old ways of tracking web visitor analytics just doesn’t work in that scenario.

Just like any kind of marketing, each company has their own set of objectives and reasons for reaching them via social media channels. That means different methods and ... read more >>

You’ve most likely heard of RSS feeds, but you might still be wondering exactly what they are. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” RSS itself is just the format for delivering regularly updated web content. Blog feeds allow readers to keep up with the newest info posted on different sites, and people “subscribe” to the feeds of their choice.

Enter the “Feedreader”

For example, there are 25+ blogs out there that I enjoy reading on a regular basis. I want to keep up with them because they help keep me up date with all of the latest information in my niche. However, I don’t want to have to go out to the web and pull up each blog individually every day just to see whether they have been updated. The solution to this is to use a “feedreader” to see all of my favorite blogs’ latest content all in one place. Feedreaders allow you to access new content in two main ways: through the actual reader itself or via email updates. One of the most popular feedreaders and the one that I use is Google Reader.

The Business Use

Why is this important for marketing? Two reasons: 1—It’s a great way to stay current and educated on the things going on in your niche or market through ... read more >>

How much attention do you pay to the headline of a blog post or other content you write?

I always think that the headline of a blog post, newspaper article, news release or other piece of written material is the most essential thing to pay attention to when you write that content.

A compelling headline or title is usually how you’ll get the attention of people when they’re doing things like I do most days – scroll through a list of headlines of content in my RSS reader.

I don’t see photos or other visual attractions, just words upon which I’ll make a rapid almost subconscious decision on whether to give the content the headline leads to any attention, or skip and continue scanning.

As an example of making headline creation an art if not a science, look to the Huffington Post and what they do to write compelling headlines as reported by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard university:

From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks ...

As a humble member of various social networks including Twitter it never fails to amaze me how lame some businesses are in their approach.

I don’t know what is happening inside the brains of the people behind this behaviour on behalf of companies. But it is like they’ve forgotten what it is like to be a real person.

Here are five sins that I’ve seen businesses commit in social networks:

1) No foreplay

Social networking is precisely that ’social’, that means it works just like real life.  How many times in real life do you just walk up to someone and say: “Hi I’m X, do you want to buy my product?” without saying “hi”, making some eye contact & introducing yourself?

In real life, apart from outbound telemarketers, we typically shoot the breeze for a while before launching into the hard sell.

2) Not being real & not letting staff be real

One of the reasons that @comcastcares and @zappos have worked on Twitter is that there were real people behind those accounts & they backed it up with consistently having real people there. Some companies forget that the social nature of these networks means that they need to be more transparent and open up to the outside ... read more >>

It’s a given–we all want to do more in less time with social media.  The good news is that there are lots of tools to help automate your social networking activities.

Although I don’t encourage automating your whole experience (that would be missing the point), there are some useful productivity-boosters worth checking out.

1) Ping.fm: Want to update your Twitter status as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites all at the same time from one place? Ping is great for this.  Tools like Ping are one of the top “secret weapons” of the most successful social media marketers.  (Finally, a way to be in multiple places at one time! )

So, if you have something to say to your Twitter followers but that you would also like to share with your Facebook fans and friends and your connections on LinkedIn, you can—without going to each site and logging in separately.  Ping has the ability to update over 40 different social networks.  This is a major time saver!

Plus, you can even create groups, so that if you only want to update LinkedIn and Twitter but not Facebook, for example, you can do that.  It’s definitely worth exploring.  (It’s also worth ... read more >>