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Social Media CRM w/ Mike Sneider

Panel from #smbusinessforum (Social Media business Forum in Durham NC) w/ Mike Sneider talking about how to implement an overall strategy for your Social media customer relationship management solution.

Awesome data driven marketing content here. Runtime 35minutes. Subscribe over in Itunes if you want the podcast on the go.

 

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For the full timestamps of the talk head on over to Alter Imaging’s blog

Social Media CRM – Connecting your sales force to the social Web from Alter Imaging, Inc. on Vimeo.

Posted by David Wells | Comments

Best Practices for Business Blogging

Here is the panel from the Social Media Business Forum with Jeff Cohen, DJ Waldow, and Alison Bolen on “Business Blogging Best Practices.” It was a great panel and some very good tips, tricks, and how-to on how to get your blog working for your business.

 

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For the timestamps of the Video Please head on over to Alter Imaging’s Blog!

Runtime 51min.

Posted by David Wells | Comments

The Future of Business on the Social Web

Here is a little video I took from the 2009 Social Media Business Forum.

Laura Fitton (author of Twitter for dummies), Jason Falls (Principal over at Social Media Explorer), John Andrews (Founder and Managing Partner at Collective Bias), and Lucretia Pruitt (Director of Social Media at Collective Bias.) Speaking about how the Social media landscape is changing.g

 

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View the video with timestamps over at Alter imaging’s Blog

The future of business on the social web – Social Media Business Forum from Alter Imaging, Inc. on Vimeo.

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Barcamp Charlotte SEO Session with NC_SEO

I recently attended Barcamp Charlotte. It was an awesome experience and I only wish they had it more than once a year!

There were some absolutely amazing sessions, ranging from how to make balloon animals to social media to developing advanced iphone applications through the SDK (whatever that means!) One of my favorites was venturing down the rabbit hole with a local artist Jared. “Once you are in the rabbit hole you never want to leave.”

For those of you who missed it, I snagged a video of NC_SEO (Robert Enriquez) talking about how to get the other 9 listing on page one of Google. Some great SEO tips in here for online reputation management. Runtime 29minutes

Internet Marketing Training – SEO Google from Robert E on Vimeo.

Let me know your thoughts on BarCamp CLT in the comments!

Also since I know a lot of web devs were there and might be watching this… can someone give me a clue as to why my blog load time is slower than molasses?

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Vark! A human Google

It has been a while since I have updated my blog and even longer since I have been throughly delighted by a new web 2.0 app.

Aardvark. Vark for short. Is something I recently stumbled across and can’t seem to get enough of it.

Vark is a community based question service that taps into your existing network of friends via various social media sites as well as it’s own very expanding community.

Think of it like yahoo questions on steriods.

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‘Digital Marketing Zen’ Podcast #4: Getting Linked in with Linkedin w/ Lewis...

In this short episode Lawton has a conversation with Lewis Howes author of LinkedWorking: Generating Success on the World’s Largest Professional Networking Website.

They discuss various aspects of how using LinkedIn as a personal branding tool is extremely important in the professional world.

(sorry in advance for the not so great audio quality! Great content makes up for that!)

 

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Runtime 12:30 min

Shownotes:

2:20 Taking legacy of Lawton Chiles Governor working with children and implementing with Worsttofirst.org

3:00 1 one mistake about using linked in is not making messages personal

3:40 Connect on a personal level

4:38 Answering Q & A questions to build connections with people. This can make you an opinion leader

5:22 Provide the best answer for questions. This leads to people clicking on profiles then onto the website.

6:00 Ask thought provoking questions. To get free advice from industry experts

7:06 Linked working book on amazon

8:00 one of the best ways to be known in your industry is to host events.

10:38 Follow Lewis howes on twitter. Check out Lewis’s Linkedin Profile.

11:20 Ustream sound quality SUCKS! Sorry about that listeners. We are working to resolve these issues

Linked in Links!

• - Getting Started with Linkedin

• - Guy Kawasaki on Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn

• - LinkedIn Tips and Tweaks: Do More with your LinkedIn Account

• - Personal Branding Tips for LinkedIn via Shoestringbranding

• - Lawton’s tips on leveraging linkedin including video of Lewis House

• - 5 linkedin tips via lifehack.org

Thanks for listening! Please let us hear your feedback! Post a comment or call our comment line at 646-402-5686 x 31903

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‘Digital Marketing Zen’ Podcast #3: Video marketing best practices, youtube ...

 

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ShowNotes

1:00 Video marketing best practices

1:35 Tip 1 : use the metadata to its fullest advantage: Title, descriptions, keywords, related terms,

3:00 Copywriting tips for title descriptions

3:15 Look at what others are doing and if they are getting those views than check out the metadata in the blue more description tab

4:14 Use italics and quotes around keywords in title

5:00 Can’t have too many keywords but keep it relevant towards your vertical

5:40 Use bottom results of google for keyword tips

6:00 Thumbnail optimization – pick a thumbnail that will grab attention of viewer

7:02 Make sure your content is fresh and that it is staggered.

8:00 Youtube is being leveraged as a tool to ultimately send traffic to your site!

8:20 Youtube Secret TIP!!! Live hyperlink in description. Making it easy to send traffic to your site.

9:33 Watermark your video in the corner of the screen. So if the video is embedded away from youtube you are still getting your brand out there.

10:32 Youtube Secret Weapon.com

11:00 Implications for b2b use of online video

11:13 Webinars like hubspot.tv

12:05 Relevant content is key if you are going to pitch anything at the end

12:25 Will it blend – by Blendtec

13:25 The whole goal is to make it shareable AKA Viral

13:55 There is no secret sauce to viral videos. There are multiple ways to do it.

14:53 Stay genuine. Fake virals have a bad backlash if consumers feel duped.

15:30 OfficeMax Viral commercial

16:20 Viral tip: use subtle branding…

16:30 Ways Brands Leverage Youtube

16:40 Youtube Brand channels

17:18 In-video PPC. Not a good idea to leverage as it annoys consumers

17:55 Youtube annotations: Samsung Instinct. Series of videos where you choose your own ending.

19:00 Annotations are the perfect way to be engaging to the consumer

19:20 Leading the consumer through the experience. Call to action at the end of the journey to convert.

20:30 Branding on the sly through the Samsung instinct viral video

21:19 Show take away: make it as easy as possible for consumers to interact with your brand at any given touchpoint!

Thanks for listening! Please let us hear your feedback! Post a comment or call our comment line at 646-402-5686 x 31903

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MashUps: Living in a Recombinant Culture

I found this video a long time ago but a recent conversation with a friend brought it up again. So I thought I’d share it with you.

Its a talk done by Faris Yakob over at Talent imitates, Genius Steals about A History of Recombinant Culture.

The main idea is that we live in a recombinate culture:

Recombinance is making something from other stuff, or recombining existing ideas into a new one. If you put this concept together with our culture implicitly talking about media and how we use it (and how we now MAKE it), you get a recent phenomenon commonly known as Consumer Created Content or Mash-ups.

The farther apart these two or more ideas are from each other usually make whatever the mash-up is more intriguing.

Really interesting stuff to think about. Here is the Video and Deck from his presentation:

Faris Yakob at Interesting New York from David Nottoli on Vimeo.

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Qassam Count: Leveraging Facebook and Twitter in a new way

During the recent Israel and Gaza conflict I saw an interesting use of social media that deserves mention.

QassamCount, a nonprofit org set up to supply updates about rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel, leveraged both Twitter and Facebook to spread there message out.

This was done by people opting in to donate their Facebook status and tweets to read the constantly updated missile reports.

This is the first time that I have seen these two mediums leveraged in such a way that instead of blasting out your own messages through your portals that you invoke the masses to adopt your cause and help spread the message.

(However bias the reporting is not the important part. I am skeptical of all news!)

What is important is how this tactic can be leveraged by multiple other not-for-profit organizations for time sensitive campaigns/events.

This is a very ingenious use of these two social networks and I thought they deserved an honorable mention

Kudos! Qassam Count

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Some thoughts on the perfection of marketing

So I was listening to an episode of marketing over coffee with John wall and marketer and avid Buddhist James Connor.

They were going over the main points of James Connors new book, The Perfection of Marketing.

One of those points got me thinking…

That point was that many companies and marketers make a fundamental mistake on how they go about pushing their products.

James Connors explains that yes maybe your product can do this, that, and the other but the customer doesn’t care about that. They care about the core function that is the selling point, or what he coins the sales moment . Once you find this sales moment, you don’t have to barrage the consumer with all the various benefits that the product or service will provide. You need to paint that one mental image of their life being better by having your product.

In fact if you throw up all of your product benefits into their face too early they are going to become weary of your desperation or just not care. Grab that single thing (the light bulb if you will) that they are looking for and start your marketing efforts there. After you cross that threshold you can start feeding listing more benefits.

He also makes another great point: Do you choose to buy something the first time you see it? No of course not.

Its not until what he says to be at least 6-9 brand interactions/expsoures that you even begin to start this thought process.  So spend your budget appropriately and don’t blow it all on a fancy TV spot. Touch as many bases as possible as long as they are viable.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this! Please feel free to comment.

Listen to the whole interview over at Marketing over coffee.

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Green is good (great even), but is it different?

With the recent proliferation of green marketing (not necessarily the marketing itself but company’s going “green”) it seems it is becoming more and more of a ‘me too’ movement.

Hey “company X” is going green! Lets go buy their stuff! Wrong

I just watched an E-surance commercial that boasts their greenness by how they contribute to replanting trees. That is a good thing, everyone can agree. However, at the same time the company in question is a car insurance company. Now, doesn’t their product, insurance, enable people to drive? Well cars (most cars anyway) aren’t very environmentally friendly. If they were trying to do something green they would stop selling insurance and take all their money and form a crazy lobbyist group to ban cars or promote electric ones (hyperbole).

There seems to be a clear disconnect from this philanthropic marketing tactic and the companies underlying actions.

In my opinion, I think it is imperative for companies to engage in philanthropic activities to further/foster their companies continued success. However, my suggestion would be to make that philanthropic activity something that relates to the product itself. It wouldn’t work for everyone but it would make people less weary of green marketing nonsense.

Take away:

• Just because you and your company changed 8 of the light bulbs in your office doesn’t make you Green!

• These murky green marketing messages detract from the actually green movement and also from your credibility as a brand.

Let me know what you think! Comment below!

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The future of Digital Cable advertising, a fresh perspective.

A couple weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending a local mixer of the Tallahassee American Advertising Federation. The keynote speaker was Jeremy Delaplane, digital director at MTV. He highlighted some truths about the proliferation of new media opportunities and how marketers can capitalize on and off line media to extend the message’s reach.

One of the topics discussed which I thought was really cool, was the direction in which digital cable is heading.

Now, we all know that Tivo has been around for quite some time now and that fewer and fewer 30/60 spot commercials actually get watched. So, the question is what is a brand to do? (besides simply featuring a still of your brand’s logo in the corner of the screen, in the hopes that the person fast forwarding will notice it for the 3 seconds that it is there.)

The answer goes along with the basic concept of making the content engaging and relavant to the consumer. With cable being a digital medium it can (not quite there yet) be a geo/psycho/social targeted medium. Once this happens in a big way, digital cable spots will become a medium that some niche players could get involved with. These same brands did not have the multi-million dollar budget to blanket a broadcast TV network like the well established brands. With the ads being more effectively targeted they will inherently become cheaper and something that these niche markets can dabble in.

Another insight I took away from Jeremy’s keynote was how reality TV shows (which I think are the bane of human existent) are already engaging audiences to vote for polls and contestants via SMS. Another more integrated approach is already in the works. It focuses on using the button already on your remote to engage the customer.

Like so:

Using this technology could be leveraged in several different ways to be a game changer to the traditional 30/60 second spot.

Such as:

• Polls (as shown on the left)
• Custom commercials based off the viewers input. Kind of like the books where you decide how it ends by choosing different outcomes to an event.
• Branded games

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My thoughts on the future

So, these are the things that should be happening with the current technology available. But, let me share with you my invention to make it even better.

It involves introducing an accelerometer, like those found in Nintendo wii or the IPhone, into the everyday TV remote. The technology exists, but the implementation is another thing!

Just image it though, watching your favorite television show and the commericials come on, but instead of asking who has the remote to fast forward it, you ask who has the remote to fight over who gets to play the latest branded mini game from Nike or whoever.

These branded minigames have the potential to go viral if they are engaging enough. With on-demand television at your fingertips today there could also be an on demand branded minigame section. In this on-demand section users could play the games as many times as they wish. They could also be incentived by giving the player with the highest score or most plays (etc.) This would be a great way to get back the consumers attention with something they would be more likely to enjoy.

Unfortunately, I do not currently posess the technical know-how to get something like this to work. So if someone wants to do it. Be my guest! (just give me some of the billions you will make)