Posts Tagged ‘social media marketing’
Here’s a great post from my friend, Jeffery Smith, over at SEO Design Solutions about search engine algorithm changes and how to NOT panic by creating multiple keywords for which you are ranked .
I agree with Jeffery in that being a one trick pony with your website rankings will eventually lead you to despair and I’ve seen it cripple a business that has become dependent on the sales generated online.
However I think his suggested solution of having multiple keywords for which you are ranked does not take the solution quite far enough. In many ways you are still dependent upon the search engines and that still means all your eggs are in a single basket.
I would offer that you also diversify your traffic platforms by targeting video and audio as well as other platforms. Further, I would advise you to pick a social platform like Facebook or LinkedIn and have a presence there where you engage people on a regular basis.
Other advantages to this tactic, than simply having diversified sources of traffic, are that this moves your focus from your website and blog out into the media where your potential customers are already carrying on conversations about competing products.
This allows you to enter into these conversations and engage with that audience. At this point, you can gently introduce your products and educate your market (but don’t try to “sell” in the social realm, that’s a no-no). Educating, however, is a trust building activity and when you catch the shopper in the early stages of making a decision and alert them to your products and your advantages, they will likely take a longer harder look at your products and your brand.
Just make sure that there are clear paths from all the channels into your sales funnel so that you can convert this traffic from potential leads into solid sales.
You will find that your sales increase dramatically, because this on-line multi-channel approach to marketing will help to instill a sense of trust. People typically have to hear about you several times before they will buy from you and the multi-channel approach will help to do exactly this.
For more information about the different channels of online marketing and how you can most effectively incorporate them into your online marketing plan, check out www.pyramidofpromotion.com
Microsoft unveiled a proof-of-concept prototype “LookingGlass” this week at Advertising Week 2009.
According to Jamey Tisdale and and Marc Mercuri from Microsoft, “LookingGlass,” will let companies listen to, participate in, and analyze social media. It harnesses the Microsoft platform to demonstrate how businesses can quickly and efficiently put social media to use as they create advertising. It’s a prototype of a social media business platform, “What we’re trying to do is to make social media actionable for businesses.”
The first step in making social media data useable is listening to the conversation. LookingGlass, which is built on a number of Microsoft technologies, lets users track customer sentiment across an array of social media sites. For example, the Zune HD marketing team could use LookingGlass to see what users are saying about the product in real time on Twitter, Flickr, or YouTube. Using technology from Microsoft Research, LookingGlass automatically rates each posting as positive or negative, so the Zune HD team could rank comments according to sentiment and see how customers are responding to the product and the campaign to sell it.
Under the Zune example, the team could use LookingGlass to post a quick response on Twitter or Facebook. With all that information, businesses will be able to participate in conversations taking place on the social Web or start new ones. At a glance, they’ll be able to see a spike in activity and to pinpoint how their campaigns are being received. marc enthused that that’s what gives LookingGlass its power “You can not only identify whether your message is on target or not, you can discover memes or customer segments that you’re presently unaware of.”
LookingGlass will be accessed via a web browser to allow for compatibility with both PCs and Macs.
With LookingGlass, businesses can overlay advertising, sales, support, and other key business information onto their Web sites. Built using Microsoft SQL Server 2008, LookingGlass readily integrates with other internal data. Marketers can then look at how internal data compares with, say, user sentiment of a product on Twitter or other social networking sites. They can then take targeted actions and enhance their investment of participating in social media.
This allows businesses to analyze their advertising investments in new ways. The emphasis is that LookingGlass is its own platform, which plays to Microsoft’s strength. “Microsoft is uniquely qualified to be able to connect business information with social media information in a way that makes it actionable,” said Jamey. Partners will be also able to build on top of the Microsoft platform to add their own insights and information for their clients.
“If we at Microsoft can change the discussion from banner ads to how do you provide a rich, relevant experience on the Web, we can start having a better business conversation. With LookingGlass, and some of the other proof-of-concepts we’re working on, we’re taking a big step toward changing that conversation.”
Quoted heavily from Microsoft Advertising Blog
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