Dec
1
48% of Businesses spending more on Social Network Marketing to tackle the downturn
Filed Under Online Marketing, Social Networking | Leave a Comment
When the economy gets jittery, marketing budgets get cut. For most companies with limited resources that is a fact of life.
Yet, as we have said time and again, the trick is knowing how to market smarter with less money, to achieve better results than before. Enter Social Network Marketing stage left.
Social network marketing combines the power of word-of-mouth with the massive reach of the Internet so that the online community actually helps you get your message out. Watch this slideshow for a 2 minute crash course on what Social Network Marketing is and why it is vital for your business.
Well, last week MarketingSherpa announced the results of a survey on current Marketing Trends in the Economic Downturn that found that 48% of businesses plan to increase their spending on Social Network Marketing, placing it as the top way to win new business in these tough times. (See chart below)
Social Network Marketing is no new marketing fad, but a powerful strategy that is quickly gaining widespread acceptance. Almost half of the businesses surveyed see Social Network Marketing as the way forward and want to do more of it.
Ready to wizen up your marketing so you see more results for less money?
Contact us to learn more about how you can manage your own Social Network Marketing campaign with little outside help, once it’s set up and running!
Nov
27
Is Google SearchWiki a Failed Attempt at Web 2.0?
Filed Under General Stuff, Social Networking | Leave a Comment
Last week Google unveiled Google SearchWiki, the first major change in ages. So is this the search engine that anyone can edit? No. Not quite that! Actually when you boil it down, this half-baked attempt for Google to go Web 2.0 is one big disappointment, no matter what Google has to say.
Google SearchWiki lets you personalise your search results by moving individual entries up or down the list, or deleting them altogether. Only you will be able to see these changes and only when you are logged into your Google account. Nothing Web 2.0 about that is there?
You can actually add comments to your favourite sites on Google SearchWiki, but for anyone else to see them, they must be logged into their Google acount click a link hidden at the very bottom of the SearchWiki page. The trouble is that not all searches will have comments of course and getting a message saying no comments found is bound to get tiring in no time.
But the worst is still to come: you cannot edit or delete the comments that other people make, but merely vote them up or down. So much for being a wiki! If this were a wiki, people would be able to make changes to each other’s contributions, discuss the edits, revert to older versions and all that jazz.
As things stand, as ReadWriteWeb rightly points out, Google SearchWiki is all open to abuse:
Try a search for McDonald’s, for example. There are two notes - one from some random web designer that’s spamming the “wiki” with a link to his page, the other from some joker testing the obscenity filter. Neither can be removed, edited, nothing. We presume that the McDonald’s PR department has seen this - but is there anything that even they can do about it? Apparently not. Wait until it’s you that has things you don’t like appended to the page just one click away from page 1 Google for your name - what are you going to do about it?
So is there any hope at all for SearchWiki, beyond a glorified bookmarking service or a dirty way to get back at people or websites you don’t like? Hopefully yes. If Google pay any attention to all the negative comments buzzing around the web they’ll be taking this one back to the drawingboard and reworking it into a the collaborative search engine of everyone’s dreams.
Am I being too optimistic?
Oct
31
Download the audio of Seth Godin’s latest book Tribes for FREE!
Filed Under Social Networking | 2 Comments
Seth Godin is one of my favourite Marketers, his blog went straight into my Google Reader list. I’ve read MeatBall Sundae which I thought was an absolutely great book.
Now you can now hear Seth Godin reading his latest book Tribes. Seth has advertised on his blog a FREE Promo offer to download the book via Audible (you will have to register first), which I did and listened to on my iPod.
Tribes is a fantastic book about creating and leading communities in a Social web! Company Directors should open their minds to this new Social Revolution because it’s only going to get stronger and evolve. Seth again has opened my mind to new possibilities and opportunities.
Download the audio of Seth Godin’s latest book TRIBES for FREE via Audible.
Oct
27
Barack Obama’s lesson in Social Media Internet Marketing for your business
Filed Under Online Marketing, Social Networking | 6 Comments
Politics aside, no one can argue with one very significant way that Barack Obama is light years ahead of John McCain – his campaign has recognised the importance of social media Internet marketing and knows how to make the best use of it to energise the masses, rope in new participants and even collect millions of dollars. And the strategy that has really paid off big for Obama can work wonders for your business too!
As Barack 2.0 (a website that discusses how to apply Obama’s social media marketing strategies to small businesses) says:
The Obama campaign has fully utilized social media to change the way political campaigns are run. And there are many lessons small business people can learn from studying his campaign. Just as Obama has used tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to “win friends and influence” people, small business people cand do so as well. And finding enough new customers efficiently is one of the leading challenges small businesses face.
Social media Internet marketing is a relatively recent phenomenon that has the power to transform your business website from an unknown dot, lost in the Internet backwaters, to a prime piece of online real estate receiving thousands of visitors a day. The thing is that the social media enable total strangers to connect with like-minded people and to communicate, share ideas and establish trends faster than ever before.
Obama’s campaign goes way beyond a very professional looking interactive website and blog.
His YouTube account contains a vast collection of videos that is more than just about the campaign itself. For example, in one clip, his sister talks about their mother and Obama’s early life, allowing him to connect with voters in a personal way that is difficult to achieve in public rallies. With over 100,000 people subscribed to receive updates when a new video is added and many times that number in actual viewers, the social media Internet marketing potential is enormous. You see, whenever anyone comments on a video or shares it with a friend (which is happening all the time), that’s ordinary people doing marketing for Obama.
The same thing goes for his Flickr account, packed with photos of the campaign and his Facebook page with well over 2 million registered supporters, and you will also find Obama is active on several other social media platforms, including LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter.
So how do you get started with your social media Internet marketing campaign for your business? The easiest way is to start small with a few social platforms and work your way up. Take a look at what we have done for our client Pearly Grey Ocean Club.
The first thing we did was create a gmail account that is used to coordinate all the other social media features and keep track of passwords and other details using Google Docs (as well as providing access to Google Analytics for the main website and blog). This gmail account makes it easy to handle so many accounts that might have to be accessed by different members of a company’s staff and also acts as a marketing e-mail address.
Pearly Grey have been running their blog www.pearlygrey.info for some time now, so we built a Flickr account for them with photos of the tenerife resort and events and guests and incorporated it onto the blog. We also set up a YouTube account for them, and a FaceBook profile where they can keep guests and clients updated with more of the latest happenings, and which allow viewers to easily share videos, images and other information about Pearly Grey with their friends.
So, take the plunge and get started with your social media Internet marketing for your business. Get a LinkedIn account for your directors and possibly main staff, upload pictures of your products, offices, staff parties, and so on to your Flickr account, tap into the power of FaceBook, and upload some cool videos to YouTube. As you work at it, you develop a network of prospects and clients who are interested in what you’re selling and rope them in to spread the word among their friends as part of your extended team of marketers. Once you get started and begin seeing the results, you won’t look back!
Aug
20
Marta Kagan has compiled a great slide show on the importance of Social Media marketing, although its a bit crude I think it is well worth look.
Jul
23
Build your own online community with a property forum
Filed Under Online Marketing, Social Networking | 1 Comment
Imagine having a part of your real estate website that people visit again and again to interact with other property buyers and sellers - asking questions, giving advice and sharing experiences. Your staff of real estate experts would participate in the discussions, helping people out, bolstering your estate agency’s image and even winning clients over. And all the while, you are accumulating pages upon pages of text, full of property-related keywords for the search engines to index, so you get still more visitors.
That, in a nutshell, is what you can achieve by starting your own online property forum as part of your website. (Just in case you don’t know what an online forum is, you can see an example here.)
Now before you start thinking that all these benefits of having your own property forum seem too good to be true, there is something you should know. You see, getting a successful real estate forum off the ground is pretty much like kicking off a great party - people will only visit your forum if the other people visiting it make it worthwhile. This means that you will have to put in some extra effort at the beginning, to get the ‘party’ started until your forum grows in popularity.
How to set up an online property forum
Setting up and hosting your forum is quite straightforward for your web designer to do, and there is even free forum software that you can use. Contact us and we’ll be happy to help you get started.
On the other hand, you will have to give some thought to how broad or focused you want your forum to be - something that will depend on the market you are trying to capture. Most likely, you will want to have your property forum revolving around the geographical area you operate in, of course, so that it attracts visitors who are also your potential clients.
Another thing is to organise the forum into categories such as ‘Legal Questions’, ‘Holiday Homes’, ‘Property Investing’, and so on. Get some ideas from other property forums you like and then come up with your own categories that you think will appeal to your audience. Be sure to include an ‘Off Topic’ section, where people can socialise and discuss things that have nothing to do with property at all.
Getting people to join in
While we’ve already said that this is the tricky bit, there are a number of things you can do to get the ball rolling.
1) Get staff, family and friends to participate. Pretty much everyone is involved in property in some way or another, be it buying, selling or renting, so it should be easy for them to come up with some questions and have a good discussion.
2) When clients ask questions that are not of a private nature, you could try and persuade them to use your real estate forum. Failing that, you can reword the questions and get your friends to post them for you to answer and discuss in forum style.
3) If you have a strong blog readership, you try posting about controversial topics like interest rates, property bubbles, and so on and provoke your readers into a forum discussion.
4) Visit other property forums and make friends with the most prolific users and invite tehm to participate on your forum too.
5) As a last-ditch solution, if you have the pocket for it, you could even consider paying people to participate in your property forum, until it gets off the ground. Remember, you don’t need to spend a lot on expert writers for this one, and anyone willing to talk about their property experiences will do.
Of course, if you could push a button and have a thriving community of people interested in property visiting your property forum, every estate agent and his brother would have one. But if you are able to take the lead and keep working at it, you should see your forum gradually begin to thrive and turn into a great source of new business as well as a way for people to find your real estate website by landing on your forum pages from the search engines.
Go for it! And good luck!
Mar
12
Referral business is the best
Filed Under General Stuff, Social Networking | 1 Comment
We recently looked at last year´s statistics on our performance and where our business comes from. Interestingly enough 85% of our business came from referrals, for which we are truly grateful and we would therefore like to take this opportunity to thank a few people who continually refer business to our ourselves.
Thank you to Stephen Eade at Horizon Property Group, Sarah Hill at Actual Properties, Robin Brinkman at Dia Soleado Invest and David Wood at Mouse Move. If we have not mentioned you, please accept our apologies, but don´t stop referring the business!!
Feb
13
Why you should be concerned about your business Social Marker
Filed Under Social Networking | Leave a Comment
Once upon a time, businesses had full control over their image and branding, as long as they had enough money to hire people who knew what to do. The mass media made it possible to get their message out to the masses and influence the thoughts of individuals as they sat in the safety of their living rooms.
Today, the advent of social media and the social web has brought about a revolution. For the first time ever, is the individual who has the power to speak and, as Jay Deragon says in the Social Media Today blog, people’s conversations are having a strong influence on the image of a company - for good or for bad.
Jay explains how the conversations of people who have experienced a product or service create a collective impression of that brand - something Hugh MacLeod calls the brand’s ‘Social Marker‘. When your customers, employees, or even providers talk about you in the social media - and yes, they are talking - their conversations have a knock on effect and are able to spread very rapidly. One person tells another who tells another, and suddenly it’s thousands, or even millions, all talking about you!
‘Who are your customers?’ and ‘What do they want?’ have always been two fundamental questions for any business to ask. But now, the focus really has to be on, ‘What are your customers saying about you?’, both because this question has a direct bearing on the real image of your company that’s out there, and also because by listening to your customers, you can answer the first two questions with a deeper insight than ever before!
Like Jay Deragon says, people don’t want to be managed (by media campaigns, websites talking down to them, and all that jazz). They want to be heard! They want to voice their opinion about the companies they deal with and that includes you. People are clamouring for attention all over the Internet - in their blogs, in their YouTube, in their e-mails. You name it!
Want an example of the power of one man and his social network? Take a look at what happened when a client ran into a dumb customer service rep while trying to cancel his AOL internet account and blogged about it. The resulting media circus left such a lasting effect that if you google the words ‘cancel aol‘, three out of the top six results you get refer to this unfortunate incident that happened over a year and a half ago! A big, black and persistent blot on AOL’s Social Marker.
So, have you got your ear to the ground - or rather to the Internet? If not, it’s time to become aware of the conversations that are happening about your business both online and offline. Jay rightly says what we all know - that people are frustrated by unfulfilled promises and old sales and marketing tactics and that they are “speaking out and are managing, creating and influencing markets.”
Can you afford to plug your ears? Or are your company’s actions going to scream, “We heard you” to the collective public out there? The choice you make will probably have a bigger impact on your business’s Social Marker - and consequently on your business itself - than you could ever imagine!
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