Category Archives: Social Media Marketing

Using Ping.fm for Mass Automated Social Media Updating

Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , , , , ,

The following article was first seen on Search Marketing Standard:
Social media has brought along many amazing innovations – and Ping.fm is one of the best kept secrets among social media marketers to make their job a lot easier. If being able to conveniently get an update out to all your social networks, no matter where you are (café, bookstore, conference, etc), in a matter of seconds, sounds appealing … then read on to learn more about Ping.fm.

What Can Ping.fm Do?

Ping.fm allows you to post to your social networks at any time, from anywhere in the world. You could make a Facebook post or a tweet from your cellphone, from instant message, from an iPhone, from a computer, really from just about any electronic medium.

Ping.fm gives you a single access point to all your social networking sites. Instead of needing to log in to each site separately to do an update, just do it once and ping.fm will cross post your update for you. The technology is easy to use yet incredibly powerful.

What Sites Can Ping.fm Post To?

Ping can post to almost all the well-known social media sites, as well as many of the lesser known ones. Supported sites include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Shout’Em, MySpace, Hi5, Blogger, WordPress, Xanga and many more.

Why Use Ping?

There are two main reasons to use ping:

First, it saves you a lot of time. Each social network requires you to go to their website and log in before you can post your update. Let’s say each one takes 2 minutes. If you’re updating 3 sites, that’s 6 minutes.

The difference between a quick update on your phone and a 6 minute interruption in your work flow is vast. It’s just far more convenient to do it all at once – And it doesn’t even cost you anything.

Another reason to use ping is that you can update on the fly. Something funny or relevant happen during your life? Send ping a text right away. You don’t need to wait until you’re in front of your computer.

If a significant event happens, you may not want to wait until you’re in front of the computer to post. If a massive event happens that’s relevant to your industry happens unexpectedly, (oil spill, death of someone important,) you want to be able to post about it – immediately.

Ping for Mass Social Media

If you’re just getting into social media, if you’re not using many services or not updating often, then Ping.fm might not be for you.

On the other hand, if you’re taking full advantage of the social media sphere, if you’re on multiple services and you’re updating often, if you’re doing social media on a mass scale, then Ping.fm could be a lifesaver.

The interface is easy to use and the service is completely free. If you think Ping sounds like something that could help you and your social media, why not give it a shot and see if you like it? I love it!

Peter Marino is the Senior Partner and CMO of reelWebDesign.com a search marketing firm in NYC. If you’d like Peter to write for your marketing blog contact him at peter@reelwebdesign.com

A Review of Online Reputation Management Services

Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, ,

Reputation management is a process whereby an individual person or group, such as a business, is assigned a ‘ranking’ based on how that individual or group interacts within a larger structure. Reputation management usually takes the form of professional software or a specially developed application. While there are free versions of this technology, in practical market terms, reputation management is usually handled by what is known as “innovation management software.”

Paid Services

Innovation management software allows large global corporations with literally hundreds of thousands of employees to gather ideas from their workforce, and correspondingly assign reputation rankings to each individual employee. The employees can earn their reputations based on how their comments are rated by both their peers and their superiors. In this instance, reputation management is a constantly evolving process, with the software recalibrating the ranking based on new, incoming data.

There are several software major innovation management software companies that provide this service, including Brightidea and Spigit. Within each company’s software suites there are customized reputation management modules. In Brightidea’s case, each employee’s reputation is based on an in-depth point scheme. Employees earn these points by participating in voting and collaboration sessions, where ideas are both critiqued and improved upon by the larger user community. Employees who perform exceptionally well by consistently voting for ‘good’ ideas, or earn a significant number of points by always being helpful in collaborative efforts, earn points. The more points they earn, the higher their reputation ranking, which draws attention within the framework of the reputation management module. These individuals are singled out for either recognition or reward by senior management. Spigit’s process is similar, although it emphasizes an slightly more opaque approach, providing management with more discretion as to how individuals may earn higher status within the reputation management system.

Reputation management can also be bought as a separate service to enhance the online reputation of a company. An example is British Petroleum, which after the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico aggressively worked to make sure that positive articles about the company and its efforts to clean up the spill would appear when a user typed in keywords relating to the spill into global search engines. While this service was folded into a larger public relations campaign, the technology that powered the service is a perfect example of reputation management.

Free Services

Large online businesses provide a ‘free’ version of reputation management. ‘Free’ is in quotes in this context because the service often requires the user to pay a fee to use the service itself; the reputation management aspect of that service does not cost anything. An example is eBay, where users can rank other users based on their responsiveness and general conduct during a transaction.

Benefits and Drawbacks

Reputation rankings play a huge role in the amount of power any one person or group has in influencing a process. Prior to the advent of this technology, a person’s presence online or within a computerized software suite had an importance ratio of 1:1; in other words, that person’s commentary had the same weight as any other user. The corresponding clutter of ideas, both good and bad, led to the need for a hierarchy and a cleaner organizational format.

The increasing popularity of reputation management software has both benefits and drawbacks. Reputation management can help identify leaders and thoughtful individuals who have a worthwhile contribution to make out of a sea of literally billions of opinions. Unfortunately, reputation management can also create artificial barriers to innovation and an inaccurate reflection of reality. On the positive side, singling out exceptionally savvy individuals helps advance both the career of that individual and the prosperity of the organization or community in which they are participating. However, on the negative side, reputation rankings can shut out slightly more unusual ideas that may lead to improved processes, especially if those ideas originate from an individual with a low or nominal reputation score.

As with any business, those who control reputation management must be vigilant, and open to frequently changing or updating how reputations are tallied. Individuals who attempt to “game” the system by illegitimately inflating their ratings must be screened out; likewise, those who are hesitant to participate must be encouraged to contribute.

By Peter Marino

Peter Marino is the Senior Partner and CMO of reelWebDesign.com a search and social media marketing company in NYC.

Mobile Analytics, Does it Work?

SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing

The Effectiveness and Future of Mobile Analytics

How does one measure the effectiveness of an advertising strategy that has no fixed location, but that relies primarily on the response of individual targets? Mobile marketing, a strategy which allows advertisers to send out text messages or alternatively develop applications for use on mobile devices, is measured by what is known as mobile analytics. According to studies conducted over the last ten years, mobile marketing can dramatically increase the impact of any given ad campaign in terms of what is known as ‘user engagement.’ Specifically, applications, or ‘apps’ as they are known, attract users who are interested in a particular product or service, and keep them engaged by periodically offering them relevant updates or information. But what is the future of mobile marketing? Has it already hit its prime, or is there room for development that will come to redefine the relationship between ‘customers’ and ‘businesses’?

Effectiveness

                A recent news event confirms the effectiveness of mobile marketing. The event involves Nokia, a once-powerful telecommunications company that has been struggling to regain market share against its competitors the iPhone and the Android. Nokia announced that is purchasing the Mobile Analytics company Motally, which has spent years developing highly refined techniques of tracking customer interaction and response to mobile apps. Motally’s data takes into consideration the device that the user has to access the data, the content the user accesses, the location from which they access it, and the total amount of time they spend accessing it. This type of information, coupled with demographic data that is publicly available on such applications as Facebook, provides companies with a wealth of detailed information about their visitors, including age, work history, and social connections. Nokia’s decision to purchase the company when Nokia itself is struggling indicates that the company believes that Motally’s technology will allow Nokia to aggressively re-enter the mobile device market.

Motally’s mobile analytics has an added degree of sophistication, primarily in the rapid way it is able to sort all of this data and render it to Nokia. One of the unexpected difficulties of the 21st century has not been accessibility or availability of information, but rather the ability to sort through all of the available data to produce meaningful and useful results. Mobile analytics in of itself is incredibly valuable and useful primarily because it offers companies a pre-developed metric to sort through literally thousands of gigabytes of data in a timeframe that allows them to make commercial gains.

By comparing real-time user data with demographic information, a company can predict the interests of a particular user, and send them information about upcoming products or services that they will very likely be interested in either purchasing or using. Each time the user interacts with the information that has been sent to them, they add to a larger data stream of information about them, which allows companies to target them with ever increasing accuracy. In this sense, mobile analytics is the equivalent of a personalized commercial profile, a tool which gives companies and developers incredible power.

Case Studies

                The burgeoning club scene in Los Angeles, New York, and Las Vegas has discovered something about its users: they move fast. In an era when the rapid-fire communication technology of social networking sites has bestowed upon email a certain stolid formality, marketing to people under the age of 30 requires a high-impact approach. Both PACHA in New York City and the nightclub TAO in Las Vegas discovered an enormous boost in attendance and follow-up participation once they switched from flyer and email marketing to an text messaging/app-based approach. This direct engagement, which could be instantly modified depending on user response, helped both clubs create instantaneous communities of dedicated club goers.

Of course, the success of mobile marketing is not limited to night clubs. Other businesses have benefited from being able to interact with their customers, including those companies who offer services online, such as the iTunes store, or developers who create apps. In each case, the success of the marketing strategy seems to hinge on the fact that the company begins to develop a slightly more ‘personal’ relationship with its customers. In the case of the Ran Pass Liquor store in Texas, customers were clued in to discounts ahead of the official announcements, creating customer loyalty and spawning other events, which in turn drew in more customers, who signed up for the individual messaging service.

Apps, meanwhile, compete with each other for market dominance primarily by being able to offer customers the most useful and efficient methods of parsing data. With its detailed roster of data, mobile analytics is vital to the success of a given app. If an app user knows that his or her core customers are spending most of their time on one particular feature, but neglecting others entirely, he or she is able to spend the appropriate amount of labor and time in re-engineering those portions that work, and those that do not.

Geolocation

                So what is the future of mobile marketing and mobile analytics? With an increasing amount of personal information now available on the internet, is there a point where the most successful mobile analytics firms will develop a formula that emphasizes speed?

Not necessarily. While information parsing is of vital importance to the technology, the “type” of information may also impact mobile analytics, and subsequently alter business practices. Geolocation, which is the technology that allows a network to pinpoint the geographical location of an individual based on his or her access signal or IP address, may dramatically reconfigure business models, and play a substantial role in how mobile analytics is used.

Perhaps the easiest way to visualize how this could occur is to imagine the stages of evolution of the internet. In the 20th century, the internet was primarily an amorphous realm, without tangible connections to a physical locale. Gradually, as more and more users began to interact with the internet, the idea of a three dimensional physical location began to gain more importance. If someone wanted to order a pizza, for example, they would need to know who sold pizza within their geographical radius, not all the pizza makers on the planet.

With the increasing emphasis on commerce, physical locality again becomes of utmost importance. In order to compete in this new era, retailers will want to advertise directly to individuals who are within their vicinity, which makes the availability of geographical data a kind of insider edge. Additionally, as users continue to build up a commercial profile of themselves by virtue of not only of the purchases they make online, but how and when they make them, retailers will want to start competing for very specific individuals who have excellent shopping ‘profiles.’ Put another way, everyone will want to track down the big spenders. Undoubtedly, mobile analytics will make advertising rates to certain individuals far more expensive than to others whose commercial profiles are not as impressive.

This gradual narrowing of focus in advertising, with an emphasis on targeting a select group of coveted individuals, will have other effects. Individual users may in fact have their device subsidized if they spend more money. If Google and Verizon manage to enact a two-tier system, the public internet will require users to pay to get in, while those individuals who use their mobile devices to make purchases and thus create detailed histories about themselves will be able to use their devices for free.

Conclusion

                Mobile marketing and mobile analytics are both useful tools that promise to alter how society interacts with the internet, and with each other. By increasing the amount of accurate information about individual consumer habits, mobile analytics changes how businesses interact with their customers. Those mobile analytics companies that can parse data in the fastest and most detailed fashion will become very wealthy indeed.

By Peter Marino, Senior Partner and CMO of reelWebDesign.com, a search and social media marketing company in New York City.

Using Social Media to Acquire Customers via Forms

Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Design

The goal of every business is to attract as many targeted customers as they can. Businesses create websites with the goal of increasing their chances of acquiring more customers either through direct sales or as prospects.

With the number of websites increasing, there is a need for business owners to either learn good search engine optimization (seo) practices or hire someone else to do the work for you. With good seo, you are assured that your website has a constant flow of visitors who need your product or service.

Other than using search engine marketing, progressive companies have embraced social media marketing as part of their marketing efforts. Companies can use social media marketing to:

1. Acquire new clients,
2. Use social media networks for customer support, or
3. Create a buzz about their products

Proper use of both seo and social media marketing can lead to a never-ending stream of visitors to a business website. There is one more thing that remains after a company gets visitors to their site. One needs to turn these visitors into buyers. In other words, you need to convert these visitors. This is especially true if the company had used social media to acquire its customers. To convert visitors into buyers or potential customers, the best tools to use are efficiently laid out forms.

Forms that work are easy to use, easy to find and are inviting to your web visitor. It is imperative for the visitor to find the form on your site. The form should entice the visitor to sign up or input their details. There is nothing wrong with ensuring that it is the most prominent section in your website.

Forms that aquire customers ask for limited information. For example, if your company does not need to know the zip code of the client, then do not include it in the form. Your web visitors want to spend as little time as possible on your site and give as little information as they can. It is prudent to assure them that you will use their information legally. A link to your privacy policy is essential for a form that works.

If you have used social media to attract a customer to your form, tell your website visitors what they will receive from filling in the form. The visitor should know what to expect once they have filled out a form. For example, you can tell them that they will receive a free newsletter, or a free book, or special offers. If the visitor values what they will get, you are likely to get more customers.

Finding potential customers is the first step for any business. However, implementation of forms that work can have a dramatic, positive impact in your business.