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Guest Posts
August 25th, 2010 11:25 AM
How to Get More People to View Your Content
Distributing your original content can lead to greater engagement and increased sales
It’s no secret that creating original content for your website is a terrific way to get your marketing messages across, establish yourself as an expert, and humanize your company and its employees.
By writing articles, blogs and white papers, companies can offer a real service to their current and potential customers and clients. It is essential, though, that the content be well-written, informative and understandable for your target audience. It is worth the investment to either have an accomplished copywriter on your staff, or to seek the services of a professional copywriter.
Creating meaningful content is just the first step, though. The key is delivering that content to as wide an audience as you can. Fortunately, there are many online platforms through which you can distribute your original content.
Properly marketing your content across multiple platforms requires an investment of time and money , but that investment is often rewarded with a spectacular return, as increases in viewers frequently translate to increases in clients, customers and revenues.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds
An RSS feed is a simple way to “subscribe” to a blog, the same way you would subscribe to a magazine. You can use a program called an RSS reader (Bloglines and the one provided on your MyYahoo! page are popular and easy-to-use examples) to subscribe to blogs. Once you’ve subscribed, you don’t have to check each site individually—just fire up your RSS reader, and you’ll see all of the new content that’s been created since the last time you checked.
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others
If your company has a social media account (or multiple accounts) on a service such as Twitter or Facebook, use it to announce the publication of your latest content piece. Virtually all social media accounts allow you to hyperlink directly to your online content. If your friends or followers like the content piece, they are also likely to tell people in their networks about it, creating an ever-growing audience.
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July 12th, 2010 08:28 AM
Unlocking the Power of Business Blogging to Build Your Brand
How persistence and consistency can reap rewards
Editor’s Note: This article is excerpted from Blogging All-in-One for Dummies by Susan Gunelius (Wiley, 2010). Susan is a frequent contributor to our blog. See her previous posts, “From Return on Investment to Return on Impression” and “The Ultimate Brand Champion.”
A brand is the message, image and promise that your business, product or service consistently, persistently and repeatedly communicates to consumers.
A business blog is an amazing tool for building your brand. Not only does it give you the opportunity to put a voice to your brand, which allows you to develop and meet customer expectations for your brand, but it also allows you to extend your business’ Web presence exponentially. Each new blog post you publish on your business blog becomes another entry point, and with each new entry point comes the potential for more traffic.
As the traffic to your business blog increases, so will the number of loyal readers that your blog attracts, the number of incoming links that your blog receives, and the extent of your business’ online presence. Increased traffic leads directly to building the awareness of your brand to a wider audience who could talk about it, link to your content, tell friends about it, and so on.
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July 6th, 2010 11:29 AM
The Theory of Social Validation and Social Media Marketing
Fact is, you’re not great until others say you are
Back in September of 2009, Psychology Today published a piece entitled, “The Theory of Social Validation,” which boils down to the idea, “you’re not really great until someone says you are.”
The real-life implications of this pillar of wisdom is not something to be taken lightly, even if it is the case that each one of us can be great on our own terms without the need for a pat on the back from others. Consider which books, from all the tons of books actually published each year, actually ascend to top ten bestseller lists: the ones with good reviews from the press, from vocal readers, and even from self-generated buzz via traditional marketing and social media channels.
This doesn’t mean that it’s easy to go around tooting your own horn on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc., to become popular, but it does mean that the social media medium is a tool where validation for an unknown product can happen in minutes.
Want validation? Have a good product!
One thing to remember in social media, however, is—just as in the brick-and-mortar world—your products must be great to keep people talking. And if your product is only mediocre, or is lacking in some way, it will be publicly criticized or, even worse, ignored.
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July 1st, 2010 07:50 AM
Display Ads Go Viral
Part Two: Creatively challenging the status quo with sharable display ads
In part two of our four-part primer on getting started in online display, we look at some of the latest trends and innovations in display advertising. View part one, “Planning and Strategy.”
A few years ago, Oregon residents logged onto the web to find an animated crab crawling across their browser window before making a home for himself inside the four walls of a display ad.
It was a clever use of rich media at the time, recalls Andy Askren, but he isn’t sure it would play today. The ad was created by Askren, creative director of Portland-based advertising agency Grady Britton, for the coastal town of Newport. “At the time it was really successful,” he says, “but I wonder if it would be seen as cheesy today, whereas once it was innovative. The content in online ads has to constantly keep one-upping itself.”
When it comes to creating engaging content for online campaigns, advertising agencies have more tools to work with than ever before. They also have the pressure of trying to innovate in a field where innovation itself is humdrum.
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June 28th, 2010 08:56 AM
Three Ways to Respond to Negative Online Buzz
Fight, flight or flood?
People talk about things that are meaningful to them. They’ve been talking about products, brands, businesses and people offline since the first means of communication were created. So it’s not surprising that people today talk on the social Web. The global conversation is loud and powerful, and it can positively or negatively affect you, your brand and your business.
But what should you do when someone says something negative about you or your business online?
This is one of the most common fears of individuals and businesses considering leveraging the social Web conversation to build their reputations, brands and businesses. And, unfortunately, it’s one of the main reasons why people and companies are not getting the results they want and need from their social media efforts.
Don’t be afraid to let the audience take control of the conversation. That’s where the power of the social Web comes from in terms of building brands and businesses. And if someone publishes something negative about you or your business online, don’t try to squash the conversation. Overtly trying to control the conversation can do far more harm to your reputation than good. Instead, follow one of the three paths described below to effectively respond to a negative online buzz about you, your brand or your business.
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[ 1 comment | Categories: Guest Posts, Industry Trends ]
May 13th, 2010 08:24 AM
Ad Agencies: Get on the Ball with Social Media
Some agencies get it, but many still don’t. Which one is yours?
It’s no secret that when it comes to social media, advertising agencies aren’t generally known to be blazing a trail of social media enlightenment, supplying us with mind-blowing, game-changing, never-been-done-before tactics in social spaces that turn the rest of us friends and followers into digital carnival barkers. It’s by and large just not happening like that.
In fact, many ad agencies aren’t engaging in social networks at all. A 2008 survey of 302 full-service U.S. ad agencies that looked at agencies’ use of social media in a recession reports:
We’re finding that agencies are not digitally prepared. They are way behind the growth curve of new media… Only 33% of these agencies even had a blog. Email, search engine optimization and eNewsletters were rated less than 4 percent as a source for new business opportunities and as a way to reach prospective clients.
But that was two years ago. Today, shining through the advertising industry’s still-looming cloud of digital uncertainty are an innovative few who are tapping into their social networks and exploring (and sharing) the value they’ve found through these channels. These innovators constitute a subculture of agency techies, speaking the hashtag-littered language of Twitter as smoothly as “Family Guy’s” Stewie articulating “Cool Whip” all over YouTube.
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April 29th, 2010 09:42 AM
Lessons for Social Media Stakeholders, Part II
Strategies for marketing, brand, PR and market research
In the first part of “Lessons for Social Media Stakeholders,” we reviewed ways in which Customer Care, Sales, Product and Editorial teams can actively and passively utilize social media data and networks.
Social networks can include Twitter and Facebook accounts, blogs and blog comments, forums, groups or any site where there is social interaction. In many cases, social networking can also include offline events.
In this article we’ll continue this exploration with four more types of stakeholders within a company:
- Marketers
- Market Research
- Brand
- Corporate Communications and PR
As mentioned in the previous article, one person in a company may wear several hats, taking on more than one responsibility listed in this series. For example, a marketing person may also be doing the research, brand work, and writing editorial pieces. In that case, a combination of listening and engagement activities listed under each one of those stakeholders in these documents would apply.
Listening herein refers to gathering data from social networks, and tapping into conversations our communities are having on and (sometimes) offline.
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April 9th, 2010 07:17 AM
The ÜBER Sports Nation
Targeting super sports fans online
Imagine a consumer who truly appreciates your advertising. This consumer is more likely to spend money online, has a higher income, and a large, active social network where he can advocate for your products. He spends more than 14 hours a week on the same sites, making him an easy target to reach.
Now imagine there are 15.1 million of these consumers in the U.S. This isn’t just a marketer’s dream—this is the Über sports fan.
To better understand this phenomenon, Yahoo! surveyed 1,010 sports fans who visit online sports sites several times or more per weekmore than once a week. As expected, we found Über sports fans are much more engaged online than the average sports fan, but—importantly—they also have higher expectations for ads.
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April 6th, 2010 07:19 AM
How to Dominate Search Results through Social Media Sites
Get out there and get noticed
Obsessed with the visibility of your website in search results? We’ve all been there, but did you know that whether you are an individual, a small business or an enterprise, you can easily utilize other sites to get even more visibility for your brand in search results? Here’s how.
Check out these search results for Matt Cutts, one of social media’s biggest bloggers.
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March 26th, 2010 02:39 PM
The Ultimate Brand Champion
Lessons on “being the brand” from Playboy’s Hugh Hefner
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Author and consultant Susan Gunelius’ new book, Building Brand Value the Playboy Way, explores how Hugh Hefner became the ultimate embodiment of the Playboy brand. In this brief article, she writes about some of the lessons Hefner can teach today’s brand champions.]
There is perhaps no other brand in the world which has been so closely aligned with a single person as Playboy has been with Hugh Hefner for over half a century. And there is no arguing the influence that a visible brand champion who truly lives and breathes a brand can have on the success (or failure) of that brand.
Hugh Hefner, Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey—these names are synonymous with the brands they champion and guard, and their ongoing influence has helped make brands like Playboy, Apple, and Harry Potter become household names around the world. Loyal bands of brand-advocate customers evangelize and support the brands they love to anyone who will listen regardless of whether those people actually want to listen.
Being the brand the Hefner way
Whether you love the Playboy brand, hate the Playboy brand, or are completely indifferent to it, the story of Hugh Hefner—with his air of suave sophistication that pushed the limits of social mores—as the ultimate brand champion is one that all marketers can learn from. Playboy and Hugh Hefner are one and the same in many ways.
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