social media

Why You Shouldn’t Rely on a Social Media Ringer

Let’s hire a ringer!

Or so goes the quick answer at many a business when they’re trying to figure out how to get their arms around social media. The temptation is to go out and scoop up someone with name recognition, with a prominent presence on the latest social networks, and put them in the driver’s seat for your social media strategy. That takes care of everything, right?

Not quite.

It’s awesome to hire talented, accomplished people. It’s even better to hire talented people that have skill sets and expertise that might not be prevalent in your company. But it’s very, very important to look at the long term play. Make sure your ringer is part of the picture, even an important one, but not the basket in which you’re plunking all of your eggs.

Read more

12 Most Important Ways to Build Brand Advocates

Successful social media marketing is all about relationships, with the highest ROR (Return on Relationship) coming from relationships with your Brand Advocates — those people who are so delighted by your product/service/brand that they can’t wait to tell their friends and their whole social networks about their experience.  Here are 12 ways to build your Brand Advocates to increase your ROR:

1.     Focus on the relationship first.

Consumers don’t fall in love with your brand and become Brand Advocates by being pushed into sales; they fall in love with your high quality product, excellent customer service, and a consistently enjoyable experience – all natural byproducts of strong relationships.

Read more

My Single Most Powerful Productivity Trick

You could circle the world at least dozen times just by stringing together all the words that have been written about productivity.

In particular, managing information overload in a social and new media era is a topic that never ceases to draw the masses. There isn’t a day that passes that I don’t see at least a post from someone lamenting how they simply can’t keep up anymore, or keep track of what they have to do, or how they’re getting buried in information but not finding anything valuable out there. It happens to the best of us.

Read more

A Consumer-based View of Data Gathering

The more social media use becomes a way of business and a way of life, the more we are seeing – and will continue to see – issues around data collection and user privacy.  It of course makes sense for marketers to leverage this data, but in my opinion, we’re going about it in the wrong way.

Brands MUST begin to view data as a relationship-building and consumer-engagement opportunity, rather than simply a targeting tool.  The targeting mentality is all about “catching” the customer, zeroing in on the customer like prey — totally counter to the emerging culture of social/relationship-based marketing!

Brands that embrace this targeting mentality are missing the boat and letting a huge relationship-building opportunity pass them by.  Let’s turn the table on the data collection/privacy issue and instead make it valuable to the consumer in the form of getting to know them and serving them better.

Read more

Think before you discount

Until recently, “social media fatigue” has been the most dangerous “condition” that we social media marketers have had to combat.  Now, however, with the recent trend toward frequent deep discounts and coupon offers, we are risking an even more serious condition of “offer fatigue.”

Social media fatigue is of course of concern to social media marketers, but I think it will continue to be seen most often as simply an unfortunate side effect to the incredible advances that social media has brought to human connections and access to information.  Offer fatigue, on the other hand, has serious consequences for our brands.

Read more

The Gamification of News

“Gamification” seems to be the up and coming buzz word. You may recall that in April, I covered Empire Avenue in a post about the gamification of social media. Now, Google is in the news (literally) with a gamification project of their own, and I think it has some potential.

Let’s explore why.

This week Google announced the launch of their Google News Badges. Google heralded the launch with the following description:

The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends.

You’ll probably feel like the badge adoption seems familiar; after all, Foursquare made this a central part of their service.

Read more

Are You Laying the Groundwork Your Brand’s “Infinite Moments of Truth”?

Moments of Truth are well-known concepts in the marketing world, from research (Zero Moment of Truth)… to shopping (First Moment of Truth) … to owning/using a product (Second Moment of Truth).

Now, in a recent blog post, David Berkowitz introduces one more: the Infinite Moment of Truth (IMOT), which is all about sharing the experience of any (or all) of the other Moments of Truth.  Berkowitz suggests the IMOT is infinite in three ways:

  • the number of people a consumer can share experiences with
  • the ways they can share experiences
  • and the period of time during which they can share their experiences

Each of the Moments of Truth provide their own marketing opportunities, but the Infinite Moment of Truth is the one that can harness the full power of social media and start the “moment of truth cycle” again by influencing the choice a consumer makes at the Zero moment of truth.

The consumer purchases a product, uses it, loves it, and shares this experience with their networks… and someone in their network gets to the Zero Moment of Truth and says “I will purchase.”  

Read more

Google+: a platform, not the message

Google+ is here — what do you need to change about your brand message to leverage this new tool?

Nothing!

Now more than ever, your brand message needs to remain strong and consistent, and your focus needs to stay on building relationships. Don’t let new tools (like Google+) distract you from your brand message! As I continue to say, successful social media marketing is all about relationships, and the tools simply facilitate those relationships. Without the people and connections, the tools are meaningless.

Read more

Is your brand relevant to your social media audience?

Since social media makes it so simple (quick and easy) to post your message (content) in numerous social networks, it can be tempting to spray your message around the cybersphere as far and wide as possible.  However, that method keeps you at a surface level of connection… which gets you little more than a glance.  To go deeper and have ongoing consumer relationships that result in sales, you need to be relevant and stay relevant to your audience.

This might sound like Marketing 101, but with the introduction of social media and the exponentially increased capacity for one-too-many messaging, it bears repeating:  no matter how perfectly or brilliantly worded your message is, it will not make an impact if the content itself doesn’t matter to (isn’t relevant to) your audience.

Read more

The science of social media marketing: experiment, experiment, experiment!

There are no true experts or gurus in this social media space – we are ALL still trying to figure this out. When I said that at the 140 Character’s Conference: New York City (#140conf) the audience applauded… because we all assume that someone else has all the answers to social media marketing success.

The truth is that social media is still too new as a serious business tool for any one of us to know all the best social media marketing tactics or even understand best how to leverage every platform.

So why am I (@TedRubin) the #1 followed CMO on Twitter (and been so for close to two years) with over 54,000 followers? Because I don’t assume I know everything about social media marketing, so I focus my time on building relationships. Because I pay attention, respond to, and interact with my followers… and I am not afraid to experiment publicly to see what topics are most relevant to my network(s), and what content is most useful to them.

Read more