Five Reasons Why Inbound Marketing Is Going To Become Big In 2013

2
145 days
by in Social Media

(Spe­cial Guest Post From Tiffany Tor­bert from Agency Plat­form)

The world of online mar­ket­ing has under­gone some major changes in the past year. We’ve been watch­ing as social media under­dog Pin­ter­est quickly gained ground. We’ve seen an aggres­sive polit­i­cal ad war, and watched sev­eral IPOs and acqui­si­tions occur. So what’s on the hori­zon for 2013?

A recent study per­formed by the For­naise Mar­ket­ing group uncov­ered a dis­turb­ing sta­tis­tic. The study found that 73% of exec­u­tives are work­ing under the assump­tion that mar­ket­ing isn’t dri­ving demand and rev­enue. This will have to change. As a result, mar­ket­ing will be play­ing a more crit­i­cal role in rev­enue gen­er­a­tion in 2013.

It stands to rea­son that CMOs and senior exec­u­tives will be allo­cat­ing more resources into cre­at­ing a strong inbound mar­ket­ing engine in order to gen­er­ate more inter­est, traf­fic, leads, and con­ver­sions. This has to hap­pen. Here’s why:

Google Updates are Turn­ing SEO Upside Down

In the past, search engine opti­miza­tion has been about know­ing the tricks of the trade. SEO is rapidly chang­ing. Hav­ing the right H1 tag or the right key­words won’t cut it. Over­all, SEO has moved fur­ther away from on-page SEO. The focus has turned to var­i­ous com­po­nents of off-page SEO

Search Has Become More Social
There is a huge pos­i­tive trend towards the amal­ga­ma­tion of search and social. SEO is evolv­ing into a process that involves cre­at­ing high qual­ity, orig­i­nal con­tent that can be socially con­sumed and shared. This is a great devel­op­ment. Peo­ple will have more access to rel­e­vant con­tent and this should make the con­ver­sion process much more reliable.

Inbound Mar­ket­ing Trumps SEO & Other Mar­ket­ing Strate­gies
Let’s face it; inbound mar­ket­ing has more adop­tion than SEO and other online mar­ket­ing. Pre­vi­ously, SEO and mar­ket­ing automa­tion dom­i­nated the scene. Unfor­tu­nately, this “set it and for­get men­tal­ity” won’t cut it now. In the­ory, mar­ket­ing automa­tion should have been a mar­ket­ing dream. In real­ity, this often resulted in con­tent spam and a nur­tur­ing process that over­whelmed users with con­stant mar­ket­ing messages.

Inbound Mar­ket­ing Tools and Val­i­da­tion are Widely Avail­able
It’s become much eas­ier to see results from mar­ket­ing efforts now. We can mea­sure almost every part of the process. There are no more hit and miss strate­gies. Account­abil­ity is a huge real­ity in rev­enue gen­er­a­tion. As more wid­gets, gad­gets, and devices enter the mar­ket, mar­keters will have to deter­mine how to best use each plat­form. Apply­ing old mod­els to these new tech­nolo­gies just isn’t possible.

Prac­ti­tion­ers are See­ing Results
You can’t argue with facts and fig­ures. Now that we can see results of inbound mar­ket­ing efforts more accu­rately, there’s lit­tle excuse and no room for fudg­ing. We can now trace the results of every campaign.

This is won­der­ful and some­what scary.
There’s no room for argu­ment. Inbound mar­ket­ing is going to be huge in 2013. There’s no way around it. Mar­keters will have to adapt or die in the face of this new development.

Inbound mar­ket­ing is a great way to achieve more con­ver­sions and more rev­enue. We can be sure that we’ll be see­ing more devel­op­ments around this phe­nom­e­non as the year progresses.

(This arti­cle pro­vided by Agency Plat­form.  Agency Plat­form pro­vides white Label Inbound Mar­ket­ing Soft­ware that suits for inbound mar­ket­ing agency that helps to stay on track, share and col­lab­o­rate, work faster and close more deals. )

linkedin-icon

The New Way To Leverage LinkedIn To Personalize Your Digital Campaigns

0
267 days
by in Social Media

Deliv­er­ing rel­e­vant con­tent to the right audi­ence is the best way that today’s mar­keters can max­i­mize the effec­tive­ness of their cam­paigns in today’s increas­ingly noisy dig­i­tal space. This is par­tic­u­larly chal­leng­ing when tar­get­ing new prospects where you may not have use­ful data for seg­men­ta­tion and per­son­al­iza­tion. You may fall back to a “shot­gun” approach of send­ing the same mes­sage to a wide audi­ence. Even if you can cap­ture your prospect’s inter­est in your e-mail or ban­ner ad, you will most likely drive them to a “one size fits all” land­ing page or web site – forc­ing your prospect to find the data that is most applic­a­ble to them.

As a mar­keter, what excites me about social media net­works like LinkedIn and Face­book is find­ing ways to lever­age the rela­tion­ships and data that peo­ple add into the net­work on a daily basis. If I can per­son­al­ize a cam­paign based upon a prospect’s con­nec­tions, their likes, their school, etc. as well as their title and com­pany, I am much more likely to have my mes­sage resonate.

Both Face­book and LinkedIn offer tar­geted ban­ner ads where you can cre­ate unique ban­ner ads tar­get­ing spe­cific peo­ple based upon their pro­file data. Through Face­book Con­nect, com­pa­nies are able to lever­age that data to per­son­al­ize an expe­ri­ence based upon their Face­book pro­file data. How­ever, par­tic­u­larly in the B2B space, more and more com­pa­nies would like to lever­age the up to date data within LinkedIn to cus­tomize their cam­paigns. Until recently, this has been dif­fi­cult to do.

Enter LinkedIn’s updated API which has been com­bined with an award win­ning devel­op­ment effort to not only allow you to tar­get spe­cific peo­ple, but pass on that pro­file data to a per­son­al­ized land­ing page. This opens the door to things such as:

  • Per­son­al­iz­ing case stud­ies and value propo­si­tions based upon com­pany, title, and industry.
  • Dis­play­ing con­nec­tions between your prospects and your com­pany and/or exist­ing customers.
  • Rec­om­mend­ing prod­ucts and solu­tions based upon com­pany size.
  • Mix­ing in prospect spe­cific data gath­ered from out­side stud­ies or reports.

Com­pa­nies like Microsoft, AARP, and Ves­tas have already begun to embrace this approach. For exam­ple, Ves­tas, one of the world’s lead­ers in Wind Tur­bine Tech­nol­ogy, used this tech­nol­ogy to tar­get C Level exec­u­tives at For­tune 1000 com­pa­nies. Dynamic ban­ner ads (as well as tar­geted LinkedIn Inmail mes­sages) were pushed to spe­cific peo­ple at the tar­geted com­pa­nies. Any­one who clicked on the link was brought to a microsite which is per­son­al­ized specif­i­cally for them based upon their LinkedIn pro­file data and data from a Bloomberg study.

   

 

Do you want to see how pow­er­ful this can be? Click on this link for a per­son­al­ized live exam­ple spe­cific to your LinkedIn profile.

Facebook’s Subscribe: The Death of Fan Pages, or is it?

1
594 days
by in Social Media

Facebook’s intro­duc­tion of the “sub­scrip­tion” fea­ture for pro­file pages has blurred cer­tain lines between pro­file and fan pages for many indi­vid­u­als seek­ing to lever­age social media to build their own per­sonal brand and on-line pres­ence.  This is par­tic­u­larly true for many sales peo­ple, agents, etc. who are look­ing to use Face­book as a way to com­mu­ni­cate with cus­tomers and prospects.

Face­book fan pages were orig­i­nally cre­ated for brands like Coke or Wal­mart and expanded out to be used by celebri­ties, orga­ni­za­tions, places, and many oth­ers.  Many indi­vid­u­als who wanted to inter­act with fans, prospects, and cus­tomers also began to cre­ate fan pages since it was an effec­tive way of sep­a­rat­ing their per­sonal Face­book activ­ity from their busi­ness or pub­lic Face­book pres­ence.  In addi­tion, fan pages pro­vided lower bar­rier to entry in that it did not require the page to “approve” each fol­lower / fan / friend.

Face­book recently intro­duced their sub­scrip­tion fea­ture as a light­weight way for an indi­vid­ual to share his updates with a larger audi­ence.  Sim­i­lar to fan pages, a fol­lower does not need approval from the page to access updates and the news feed.  To many, this seems like an easy way to cre­ate a fan page like pub­lic news feed with­out the trou­ble of cre­at­ing a fan page.

So, is the sub­scribe func­tion right for you?

Let’s start by com­par­ing the three options:

 

Unless you have 5000+ pri­vate friends, a stan­dard Face­book pro­file page will most likely meet the needs for your per­sonal Face­book activ­i­ties.  You can even start to seg­ment your friends and updates (e.g. friends, fam­ily, work, etc.).  While you should almost always assume that any­thing you post on Face­book could be made pub­lic, it’s the best way to keep your polit­i­cal rants, shop­ping and lis­ten­ing habits, and pic­tures of your kid from being eas­ily accessible.

 

Enable Subscribe

Some issues and thoughts with the sub­scribe functionality.

  • Most indi­vid­u­als pre­fer to con­trol who can view their per­sonal updates and infor­ma­tion.  If you are using the “pub­lic” news feed on top of your per­sonal pro­file to com­mu­ni­cate with friends, you need to be con­tin­u­ally think­ing whether the post is for pub­lic or “friend” consumption.

Facebook Status Update

 

  • For those that are using it to build their per­sonal brand, you’re miss­ing out on all the ben­e­fits that come from a Face­book fan page – most notably report­ing, tar­get­ing, and the abil­ity to pro­mote and adver­tise your page.  If you DO decide at a later time to cre­ate a Fan page, you’ve now got to go through the process of try­ing to get your sub­scribers to like your new fan page.
  • Some die-hards have taken the approach of man­ag­ing both a sub­scrip­tion page AND a fan page.  See Mari Smith’s Fan Page and Pro­file Page for an example.

 

MariSmith1

Mari’s Fan Page

Mari2

Mari’s Pro­file Page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • The biggest chal­lenge this cre­ates is the need to cre­ate yet another stream of con­tent for your fans.  Do you post the same con­tent to both?  You may already be man­ag­ing your Face­book, Twit­ter, LinkedIn, Google+, Tum­blr, Blog, etc. feeds.  Ask your­self what the incre­men­tal value will be for yet another feed.

Finally, there is a grow­ing group of indi­vid­u­als – sales peo­ple, agents, employ­ees, cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives – who are look­ing to Face­book as a way to com­mu­ni­cate with prospects and cus­tomers.  These peo­ple are par­tic­u­larly con­cerned with sep­a­rat­ing their work and home social streams and some may look to the sub­scribe func­tion­al­ity to meet that need.  There is an argu­ment to be made how­ever, that the dan­gers to be caused by pos­si­bly over­lap­ping per­sonal and work news­feeds is even greater and could end up dam­ag­ing either the employee or the com­pany they rep­re­sent.  Fan pages for each employee in con­junc­tion with a well designed social media man­age­ment plat­form (SMMP) such as One To One Global’s Mes­sage­Maker solu­tion can pro­vide a vari­ety of ben­e­fits both for the employee as well as the brand or organization.

As you’re look­ing to lever­age the power of social media, like any­thing else you’ll find that the tools and fea­tures avail­able all have their respec­tive pros and cons.  Before you blindly enable a new fea­ture within your Face­book set­tings, be sure you under­stand the pri­vacy impacts as well as your goals and chal­lenges with that pub­lic news feed.

 

 

Social Media: Winning the Popularity Contest (by guest blogger Frank Anderson)

0
615 days
by in Social Media

Like high school, the world of social media can be cruel and quite intim­i­dat­ing for some peo­ple. Here are some insight­ful tips to help find your­self on the top of the social media scale.

Join the issues that will bond your rela­tion­ship with the pop­u­lar forums.

Ask your­self, “What do I want out of Social Media?”, “What activ­i­ties will I ben­e­fit the most from?” If you’re a a small busi­ness, per­haps this means cre­at­ing a blog allow­ing you to com­mu­ni­cate with your customers/clients directly. If you are look­ing to net­work online with peo­ple who share sim­i­lar inter­ests, a niche social net­work like Linkedln can be the right place to start. Above any­thing, it is impor­tant to real­ize that the process of inte­gra­tion may not, and most likely will not, be easy. Pop­u­lar­ity is not some­thing you can do in your spare time or when you feel like it, not in the fiercely com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment that social media has proved itself to be. The con­ver­sa­tion has already started and is well under­way. It is your choice to get involved, or not. Just like the first day of school, take a deep breath and go for it.

To ensure you make the team, do your research.

Research what exactly? Your com­pe­ti­tion. A rich his­tory of expe­ri­ence has guided us to dis­cover how to for­mu­late vari­ables to pre­dict the win­ners of elec­tions or the out­come of opin­ion polls. Social media inte­gra­tion is no dif­fer­ent. Research­ing past behav­ior and plat­forms that have proven suc­cess­ful can help guide you towards the next fla­vor of online suc­cess. To begin, get a grasp of the land­scape to iden­tify where you need to be look­ing. Think about the dif­fer­ent out­lets -  Face­book, Twit­ter, blogs, the list is end­less… that are most per­ti­nent to your spe­cific space. While the pur­pose of research is to inform action, it is impor­tant to only act in a capac­ity that inevitably proves wor­thy to your ulti­mate goal.  Don’t hypoth­e­size on what the lead­ers in the space would do, expe­ri­ence what they are doing at this moment. Just as you relate to your peers, you must relate to your com­pe­ti­tion. Get to know them. If there is any secret of suc­cess, it’s found in the abil­ity to see things from another’s point of view. Exhibit­ing a healthy inter­est in the action of oth­ers is an essen­tial ingre­di­ent in form­ing a pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing effort. The aver­age crowd proves more inter­ested in his/her own name than in all oth­ers’ com­bined. But who ever strives for average?

Dress for success.

In the world of social inte­gra­tion, your first impres­sion may very well be your last. Social media is no excep­tion. Today’s norm of split-second clicks leaves no room for the face of your com­pany to be any­thing short of utterly fan­tas­tic. When you run a busi­ness online, your web­site should, in the very least, be well-executed, eye-catching, and easy to nav­i­gate. You don’t want to be caught look­ing like an ama­teur. What makes a web­site dynamic? Don’t know where to start? Ask. Rarely do we con­sider the oppor­tu­nity we miss as a result of hid­ing our short­com­ings. Some­times one needs the cre­ativ­ity and skill of a professionally-trained designer to mar­ket and pro­mote suc­cess­fully. Regard­less of what your means of orig­i­nal con­cep­tion might be, a sexy, easy-to-navigate page lay­out com­pli­mented by text markup will win every time against the care­less, cringe-worthy sites we’ve all seen before. Instead, spend the extra effort and if need be, dig a lit­tle fur­ther into your pock­ets, to cre­ate a web­site that pro­motes some­thing new and fresh. You will already be start­ing with the advantage.

Be con­fi­dent.

Sim­i­larly to the shy crowd in the cor­ner, the more intro­verted of online pres­ences are often over­looked. It can be dif­fi­cult to net­work with con­fi­dence when you are new to the social media game. If all you do is dream about the suc­cess you might one day exhibit, you will sadly most likely miss the oppor­tu­ni­ties needed to make them. You can con­tinue to come up with end­less excuses as to why this moment isn’t right, or the time is too soon to be proac­tive. But where will that phi­los­o­phy leave you? Instead, make net­work­ing a pri­or­ity, and con­fi­dence an unwa­ver­ing mind­set. The suc­cess of your busi­ness endeav­ors directly depends on the net­work you form with the rep­u­ta­tion you cre­ate for your­self. Social­ize with every­one! Social­ize every­where! And while at first you might have to “fake it ‘til you make it”, this mantra will one day hope­fully lead to noth­ing short of the real deal.

Don’t lie. False guar­an­tees will find you checked off.

While hold­ing a greater vision for your busi­ness is valu­able, it is more imper­a­tive to know your lim­its and grow in a healthy man­ner.  In social media, com­pa­nies canno longer be fake and get away with it. Peo­ple talk, and with the expanse of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through online forums, liars will not be suc­cess­ful for long. With the fear of being for­got­ten and ignored comes the temp­ta­tion to skew or exag­ger­ate one’s abil­i­ties. While herd­ing fol­low­ers using what­ever means nec­es­sary might appear entic­ing in the moment, this risky tac­tic will no doubt lead to a dev­as­tat­ing down­fall. Worse still, you’ll have only your­self to blame. You don’t have to look very far to see how a liar will inevitably end up in the opin­ion of their peers. Just as in life, nav­i­gat­ing the world of social media starts with respect.

Just as we all nav­i­gated high school at one time or another, we now find our­selves in the dig­i­tal clique oth­er­wise known as social media. If being pop­u­lar is not going to lead you or your busi­ness to the utmost sat­is­fac­tion then for­get it and focus else­where — life is too short to be any­thing but happy. But I think we can all hon­estly admit being on top feels pretty dang good.

 

Frank Ander­son is a social media and tech­nol­ogy writer and blog­ger.  He works with emailexchangehost­ing at the com­pany WebHosting.net.

iphone-video

The Best Mobile Applications For Sharing Video

15
637 days
by in iPhone, Social Media

One of the things I love about my iPhone is the abil­ity to quickly take decent qual­ity video and share it.  The iPhone does a good job at this out of the box, but there are many video shar­ing apps out there that pro­vide more flex­i­bil­ity, ease of use, and lever­age social media sites to share your cre­ations.   To help you select the best one, I’ve cre­ated a seg­mented list of apps based upon how they can be best used.

As part of my research in writ­ing this arti­cle, I cre­ated a good one page table com­par­ing the apps and their key fea­tures.  If you’re inter­ested in down­load­ing this PDF, please CLICK HERE.

1. GOAL:  Pri­vately share with a sin­gle per­son or a few people.

If you take quick pri­vate videos that you want to share with only a few peo­ple (e.g. a video e-mail) or per­haps videos that haven’t been edited enough to share to a pub­lic crowd, the eas­i­est thing to do is to use the iPhone’s e-mail client (here’s a quick Life­hacker arti­cle on how to send video if you’re new to this).  You’re lim­ited to less than a minute, but it works across almost all clients and recipients.

Unstreamed Options

If you want to send the phys­i­cal video file to some­one (as opposed to the stream­ing options I’ll show below), I’ve found a few good notable apps to make things sim­pler and more powerful.

Video­Mail (RECOMMENDED) :   A great inex­pen­sive app to fire up, cre­ate an video (or an audio or pic­ture) mes­sage and eas­ily send to peo­ple.  It has qual­ity and length default set­tings and keeps track of the peo­ple you send mes­sages to.

Medi­aSend:  If you’ve got mul­ti­ple pic­tures or videos that you want to send to some­one in one e-mail, Medi­aSend is useful.

 

Stream­ing Options

When you send an e-mail with a phys­i­cal copy of the video attached, you’re always lim­ited to both your e-mail provider, spam fil­ters, and your recipient’s e-mail fil­ter.  That’s why using ser­vices that store your video file on-line and stream it to your recip­i­ents is so ben­e­fi­cial.   It’s also eas­ier to fur­ther share or post mes­sages if you want to at a later time.

KinKast (RECOMMENDED) :   One of the best free video shar­ing apps out there.   The UI is intu­itive  and very well thought out.  It’s one of the few that let’s you eas­ily record and share a video (with no file size or num­ber of mes­sage restric­tions) to an indi­vid­ual (as well as the social media sites).   The free ver­sion only stores mes­sages for 30 days and has ads, but it’s a must have.  For $5/month you can remove the 30 day restric­tion and the ads.

Qik:   I was one of the early users and lovers of Qik – had it run­ning on my Palm Treo years ago.  Qik has gone through many changes since then – most recently being acquired by Skype.  The unique thing about Qik is its abil­ity to share LIVE video as well as video chat (sim­i­lar to Face­time).  The video shar­ing is not as strong as Kincast’s offer­ing – either free or paid.  Qik’s free prod­uct is lim­ited in that you can only store 25 videos of unlim­ited length.  For $5/month, their pre­mium ser­vice allows you to store unlim­ited videos.  I believe that Kin­cast wins this bat­tle unless you like live streaming.

 

Thwapr:  Thwapr is another option for pri­vately shar­ing hosted videos.   The videos are lim­ited to 5 min­utes long, but the ser­vice is free and you can store unlim­ited videos.  While it can share via Twit­ter and Face­book, it’s unique capa­bil­ity is that it can share via SMS (text mes­sages) – with­out using your per­sonal SMS mes­sages.  It doesn’t have an easy way to share via e-mail – one of the product’s big short­com­ings.  I had spo­ken and pro­vided feed­back on the app ear­lier this year to the senior man­age­ment at Thwapr – great group of guys -  but they seem to be cur­rently more focused on their busi­ness offering.

 

2. GOAL:  Share videos directly to Face­book, Twit­ter, & YouTube

One of the eas­i­est ways and most com­mon ways that peo­ple share video is to post them to Face­book or YouTube.   The nice thing about both of these is that you can use pri­vacy set­tings at either these sites to define who can actu­ally view your mes­sage.   For exam­ple, see this arti­cle on how to do this with YouTube.  I’ll also group Twit­ter shar­ing into this sec­tion since it’s the next most estab­lished social media site and peo­ple often use it for video sharing.

To be clear, our objec­tive is to quickly take a video and post it to one or more of these key social media sites.

Shozu (RECOMMENDED):   This inex­pen­sive app ($.99) and web based ser­vice allows you to very eas­ily post pho­tos, videos, and text to all your favorite sites with one click.    Han­dles Face­book, YouTube, Twit­ter, and MANY more.    A very easy to use and flex­i­ble app.

Pix­elPipe:  Very sim­i­lar to Shozu, but their iPhone app that I have been using for a long time has mys­te­ri­ously dis­ap­peared from the App­Store as of 8/2011.  Sup­pos­edly, they’re com­ing out with some­thing new, but there isn’t any detailed infor­ma­tion on what they’re doing.

TwitVid: (RECOMMENDED):   An excel­lent free app to eas­ily post videos to both Twit­ter and Face­book.   I wish this app would give you the link to the video it cre­ated so you could send the video via e-mail or text – but you have to go to the web site to find that iink.

qTweeter (RECOMMENDED):  For those with Jail­bro­ken iPhones, I’d rec­om­mended tak­ing a look at qTweeter.  It’s a great appli­ca­tion that you can quickly open, write an update/tweet or record and send a video to Face­book or Twitter.

 

3. GOAL:  Share videos to A Spe­cific Group Of Peo­ple (pri­vate or public)

Beyond Face­book, there are many appli­ca­tions and net­works that have been specif­i­cally designed to allow you to host and share video with a group of peo­ple — often with bet­ter track­ing, qual­ity, and a video blog look and feel.

Pos­ter­ous (RECOMMENDED):   Pos­ter­ous and Tum­blr (see next) are very sim­i­lar.  Both allow you to cre­ate a pub­lic or a pri­vate stream/blog that includes video (as well as audio, pics, text, etc.).  Between the two, I like Pos­ter­ous’ UI more and the fact that you’re not lim­ited to video length.  In addi­tion, Pos­ter­ous seems to inte­grate bet­ter with Twit­ter and Facebook.

Tum­blr:  Very pop­u­lar self-blogging site with strong video shar­ing capa­bil­i­ties.   I do like that it allows a sin­gle pass­word pro­tected blog (instead of forc­ing peo­ple to sign-up to view a pri­vate stream).

Social­Cam (RECOMMENDED):  Next to Kin­cast, I think Social­Cam has one of the best user inter­faces for video record­ing and shar­ing.  In addi­tion to being able to host and share videos via the Social­Cam site, it eas­ily allows you to share the videos to Face­book, Twit­ter, Pos­ter­ous, Tum­blr, Drop­Box, e-mail, and SMS.  My only com­plaint is that it doesn’t address the need for pri­vate shar­ing very well – if some­one is fol­low­ing you, they can see all your videos.  With a minor change to sim­ply allow for videos not to auto­mat­i­cally show up in your ‘stream’ this would be great.

Vlix:  A decent alter­na­tive appli­ca­tion.    While it lim­its you to only 60 sec­onds per video, the shar­ing options are pow­er­ful (Face­book, Twit­ter, YouTube) and it also includes some cool video edit­ing and basic open­ing / clos­ing titles for per­son­al­iza­tion.   Allows for pub­lic and pri­vate video feeds as well.

Tout:  Think of Tout as Twit­ter for video.   It’s sim­i­lar to Vlix, except now the videos are lim­ited to only 15 sec­onds.   What makes Tout inter­est­ing is that they have some celebri­ties using it includ­ing Jeff Probst, Mitt Rom­ney, Dana White, and oth­ers.  The 15 sec­ond lim­i­ta­tion is inter­est­ing, but even lis­ten­ing to Probst’s Tout’s, he was often get­ting cut off mid sentence.

 

Sum­mary

While I’d love to have a sin­gle app to use for all things, it really does vary.  My top favorites from the list are Video­Mail, Kin­cast, qTweeter, Pos­ter­ous, and Social­Cam.  If I had to pick one, I’d go with Kin­cast.   A dis­cus­sion on video edit­ing on the iPhone will have to be addressed another day!

Please down­load and play with them and tell me which ones are your favorites (or why you hate mine).  Please also let me know if I’ve missed great ones that you use.  Happy sharing!

iphone-video

Table Of The Top Video Sharing Applications For The iPhone

4
641 days
by in iPhone, Jailbreak, Social Media

One of the things I love about my iPhone is the abil­ity to quickly take decent qual­ity video and share it.  The iPhone does a good job at this out of the box, but there are many video shar­ing apps out there that pro­vide more flex­i­bil­ity, ease of use, and lever­ag­ing social media sites to share your cre­ations.   To help you select the best one, I’m writ­ing an arti­cle for either SocialMediaToday.com or Tech­no­rati with a seg­mented list of the top new video apps.

As part of my research in writ­ing this arti­cle, I cre­ated a good one page table in PDF for­mat com­par­ing the apps and their key fea­tures.  These appli­ca­tions include KinKast, Video­Mail, Qik, Thwapr, Social­Cam, Pos­ter­ous, Vlix, Tum­blr, and many oth­ers.  The arti­cle should be live soon, but I thought I’d go ahead and post the one pager PDF to my blog for those that have asked for it.

Please let me know if there are any addi­tions or cor­rec­tions to the table and I’ll update it.

Feel free to down­load the PDF by click­ing this link or the image below:.

 

 

 

People Yelling

How To Repair the Social Media Disconnect Between Brands and Consumers

0
659 days
by in Social Media

Look at your Face­book, Twit­ter, Google+, etc. news feed.   Does it increas­ingly feel like you’re sit­ting in mul­ti­ple rooms with hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of peo­ple yelling at you to read their update, click their link, or play their video?  The con­tent that you want to read and engage with is usu­ally mixed in spam and unre­lated con­tent – often from the same brand or person.

Brands have many chal­lenges to over­come when it comes to social media.   They first must con­vince you to visit, like or fol­low them and then must deliver a steady stream of valu­able con­tent.    Socially irrel­e­vant con­tent will most likely result in either a brand’s con­tent being ignored or unliked.   At worst, that invest­ment in social media could result in dam­age to a brand or even a lost customer.

The sim­ple answer to this chal­lenge is seg­men­ta­tion and tar­get­ing – a con­cept which is far from new for mar­keters.   (more…)

MM Social Smaller Logo

Press Release: One to One Global Launches MessageMaker Social, A Social Media Management System For Deploying Large-Scale Social Marketing

0
694 days
by in Social Media

Boston, Mass.—July 27, 2011 – One to One Global, an inter­ac­tive mar­ket­ing and social tech­nol­ogy firm, today announced the avail­abil­ity of Mes­sage­Maker Social™, a social media man­age­ment sys­tem that allows com­pa­nies to fully lever­age the power of social media. Mes­sage­Maker Social enables brands to pub­lish, man­age and mea­sure highly seg­mented, local­ized and tar­geted con­tent to fans and fol­lowers across many social networks.

“As we all spend more and more time on social net­works and mobile devices, it is essen­tial for com­pa­nies to con­nect with cus­tomers through the peo­ple, brands and local voices they already know and trust,” said Chris Heit­mann, man­ag­ing direc­tor of One to One’s Con­nect divi­sion. “To do so, they need the right infra­struc­ture to man­age a large-scale social presence–one that allows them to deliver highly rel­e­vant, per­son­al­ized and local­ized content.”

Mar­keters today are fac­ing an enor­mous prob­lem imple­ment­ing their social media strate­gies. Most have learned the value of seg­ment­ing their mes­sages across e-mail, print and broad­cast but have yet to learn how to local­ize and seg­ment con­tent across social media net­works and as a result are not max­i­miz­ing their invest­ment in social.

The Mes­sage­Maker Social SaaS plat­form allows com­pa­nies to:

  • ENGAGE WITH RELEVANT CONTENT – Mes­sage­Maker Social helps grow fans and fol­low­ers while increas­ing engage­ment by let­ting mar­keters tar­get con­tent to spe­cific social inter­ac­tion points based on geo­graph­i­cal, sales rep or prod­uct interest.
  • ENSURE BRAND INTEGRITY – Mes­sage­Maker Social ensures brand com­pli­ance and con­sis­tency across all your company’s Pages and accounts, while also allow­ing for dynamic and per­son­al­ized elements.
  • UNDERSTAND ACTIVITY AND ENGAGEMENT – Mes­sage­Maker Social’s ana­lyt­ics and report­ing capa­bil­i­ties facil­i­tate greater insight into cus­tomer and employee activ­i­ties and pro­vides vis­i­bil­ity across all social media chan­nels help­ing to max­i­mize con­tent, cam­paigns and connections.

The most recent cat­e­gory to emerge in the social media busi­ness soft­ware indus­try is social media man­age­ment sys­tems (SMMS) and demand for SMMS solu­tions is explod­ing. This is due in part to many mar­keters real­iz­ing the need for broad and long-term social media strate­gies. In fact, nearly four in 10 inter­ac­tive mar­keters have already devel­oped a long-term plan, while another 36% plan to in the next 12 months.*

“To remain com­pet­i­tive, it is imper­a­tive for today’s enter­prise mar­keters to engage in social at every stage of the cus­tomer life­cy­cle,” Chris added. “Suc­cess­ful social media mar­ket­ing requires the right mes­sage, at the right time, in the right brand voice–to con­nect with thou­sands of social end­points includ­ing employees.”

For addi­tional infor­ma­tion please visit www.messagemaker.com/social or fol­low us on Twit­ter @msgmkrsocial.

About One to One
Mes­sage­Maker Social is a web-based social media man­age­ment sys­tem (SMMS) from One to One Con­nect, a divi­sion of One to One Global. One to One Con­nect has over 10 years of expe­ri­ence work­ing with com­pa­nies such as UPS, Sun­Trust, and Gap Inc., strength­en­ing brand rela­tion­ships by deliv­er­ing mea­sur­able con­tent, mes­sages and ROI across a broad spec­trum of per­mis­sion mar­ket­ing chan­nels includ­ing social, email, mobile and apps.

One to One Global is an inde­pen­dent inter­ac­tive mar­ket­ing and social tech­nol­ogy firm with offices in Boston, Lon­don, Sin­ga­pore and Sao Paulo. Founded in 1997, the firm cre­atively employs dig­i­tal, mobile and social media along with advanced research ser­vices to cre­ate mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions between con­sumers and brands. One to One’s vision is to be the lead­ing Human Expe­ri­ence mar­ket­ing firm. For more infor­ma­tion please visit www.onetooneglobal.com or fol­low us on Twit­ter @onetooneglobal53.

Mes­sage­Maker Social is a reg­is­tered trade­mark of One to One Global, Inc.
*“Accel­er­at­ing your Social Matu­rity” For­rester Research Inc., June 2011

Donut-Maker-Fail

How The Entenmann’s / Casey Anthony Twitter Debacle Was Actually A Success

0
710 days
by in Social Media

For those that missed the HUGE news, Like­able Media issued a sin­gle tweet on behalf of their client Entenmann’s that make a tongue in cheek joke about the Casey Anthony Trial.

Cue online right­eous indig­na­tion by peo­ple with too much time on their hands.  Boy­cott Like­able Media!  Boy­cott Entenmann’s!  How DARE they Hash­tag surf across such an impor­tant topic!  How could they be so stu­pid?  The dam­age that will be done to Entenman’s is irreparable!

Seri­ously?   It’s a tweet, not a tat­too.   If you don’t like it, move on to the next one.

Regard­less, despite the fact that the tweet was almost imme­di­ately taken down along with a twit­ter update, this resulted in a flood of apolo­gies from Entenmann’s and Like­able Media.

Here’s Entenmann’s statement:

“We are sad­dened and dis­ap­pointed that an out­side agency han­dling our social media posted a com­ment on Twit­ter asso­ci­at­ing the Entenmann’s brand with the not guilty ver­dict in the Casey Anthony trial. This Tweet does not reflect the val­ues of our com­pany, our asso­ciates or the Entenmann’s brand. We have taken imme­di­ate steps to make sure the indi­vid­u­als that cre­ated this post will not work on our account again. Addi­tion­ally, we are tak­ing steps to ensure that future tweets reflect our company’s val­ues. We sin­cerely apol­o­gize for this incident.”

And here’s a part of the Like­able Media apol­ogy:

We apol­o­gized on behalf of the Entenmann’s brand right away, how­ever, as the leader of Entenmann’s social media agency, I would like to per­son­ally say I’m sorry if the tweet offended any­one. The truth is, our team was lever­ag­ing the trend­ing top­ics and mov­ing so fast they neglected to see what the hash­tag was related to. It was obvi­ously insen­si­tive, and on behalf of the entire Like­able team and our client, Entenmann’s, I’m sorry. Please know that I am work­ing on refin­ing our process to ensure that this does not hap­pen again.

I per­son­ally found two things inter­est­ing about this whole story:

First, Dave Ker­pen from Like­able Media (who hon­estly did an amaz­ing job respond­ing to all com­ments and gripes) was basi­cally stat­ing that this was some sort of “mis­take” — like a typo that should have been caught or acci­den­tally send­ing a pub­lic tweet vs. a DM.  This, as opposed to say­ing some­thing like, “I’m sorry if some took our tweet the wrong way, we obvi­ously failed to echo the value of the brand and will do bet­ter in the future”.

I don’t believe this was a “mis­take”.  I’m con­fi­dent that the per­son that sent this tweet out knew exactly what it was refer­ring to and thought it was cre­ative and clever.  Would it have been sent if it required approval by Like­able senior man­age­ment?  By Entenmann’s mar­ket­ing team?  Maybe not.  Good mar­keters should be seek­ing unique ways to get peo­ple excited and read our stuff.   I hope that the per­son respon­si­ble for the tweet did not lose their job and was actu­ally given a pri­vate “attaboy” for think­ing out­side the box.  Twit­ter can be a test­ing ground for con­cepts and ideas (ide­ally with client’s approval) — before you spend mil­lions on more expen­sive wider reach­ing campaigns.

Sec­ond, let’s talk results.  This may actu­ally be a case where “Even ‘bad’ press is good press”.  A few months ago, there was a sim­i­lar “scan­dal”, when Ken­neth Cole tweeted, “Mil­lions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new Spring Col­lec­tion is avail­able online at http://bit.ly/KCairo-KC”.  This arguably more offen­sive tweet resulted in thou­sands of new fol­low­ers in the first few hours — and a great deal of buzz.

Sim­i­larly, Entenmann’s Twit­ter fol­low­ers were rel­a­tively flat for months and amaz­ingly “suf­fered” a 35% spike in fol­low­ers after this dis­as­ter.   Ter­ri­ble, huh?

Entenmann's Twittercounter Chart

There may actu­ally be some peo­ple that were so hor­ri­bly offended by this sin­gle tweet that they will illog­i­cally black­mail the brand.

How­ever, I real­ized that all this talk about Entenmann’s made me remem­ber how much I missed their donuts and will be going out of my way to find them the next time I’m at the gro­cery store.  Since I’m still rel­a­tively upset since the jury couldn’t find Casey Anthony guilty, a lit­tle com­fort food might help.

 

Jada And Young Caesar

A Tribute To My Dog and Friend For 10 Years

7
715 days
by in Personal

While I typ­i­cally try not to use my blog as a “diary”, I felt it was cleans­ing for me to jot down a quick trib­ute to my dog Jada whom I painfully had to say good­bye to this past week­end after a 4–5 month bat­tle with cancer.

It’s kind of scary, but next to my wife, par­ents, and my broth­ers, I prob­a­bly spent more time with that dog than any­one else in my entire life.   She was always there to play with, take a walk, or just sleep on my armpit on the couch.  So, if my read­ers will indulge me, I wanted to pro­vide a quick trib­ute list to Jada.

  • For affec­tion­ately lean­ing against my leg so hard the first time we met that you almost knocked me over.
  • For break­ing down a door that first night (when we tried to put you in the base­ment) because you weren’t going to be left alone when you knew there were peo­ple in the house.
  • For your abil­ity to spin while hold­ing a stick by your teeth.

  • For your blood­hound like incred­i­ble hide and go seek skills.
  • For accept­ing your fall in pri­or­ity from #1 to #2 (after my mar­riage) and then #3 (with the entrance of my son Kyle).
  • For shak­ing in a way that always made me feel guilty when I screamed at the com­puter after los­ing big hands when I played poker on-line.
  • For putting up with our new dog, Cae­sar, as well as my son who both man­aged to sleep on you, wres­tle with you, and drive you crazy in a way I know you loved
    Jada, Caesar, and Kyle Sleeping On Couch
  • Despite the fact that you were part pit bull, for being prob­a­bly the worst watch dog that ever lived — even hap­pily jump­ing in the car of the pizza deliv­ery guy.
  • For always being there with a spin and a smile regard­less of whether we were gone for 1 hour or 10 days.
  • For prepar­ing me to be a father (as far as sac­ri­fice, respon­si­bil­ity, and the ulti­mate rewards of hav­ing some­one that relies 100% on you)
  • And finally, for never com­plain­ing or whin­ing– not once – as you got sicker and sicker to the point where you couldn’t walk or eat.

Rest in peace my puppy.

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