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Seven Steps for a Successful Social Contact Strategy

By on August 10, 2012 in Blog

If you’re in marketing, you probably know these feelings. It’s a tall order to get a message out in front of prospects and leads, and it’s a Herculean feat when you’re up against larger competitors for customer business.

Social media is no magic bullet. It can’t rescue a broken lead management process. But it can provide an organic, competitive advantage when battling the big guys.

Luckily, many of the tenets of traditional demand generation also apply to social media, but social can be woven into various touches you have with potential customers.

Learn more about the Seven Steps for a Social Contact Strategy at CRM Magazine.

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Replace a word with librarian — Twitter fun

By on May 23, 2012 in Blog

In case you missed it, there’s an entertaining hashtag game going on right now on Twitter. There’s been a few of these before, but this one seems to have brought out a particularly high level of creativity — a trait well represented in the librarian community. To play, take a phrase and replace one word with “librarian”. For example — brief pause while I check the twitter feed — pick a line from Lord of the Rings:

“A librarian is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” # — Tim Chase ‏@gumnos

Here’s a few from the last couple of days:

To follow the stream, search for the hashtag #replaceawordwithlibrarian, or just use this link: replaceawordwithlibrarian.

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Want to know what Google knows about you? Get a report

By on March 30, 2012 in Blog

Yesterday Google announced a new feature for Google account users. If you sign up, each month you’ll get a link to a password-protected report that provides information on what you’ve done while signed in to Google.

The example Google gives is:

For example, my most recent Account Activity report told me that I sent 5 percent more email than the previous month and received 3 percent more. An Italian hotel was my top Gmail contact for the month. I conducted 12 percent more Google searches than in the previous month, and my top queries reflected the vacation I was planning: [rome] and [hotel].

To sign up, go to to www.google.com/settings/activity. Within minutes of signing up, you’ll get your first report.

More detail is on the Google blog: Giving you more insight into your Google Account activity.

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Social Media Sends a Message

By on March 19, 2012 in Blog

Social mediaThe rise of Social Media has been chronicled as the best and the worst of our culture today. Whatever you think of it personally, you need to know that Social Media can and impact you, your company and the world that surrounds us all.

When a social media message is sent:

– It can be read by a few, thousands or millions
– It can be ignored

Here is a current example of how quickly social media messages impact us.

On Mar 5, 2012, a group known as Invisible Children Inc. uploaded a video to YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/invisiblechildreninc. The title and content is all about an African warlord named Joseph Kony. The film and campaign by Invisible Children aims to make Joseph Kony famous to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.

As of March 10, 9am there have been 65,969,792 views of this video in just five days. Newspapers, TV News, CNN are all covering the impact of this 29 minute video.

Now, you may not have a viral video ready to capture the world’s attention. However, using social media in some form – small, medium, large – will benefit your organization in various ways, such as:

  • Connect with existing customers
  • Attract the new and not yet customers
  • Improve relationships with your employees
  • Support various causes in your neighborhood

The more people know about you, your products, and your involvement in the community outside of business, the more people will want to develop relationships with you and your company. Have a social media question, contact Unlimited Priorities. Plans for where, when and how need to be explored for ways that will support you and your message.

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Blogging for Outreach and Conversation

By on February 8, 2012 in Blog

In this month’s issue of Computers in Libraries magazine Meryl B. Cole, Christian L. Gray, and Cindy A. Romaine authored Blog Impossible:

This is the inside story of how a handful of volunteers with no budget generated 4 million hits, 400,000 unique visitors, and 365 posts.

Throughout 2011, Special Libraries Association (SLA) volunteers, including the article’s authors, made it their goal to determine how information professionals are adapting to the challenges and inherent in our new knowledge economy.  They created Future Ready 365 to explore the topic and used existing social media avenues like Facebook, Twitter, and Paper.li to get the word out.  Over the course of  the year, the project took off like crazy.

Read the full story.

Blogging as Outreach and Conversation

No matter the size of your organization, a blog is a great way to stay in touch with customers, staff, and stakeholders.  Unlimited Priorities often recommends blogging as a way for organizations to keep their message and work visible to the people who matter most.  For many small to medium sized  organizations, an official blog can provide the content needed to stay fresh and relevant on social media channels.

Everyone online suffers — to various degrees — with information overload and it is easy for an organization to find that its message is lost in the flood of information surging around the net.  By blogging and acting as a curator for valuable information your organization can help your audience stay on top of new information about you and about the world in general.

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Building Your Social Media Plan

By on February 1, 2012 in Blog

Social MediaLast week Unlimited Priorities participated in the NFAIS Webinar “Building Your Social Media Plan”. This was the third in the series “Successful Strategies for Email and Social Media Marketing.” All were well run and packed with useful information.

The webinar was Hosted by Cari Sultanik, Director, Interactive Account Management at FulcrumTech, and covered what you need to do before launching a social marketing campaign on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

Here’s our takeaways:

You need develop a relationship marketing mindset. You are engaging and interacting with your customers, meeting them where they are. Don’t try to lure them somewhere else. Listen for feedback, issues and complaints, prospect opportunities, PR opportunities, advertising feedback, competitive insights and industry trends.

Building a social media strategy involves four parts:

  • People:Assess your prospects’ and customers’ social activities. People fall into groups. You want to reach the spectators (the largest group). The way to do that is through the influencers (the creators, critics and collectors).
  • Objectives: Decide what you want to accomplish. It’s best to start with a single objective.
  • Strategy: Plan for how relationships with customers will change and design campaigns and monitoring plans. Strategy means figuring out what will be different after your plan is in place. Because social media is changing rapidly, it’s best to start small, with a short time frame and revise it every few months.
  • Technology: Decide which social technologies to use. Besides the large ones like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Blogs don’t ignore the smaller ones like Pinterest, Instagrom , Flickr, Foursquare, Quora, Fling, Yelp, Get Satisfaction, Slideshare and discussion boards such as vBulletin.

The People-Objectives-Strategy-Technology or POST comes from Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff, which Cari highly recommends reading.

Don’t forget about content. It’s the content that people are interested in. Build a content plan for each of your channels. Look for interesting content and engaging topics. Don’t be afraid to go “off topic” — humor, charity, and inspiration all work well to engage followers. Monitor closely for feedback, positive and negative. Be open to “curating” content that will be valuable to your audience. Consider offers, promotions and user-generated content.

And, importantly, measure as much as you can. There’s more to the “R” in ROI than just financial numbers. Some of the things to look for are customer insights, improved segmentation changes in brand awareness, increased sentiment ratings, higher quantity/quality of responses to offers, increased customer advocacy, better brand trust perception, higher customer satisfaction, and increased loyalty.

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Twitter is Adding Analytic Tools

By on January 30, 2012 in Blog

Twitter will unveil a series of new tools in the next few months, including sophisticated analytical tools, according to Erica Anderson, Twitter’s manager for news and journalism.

Anderson said the analytical tools will better help publishers track the reach of tweets sent through the microblogging service. She made her comments Saturday at Columbia University’s social media weekend in New York.

Read more from ReadWriteWeb at:
Twitter Upgrades Will Include Analytical Tools.

Even if Twitter is playing catch-up to produce features currently available from services like HootSuite, this new feature from the popular microblogging platform should help businesses better track the ROI on their social media investments.

 

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What you should know about Google’s New Privacy Policies

By on January 26, 2012 in Blog

Google is updating its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service on March 1, 2012.  If you use any Google services this update applies to you.  This change will allow Google to support a single set of terms and policies across the entire Googleverse and make things simpler for both users and the search giant.

Privacy PolicyWith a single privacy policy, Google can use information from one service and deliver it to users of another service. This will help users get more out of Google+ by helping them connect with the people they correspond with via Gmail.

“In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience,” Google notes.

Continue Reading →

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When it Comes to your Organization’s Social Media Efforts: Plan Ahead

By on January 5, 2012 in Blog

Social media is here to stay.  Every day more and more organizations make use of services like Twitter and Facebook to reach out to their existing and potential customers.

Connecting with customers via social networks provides a unique way to interact with people and keep them informed about news and information in real time, but, as recent events have shown, it is important to have a plan in place detailing roles and expectations within your organization.

A current California lawsuit provides a cautionary tale for organizations with employees participating on social networks on their behalf.

Mobile phone retailer and tech news hub PhoneDog.com had a staff member who tweeted as @PhonedogNoah while working there.  When Noah Kravitz and PhoneDog parted ways, Noah changed his Twitter handle to @noahkravitz and kept the seventeen thousand plus followers he had attracted while tweeting as @PhonedogNoah.

According to The New York Times, Kravitz claimed that PhoneDog told him he could keep his Twitter account in exchange for posting occasionally. It is now eight months later, and PhoneDog, referring to his Twitter followers as a customer list, seeks damages of $2.50 per month per Twitter follower for a total of $340,000 from Kravitz.

Since this story has hit the news, PhoneDog has published their side of the situation in which they present a their view that this has all been a far more complex situation stretching back to promises made and not kept by Kravitz when he left the organization.

And, of course, PhoneDog promoted this message via Twitter.

@PhoneDog
PhoneDog
Curious about the Twitter lawsuit? Here’s the full story http://t.co/iUqjPovu#meritless
Jan 03 via TweetDeckFavoriteRetweetReply

Embedly Powered

via Twitter

PhoneDog’s Side

Noah joined the PhoneDog team in April 2006.  During that period, PhoneDog.com was in the very early stages of becoming the personality-driven mobile tech review site it is today.  … Over the next four years, we invested in Noah and the site by sending him to trade shows and conferences from San Francisco, Vegas, New York, Barcelona and many places in between. …  During this time, we also expanded our efforts into many forms of social media, starting with our YouTube channel, then to Twitter and Facebook respectively; each with the very specific intent to grow PhoneDog’s social media following and its loyal audience.  From all of our efforts, the site’s popularity continued to grow and Noah essentially became a micro-celebrity of sorts.  What started out as a small part-time freelance opportunity grew into a very well paid career for Noah.

So when Noah notified us in October 2010 that he wanted to leave PhoneDog and the mobile tech industry to pursue something more “meaningful,” we were obviously disappointed.  However, we completely respected his decision and wished him our most sincere best of luck.

Shortly after Noah left the company, we found that Noah’s intentions had changed.  Whatever his motives, he began publishing content for other tech publishers while still being paid by PhoneDog, thereby going against the terms we agreed to prior to his departure.  In addition, he was promoting the competitors’ content to the Twitter account we clearly had and have rights to.

Regardless of who said what, and when, this is a matter that will probably be settled in a courtroom unless both sides come to some agreement.

The best thing to come out of this, for anyone, will be if organizations take a moment to think about their social media strategies and ensure that both the organization and its staff members are clear about their expectations in regards to social network contacts in the event of a parting of the ways.

I find it sad that this matter has come to be a matter to be passionately debated by people who were not part of the original discussions and agreements; however, every new innovation in customer communication needs a cautionary tale.

Unlimited Priorities can help you plan and implement an effective social media strategy. Once implemented, we can help you monitor, improve it and ensure that it stays current.

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Goodbye to IE6! (In the United States anyway.)

By on January 3, 2012 in Blog

Time to pop open the champagne because, based on the latest data from Net Applications, IE6 usage in the US has now officially dropped below 1%!

Goodbye Internet Explorer 6

Goodbye Internet Explorer 6

IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we’ve been as eager as anyone to see it go away. In fact, we launched the IE6 Countdown site last March to help accelerate the process. Less than a year later, I’m thrilled to say that the United States has joined the ranks of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway in dropping below 1% usage of IE6.

via The US Says Goodbye to IE6.

What does this mean for your organization?

This means more developers and IT professionals can officially consider support for IE6 a “low-priority” stop spending time and resources supporting such an outdated browser.

This also means that if your website has been around for a few years it may be limited in its design and functionality in order to ensure that it looked and worked okay with the old Internet Explorer 6 web browser.

This may be a good time to get an unbiased report on your current website along with recommendations on how your online presence can help drive your organization’s goals forward.  Unlimited Priorities provides the website analysis, development,  and social media coaching you need to help your enterprise stand out in the crowded online world.

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