Posted by Samantha Coren on Wed, Aug 11, 2010
It seems like just about every day you hear news reporters taking aim at the most outlandish events in social media. With every infidelity or cyberbullying case uncovered on Facebook or Twitter there's always something you can take away when it comes to social media marketing for business.
Don't believe me? Let's take a look at some current events in social media rocking the newswires:
An Ohioan mother of two discovers that her husband has a second wife on Facebook. Now she fights for the custody of her sons and to prove that her original marriage was lawful.
Marketing Takeaway: Don't let someone find out your business screwed up big time via social networking sites. Represent the same set of values on and off line and you'll find yourself avoiding a whole bunch of unwanted drama.
Chris Peterson, head coach of Boise State's football team, has decided to ban his players from tweeting during the regular season. Why? He thinks it's a giant distraction.
Marketing Takeaway: HubSpot's VP Mike Volpe has a unique stance on social media policy (or lack thereof). Forbidding your employees from participating in social media is like shooting yourself in the online marketing foot. It shows that you don't trust your workers to use good judgement, and cuts away any sort of beneficial interaction with your connections of supporters.
Us PullnotPushers tweet constantly throughout the day on @PullnotPush and our personal accounts: @s_coren, @jeff_machado, @justincambria, @czwolf, @timstansky and @danronken.
Swiss Pharmaceutical giant Novartis rattled the Food and Drug Administration's cage with language describing a drug to treat a form of leukemia. Apparently the FDA believes that the copy generated by a "share more information widget" on Facebook didn't properly reflect the risks of taking the drug.
Marketing Takeaway: It's always a good idea to make sure you aren't breaking any state and federal regulations with the content you publish on social media (or else where for that matter). Not sure if what you're putting out is safe? Have someone proof your work and run the research who's qualified.
The Week of Crazy Ways to Quit Your Job
In other news this week, PullnotPush would like to give a special Magnet award for "Cleverest Way to Quit Your Job" to Steven Slater. Slater was a JetBlue attendent who lost his cool after getting fed up with rude passengers and slid down the escape slide to freedom. Now he has a Free Steven Slater Facebook page set up by fans with over 25,000 likes to fund his legal fees.
The runner up? The folks on reddit sure did love the girl who decided tell her company via e-mail she was quitting with a series of funny photographs and a whiteboard. Too bad it turned out to be a hoax by a struggling LA actress named Elyse Porterfield.
Marketing Takeaway: Never underestimate the impact of a remarkable story and social media users spreading the word...however it's way better when that remarkable story is true.
What are your thoughts on these bizzare, yet newsworthy items?
Posted by Samantha Coren on Wed, Aug 04, 2010
There's been a lot of talk in the internet marketing world regarding Ben & Jerry's ending their e-mail marketing efforts in the UK. Their decision to focus on promoting their brand through social media channels has polarized many.
Several gave virtual pats on the back to the two socially conscious ice cream peddlers for making this bold move. Others felt the decision to axe e-mail marketing was short sighted. As for me? For Ben & Jerry's giving up on e-mail makes sense given their extensive brand history and business model.
However going "social media only" with online marketing outside of your website may be a huge mistake for many reasons. Here's why:
The Fight for Attention
With Facebook and Twitter your business is fighting for the attention in giant streams of messages we all scan through in a day. Even within a company's individual profile page there are several different links and messages for someone to review and get distracted. There's no main focus - just hundreds of little "sound bites".
A well done e-mail marketing blast with a single call to action is much more effective at achieving a desired conversion goal than a tweet or a status update.
Customization, Personalization and Segmentation
While Facebook gives Pages administrators the option to target messages to certain connections there's no room narrowing down who your recipients are beyond age, sex, and location. With Twitter you can only mention someone's individual user name or send them a direct message. While it would be nice to send personalized messages to all your followers there's no quick and easy way to go about it in social media - especially if your social media connections are in the hundreds or thousands.
In a survey conducted by e-Dialogue, 64% of consumers want marketers to show that they know what types of products or services they like. Most e-mail marketing software platforms allow you the ability to personalize and target your e-mails based on user provided information such as name and purchasing history.
The more relevant the content is to the individual the more inclined they are to open and read your messages.
User Backlash Against Marketing in Social Media
Not everyone is happy about the commercial invasion of social media that's been occurring over the past few years. Facebook originally started out as a way for Ivy League college students to get to know one another - now it has grown into a major means of communication for anything and everything.
There's been resentment among Facebook's earlier user base about this transition. Older Facebook users in the 40 and over age bracket (among Facebook's fastest growing user segment) aren't as inclined to consistantly check Facebook multiple times a day either as they are with e-mail.
Many individuals have gone as far as deleting their profiles off social media presence altogether. Choosing to not do e-mail marketing will make your marketing efforts more or less invisible to this segment of internet users.
Before You Decide to Pull the Plug on E-mail Consider This...
Just because marketing your business solely through social media seems like the cool hip thing to do doesn't mean it's in your best interest. If you're not seeing results with your e-mail campaigns then you're probably not building them with an inbound marketing methodology in mind.
While social media can be a great promotional tool for your business you can't completely disregard the value of being able to tactfully target and pull your audience back to you the way you can through e-mail.
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Posted by Justin Cambria on Fri, Jul 30, 2010
Hey y’all. I'm Justin Cambria, new to the Pull Marketing Blog, and 
a Digital Marketing Strategist here at PNP. So I try to help our clients – and our company – with online marketing strategy. Utilizing the HubSpot CMS, I develop and execute digital marketing strategies using a comprehensive program of quality content creation, clever keyword placements, social media marketing, and blogging for business. Glad to be here with you all!
Facebook...
So… Facebook. It’s a 10,000 lb upstart gorilla in the internet world, which holds clear relevance to online marketing by virtue of its size alone. If you are a business that’s at all serious about your reach, you need to be on Facebook. There are vast resources available about how to do so and Facebook for Business Best Practices, so I won’t go into that today.
Why Facebook matters to Social Media Marketing
I’d like to focus on why Facebook has value, and to what extent that value can be measured for an individual business. As an example, we maintain a PullNotPush Facebook page. This holds value for us for several reasons: Google indexes Facebook pages, which helps search engine optimization, and since Facebook is a highly trafficked site, their links tend to perform well on Google searches. Also, we want to be able to be found and ‘liked’ by clients and partners within Facebook. And we want to share the content we publish in the Facebook channel. It’s an essential place to maintain an active presence, in large part because you are giving away a free marketing opportunity. All of this is undoubtedly good for us.
Can you measure its worth?
But one of the burning questions is how good is it, and how do you measure that value? If you are utilizing Facebook for its Public Relations potential, there’s little to debate. But speaking solely of sales revenue, it’s less clear. We are fortunate enough to work with HubSpot, we use some of their awesome tools to track how effective Facebook and other social media sites are in helping us to convert leads. Here's a snapshot of a client's Social Media traffic, which shows leads from Facebook specifically:
As practitioners of closed loop marketing, we believe strongly in the value of bringing visitors back to our website; if we can’t publish content that’s thought provoking enough for people to visit our site and give us permission to contact them, we’re in the wrong business.
But what'$ a Like REALLY worth?
Discussing some of this yesterday with Michelle from the digital strategy firm LoveTheCool, we spent some time pondering how to quantify the value of Facebook likes in terms of actual sales for B2C businesses, such as musicians who might want to sell MP3s directly to their followings on Facebook .
This is a harder question to answer. Some of the URL shortening services designed for Twitter such as bit.ly offer analytics tools: you can shorten the same URL (say, a link to an amazon MP3 sale page) many times repurposing each for a specific Facebook promotion. Then clicks on each link could be tracked a-la-carte. While that is a nice and useful feature, there is not, to my knowledge, a comprehensive way to demonstrate that having X number of fans, and posting Y times per day about album Z translates into N revenue. And there's clearly a demand for that
Convert Leads & Close the Loop!
As Facebook, which is likely working on a solution to this analytics issue, catches up, we see it as another argument extolling the benefits of closed loop marketing, which culminates by converting leads. Give your followers the option of consuming your content wherever they like – on your blog, at your Facebook page, or elsewhere – but get them to come back to your page and convert if you want to offer them something specific and continue a deeper dialogue. This is especially relevant to B2B business, or any business with a consultative approach to its services. Isolating that interaction out and making it one on one on your website will help you to qualify your leads and spend time only with prospects who are genuinely interested in interacting with you.
How do you use Facebook for business? Are you frustrated by proving its value? Drop a comment!