Ideas for Business

[Note from Lee: The growing trend towards integration of marketing and communications disciplines has brought a tremendous demand for guidance and insight. I'm happy to say that my friends Geoff Livingston and Gini Dietrich have published a new book about just that. We rarely publish guest posts but the message of integration and optimization in this book blend perfectly with our core messages here.]

One of our favorite books to come out in a long while is Lee’s Optimize. We love the three discipline approach — content, search and social — to online marketing. Without integration across all marketing disciplines we fail to understand the customer experience.

We just published Marketing in the Round on a overarching integrated communications, traditional and new, and see online as the backbone for all marketing today, on or offline.

Consider the customer experience. They weave between traditional broadcast and print media into online seamlessly. For example, someone could ride their local train or subway, see ads, surf the Internet on their mobile phone, read a magazine (on their tablet or not), or a host of other activities.

You get the point. Customer media use supersedes tactical practices. That’s true for both B2B and B2C, though as Lee points out in his book, these sales cycles are very different.

Multichannel marketing applies to traditional print, broadcast, mail and PR approaches, too. They should all be optimized for search, too, with messaging and keywords that will invoke familiarity with stakeholders regardless of which media form they are seen.

Think about it. Customers search when they are looking to find something. If you optimize online ads, content, social and SEO so that search indexes your company’s name first, then you absolutely need your print ads, direct mail, press documents, white papers and broadcast ads to use the same keywords.

A customer may not even realize it, but they are mentally associating these words — message components — with your brand. When they search, they will use the keywords, and your optimized content will naturally come up in the top results. More importantly, it will already be familiar to your customer.

Take it a step further and add your creative, ads and content to the web site in a the modern press room. Transcribe the broadcast media so the keywords are searchable. Make them shareable. and start real discussions on them. Even ask for feedback on the ads. All of your traditional content can be repurposed, optimized and indexed for social and search.

That’s why all marketing disciplines should be integrated and operate together as a collective whole. Marketing in the Round discusses selecting traditional tactics and newer disciplines like social, online and mobile. It’s about how to weave them together to achieve the common objective.

Geoff Livingston is an author and marketing strategist, and serves as VP, Strategic Partnerships for Razoo. A former journalist, Livingston continues to write, and most recently he co-authored Marketing in the Round, and authored the social media primer Welcome to the Fifth Estate.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication ?rm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro and co-author of Marketing in the Round.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | All Marketing Should Be Optimized – Geoff Livingston & Gini Dietrich | http://www.toprankblog.com

If you didn’t hear already, GM announced that they will no longer be advertising in Facebook.  That may not mean a lot to you, but for a company that has almost a 2 billion dollar annual ad budget, it starts to make you think.

 

Actually, I’m not shocked.  In fact, I was wondering when a large company like GM would stand up and say “Not anymore.”  Why?  The very fact that their brand is in the social network creates demand for the network and not necessarily the brand itself.  In addition, Facebook and most social media sites for that matter don’t protect your intellectual property, but instead leverage it to attract more users and social engagement.  In lemans terms that means that your brand (especially large ones) create demand on social media sites because of their global brand equity.  So that begs a great question…why should you advertise on a social network that:

• Takes advantage of your brand’s intellectual property
• Doesn’t really care about the personal privacy of its users
• Makes data mining impossible, which to make matters worse, businesses are actually paying the social network for in terms of advertising

 

When you really think about it, I think we are starting to see some of the real fundamental challenges social media networks are going to face in the near term.  In a nutshell, a business of any size participating in social media really doesn’t own anything.  So why should you spend your advertising budget in making the social media network more popular or attracting users that you don’t really own?

 

Like magic tricks, if you really want to know the secret, you have to ask yourself…”What would have made that better?”  I have been asking myself that question for quite some time now and think I have the beginning of something that I call social media 2.0.  So what would that look like you ask?  Here are some of the attributes that I would expect to see:

• Decentralized information of a hub like format (aka- the social hub would not be the owner of the content)
• Users of the network would be able to control and keep track of their users (not to say it couldn’t connect to a hub, but the database would be kept locally on a host or your computer)
• Your intellectual property is protected and your advertising spend to increase your social engagement is actually yours

 

I’m not at all advocating that social media is dead, however I am suggesting that we are going to see shift in how social networks are utilized and what they will look like.  Will Facebook be the leader 5 years from now?  You might be saying “Yeah they have over 900 million users….”, but then again we saw the fall of MySpace and the recent popularity growth of Pinterest.  If I were to sincerely wage my bets, I would doubt that we have seen the Facebook killer to date, however could be around the corner if the technological issues of social media 2.0 could be worked out and enough resources were devoted to make it work.

At TopRank Online Marketing, we are fortunate to provide consulting to quite a few innovative B2B companies that serve other marketers. A great example of that is PRWeb and parent company, Vocus, both long standing clients.

In late 2011 Vocus welcomed Jason Jue as Chief Marketing Officer. As Vocus & PRWeb’s Account Manager at TopRank, I was keenly interested in getting to know Jason better and learning his plans for the future – and what better way than through an interview for all readers of Online Marketing Blog to see?

In this interview Jason talks about the undeniable convergence of PR and marketing, what social media metric is most undervalued by many PR and marketing professionals, where marketers should invest for 2013 and his vision for Vocus.

Tell us a little bit about your background and what excites you most about joining Vocus? 

Prior to Vocus, I was Vice President of Marketing at Rackspace and had several executive positions at Dell in the US and Asia, marketing to businesses. Vocus offers cloud marketing and PR software to businesses in every market sectors and size that want to reach and influence buyers

I’m excited about sharing with businesses how easily our products work wonders for our current customers. Some of the leading marketing consultants such as Sirius Decisions and MarketingSherpa use our products to maximize their online publicity.

For some people, Vocus is synonymous with Public Relations software. Can you speak to how and when Vocus first expanded to offering marketing solutions?

We have always believed PR to be a core part of “promoting a product or service” or marketing. Many customers who buy our PR software have a marketing title, and we’ve recently seen faster growth in this group. These customers use our social media and PRWeb news release features of our PR software. For them, we created a cloud marketing suite which integrates search, publicity, and social media marketing. Our cloud marketing suite was the most successful product launch in Vocus history, and will be even better when it includes email later this year.

Do you see PR and marketing professionals as two separate audiences? Or are they converging disciplines?

In marketing teams that have PR and marketing professionals, we continue to see them as two audiences with different product needs, although their roles are converging, especially around social media. PR professionals are using social media for brand positioning. Marketing professionals use social media for lead gen. Meanwhile, for the millions of businesses who have few, if any marketers at all, the marketing functions blend together.

Use your crystal ball and give us a glimpse into the future. How will the Vocus offering change over the next 2 years? Where do you see the most opportunity for growth?

The future of marketing is simple and powerful integrated campaigns. Every marketing team realizes that when working together on unified and integrated campaigns, lead generation and brand perception results are much better than working alone.

I know that sounds like a pipe dream as marketing complexity has increased to address the everywhere all the time customer. Today’s customers are constantly switching back and forth from website, news, social, search, email, and mobile. To add confusion, each specialty has their marketing tools resulting in silos and disjointed communication.

In the near future, marketers will be able to buy cloud marketing software to easily manage integrated campaigns. It will incorporate the trendy with the tried-and-true tactics of marketing The essential elements will work together for better results in lead generation and brand perception. And, it will recommend how and when to engage with prospects and customers.

Seem unbelievable? I think it’s unbelievable that it hasn’t already happened. In the past 15 years, every corporate function, from marketing to sales to HR, has seen a proliferation of technology tools. Marketing is the only function without a major product suite. IBM is doing it for large enterprise marketing. We are integrating all the important marketing tools into a cloud marketing suite so every business, large and small, can easily achieve big results .

Staying on social for a moment, what is one social metric that you think may be most overlooked by PR and marketing professionals alike? On the flip side, any stat that you view as overvalued?

The most important social media metric is how many people actively recommend your product or service. I think the most overvalued metrics are fans, followers, and likes.

As 2012 is well underway, what is one investment you think marketers must make in order to succeed the rest of the year and into 2013? (i.e. invest in mobile marketing)

Focus on marketing fundamentals that will dramatically accelerate growth. Who is your target customer? What product or service should you develop for them? How should you promote to them? Why should they buy from you?

Then, find the best product for you that simplifies all the marketing tactics and trends. This product will then let you focus on the marketing fundamentals.

Thanks, Jason!

 

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue | http://www.toprankblog.com

In March of this year I made a decision: I wanted to get healthier.  The problem I have always faced is that I didn’t see the point of exercise, just for the sake of exercise.  Treadmills and stationary bicycles never did much for me, but I was looking for a way to regain some focus and start down a healthier path.

About a month ago I spoke with my good friend Ali who had recently started a training program to become a yoga instructor.  She convinced me to attend a class with her and I even though I’ve done yoga before, this was an entirely new experience.  After 75 minutes in a sweltering room (enduring one of the toughest workouts I’ve had in a while) the strangest thing happened. I felt stronger, lighter, and more focused.

Many times as marketers we get caught up in daily tasks and lose focus of what is really important.  When we lose focus, we may become uninspired, lazy, and complacent.  It is undoubtedly just as difficult, yet as essential, to breath new life into our marketing plans as it is to jumpstart our bodies.  The question is: where do we begin on the road to creating a “healthier” internet marketing strategy?

4 Tips For Strengthening Your Internet Marketing Plan

# 1- Become An Agent of Change – Don’t be Afraid to Try New Things
Fear consumes many people both personally and professionally.  A fear of failing or disappointment can often lead to a stagnant and uninspired plan for dominance on the web.   Instead of allowing fear to make an appearance, instead recognize that mistakes will be made, but they will be a learning experience. What are some changes you can begin implementing today?

• Surveys of existing customers
• Develop different ways of communicating with your audience (blog posts, social media outreach)
• Ask questions of industry thought leaders
• Join new virtual groups on LinkedIn
• Begin attending more events locally to gain industry insight

# 2- The Journey Is Just As Important As the Destination – Just Make Sure You Document
Along the way to creating your “perfect” internet marketing plan, there is a lot to learn.  Remembering that the journey leads to our destination will put us in the right frame of mind to learn from the experience.  As you’re making mistakes or experiencing success it is essential that you document the steps that you took to get there.

# 3 – Take Some Time to Breathe – Step Back and Survey the Situation
A true marketer knows that our industry is a very customer-centric business. Without our customers we wouldn’t have jobs.  It can become very easy to fall into time sucking tactics that may only put us further behind.  Before jumping head first into the newest social media platform or marketing tactic take some time to ask a few questions:

• Who will we target with this approach?
• What will be our core messaging or strategy?
• Why should we include this tactic?
• How will my team accomplish this tactic and how will this benefit my customers?
• How much will this cost in both time and money?

# 4 – Have An Open Mind – Brainstorm With Your Team Regularly
Collaboration with fellow team members can be of benefit to all parties involved.  Not only will collaboration open up new ideas, but it will also improve buy-in from other associates.  If you’re in an internet marketing rut, or just looking to breathe that new life into your plans to dominate the search and social web, be aware of the resources you may already have at your disposal.

All of the tactics mentioned above will lend themselves to creating a stronger, more cohesive marketing plan.  At one time or another, most of us have faced a situation where we knew our plan wasn’t working, but weren’t exactly sure how to fix it.  I hope that these tactics will become part of a stronger plan and give you the jumpstart you need to get on the road to internet marketing success.

I’m curious to know what experience you have had as a marketer attempting to breathe new life into and strengthen your internet marketing plans?  What were some of your biggest obstacles and what was the most important lesson you learned?

Namaste.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Channel Your Internal Marketing Warrior: 4 Tips for Strengthening Your Marketing Plan | http://www.toprankblog.com

TopRank receives a lot of value from having me speak at conferences but you don’t have to be a speaker to realize a positive return from events. Small, large online or offline, there are numerous ways to optimize and maximize your return on conference involvment both in the short and long term.

If your company is considering whether to send you to events because of uncertain return or benefits, show them the following list.

In fact, if I were running a conference, I’d make sure these tips are shared with attendees, sponsors and speakers alike.

The first step in getting more value out of event attendance is to understand the “why”. What benefit that brings value to the business can you get from attending conferences, workshops, webinars and educational meet/tweetups? I like to say that I can “make money” at any conference. The reason why is that I am specifically aware of multiple ways to create value with events – beyond simply prospecting for new business. Here are 5 key benefits you can create from event participation and goals you can set for each:

1. Grow Your Network

There is no substitute for a quality network. It takes time to grow a personal network and if you’re advocating for your company, then community development is also ongoing. Attending events online and off are essential for productive networking that can result in a variety of valuable outcomes including:

• Recruiting
• Collecting competitive intelligence
• Vendor and consultant sourcing
• Partner sourcing
• Prospecting for new customers.

When you attend events, set goals for the kinds of contacts you want to make. Go so far as to make a list of people you want to meet if they’re particularly important to your goals. Initiate new connections with qualified prospects, marketing partners, vendors to outsource to and job candidates. At the same time, reinforce existing connections with contacts in your social networking pipeline. Each day, tally them up and plan how you will follow up. Follow on Twitter, connected on LinkedIn. Share useful tips, links and info that are relevant to your interactions with them. Give to get, but have a purpose and a goal for the connection.

Make sure you have goals and a purpose to your online and event networking. If you leave it to chance, you’re leaving a LOT of value on the table – for your competition.

2. Get Smarter. Repeat.

There are numerous benefits to attending conference sessions. The obvious is to hear smart speakers give presentations on important topics with useful tips. Sometimes speakers deliver on that promise and sometimes they don’t.

Don’t let bad conference content get in the way of getting smarter.

Pay attention to how the speaker gives their presentation and observe how the audience responds. You might think the information isn’t useful to you, but if the attendees are leaning forward, writing notes and holding up their phones and ipads to take pictures of the presentation slides, then the speaker is connecting.

You can benefit from understanding how the information is presented as much as from the actual tips. The format, sequence, design and presentation of information that connects is a model you can leverage for your own purposes: whether it’s speaking at a conference or event yourself or communicating and persuading people internally.

Planning your conference session attendance is essential. Think of how many sessions will you attend and how will you capture the information presented. Will you take notes on an iPad, laptop or (gasp) on paper? Will you take photos or video (where allowed)? Do you know where to get a copy of the speakers’ presentations? Introduce yourself to speakers and ask them a key question on video so you can review later and share with your team.

When meeting new people, discuss the sessions with them. Compare notes – it’s a great way to network and to get other opinions. Before the conference, make a grid or a plan for which specific sessions you’ll be attending. Often times, there is not much time between sessions and the difference between getting a good seat and standing room only can be a matter of minutes and you might miss out on the session entirely because rooms can fill up.

3. Curate and Create Content

Content Marketing is hotter than ever but sourcing content is probably one of the biggest challenges for companies getting into the content publishing realm. The good news is that events from Twitter chats to webinars to keynote presentations and breakout sessions all provide opportunities to capture, curate and even create content. Some examples include:

• Liveblogging – Transcribe what the speakers say word for word. Listen for key quotes or pieces of information and make a “list post” around a specific topic. Pre-write an article about the session topic and fill in stats and quotes from the speakers.
• Interviews – Reach out to speakers in advance and collect tips from their presentations as a way to help boost attendance to their session. Shoot video interviews of speakers or other smarties at the conference. Record podcast interviews with the same people. Capture single tips on video from a large number of people and compile into one video. Go to exhibitor booths and ask them for a 30 second pitch on video and compile them. Survey attendees on what they like best, tips they’ve heard, etc into a compilation video. With video, you might want to get sign-offs. Also, non-speakers may be reluctant.
• Journal – Keep notes and write a summary of key points from the day and publish like a journal entry. Link to other bloggers that are publishing liveblog posts at the same event.
• Curate – Use a tool like storify to curate the buzz of the conference. You don’t even need to be at the event to do this if a conference hashtag is used consistently.
• Track Your Own Buzz – If you are speaking, make sure someone from your team is tracking mentions of you, your company and topic on social streams like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. Monitor any liveblogging of your presentations as well. Give people an incentive to liveblog your sessions too. If anyone liveblogs one of my presentations, I will send them a copy of Optimize (for example). Curate those mentions into a roundup post on your company newsroom.

Think about how you can leverage your conference experience to create new content for your company blog, articles, or process documentation. Set goals for how many content objects (blog posts, articles, videos, tweets, images) you’ll create each day. Organize what you will capture, with who and with what devices. Plan where you’ll publishing this content and when as well.  For curation, compile presentations posted to Slideshare, interviews others have posted to YouTube and liveblog posts covering interesting sessions – then add your own commentary as the icing on the cake.

The content you capture and create can supply a company blog with numerous posts and show clients, staff and prospective clients that you are on top of what’s happening in the industry.

4. Share the Smarts: Knowledge Transfer With Your Team

The explicit purpose of attending conferences is to hear industry experts share advice and insights into topics that your business can benefit from. Collecting actionable tips, statistics and other useful information form conferences to share with your team, clients and other groups in your organization can multiply the value of one person attending an event. If multiple people attend, the value can be even greater.

To make knowledge transfer from conference content work, it’s important to create a process for information capture, synthesis and distribution.

• Capture: Target specific speakers and sessions. Write questions you want answered and if the presentations do not contain those answers then pursue subject matter expert speakers to ask them directly. Capture information in text, audio, video and image. No one ever comes back from an event thinking they took too many photos. Maybe the wrong photos, but not to many. Also, be aware of conference policies on video and image capture.
• Synthesis: When you formulate questions, have specific applications for your business in mind. When you get the answers, filter the information in a way that will be practical and useful when it is shared – vs. all theoretical. Discuss the information and tips collected with fellow attendees to filter out what’s most useful.
• Distribution: Have a plan for how you will present the useful tactics, insights, statistics and case studies with your co-workers, clients and other interested parties.  You could write a report, you could create a presentation to give live or via webinar, you could compile video clips and images to narration. Individual tips could be saved on an internal knowledge base blog according to category. You could have a post-conference brown bag lunch discussion or a more formal presentation. There are many different options, but have them in mind before the conference to increase the likelihood they will actually happen and in an effective way.

Knowing you will be required to present the information you are gaining at a conference with the team back at the office can helps you focus on takeaways and practical interpretations of what’s being presented, instead of what you don’t like or the lacking presentation skills of the presenter.

5. Optimize the Marketing Value of Events

For nearly all events, I like to break things up into pre-event, during and after.  You could actually further distinguish near-after and long-after as well as a recurring component if the event is held at regular intervals, like many are on an annual basis.  Many conference speakers rely on the event to do the marketing. That’s a big fail.

Here are a few tips before, during and after the event to gain more attendees, more media coverage and post-event value:

Before the event:

• Write headlines, descriptions, tags and make trackable short URLs
• Pre-write tweets, updates and decide on a hashtag
• Submit your session to event listing sites, create events on Facebook and LinkedIn
• Create a contest or buzz around your presentation to inspire others to tell their networks
• Issue an optimized press release
• Schedule interviews with media attending the event and/or local media
• Connect with other speakers in advance
• Create a teaser for your presentation
• Announce your event attendance through email and your social channels
• When you meet people before your presentation, don’t be shy about sharing when you are speaking
• Create a check-in notice on Foursquare inviting people to attend your session

During the event:

• Create content the audience can participate with. I like to take photos of the audience and post to our Facebook page so they can tag themselves.
• Use tweetable, shareable content in your presentation
• Give something away to motivate desired behaviors like asking questions
• Always include a report or fulfillment piece in your thank you page
• Have someone on your team monitoring tweets and buzz during your presentation. Interact as appropriate

After the event:

• Curate buzz about the presentation into a blog post and/or newsroom post
• Follow up on questions asked and fulfillment deliverables
• Connect with new contacts through appropriate social channels
• Thank the conference for having you
• If you were on a panel, thank the panelists and moderator
• Thank any livebloggers that covered your session
• Use media coverage from the event in your newsroom, corporate email and other communications
• Follow up!!!!!

This should probably have been turned into an ebook on the topic, so congratulations on making it to the end of the post!  Heck, maybe we will make it into an ebook and add a few forms, checklists and examples.  In the meantime, share this list of tips with those in your organization that hold the purse strings for your event attendance. Try one or two of these tips for your next conference and share what you’ve done to get more value out of event attendance.

As always, if you like these tips, be sure to get your copy of Optimize for a deep dive into an integrated approach to optimizing your online marketing.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | 5 Ways to Optimize the Business Value of Attending Conferences | http://www.toprankblog.com