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Posts Tagged ‘Cool Stuff’

A couple of weeks ago we gave you a sneak peek into Hanapin Marketing’s big plans for the blog redesign. After much anticipation, the day has finally arrived… PPC Hero just got a makeover! The PPC Hero team is very excited to launch our new and improved blog design. If you don’t remember the old look, check out the before and after:

BEFORE

AFTER

We hope you love it as much as we do. After all, this redesign is for you, our readers. So in addition to the spiffy new look (and chiseled biceps), you will find the following new features to make browsing and interacting with our blog much easier:

1. Get the best of both worlds, all in one place! The Twitter feed will enable you to stay connected with @ppchero special news and announcements that may not appear on the blog.
2. Finding our best content just got easier with a dedicated section for PPC Hero’s Most Popular blog posts.
3. Can’t get enough of PPC Hero? The new Connect section in the footer provides an easy, one-stop portal so you can connect with the team via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other cool stuff.
4. Looking for help on a specific topic? Quickly find the most relevant content via the new Categories page.
5. Spread the PPC Hero love! Easily share favorite blog content with your social network via the social media bar.

Of course we hope that you enjoy the new look and features. However, with every redesign there are some growing pains. Please reach out to our team if you have any technical issues with our new site!

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2010 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Today, I received an invitation to test out Flowtown. Flowtown is a new application that allows you to upload your email subscriber list and append social media to the list. I tested it with my email list and it worked flawlessly.

As companies continue to adopt social media, tools like Flowtown will come in handy to synchronize their following outside of email and into other social applications and networks.

Click through to the video of how Flowtown works if you don’t see it in your feed or email.

Pricing is 5 cents a record and there are some limits on the number of emails you can send. I’m impressed with quality of the service as well as the accuracy. They already have a Mailchimp integration so I was able to import my subscribers directly from an existing subscriber list within Mailchimp. Pretty nice feature!

The application updated over half of my records and appended Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, StumbleUpon and Amazon accounts where it identified a match. It took approximately 2 seconds per record and the system emailed me when it was completed. I tested about 20 of the appends and didn’t find any issues with them.

What I don’t like is that I can’t export the appended data (or that’s how it appears, anyways). If I bought it, I should be able to export it and just not view it. I’d love to use a system like this and push the data to another Email Marketing Platform. This would allow enterprise clients to upload a delta file of the customers they don’t have data for and manage the email in an external system where they’re storing many more data attributes.

As well, paying for every record is a bit risky if you have a crappy email list. With the past data append providers I’ve worked with, there was typically a base cost and a price per successfully appended record.

Still some pretty cool stuff – looking forward to seeing how their pricing evolves and if they’ll offer an API. There are more services and applications like this popping up – Rapleaf is one that I recently discovered. You can sign up at no cost at Rapleaf and see your own profile… it’s a bit scary, they identified me accurately across 22 different social networks and applications and even identified old email addresses that I had used! Rapleaf also allows you to opt-out of their database, a very very nice feature.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

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I am a graphic designer and i need a personal blog website to display my art, and link sources and lots of other cool stuff. I want to make a website that can install the cool word-press themes. It has to be completely free. I don’t have any hosting or previous website experiences.
i was hoping to have a website that has only the name i want in the url like www.Hongkiat.com

Every now and again I come across posts talking about how people don’t want to “engage” with brands on social media and that your brand shouldn’t be there, it should be people, etc., etc.

The latest was a post from Mike Seidle, a local blogger and business person who runs Professional Blog Service. I want to preface that I don’t know Mike and I have nothing against him. I follow him on Twitter and I think he generally has some good thoughts about business blogging and social media, however I still disagree with Mike on this point.

It is OK for your brand to be on Twitter – to be on Facebook – to be active in social media. It really is, and for a couple of reasons.

1. It gives your customers one point to gather news and information about your company.
2. It allows you to monitor the conversation.
3. It allows you to connect with other brands and possibly forge relationships and parterneships based on their interactions in social media.

Mike points out that people want to engage with other people. Yes, this is true, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t carve out a space for your brand as well. Here are some effective ways to do this:

1. Acknowledge who tweets/updates Facebook etc. on your company’s behalf: By providing some real faces it helps humanize your brand. FreshBooks does a good job of this on their Twitter page.
2. Allow your employees to interact on social media on a personal level AND on behalf of your company: I manage our twitter account as well as our Facebook page but I also have my own personal accounts. Many of FormSpring’s customers don’t want to follow me, because well, sometimes I like to talk about sports, or my kids or whatever else is going on.So, much of what I have to say is not great for them. But I also am an advocate and an evangelist for FormSpring, and when it makes sense, I talk about the cool stuff we are doing on my personal accounts. It gives insight to people who follow me on what I do for a living and helps expose them to FormSpring. Empower your brand and employees and it will pay off.
3. Have personality. If you are going to engage as your brand on social media show a bit of personality. We know that brands are not humans, but the more “life” you are able to give your brand on social media the more value you will derive from interacting through the multiple mediums.

Agree? Disagree? Have other ideas on how to use your brand across social media, let me know in the comments!

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