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Posts Tagged ‘Media Integration’

I just wrote this question directly from my sidebar using the ChaCha.me widget with WordPress integration enabled on a custom profile built just for The Marketing Technology Blog.

In addition to WordPress (publishing via XML-RPC), your questions can also be published on your Facebook profile, Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter Account and even your Tumblr account! Blogger integration is coming next!

This is a fantastic means of opening your blog to questions from your visitors. Very cool!

Disclaimer: ChaCha is a client and I am assisting them directly with some of these features and social media integration as a whole.

Ask me anything, even anonymously

This post was written by ChaCha Questions

Use ChaCha to submit your Online Marketing questions to The Marketing Technology blog! This account utilizes the WordPress integration available at ChaCha.me. Ask us your question now!

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New friend, Scott Hoffman of Cliqology, shared an incredible presentation on the simple foundation of so many social media platforms… the status update.

With the assistance of Bit.ly, Scott did an analysis of shortlinks and where they lead to. It may surprise you! This was filmed at Webtrends Engage conference in New Orleans earlier this month… see you next year at Engage in San Francisco!

The two videos Scott shared:

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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Doug mentioned in a recent post how tight integrations and automation are going to be key for email marketers. We work with Real Estate agents and that’s exactly what they are demanding. A couple things you should know about real estate:

• Real Estate agents aren’t technologists and don’t have an IT department to call up when they need help. They’re entrepreneurs, quickly adopt technologies, and always measure the impact. They’re often very sophisticated marketers – because their income depends on it.
• Real Estate agents work with margins. Every expense made on a new marketing vendor or technology is money out of their profit margin on a home sold. As a result, they’re extremely cautious about the tools they adopt, how simple they are to use, and the impact they make on the sale.

As a result, they’ve driven us to develop around the clock. We now automatically push a “Listing of the day” to our real estate customer’s Facebook wall and Twitter stream. This is one of their own listings and is linked back to a virtual tour that we host for our customer. When we developed the feature, we were unsure of how receptive friends would be to seeing a real estate listing on their wall.

Turns out, very receptive! Many of our agents get comments almost everyday. They are not from the same group of people and sometimes are not the type of comment the buyer might want to hear (like “needing to be cleaned”) but for a real estate agent presence of mind is very important and having an ongoing conversation about their listing keeps them on top.

Our real estate marketing service is now integrated with Twitter, YouTube (we dynamically generate videos from the listing images), and Real Estate Listing Syndication services. The results have been fantastic – our clients have seen about a 25% increase in the number of page views on virtual tours, inbound text and toll free inquiries. This response surprised me somewhat and illustrated very clearly how integrating social media into your marketing efforts (even in a very brick and mortar business) can have a tremendous impact on your brand.

Here’s one of the automated YouTube Real Estate videos:

The best part of this is that the customer is able to do all of it – WordPress, Mobile, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube – all with a single click of the mouse. They don’t have to login to each application independently each time – they can enable the account integration once and then publish automatically. We’ve put together a video that demonstrates the functionality.

This post was written by Adam Small

Adam is the CEO of Connective Mobile, a mobile marketing company that offers mobile marketing solutions and integration. Connective Mobile works with clients in the restaurant/retail, real estate and conferences/events industries.

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You might also find these posts interesting:

• 5 Myths of Social Media (10)
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• Hello Companies… Anyone Listening? (0)

Having worked heavily in the online software industry that last decade, I suppose it’s not a surprise that more folks are seeking my advice on the development and enhancement of their platforms – especially with regard to social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes an application optimized for social media.

1. Syndication – the majority of applications start and stop with this step. They simply use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other applications as a place to force their message into each of those networks. This is the bare minimum of social media optimization… delivering your message into your network, wherever they are located. It doesn’t truly leverage social media.
2. Reaction – If you’re pushing your message out to social media, how is your application or business dealing with the reaction to that messaging? Are you recording responses, responding to reactions? Are you adjusting your strategy accordingly? A conversation is only a conversation when both sides are listening and speaking with one another.
3. Reward – What’s the reward for responding or participating? If you’d like ongoing quality interaction to fully leverage social media, the participants must be rewarded. This doesn’t mean you have to spend money – it could simply be providing the information requested. It could also be virtual credit in the form of point systems, titles, badges, etc. Unless your rewards are directly impacting revenue, you’re going to have to keep a close eye on this. I’ve watched quite a few social media optimized applications rise and fall immediately when their rewards systems were broken or static.
4. Analytics – This is such a missed opportunity… so many applications dive into social media integration but neglect to measure the impact of that communication. The volume of traffic your business, product or service can attain by tracking the viral nature of social media is enormous – but you need to ensure you’re accurately measuring it so that you can determine how many resources to apply to it.
5. Targeting – the ability to target messaging to prospects in social media can improve overall adoption and use of your application. If you can target your application by keyword, geography, interests, behaviors, etc., you’re going to have much deeper engagement with your audience.
6. Replication – users don’t like bouncing back and forth between applications, so bring the user experience to them. If your users are on Facebook, try to bring as much of your user experience there that makes sense. If the conversation is on your site but started from Twitter, bring Twitter back to your site. This was a key reason that I recently dropped IntenseDebate and picked up Echo by JS-Kit. JS-Kit effectively brings conversations across several social media applications and integrates them directly with The Marketing Technology Blog’s commenting system.

If your company is looking to expand your applications or strategies into social media, be sure to have a complete strategy. Blasting your message across a bunch of social media applications may have a little bit of impact – but optimizing your strategy can fully leverage the incredible power of it.

Ultimately, what you’re trying to do is to enable the power of social media by building a programmatic or virtual bridge between your business and the medium. Once you effectively build that bridge, watch out!

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.

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This may be a repeat post… but I really need to emphasize this. I’ve watched several companies stumble all over social media strategies. They eventually abandoned it altogether. The question I couldn’t get them to answer was why had they attempted in the first place?

I like to think of social media as an amplifier… an incredibly powerful amplifier. If you have a solid foundation of public relations and marketing, and are covering both acquisition and retention effectively, your great work will really stand out as you begin to engage and build a reputation online. If you have a mediocre PR and Marketing strategy, social media could destroy it.

My 5 Myths of Social Media Marketing

1. Social media replaces a website. You still need a place to capture leads and draw attention to your company’s products or services.
2. Social media replaces email marketing. Email is a push method that informs customers and prospects when you need them to be contacted. In fact, Social Media requires much more email communication to keep social site users coming back. Think about all the email you get from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter!
3. Social media’s high usage means it’s a great place to advertise. Social media is not something to throw ads on top of, it’s something to be communicated from within. Too many companies pour money into banner ads and textual advertising in social media sites where the users have no intent of ever purchasing.
4. Social media impact can’t be measured. Social media impact can be measured, it’s simply more difficult to measure the impact. You’ll need to employ a robust analytics package – perhaps with a social media integration, or figure out how to effectively deploy code from your current analytics package to capture leads and conversions from social media.
5. Social media is simple, you just do it. NO! Social media is not simple. Imagine being at a lunch party and speaking over your products and services with a prospect. He smiles, you smile, he asks a question, you say all the right answers… you pay for lunch… you grab his trust. Online, you never see them coming, you never know where they’ve been, you don’t know anything other than the fact that they’re probably more knowledgeable than you are.

   Social media is building trust with someone that you may have never have met. It’s difficult, it takes time… it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Social media fails many companies because they underestimate the resources and time it takes to build the momentum. They don’t realize that it’s a long-term investment, not a short-term strategy.

   With a strategy, you can explode out the gate and grow your business well beyond expectations. Without it, you may wind up throwing in the towel.

This is the reason why Southwest Airlines and Zappos can succeed with Social Media, but United Airlines and DSW aren’t doing as well. Southwest Airlines and Zappos were fantastic, customer-focused companies before social media evolved to this point. United Airlines may never be able to adopt a social media strategy given their legalize and stodgy leadership.

As a panelist today at Real Estate BarCamp Indianapolis, you could see the range of agencies and brokers right in the room. Some, like good friend and client Paula Henry (both Roundpeg and DK New Media help her), are sprinting so far ahead that they’ve actually cancelled all traditional media and are fully online. Paula’s problem isn’t how to get leads… it’s how to keep her social media strategy at the pace it is at while working all of her leads.

Others in the room were still working behind the curve… no twitter, no facebook, no online persona, no search engine optimization, no blogging, etc. It’s not too late for these folks to build an effective online marketing strategy… but it is too early to have them jump into a Social Media strategy in my humble opinion.

Newcomers need to learn how to walk before they ride. They need an effective web site that can attract traffic and provides contact information to engage with the realtor. They need to research and utilize keywords that are have impact in the region they serve – including neighborhoods, zip codes, cities, counties, school districts, etc. They need to employ an email newsletter to keep in touch with leads and previous clients. They need to deploy Real Estate mobile solutions to replace the fliers they keep stuffing in front of properties.

Social media can provide an incredible volume of leads into your sales funnel… but you must have the sales funnel in place, measuring the impact of the results, and regularly working your marketing program to nurture and capture leads and customers. Social media comes next… amplifying an incredibly effective marketing program and beginning to ripple out as authority and transparency grows.

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One of the projects I’m working on right now is a great ebook for folks who attend my Blog Indiana session on Blogging for SEO! It’s only 12 days from the event, so be sure to register and be there. Attendees will get the guide for free. After the event, I’ll be posting the book on my blog for $99!

The book will cover all platforms and options – with comprehensive instructions to enable anyone to leverage blogging for business through great search engine optimization. Included in the ebook are the following chapters:

1. Understanding Search
2. Keyword Analysis
3. Why Blogging Works
4. Selecting Your Domain
5. Selecting Your Platform
6. Designing Your Blog
7. Extending Your Blog
8. Selecting Your Categories
9. Registering with Search
10. Getting on the Map
11. Robots and Sitemap
12. Communicating with Search Engines
13. Writing Post Titles
14. Customizing Post Slugs
15. Meta Data Enhancements
16. Writing for Blogs
17. User Generated Content
18. Guest Blogging
19. Promoting Your Blog
20. Generating Backlinks
21. Syndicating Your Blog
22. Social Media Integration
23. Monitoring Search
24. Turning Visitors into Customers
25. Re-igniting Old Content

Don’t miss out on Blog Indiana! Order your tickets today – it’s going to be the best blogging event in the Midwest and I believe it will rival many of the national and international events.

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When I was down in Houston, one of the speakers noted how a company will spend more money on their lobby than they will on their online presence. No one asks a couch manufacturer what the return on investment is on a nice leather sofa for the lobby – but everyone cuts and chisels away at the cost of a new website.

Too many companies ignore the strategy altogether – too busy with their current strategies to worry about an online marketing strategy. Your website will get more visitors than your lobby with a great design and strategy behind it! It’s time for a makeover, but it’s difficult to justify the expense… nearly impossible in this economy. Until now…

If you’re a business in central Indiana, here’s an opportunity! For one local company, the Indy Business Makeover Competition will be a well-deserved refresher. The winning firm will receive marketing services, a new server, Web site and office furniture among other prizes. With more than $80,000 of donated products and services from local businesses, the Indy Business Makeover Competition says to hardworking business owners, “enjoy a makeover on us, you’ve earned it.”

The application deadline is tomorrow – July 29, 2009! Check out the list of prizes – they include a 40 blog package with Compendium Blogware, too! I’m going to see if I can talk the team into letting me throw a $3,000 quarterly consulting package into the ring as well – to help with content strategies, social media integration, conversion monitoring, etc.

Great job by the folks at Small Box and Pivot Marketing for putting on this great contest.

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