Facebook is emerging as a very effective part of businesses’ online marketing strategies, but take care not to neglect your own blog—or website—for your interaction on the social networking site.
On SmallBizTrends.com, Lisa Barone discusses the importance of continuing to focus on your own blog “to create your own authority and brand.” She offers 10 reasons, including:
Next week the May/June 2010 issue of American Spirit, and its member companion, Daughters newsletter, will begin arriving in mailboxes of all 165,000 members of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution. The increased circulation of the magazine and newsletter for this special issue enable NSDAR to promote subscriptions, encourage membership development and recount the achievements of the past three years of President General Linda Gist Calvin’s administration.
What do you know about your customers? Besides the fact that they all have at one time used your products or services? Drilling down to more specific information can help you improve your content marketing strategy, says Michael Thompson on btobonline.com.
“Collecting customer preferences allows you to have a better understanding of each customer’s interests,” he says. “This information becomes even more valuable when married with ongoing activity data, giving you a full view of your customers’ buying behavior and what drives them to take action. Collecting and harvesting this information allows you to create more relevant e-mail marketing communications, providing your customers with information they want, when they want it, to drive significantly higher sales conversion rates.”
Lee Odden’s article on content strategy vs. tactics got a lot of attention this week, with more than 40 people in his social network expressing their opinion on the value of social media experimentation.
As America’s rapid response armed service, the US Marine Corps early saw the advantages of adding air power to its traditional amphibious capabilities. Marine Corps aircraft, flown by legendary figures such as Medal of Honor recipient “Pappy” Boyington and his Black Sheep Squadron, helped win pivotal victories in World War II, Korean, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The May-June issue of Semper Fi, the magazine of the Marine Corps League, which we publish for the League, looks at what’s ahead for Marine aviation. With its long-awaited new bird, the tilt-rotor Osprey, racking up impressive service in Iraq and now Afghanistan, the Corps must aggressively update its other rotary wing aircraft, as well as acquire a new generation of fighters.
The article explains the urgency behind these replacement programs and what the Corps expects from birds that Pappy and his boys would’ve given their eyeteeth to command.
Our client the Marine Corps League held its annual Marine South Military Expo aboard Camp Lejeune, NC, on 21-22 April. The event afforded more than 200 military vendors and hundreds of Marines a chance to hold frank, face-to-face discussions about equipment.
The opening ceremonies included a brief address from Major General Carl B. Jensen,
Commanding General, Marine Corps Installations East. He drew an appreciative chuckle from the assembled vendors, Marines and Marine Corps League members when he bluntly described the equipment on display as “slicker than deer guts on a door knob.”
It takes more than establishing a presence on Facebook or Twitter, or launching a corporate blog to make effective use of social media. As Heidi Cohen points out, it takes a lot of work to make your social media marketing plans work.
As the new shiny thing on the marketing block, social media is filled with both mystery and promise. Many businesses are just beginning to get to acquainted with it, and may be infatuated with what it seems to promise.
If you read this blog regularly, though, you know we’ve said all along that social media is not magic. It’s a tool and like any tool, it takes time and effort to wield effectively and to learn what it can and cannot.
Cohen’s post summarizes points about effective social media that you’ll find in other posts on Hammock.com. These include:
• Frequent updating
• Consistent messages
• Participation by management and employees
• Clear guidelines for contributors
• Dovetailing online and offline efforts
• Buy-in and commitment by leadership
She doesn’t bullet-point it, but running through Cohen’s post is a point we cannot stress enough: Your social media need targeted, meaningful and creative content—content that instructs, informs, motivates and, yes, entertains those who access it.
We’d also add that media such as blogs and websites should embody good, functional design that makes them easy to navigate and to find desired content.
Each of Cohen’s tips suggests metrics to measure the effectiveness—or lack of effectiveness—of your social media strategy. That’s something we do for clients—we call it a Content Marketing Intelligence Report or CMIR. Measure early, measure often, and respond to what you learn.
It’s impossible not to get hooked on Zillow.com. The site provides historical data on housing purchasing prices and allows you, with a few clicks, to discover not only what your neighbor paid for his house, but also the purchase price of every house on your block. You can further feed your curiosity with the “Zestimate” feature, which provides an estimate on the value of your house today. It’s not hard to see why its site traffic last month was more than 10 million unique monthly visitors.
I think we are all tired of talking about the economy, on some level, but one thing I attribute to our downturn has been the subsequent rise in the value placed on content.
A friend of mine called me this week to talk about some clients of theirs that have vast amounts of content they are seeking to package and monetize. Another group we are talking to has a need to create vast amounts of content to springboard a community and generate highly positive organic search results.
Every day, I am having conversations with organizations about their marketing needs. Whether the organization has content and needs to be more effective in deploying the content, or whether the organization has a deficit of content or a deficit of resources, and needs help, the priority of content has increased dramatically.
I think it’s because content is like access to credit or capital, it’s fueling growth. Particularly in an internet marketing environment.
How did we get to this place where content became so important to so many companies?
I won’t lie: When the Associated Press announced they were changing the entry in their stylebook from “Web site” to “website,” several of us here in the office danced a little happydance. Despite being users (and lovers) of AP style, that was one word we did not agree with them on.
Robert Niles of The Online Journalism Review explains the importance of the AP’s change in this recent blog post, referencing a tweet he made regarding the change: “If you’re publishing online, Google style (i.e. SEO) always trumps AP style.”
I don’t completely agree with Niles; I think it’s still important for journalism students to learn AP style. But it’s also important that they learn to write for the web.
People are using Google to look for your content, and if you’re still writing like you’re publishing a magazine or newspaper, by default you’re making it more difficult for Google to find you and, therefore, connect a potential client, customer or reader with your content.
That’s not to say that all AP style is Google offensive, because it’s not. But if you’re writing a piece for your website or blog, you can’t ignore what search engines look for. SEO (or “Internet marketing,” for those who think SEO is a negative term) isn’t just making sure you have your title and alt tags in place. It also involves using words and phrases that accurately describe what your article or blog post is about in a web-friendly way to help Google connect the right searchers to you.
Read more from OJR: The Online Journalism Review.