Got Bad Online Reviews? Here Are 5 Tips on What to Do
Posted on January 13, 2012
Filed Under Advertising, General, Internet Marketing, Social Networking | Leave a Comment
Even if you run a top notch business, negative customer reviews are going to happen. Though you can and should do everything you can to prevent negative customer reviews, it’s still important to have a plan in place for how to deal with negative reviews if and when they come up.
Here are five tips to help you deal with this kind of negative customer-sourced publicity.
1. Never Ignore It 
Perhaps the worst thing you could do when it comes to negative publicity is ignore it and hope that it disappears on its own. It simply doesn’t. In fact, if anything, it will get worse and worse until you handle the situation.
Assume that any piece of negative review online is an urgent action that needs attention.
2. Respond Quickly
If you respond fast, you’ll be able to keep the fire to a minimum. You’ll also send the message to your consumers that you care and that you’re paying enough attention to catch problems before they become too big.
To illustrate the point with a counter-example, take a look at United Airline’s “United Breaks Guitars” colossal blunder. When a customer who was a musician witnessed seeing his guitar thrown by United Airlines employees and found this guitar broken afterwards, he complained. United refused to pay for the damages.
He wrote a song about it and posted it on YouTube. United Airlines didn’t respond until hundreds of thousands of people already saw the video. Today, the video has over 11 million views. Watch the video here.
If United Airlines had addressed the issue either on the spot or when it became clear that the customer was going to make an issue out of it, they would have saved the company millions of dollars in bad publicity.
5 Powerful Ways to Connect With Sports Fans on Facebook
Posted on January 9, 2012
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Sports fans are one of the most rabid and passionate groups on the planet. For zero monetary gain, they’ll follow every move of their favourite sports team, know the details of every player, memorize the scores of every game and just generally put their heart and soul into the game.
Marketing to these fans involves understanding and using a different kind of psychology. Fans can be unforgiving of marketers who don’t speak their language. Speak to them in the right way however and you’ll have earned yourself the most loyal followers in the world.
Here are five tips for marketing to sports fans on Facebook.
1. Host a Discussion
Sports fans love to talk. They love sharing notes about their teams, reliving highlights from the last game, bashing on opponents and even just plain chatter. They love sports and they love talking about sports.
Not everyone can make it to an in person sports game. Sports lovers want to feel like they’re part of the game experience, even if they’re not there. Hosting live discussions allows them to talk about the action as its happening even if they couldn’t make it to the game itself.
2. Talk About it All Week
One big mistake marketers make is only marketing to sports fan when there’s a game on. However, sports fans are sports fans 24/7 – They want to talk about it all day, all night, whenever they can.
Before a game, there’s the leadup. They can talk about the players, the matchup, who they think will win, trash talk the opponent, get excited, etc.
After the game, they can discuss what happened and celebrate or commiserate the results.
Don’t just market to them during game time. Market to them all week. Every day.
Is the Social Media Graveyard About to Add Google+ to it’s Coffins?
Posted on January 4, 2012
Filed Under General, Social Networking | Leave a Comment
The world of social media is littered with tombstones of has-been social networks. First it was Friendster, the network that just couldn’t handle the traffic and crashed. Then it was MySpace, the network that dazzled and beguiled, until it was overtaken by Facebook and reduced to a primarily music-centered site.
By the wayside of course are dozens of other smaller networks. You’ve got Orkut, which started out as a national project and was quickly waysided to Brazil. You’ve got Ning, which allowed you to start your own social network. Then you’ve got networks that focused around specific topics, like Flickr, which focused around image sharing.
Each social media network had its own rise to fame and subsequent fade into oblivion. Is Google+ headed for the same direction?
Google+ is Different – Or Is It?
Google+’s launch was a spectacular event in social media history. It quickly got its first 5 million users, then ten million, then twenty million. By many accounts, it was the fastest growing social media network in history.
But then the growth started to taper off. Today, though there’s still a lot of buzz about this social network, it’s no longer in the limelight.
Many people believe that Google missed their chance by keeping the exclusivity window too long. There was a point in time where a lot of people wanted to get into Google+, but couldn’t because of a lack of invites. If Google had opened their doors then, they might have gotten a lot more users.
Instead, they kept the doors closed. Because the doors were closed, a lot of people simply lost interest. After they lost a lot of steam, Google+ finally opened to the public, with much less fanfare.
4 Fundamental Building Blocks of Successful Social Media Contests
Posted on December 28, 2011
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A good social media contest can bring in tons of new visitors, build excitement among your existing user base and create buzz in the industry as a whole. Pulling one off successfully requires a lot of planning. Just one or two mistakes can not only bring down your whole contest, but even put your company in jeopardy.
Here are four of the most important things to know before starting your social media contest.
#1 – The Legalities
When you’re doing an online contest, you should almost definitely have a lawyer look over your legal disclaimers and the contest as a whole to make sure you’re fully compliant.
Different states have different laws about what you can and can’t do in a contest. Sweepstakes can never require a purchase. Contests that are based on skill or participation have special rules as well.
Your contest will need to have appropriate disclaimers. These should be written by a lawyer. It’s important to realize that you can actually get sued if you don’t have your legalities down.
#2 – Understand Cheating
Cheating is an often under looked aspect of online contests. If there’s real monetary value to the prizes you’re offering, there’s a very good chance you’ll attract people who won’t play by the rules. 
Forms of cheating include using proxy servers to vote on their own submission, hiring out voting or other processes overseas or even downright hacking.
Start by studying how contest players game various different kinds of systems. Then implement basic protections, such as one vote per IP, cookies to track users, etc.
Finally, check your logs regularly to see if there’s any suspicious activity. For example, if you suddenly see 2,000 users an hour coming from Vietnam voting on one user, you might start to get a little suspicious.
Intranet Social Media: Why Adoption Rates Are Low and How to Fix It
Posted on December 20, 2011
Filed Under General, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking | Leave a Comment
Intranet social media can be one of the most powerful tools for internal communication. Unfortunately, the adoption rate of social media within corporations is dismally low. Long story short, employees simply rarely take up internal social media. In fact, 72% of employees use intranet social media networks less than once a month. In comparison, most will use Facebook several times a day.
Why is that?
Intranet Social Media Networks are Designed by IT, not UE
The people who design intranet social media networks are usually the IT department, not the user experience department. In other words, the people who actually design the network aren’t trained in design. They’re trained in programming, networks and packets. 
As a result, the user experience of the social network is invariably a lot worse than the experience of other networks like Facebook or Twitter.
The people who tend to take up intranet social media networks tend to be the early tech adopters. While that’s all fine and good, the real power of inter-office networking comes into play when most of the office is on the network, not just one small subset.
So how can you fix this? How do you get the majority of the office on an intranet social media network?
#1: The Quality of the Network
The first and most important thing is to actively manage the quality of the network itself. This should be done with a push in the beginning, but it should also be an ongoing process.
Ask your employees: What do they want from a social media network? What kind of things would they want to communicate about? What special features – Such as task management, milestones, confidential memos, filesharing – do they want?
Try to make the network as useful as possible. Also try and make it as intuitive, user friendly and enjoyable as possible.
Get your user experience and design staff involved. Creating a social media network for your staff is similar to creating one for the general public. It needs to be well designed, easy to use and intuitive. Just because they’re getting paid doesn’t mean they’re going to want to use something that’s clunky and hard to navigate.
Make sure you have a great intranet social media network first, before trying to get people on board.
5 Killer Strategies for Using Social Media to Recruit Brand Ambassadors
Posted on December 16, 2011
Filed Under Advertising, General, Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking | Leave a Comment
A brand ambassador is someone who’ll actively seek out others to help spread your brand. They’ll tell their friends, their co-workers and even their social media networks about you. Through a single brand ambassador, you could be exposed to as many as 500 people through tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Brand ambassadors can’t be “hired.” They can only be earned. Great companies turn many of their customers into brand ambassadors.
When someone has a great experience at a company, they tell their friends. People want to share stories about great service. People also want their friends to experience great service. If you really create a satisfied customer, you’ll naturally create brand ambassadors who help spread your brand.
On the flip side are people who actively seek to hurt your brand. It rarely happens, because in general people want to help rather than hurt. In order for someone to want to actively hurt your brand, you’ll need to have really mistreated them or underperformed their expectations.
According to IBM, customers will usually give you as many as ten warning signs before turning against you.
So how do you cultivate brand ambassadors rather than brand haters? How do you create a fanatic fanbase of users that try to evangelize your product wherever they go? Make sure you follow these five guiding principles.
1. Consistency
In a survey of restaurant customers, people were asked questions about why they regularly ate at a certain venue. Was it the service? Was it the food? Was it the price? Was it the location? 
When the results came in, researchers were surprised to find that the #1 thing customers looked for was consistency.
They wanted to know that they could go to a certain restaurant and have a certain experience. They knew what kind of service they’d get, what they’d have to pay and what kind of food they can expect.
Consistency is very important to customers. If you want to cultivate a long-term customer, it’s tantamount that they know what they can expect from you. Be consistent.
2. Be Product Centered
What is it that separates your brand from other people?
In the short run, marketing, branding, outreach and other such techniques can mask poor products. However, in the long run, the success or failure of a company really comes down to whether one product is better than the other.
Take the example of Google. Before Google, there was Yahoo, AltaVista and a number of other search engines. After Google, there were dozens of search engines to start as well.
Google had no marketing budget. They only had word of mouth. For a long time, they lagged behind their competitors. But slowly and surely, they gained market share, for one simple reason: Their product was better.
In the short run, it might seem like being product centered doesn’t pay. However, in the long run, creating a top notch product is what will put your company on the map.
3 Effective Ways To Measure Social Media ROI
Posted on December 12, 2011
Filed Under General, Internet Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking | Leave a Comment
One of the biggest counter-arguments to social media has always been “What’s the ROI?” After all, does it really make sense to spend time, money and other resources on something whose results can’t actually be tracked?
Though a lot of different metrics have come and gone in the social media world, there’s still no definitive way to measure the return on investment in the social sphere.
So is social media worth the investment? The key thing to remember is that social media really isn’t a ROI-based activity. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re trying to decide whether or not social media is a good investment for you.
#1: You’re Beginning a Relationship
Think of social media as if you’re paying to go to a party where many of your customers will be at. How do you measure that in terms of ROI? 
It’s extremely difficult, in large part due to how difficult it is to quantify relationships. Someone you meet at the party could introduce you to a new friend, who 6 months later refers you to a big client. If you had never gone to the party you wouldn’t have met this person, but it’s very hard to quantify that client as a “return” on your investment in going to the party.
Social media is very similar. It help you create and cultivate social relationship, which can have a domino effect that can’t always be measured.
#2: Learn From Your Customers
Social media differs from traditional media in one important way: You get to learn from your customers.
If you were just running TV ads, you’d get the same branding effect, but you wouldn’t get to hear back from your customers about how you’re performing. You won’t get to hear suggestions about how to improve your product or get early warnings of potential problems.
Social media is one of the purest ways you can stay in touch with you customers. It’s just not realistic for most businesses to stay in one-on-one contact with their customers; but through social media you can easily stay in touch with a lot of people at once.
The 5 Biggest Social Media Blunders by Fortune 500 Companies
Posted on December 8, 2011
Filed Under General, Internet Marketing, Social Networking | Leave a Comment
There’s a lot we can learn from other people’s mistakes.
If you run a small to medium sized business, there’s a lot you can learn from the mistakes of larger companies. Big companies tend to be run by committees and boards, meetings and managers. As a result, they can’t be as nimble or as fast as smaller businesses.
Where they’re weak is often where you have the advantage. You can avoid these kinds of mistakes if you’re careful, because it’s much easier for you to change course if you see red flags.
Here are five of the biggest social media blunders made by Fortune 500 companies, analyzed so you can learn from them.
Mistake #1: Unclear Communication
Whenever you put a message out to your market, you should make sure it’s crystal clear and that there are no conflicting messages.
Google made a big blunder with this when they released Gmail on April Fools Day.
Traditionally, Google had done an April Fools joke every year prior. For example, one year they announced Google PigeonRank, where websites were ranked by pigeons instead of technology.
When Google announced Gmail, most of the world took it as a joke. At the time, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail were both offering only 10 MBs in storage and Gmail comes out with 1 GB.
It took several days before the announcement was actually taken seriously and by that time they lost a lot of the initial momentum. According to a CNN article, Google’s VP of product did say that they did a bit caught up in the April Fools spirit even while launching a real product.
Mistake #2: Telling the User They’re Wrong
When Apple released the iPhone 4, there was a small bug with the antennae system. If you held the phone without a case in a specific way where you were touching one of the corners with your finger, you would completely kill the reception. 
Steve Jobs’ response? “Don’t hold your phone that way.”
While Jobs was right that the bug really wasn’t that big a deal, his response was posted all over social media and was interpreted as them not caring about what the customer thought.
The whole ordeal almost killed the launch; until Jobs changed course and announced free cases for all iPhone 4 purchases.
9 Tips & Tricks for Better Google+ Brand Pages
Posted on December 6, 2011
Filed Under Advertising, General, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, Traffic Building | Leave a Comment
This article is a follow-up to our earlier post How to Use Google+ to Promote Your Product or Service.
In social media, Google+ brand pages are the way of the future. Using Google+ brand pages, you can create an informative, interactive profile for your fans on Google+ to connect with you. Few companies today are taking full advantage of what Google+ brand pages have to offer.
The easiest way to access your brand page is to go to your own Google+ page. Just click the drop down menu under your username to switch to your brand page’s view. Here you can edit the page, add people to circles and post status messages.
Here are top 9 tips & tricks for using Google+ brand pages to their full potential.
#1 – Creating an Easy to Reach URL
By default, Google+ gives you a custom URL that’s fairly difficult to read or remember. For example, your URL might be something like “plus.google.com/8723570370197390157.”
To make this easier for people, create a redirect on your own website to your Google+ brand page. For example, people should be able to reach this page by going to www.yourwebsite.com/googleplus/
You can also use Google+’s URL shortener to create a better URL on Google’s domain.
#2 – Add Buttons to Your Site
Want to make it easy for people to find your Google+ page on your site? Want to put live feeds of your status updates on your sites? Want to make it so people can re-post whatever you said with one click of a button?
It’s easy. Just add the respective Google+ buttons or widgets to your site. Access these under the “Get Started” menu in your brand page.
#3 – Don’t Share Your Visitor Count for the First Few Months
If you see that a page only has a handful of visitors, chances are you’re not going to want to visit that page. In other types of social media, like Facebook or Twitter for example, there’s not a whole lot that you can do about this.
However, with Google+, you can choose to hide your follower count. While this isn’t a good long term strategy, it can be very useful in the short term.
#4 – Give Great Resources
Google+ gives you the ability to add as many links as you want to your profile. The links can point back to content on your own website or to other people’s sites.
Make liberal use of this feature to point your users to the best possible resources for their problems.
7 Effective Tips to Turn Your LinkedIn Profile into a Social Media Battle Winner
Posted on December 2, 2011
Filed Under Advertising, Internet Marketing, SEO, Social Networking | Leave a Comment
There’s one thing that separates LinkedIn from all the other social media networks out there: Everyone who comes to LinkedIn is there for a professional purpose. Your future employers, your future investors and your future business partners all likely have a profile on LinkedIn.
If you want to network professionally online, there is no better place than LinkedIn. Spending time to perfect your LinkedIn profile is therefore a high ROI activity.
Here are seven quick tips to help boost your LinkedIn profile.
Tip #1 – An Attention Catching Headline
Your headline should be written so that anyone who sees your profile in the search results would want to click on your profile and learn more about you.
It should say something either unusual or incredible about you. It should stand out from all the other results. It should speak directly to your target audience.
Tip #2 – Have Someone Proofread Your Profile
Your LinkedIn profile is your chance to make a professional impression. Having misspellings, grammar mistakes of factual inaccuracies on your LinkedIn profile is like going to a professional networking event with a mustard stain on your shirt.
Don’t blow the all-important first impression. Even one little mistake you miss could cost you a future job or client. Hire someone to proofread your profile before going live.
Tip #3 – Make Liberal Use of Recommendations
Recommendations are one of the most powerful things you could have on your profile. It’s the 
one thing that people trust the most on a LinkedIn profile, because it involves other people recommending you.
Getting a few good recommendations can change your entire profile. Contact a few former employers, employees and co-workers to ask them to leave you a recommendation. Most of the tie they’ll be happy to do it.
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