Home Depot’s Social Media Community Manager, Tia Robinson, shares how they created an authentic voice and connection with their customers through their online How-To Community.
Superbowl, Toyota learns the hard way that social media and spam do not mix
Twitter is a great platform to get people stoked about anything, if done right. You can promote potato chips like @popchips does, and it could turn into a huge following for your brand and have fun doing it.
Or, you can do it completely wrong and annoy the hell out of people by spamming them on Twitter. Toyota opted for the second choice, spam people.
The Coca-Cola Company: Social Media Monitoring on a Global Scale
The Coca-Cola Company’s Digital Manager of Communications, Natalie Johnson, shared how they monitored conversations about their brand on a global scale across the web.
Marketers Value Social Media for Both Branding and Customer Acquisition
As marketers include social media as part of their overall strategy, 97% agree that it provides benefits and value to their business.
In a survey of more than 700 marketers worldwide, 88% of respondents told Wildfire Interactive, a social media marketing software company, that social media helps grow brand awareness. Social media also benefited marketers by allowing them to engage in dialogue (85%) and increase sales and partnerships (58%). An additional 41% of marketers said it helped reduce costs.
Social Media ROI Metrics Still Chaotic
Brand marketers continue to struggle with determining return on investment for social media campaigns. Eighty-eight percent admit to gaining positive ROI on campaigns, but a study released Wednesday from Wildfire, a social media platform company, shows that the metrics remain all over the map.
While inconsistencies make it difficult to create and follow industry standards, Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom said 75% of survey participants said they still plan to increase their social media budgets this year.
Gaining positive ROI is great, but what do marketers measure?
4 Common LinkedIn Profile Mistakes
With the new year comes the time to clean up our desks, desktops, files… and start the year on the right foot.
In the digital era and the social media era, we need to add a few tasks to start the year on the right foot. It’s time to take another look at our social media profiles, clean them up, bring them up to date, optimize them and get them ready to work harder for us.
Let’s start with LinkedIn. With an exponential user growth, I see the same mistakes over and over again, let’s start with some basic mistakes I see over and over again:
1-Professional headline:
Your professional headline is your brand, it appears next or under your name everywhere your name appears, in searches, groups… With your name, it’s the first thing users read when they come across your name, make it count. Your professional headline will determine if someone will merely glance at your name or want to click on it and read your profile. It’s who you are, what you want to be.
By default, LinkedIn will put in your last job title, is that who you are, what you want to be? Will that entice potential business partners or employers to take a closer look at your profile?
Take as much time as you need, craft a headline people will remember and entice them to want to know more about you, tell them how you can help them
2-Profile picture:
Social media is a very public space. Chances are, if you are on LinkedIn, you want to be seen and found, you want to network.
Would you go to a networking event with a mask on your face? Probably not, then why are you doing it on LinkedIn?
Posting a professional photograph has a number of advantages.
- Potential contacts do not like incomplete profiles, incomplete profiles send a message that you have something to hide
- A photo helps potential contact remember you
- A photo helps identify you are who you say you are
- A photo builds trust
3-Public profile
Your “Public profile” is actually a misnomer, it’s your public URL. Think of LinkedIn as a personal website. Each website comes with a URL (Unique resource Locator), a unique address that identify them and allows users to find them on the web.
Your “Public profile” as LinkedIn calls it is your personal URL, the address to your personal profile, a link you can add to your resume, marketing material, business card.
Just as any website address, your URL should be short and memorable.
Why short? The shorter and the easier to remember, the less contacts and potential contacts will make mistakes (typos) when they search for you and the more likely they are to find your profile. A short URL is easy to remember, it’s easy to add to your marketing material
By default, a LinkedIn public profile link looks like this: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/first-lastname/24/9a5/766 Try to remember that one, spell it to a potential contact and have that contact type it without mistake.
LinkedIn allows you to chose a custom (also called vanity) URL, the URL looks like this: http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/yourname*.
Which one would you rather spell, print or type?
4-Websites
By default, LinkedIn adds “My website”, “My Blog” “Other” as the links to your websites or internet properties. LinkedIn also offers ways to customize the links. Use that opportunity to rename them, use your website name, your blog name. LinkedIn profiles are extremely well optimized for search engines, if you search your name, chances are, your LinkedIn profile will come at the top of the search.
As a bonus, renaming the links with the name of your website or blog will give them a lift in searches (SEO effect)
Study Predicts Growing Use Of Social Media In Healthcare
A recent study concluded that social media would continue to be a factor for healthcare providers and consumers while at the same time, ambiguous regulations, privacy concerns and a host of other factors limit how patients and healthcare providers use social media
Once these hurdles are overcome, the PwC report said, social media “will open new opportunities to improve health delivery and outcomes
Social Media and Disclosures, Learning from the Hyundai Case
Hyundai avoided a collision with the Federal Trade Commission on the treacherous social media marketing course. The FTC suggested yesterday that its decision not to recommend enforcement action against Hyundai for a blogger outreach effort designed to build buzz around the brand’s Super Bowl XLV ads could be a lesson for marketers.
Three rules of thumb for social media marketers:
- Mandate a disclosure policy that complies with the law
- Make sure people who work for you or with you know what the rules are
- Monitor what they’re doing on your behalf
Deluxe Corporation Project REV
Very interesting presentation by Deluxe Corporation’s SEM and Social Media Manager, Nathan Eide.
Nathan shares how they launched a social media campaign to create brand awareness and gain customer feedback and insights on its products.
Nathan shows how you can raise awareness to your brand, gather intelligence on your product and services, do product development using social media
Influencing the Influencers
Microsoft’s Director of Community and Online Support, Nestor Portillo, shared how they leveraged both internal and external social media sites to better manage their vast customer network and create a customer-centric approach to their business.