Archive for January, 2013
6 Marketing Lessons Learned at the 2013 New Media Expo
Jan 11th
By Dan Gorgone, {grow} Community Member
As marketers, content creators, and experts gathered in Las Vegas this week at the New Media Expo, it was an opportunity for all to take the pulse of the industry. Understanding how the latest trends have evolved and gaining a vision of the future for blogs, podcasts, and content production is something all companies need – that is, if they want to understand how to market themselves, their products, and convert users into revenue.
So, as the stage lights lit up the keynote stage, and the Keynotes burned into the screens in the breakout rooms, what did these high profile leaders from across the industry have to say about the state of marketing in 2013?
1) To get something, give something. Something good. For free.
People will connect with companies they trust, and nothing spurs the growth of a relationship quite like the act of giving. In this case, creating social media accounts, blogs, podcasts, and delivering content of real value – i.e. stuff users actually want and need – helps establish you as the place to go for solutions. Your well-written post might fix a problem now, and your positive reputation can easily lead to a business opportunity in the future. As Content Rules author Ann Handley pointed out, providing content your customers might actually thank you for will generate many positives, such as improved user relations and industry reputation.
2) Marketing strategies resemble a marathon, not a race. Start training now.
With the value placed on relationships today, it’s important to avoid the hard sell, hammering users with calls to action, obnoxious social content, or any other tactic one might compare to the practice of coming on too strong. You’ve got to trust that your strategies will bear fruit given time, because, as Jay Baer noted in his session on “Youtility,” “inbound marketing does not create demand; it fulfills it.” Create and build your presence online, maintain and monitor it, and the demand will find you.
3) Marketing requires constant attention, but more work means more opportunity.
Ford’s Scott Monty shared many lessons learned from the car company’s past marketing campaigns. Without careful consideration of qualitative and quantitative data, it would be impossible to gauge their success. By that same token, you wouldn’t drive around in your car and only check the gas tank once a month. So, why would you check your analytics data just as infrequently? Likewise, you don’t set aside one hour each week to listen to your significant other, so don’t think that level of attention will work for your followers on Twitter and Facebook either. Establishing an effective process to monitor people and data takes practice and refinement, but it will lead to earlier and more frequent opportunities to meet your goals and help your customers.
4) Social good is inspiring more companies daily, and you should get involved.
More and more companies are finding creative ways to give back to their users, communities, charities, and more. Each company is different, but you must find a way to give back that aligns with your personal ideals and pursue it. Digital Royalty’s Amy Jo Martin cited the TOMS “One for One” initiative as inspiration to donate education resources. We must recognize that the smallest of gestures can mean the biggest difference for others in need. Real people are the heart of our companies and our customers, so look beyond the numbers and see the value that doing good can have on people both outside and within your company.
5) Podcasting is not dead; it’s an opportunity.
In fact, as I heard from many a podcaster this week, podcasting has never left – but, it would seem, many listeners – and media attention – have vanished in the past few years. So it’s not the game changer some believed it to be … so what. The Podcast Awards held during the NMX proved that many well-produced, entertaining, informative, and well-supported podcasts still exist, and the community ranges from one-person passion projects to productions from media titans like ESPN. The truth? Minus the hype from years past, podcasting has emerged as a medium similar to audio books: it appeals to a certain user base, but can work for almost any kind of content. In business terms, there is a real opportunity there for the taking, if you have the vision to follow through.
6) Marketers must be teachers.
The role of marketing, as always, continues to evolve, but it goes beyond analytics or strategies. Marketers already embrace many roles on behalf of their companies: the help desk, the promoter, the mechanic, the ambassador, the diplomat. But in order to gain long-term support, we must become someone that supports others through the work we do, and must do so knowing the work may not yield direct or immediate results, but may enrich the lives of others and lead to real benefits down the road.
Students don’t learn when teachers reveal an answer; it happens when teachers create an environment where students can discover the answer on their own. Students not only gain an understanding of the desired concept, but also trust the source. Marketers must follow this example, creating environments where customers, clients, and followers can discover the answers on their own through the content and features – that is, the value – we provide.
If we marketers can help teach today’s users rather than market to them, our users will view us in a new light: not just as a location of available content, but a trusted source for the future.
Dan Gorgone is a marketing teacher at Treehouse. Usability preacher. Red Sox fan. Born and raised in Boston. Follow him on Twitter at @dangorgone
Top illustration courtesy of Dan Gorgone
Three lessons I learned from being homeless
Jan 10th
A few years ago, Nancy Davis started hanging around the {grow} community and became one of its most popular contributors to the comment section. I had a chance to meet her in New Jersey and strongly encouraged her to begin blogging. She did — and her openness and authentic helpfulness caught on with a lot of people. Soon, she was contributing to many leading marketing blogs.
But throughout 2011, her many friends slowly but surely saw her life unravel before their eyes through her blog and dramatic Facebook posts. Within a few short months, the blogging had ended and Nancy was focused on just finding a place to sleep at night.
Nancy Davis has lived through a nightmare many of us will never experience. Here is her story, here are her lessons. And this is the start of her comeback as a blogger.
By Nancy Davis, {grow} Community Member
In August of 2011, I lost my good paying job. I had some emergency funds saved but not enough. I fell behind in my rent, and as a result was evicted from my apartment. Life declined steadily as I could not find work or a safety net.
2012 was without a doubt, the hardest year of my life. In this past year, I lost my home and almost all of my possessions. The one thing I did not lose was hope. While this year was a tough taskmaster in many ways, I have learned a few great lessons that I would like to share with you.
Life Can Change in an Instant
Life changed forever the moment I no longer had a permanent address.
Instead of planning and thinking and blogging, my life became a matter of finding work and doing whatever job was in front of me at the moment. I had to give up any notion of working in marketing and became a house painter, a construction worker, and I even weeded flower beds in the hot sun for a whole 20 bucks. I fixed a fence in blistering heat with no water and no shade for 40 bucks. Some days I made no money at all. I simply worked for food.
There has been no offer of work that has been turned down. Jobs I would have looked down my nose at a few years ago I do today without hesitation. I have had to learn a whole new set of skills to do all of these jobs. I even got over my fear of heights and ladders when I was painting houses.
Today, I am working in an auto body shop doing prep work. I have learned that the equation for survival is surprisingly simple – if we don’t work, we don’t eat.
Another lesson I learned was flexibility. When you are continually behind in your rent, you learn how to pack your stuff quickly and go. I wound up living in a homeless shelter in my home state, hoping that I could get some assistance finding permanent housing.
What I found was that I had to adapt to losing my routine. When I had my own place, I was used to getting up at a certain time, having my coffee, writing my blog, whatever I wanted to do. Now, I was being awakened every day at 6 a.m. I had to get out of bed, pack my stuff up, wash my face and go off to whatever work I could find.
If I was not back in the shelter by 5 p.m., I did not get dinner that day. Then I had to put my name on a list requesting to take a shower. The person I was a few years ago could not have handled all of this change. I’m a different person now.
You Never Know Where Help Will Come From
Before I was served with eviction papers, I was blogging every day and had developed strong relationships on the social web. I told everyone in my life what was going on and I was amazed at the response. One of my friends wrote two blog posts about my situation, another re-tweeted my original post anywhere possible, asking others to come help.
That was the tip of the iceberg.
In the early days of December 2011, I was still trying to hang on to my apartment. I was two months behind in my rent. I was looking for work anywhere and everywhere. On a cold and blustery Wednesday morning, I received a text message from one of my social media friends. She told me there would be a UPS envelope at my door with a substantial check inside. I walked the few blocks to my home, and there it was. I opened the brown envelope to not only find the check, but to also read the neatly typed letter with the names of the many people who donated money to help me. Three of these people I never even met before. I only knew them from my blog and from Twitter.
I held the check and the letter and began to slowly cry. I cried because I never felt so grateful. It was one of the greatest feelings to know that I had friends who would do this for me.
A week or so after that, I was contacted by another social media friend who wanted to know what my son wanted for Christmas. Obviously I could not afford presents. She was kind enough to send him a Yankee jersey and I could tell him it came from Santa. We lived in a small town, so the local Catholic Church heard of our plight and they also donated gifts. Acquaintances I had not talked to since high school brought over gifts not just for my son, but for me as well.
If You Don’t Laugh, You Will Cry
There have been lots of tears over the last year. There were days that I would just sit and cry over all the things I lost, and the relationships that were permanently changed. Some folks drifted away, while others simply turned their backs since they did not approve of some of the choices I made.
I had a decision to make, I could sit and cry, or I could try to find the silver lining and laugh at the situation. There certainly were many days where I did not feel like laughing. In some of our darker days, we would joke about having enough money to get a three dollar package of pork fat from the local bodega. Then, we would eat and laugh about some silly thing that we saw or that someone said.
There was a day in May while painting a house, that we all broke out into song randomly. We began singing “Top Of the World” by The Carpenters. That was when we knew we needed to pack it up and go home. We laughed about that the whole rest of the day. There were many other strange and funny incidents throughout the year. Those moments of pure laughter kept me going when I would get stuck in self-pity.
As I enter 2013, my biggest goal is to re-gain my confidence and stop telling myself “I can’t” because I can!
I am looking forward to better things in this year and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to begin to write again and share with all of you my biggest lessons of this year.
Nancy Davis is an auto body worker by day and a writer by night. She resides in New York. Nancy’s biggest goal is to help people who have no hope, and to bring awareness to the homeless situation here in the United States. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @nancyd68
Illustration courtesy BigStock.com
How I totally screwed up my blogging strategy
Jan 9th
A few weeks ago, I sat down to prepare for the upcoming week’s blog schedule and I became paralyzed. For the first time in four years, I seemingly had nothing to write about.
I knew if there ever came a time when I had to “force” content onto {grow} it was a sign that I needed to stop blogging so this was a bad sign. It is quite sickening to reach a point where the ideas stop.
But after I thought about the situation, I realized that in fact I had not run out of ideas. I simply had screwed up my tried-and-true system to generate ideas and was paying the price for it. Here’s what happened …
The system
Ideas come at us all the time, every day. It could be an article we read, a speech we attend, or something we hear on the news. Being a good blogger means always being alert to these ideas — and most important — capturing them. For me, that means writing them down wherever I am and then simply writing the headline for the idea in WordPress as soon as I can.
For example, recently I had a wonderful chat over breakfast at a cafe in Brooklyn with my friend Pavel Konoplenko. Pavel and I really had the ideas flying and many of them would have made a wonderful subject for a blog post. As our conversation progressed, I literally wrote the ideas down on the back of the receipt for breakfast and tucked it in my wallet. When I got to a computer, I recorded the ideas in WordPress for future development.
During my dry spell, I realized that I had swerved away from my system. For some reason, I was either too busy, too lazy, or both and ignored my discipline of recording ideas.
Luckily, I had planned for the day when something went wrong and was able to pull from a stable of extra blog posts I had prepared for an emergency. So the quality on {grow} never suffered even though I was temporarily “empty.” Another lesson — have a back-up plan!
Getting back on track
Once I realized what I had done, it was fairly easy to get back on track. Simply by paying attention to the world around me — and recording my ideas — I was able to quickly re-fill the pipeline.
For example, I read a post about Facebook that I completely disagreed with. I simply copied the link to the post, pasted it into a new blog post and wrote the headline “Comment on this?” Will it turn into a post? Who knows? But at least it is an option so I won’t be facing a blank slate when it’s time to blog.
Now when I settle into my usual quiet blogging time (you do have a quiet blogging time don’t you?) I don’t have to remember that story and try to find it on the web again. It’s sitting right there for me as a great option for a blog post for the upcoming week.
Another example — I was scanning my Google Analytics and saw an unusual keyword phrase that people had used to find my blog. It seemed like an excellent idea for post, so I immediately recorded in it the queue for future consideration.
Think about it. Even if you come across just one idea every day, by the time you sit down to blog, you have at least seven potential post concepts to choose from.
This system really works for me and I found out the hard way that when I’m not disciplined about it, I hit a wall!
What works for you? How do you keep the blog idea pipeline open?
Illustration courtesy BigStock.com
5 social media tools to kickstart your business
Jan 8th
By Ian Cleary, Contributing {grow} Columnist
As we start into a new year it’s a great time to reflect on how we can improve our marketing efforts online. One area that we can always consider is emerging tools to help us be more productive and efficeint. Social media is a moving beast and we need to keep moving with it!
Here are 5 great tools that you can kick-start your business in 2013:
Convert Facebook Fans to customers with Agorapulse
It’s very easy to get caught up with the number of fans you have on Facebook but we’re in the business of selling our products and services and your time spent on Facebook needs to be rewarded.
If you’re on Facebook and you want to take it to the next level invest in a Facebook marketing platform that will help.
Agorapulse is a Facebook Marketing platform which contains a broad range of functionality, including page management, 14 applications and the facility for building up a profile of your fans to help turn these fans into leads and ultimately sales.
Here are three highlights of Agorapulse:
Fan Profiling – As Fans interact with your content and applications, Agorapulse records it and builds a profile. Having this profile allows you to segment your fans so you can target your offers.
Suite of Applications – There are 14 useful applications for a broad range of functionality you can use to interact with your fans and further enhance build the fan profile.
Viral Sharing – All apps support Facebook Open Graph. This means that more friends of your fans will see your content. When you’re using applications getting access to friends of fans is where you will reap the benefits and Agorapulse has the necessary functionality to allow you to do this effectively.
Be more social using Nimble
Traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are dated. More and more of our interaction is with current and potential customers through social media channels. It’s important to have a CRM system that reflects that.
Nimble is a Social CRM tool which is tightly integrated with social media channels and helps you manage and grow relationships with your contacts to ultimately leads to sales.
What’s particularly nice about Nimble is how it builds up a profile of each user by retrieving their social details across a range of networks including Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn and Google +.
Would you like to see your contacts activity across all these social networks in one place and then have the ability to interact within Nimble? Yes, I thought you might!
Monitor your brand more effectively with Mention
Google Alerts is a well-known, free application that allows you to track mentions of keywords on the web. It’s useful but it’s not very comprehensive.
Mention is one of the best and most cost effective solutions I have come across. With a small team they have done amazingly well to deliver a web-based app, an iPhone app, and a desktop app that you can use to monitor keywords that are relevant to your brand.
You set up filters based on keywords you want to track and through a really nice interface it displays what it finds.
When you click on any item you see additional information related to the user and the item.
The following shows a filter based on my name that was mentioned on blogs. This identified an article on Mark’s blog {grow} that was featured on a blog post from Aaron Lee, based in Asia.
Mention is a very powerful tool with a reasonable price.
Grow Pinterest with Pingraphy
Pinterest was hot in 2012 and is destined to be even hotter in 2013. As you build your presence on Pinterest you’ll need some tools that will help.
Pingraphy allows you to upload your pins (pictures you put on a board) in bulk, schedule these items and then view statistics related to how they progress.
If Pinterest is a growing platform for your business check out Pingraphy.
Automate Actions with IFTTT
IFTTT (If this then that) is a useful tool for automating some tasks related to social media. If a particular event happens than another event is triggered.
Most tasks within social media cannot be automated but there are some that make sense. For example, when you create a new blog post it makes sense to automatically share this out on twitter.
Within IFTTT you create a ‘recipe’. This recipe contains the source and the destination. When a trigger happens an action configured kicks off.
So for this recipe the trigger is when a new post is published on the blog and the action is a tweet generated which includes the title of the post and a link to the post.
There is a selection of recipes already built that you can use or customize and you can also build your own recipe with a broad range of applications supported.
Social Media is not free. Your time is your most precious asset and Social Media eats into your time. Using the correct tools is only part of your social media strategy but it’s an important part.
Are you using the right tools for your business? What are your tool tips for 2013?
Ian Cleary is founder of Razorsocial, a website that provides sharp insight on on social media management tools. Follow Ian on twitter @iancleary
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
Groups We Believe In
