Whether you’re into social media, professional networking, PPC campaigns, email marketing, or any other type of online marketing, its a necessity to know it is still ALL about search.
Tag Archives: Facebook
Social Media Funnies
I wanted to lighten things up a bit with a couple of funny images on social media from around the web. I actually got inspired to do this from a cool video post from Chad Rothschild I saw yesterday. Thanks Chad!
Email Marketing Needs to Catch Up
Email marketing, now referred to as a more “traditional” kind of online marketing (how fast things change!), is still relevant and useful, despite the overload on Social Media tools. Social media gives you the ability to be where your potential and current customers are, but email campaigns still provide a unique ability to directly contact those people.
The downside to email campaigns, as we all know, is that they often feel, well, like spam. And its awfully hard to argue against that when you are sending those emails to everyone on your contact list from the past 10 years who hasn’t unsusbcribed, which numbers in the thousands at least. Yeah, sounds like spam. BUT we still want to be able to know that the information is going directly to those people. Social media lets you put the information out there, but you don’t know who sees it or how viral its becoming (well, Twitter has the #hashtag).
Hmm. Can we combine some of these ideas to make email campaigns better? Marc Munier of Econsultancy thinks blogs, Twitter, and Facebook all have features and capabilities which can be applied to email campaigns.
Blogs that are posted regularly have better readership and followers; this thinking can apply to emails and building up that relationship. Your emails, like blogs, should provide value and information to the audience-this will ensure continued subscriptions and greater returns. Finally, Marc Munier stresses that the replies to your emails are your way to communicate and you cannot ignore those replies, the same way a blogger cannot ignore his comments and expect those people to stay around.
As far as Twitter goes, keep in mind that people’s attention spans are short and design your emails that way. Email enables people to take another action, it’s not the final step, so your emails need to always urge people to take action and this will come from a concise email. Also, being open is key in social media, so take a tip and don’t be afraid to put “Unsubscribe” at the top of the email. It will give you more credibility and, let’s face it, the unsubscribers aren’t going to take action anyways, so let them go!
Munier describes Facebook as lacking in many areas (which I agree with), but Facebook’s flaws helps us realize that we need more than one chanel to accomplish our marketing goals. Email can be used together with other channels and tools to better reach and communicate with your targeted audience. So mesh the “traditional” email marketing with the benefits of the new social media tools and send out some rockin’ email campaigns!
Facebook is Growing…But Into What?
Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, which is extremely interesting for the social networking world for several reasons. It has long been discussed that Facebook does not have a business model in place to be profitable and yet now they are acquiring other companies…smart move? Mergers traditionally fail over 70% of the time…so how is this different? Firstly, Social Media is such a new concept even to those who are using it all the time, so the traditional statistics may very well not apply. Also, its reasonable to assume that Facebook wanted FriendFeed for the brains of the operation: indeed, they are keeping the staff on, as many of them were former Google employees responsible for such things as Gmail and Google Maps.
But what will Facebook do with this brilliant team? What is their strategy? At this point, I would say they are trying to grow their online presence even further. 250 million users dwarfs Twitter still, but there is so much buzz around Twitter and all of its real-time capabilites, especially its ability to take news and information viral almost instantaneously. Facebook has already implemented many FriendFeed features such as “Comments” and “Like” and now, according to Mashable, they get “a platform and a team that fills a number of gaps at a fraction of the cost (of Twitter).”
If you take it even further, going into Facebook’s attempt to purchase Twitter previously, it can be reasoned that they are trying to completely change our internet experience. This is the viewpoint of Oge Ekeh, of Single in Atlanta, who has mentioned that this recent acquisition does seem to show Facebook’s intent in this area. What would be the implications of this? Facebook has recently made all of its user data searchable by Google unless you set strict controls on your account. Its becoming a larger and larger resource by the day, as companies who are using Salesforce CRM can even synch with Facebook to import user data directly into their Contact Manager.
I think its going to be big, enormous even. Twitter better step it up, starting with adding a “Re-Tweet” button and a “Like” feature for posts. Thoughts?
CNN and Social Networking
I attended the AiMA event this past Wednesday and Andy Mitchell, VP of Digital and Development Marketing at CNN Worldwide was the speaker. He was responsible for the “I just saw it on CNN.com” campaign and the multiple initiatives involving Facebook for the 2008 Presidential Elections. Andy admitted that their 1st attempt with Facebook Connect for the Debates was not a success: they only gave 2 weeks to build up and so it did not work for this high-profile event.
CNN learned from this mistake and worked with Facebook to drive traffic to Facebook.com/CNN for the Jan. 20th inauguration. This was a HUGE deal because CNN was sending traffic away from their own site and to Facebook in order to build RSVPs for the stream. Andy went on to explain that being where the audience was, being a part of the news feeds, going viral, and building a reputation for being real on the social networks was MORE important than getting lots of hits on the CNN website.
You heard it from a big-wig at CNN, guys!!! This is EXACTLY what social networking is about…building these relationships, being where your target audience is and helping them/giving them what they need or want…
And those who are still skeptical about social networking: the 1st CNN and Facebook venture failed. The 2nd one for Inauguration? CNN beat the record 700,000 RSVPs for streams and ended up with over 1 million. There were over 2 Million Facebook Status updates on January 20th. Its SO important to get into social media, and according to Andy Mitchell, know that you are going to make mistakes, but that if you are committed to being a part of it, you can make it work. This was a GREAT event, thanks AiMA!