Windmill Networking Blog on Social Media Strategy (Weekly)

How Hotels and Restaurants Can Benefit from Social Media Events

2012-05-15T23:26:06Z

10 of the 12 ConnectOC Organizing Committee Members, including Windmill Networking contributors Debbie Miller (4th on the left) and Neal Schaffer (center).

Social Media events are a great way for hotels and restaurants to gain exposure. Though offering up freebies to a large audience could initially feel like a loss rather than a gain, the potential ROI of doing so in this context is uniquely unprecedented.

It may seem counter-productive to invite locals into your hotel, as hotel business relies on over-night visitors and, obviously, people who live in the city where the hotel resides aren’t going to be staying over there. But many hotels also require business in other fashions, like renting out their meeting and conference space, and drawing customers to their restaurants and bars.

I’m part of a local group called ConnectOC. ConnectOC is comprised a handful of businesspeople that initially met through social media that came together to bring our local community together. A local Hilton hosted our two event complimentary, and we were also able to get numerous donations from businesses for goodie bags and silent auctions, which allowed us to raise thousands of dollars for local charities. The majority of the people who came to the first ConnectOC event had never previously set foot inside the Hilton, because they never had to. But, because of the event, they now can visualize the hotel’s gorgeous restaurant. They’ve now tasted the food.

When considering where to dine in the future, the restaurant is going to stand out in numerous ways: in terms of ambiance, taste of food and generosity in donating so much to promote people coming together for a worthy cause. Many people tweeted about returning to the Hilton at later times to dine.

The event also familiarized people with abundant amount of meeting space the hotel has available, and several parties ended up booking future meetings. Prior to actually going to the hotel and actualizing all of its amenities outside of the guestrooms, these businesspeople hadn’t really thought about it being perfectly suited for their future business needs.

The fascinating thing about this particular kind of event is that it was promoted and leveraged entirely through social media. ConnectOC doesn’t even have a website; their main form of contact is their Facebook page, as well as their Twitter and LinkedIn portals.

While the events did receive great local media coverage, those articles were circulated on the web via social media. The audience they reached is numerous and broad, and its members were subsequently able to both meet new people and expand their networks, all while helping worthy causes.

And because Hilton supplied the venue, they were able to reap a ton of benefits from this intimate, expansive introduction.

Has your hotel or restaurant experimented with sponsoring social media events yet? Were you able to reap long-term benefits?

Debbie Miller (5 Posts)

This monthly Social Media and the Hospitality Industry column is contributed by Debbie Miller. Debbie is the Founder of Social Hospitality, a blog which outlines the ways businesses in the hospitality industry are using social media. She works for HyperDisk Marketing managing social media accounts, writing website copy and executing SEO strategies for clients. Prior, she was with a destination marketing organization where she maintained the website along with launching and managing their social media presence. She is very active in the social networking community in southern California, has enjoyed watching social media emerge over the past several years and is fascinated by its continuing evolution.

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You Should Be in Pictures; Tips for Integrating Visual Content into the Marketing Mix

2012-05-14T05:13:02Z

There’s been much buzz recently about the use of images in social media marketing. More and more platforms are visual (think Pinterest, Instagram, SlideShare and Tumblr). Facebook’s Timeline is all about pretty pictures. And it seems that every other tweet references an infographic.

We love images because they offer a nice diversion in a busy social media environment, and, let’s face it; viewing can be more fun than reading. Savvy marketers are jumping on board and exploring ways to incorporate imagery into the marketing mix.

It is about winning and keeping attention. The right image can bypass our filters, trigger feelings and emotions, and get people in a buying mood. They can communicate complicated information in an easy-to-understand way.

Yet there are some pitfalls; it is not necessarily easy to put images to work in an effective way. This article explores the trend of visual content marketing. It discusses challenges, and offers tips for overcoming these and tapping the power of pictures in marketing.

Writer’s Block: Why isn’t it Easy to Put Images to Work?

Brains or beauty? Left brain or right? Words or images? For as long as marketing has been around, there‘s been a tension between the use of words and pictures to sell products.

This probably has something to do with silos and the way we function. Few people are great at both design and writing. Pictures take many marketers out of their copy-centric comfort zones.

E.g., PR has always been more about copy, and not as clued into graphics as advertising. It is hard to talk about online marketing without bringing words into the picture (no pun intended), especially keywords and SEO. On the latter point, many, including myself, have often recommended against eye candy like Flash animation due to its lack of contribution to SEO.

Fortunately, in most cases you can use both words and images. Yet, one usually needs to take center stage.

While using imagery may involve unfamiliar skill sets, a look at the psychology of Web marketing may convince you about its benefits. Here is an excerpt from the ClickZ article Which Brain is Your Website Selling to?

… the instinctual reptilian brain can exert a powerful influence over both emotion and logic. In fact, if there’s one thing you can be sure of: in a battle of the brains, the reptilian will always win.

So what does this mean for websites and landing pages seeking to sell a product or service? The reptilian brain responds rapidly to visual cues. First impressions are always based on appearances, not information, and in the buying process, words are secondary to visual cues.

If images of dinosaur brains don’t sway you to use imagery in marketing, perhaps cold hard logic and numbers will. Like me, you may be growing weary of but also are fascinated by reports about the crazy amounts of referral traffic generated via Pinterest, the visual content marketing poster child. E.g., in the article: Why Marketers Should Invest in Visual Content Creation, HubSpot reports:

… a Shareaholic study revealed Pinterest generates more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined; only Facebook and StumbleUpon generate more. What does this mean? Some early data is indicating that Pinterest is even driving sales directly from its website — in a survey of people with Pinterest accounts, 21% have purchased an item after seeing it on Pinterest. [It} is now the number three social network in the country for total visits, and videos and infographics are peppering blogs everywhere.

The article points out that visual imagery can be a powerful way to support and communicate brand attributes, and that images drive engagement too:

But images drive more than just attention -- they drive engagement. In fact, just one month after introducing timeline for brands, Simply Measured reports that engagement is up 46% percent per post, and visual content (photos and videos) have seen a 65% increase in engagement.

Follow Professional Design Principles and Heed Basics in Image Usage

While there certainly is a place for user-generated content, in most cases you will want to give your campaign an edge through professional quality images and artwork.

Get help from the pros if you don’t have the talent in-house to produce the needed images. E.g., it might not be the best idea to rely on stock photography. A NY Times Bits blog post reported on an eye-tracking study by Web design and usability authority Jakob Nielsen. Here is an excerpt:

“Big feel-good images that are purely decorative” are mostly ignored online, while stock photos or generic people are also intentionally disregarded. In contrast, when users know that a picture … is real they will engage with the image for extended periods of time.

Of course, you don’t want to ignore other basics – such as steering clear of overly large images that take too long to load and frustrate users; see this link for more tips from Nielsen.

Another point to consider: when you are curating images (see my article on the benefits of content curation for marketing) take care not to skirt copyright laws. Fellow Windmill Networking writer Michelle Sherman touched on this in her post To Pin Or Not To Pin: How Businesses Can Use Pinterest And Reduce Their Legal Risks Of Copyright Infringement.

Finally, avoid making your images too complicated, as pointed out in this article on Ragan’s PR Daily:

If you cram too much information into your graphic, you’re defeating its original purpose…infographics are “more clickable” than other multimedia, such as video, which may turn a reader off since it usually requires sound, as well as investing more time to watch….

Tune Layout, Leverage Specific Features of Each Medium

As I said above, in most cases you can put both copy and pictures to work. It is important to understand the medium at hand and make sure that you are taking advantage of the features and optimizing layout for each.

Forbes tells how to do this for Facebook in the article Turning the Facebook Timeline into Content Marketing Gold. It says:

The new Facebook Timeline makes it easier than ever for you to tell your brand story and take control of that story as well as visitors’ experiences on your Facebook Page. [You can] turn a boring Facebook Timeline into a successful content marketing initiative. Here are five features of the new Facebook Timeline that you don’t want to miss…

The article tells how to use the cover photo, posts, milestones and apps to greatest advantage.

The Business 2 Community blog posted about text coexisting with graphics: When Copywriting and Graphics Need to Play Nice. It focuses on use of images and layout with blogs, also quotes Nielsen, and says:

Put blog content on the left…. the left side of the screen is going to get the lion’s share of attention: and if you don’t believe us, believe usability expert Jakob Nielsen, who can statistically tell you that people spend more than twice the time looking at the left side of the screen rather than the right…Good design is essential to helping your copy stand out.

Fit Images into an Integrated Content Marketing Strategy and System

When done right, content and social media marketing employ images not just to grab attention – but also to engage, and coax the reader down a path that will hopefully result in some type of meaningful outcome, AKA conversion. You want to make sure that the images you use support the greater effort and have a specific place and function in the overall system.

Magdalena Georgieva of HubSpot guest posted a great article about the Rise of Visual Storytelling in Marketing on Pro Blogger. She explores Instagram, Slideshare and Pinterest, and offers the following advice:

Make sure that your visual content includes calls to action that take viewers to a landing page on your website related to the specific visual content… you can include calls-to-action at the bottom of infographics, in the descriptions of images, or on the last slide of presentations as a natural next step for readers who want to further engage with your brand.

The post Pinterest for Bloggers – Image Based Content Marketing on Blogging Tips says:

Some blogs mention that Pinterest traffic is useless. Why only Pinterest? In fact, referral traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others are useless too if you don’t know how to use them, that is, convert them…. In short, how you use Pinterest traffic depends on YOU. There is no fixed manual. You have to tweak and experiment.

The Mashable article 12 Essential Tools for Content Marketing suggests using embed code with your infographics, and shares a link with instructions about how to do this. Doing so will ensure that the image points back to the right place (your landing page or website) when reused elsewhere.

Conclusion

I hope you have found my tips and the linked articles and resources to be useful. I firmly believe that we are still in the early days of visual content and social media marketing, and look forward to coming back to the topic, as well as hearing about experiences and tips from others.

Is your company successfully integrating visual content into your content marketing mix?

Bob Geller (7 Posts)

This monthly Content Marketing and Social Media column is contributed by Bob Geller. Bob is president of Fusion PR, and has a background that combines a solid grounding in technology with a 25 year record of success in sales, marketing, and public relations. Bob joined Fusion in 2000, and has helped build it into a leading independent tech PR agency. He has led client teams that have achieved outstanding results in areas ranging from enterprise tech, to telecom, online, CE, financial and clean tech. Bob also helped launch Social Fluency, a subsidiary of Fusion that develops dynamic social media practices which are integrated with traditional PR efforts. Bob has provided critical commentary to publications such as CMO Magazine, PR Week, PR News, and Bulldog Reporter. He created and manages the influential blog Flack’s Revenge, and has contributed to Cision Navigator, Ragan’s PR Daily, and Handshake 2.0, among others.

Bob Geller (7 Posts)

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By: Bob Geller by Bob Geller http://twitter.com/rgeller
By: Joel Don by Joel Don http://www.commstrategies.com/

5 Creative Ideas to Spark New Engagement in Facebook Timeline for Fan Pages

2012-05-14T14:16:43Z

With Facebook’s recent implementation of Timeline for Pages, we are quickly reminded that we have no control over what direction Facebook might take with their platform. Regardless if you are a fan or not of Facebook, however, there is still no better way to reach out and engage with both present and potential consumers in social media than through a robust Facebook Page. The problem is: Are you truly maximizing your Facebook presence to reach your marketing objectives? Many businesses that I meet are not.

Maximizing your business presence on Facebook begins with truly maximizing all of the functionality that Timeline – your Home Page on Facebook – provides page owners. Rest assured: Facebook wants to sell more advertising, so they inevitably created the new Timeline to maximize the chances that your page will become “stickier” to your fans. Some of the functionality they provide is intuitive, but it’s all about applying your creativity towards each bit of functionality as part of your social media marketing efforts and maximizing your chances of breaking through the EdgeRank filter.

Here’s 5 creative ideas on how your brand can truly maximize some of the functionality that the new Facebook Timeline provides you to spark new engagement with your Fans:

1. Cover Photo

Your Page’s cover photo (851 x 315 px) appears at the top of the Timeline where it takes up a good portion of the average computer screen. Hence, I can’t overemphasize the importance of having a visually-attractive and “branded” cover photo. You probably already know that Facebook has set a few guidelines down, but as a reminder your Timeline cover photo can’t include the following:

Price or purchase information
Company contact information
References to Facebook elements such as ‘Like’ or ‘Share’
Calls to action.

Creative Idea: Why stick with just one Cover Photo: Why not change it on a regular basis as a way of further engaging with your fans as well as giving a new and fresh “look” to your Facebook Page? Take it one step further and your regular changing of your cover photo could become as anticipated and noticed as when the Google logo changes above their search bar. Why stop there? Why not crowdsource cover photo ideas or images from your fans and bring your brand closer to your fans? Let’s take this one step further: Why not run a contest using a popular Facebook app platform such as Binkd or Wildfire and both crowdsource and have your fans vote on the cover photos? The possibilities are as limitless as your creativity should be here!

2. Pinned Posts

Tell people which messages you really want to get across by pinning them to the top of your page using a Pinned Post. A Pinned Post remains on top for 7 days, which means that page visitors get to see it often and you even get your message read by people who visit your page just once a week. This is the ultimate solution for a clear “Call to Action” which the old Facebook Pages lacked.

Creative Idea: Instead of just utilizing traditional marketing to have a weekly call to action here, I actually recommend mixing up what you pin on a daily basis. The last you thing you want in a dynamic environment such as Facebook is to have a post which could become “stale” to the average social media viewer very quickly. Why not highlight your fans in some of your Pinned Posts? Or perhaps shuffle those posts that have sparked particularly high engagement? This could lead to even more engagement to help your battle with EdgeRank – or, at the least, add to your Page’s Social Proof!

3. Highlighted Posts

You can also expand your stories so that it takes up both sides of the Timeline via Highlighted Posts. These images appear prominently in your Timeline in a 843 x 403 px size. Preliminary research on certain Pages that implemented Timeline right after it was announced revealed that there has been an increase in engagement of up to 65% for visual content like photos and videos. That makes sense: after all, images are the most highlighted posts in Timeline since Facebook automatically blows them up to fill the width of the post.

Creative Idea: We all know how well images do in the News Feed, and they can now also feature prominently in your Timeline. Why not try to mix up your posts by Highlighting several prominent ones, especially ones that had a lot of engagement to try to spark further engagement. Once again, let Social Proof work in your favor. Furthermore, when scrolling down a Timeline, Highlighted Posts beckon to be read once you see it emerging from below the fold, which undoubtedly can spark new engagement.

4. “Fill in the Gaps” with Milestones and Past Posts, Hide Other Posts

Every business has a story, and you can now share it to your fans through Milestones. Sure, it’s not as visible as your cover photo, but nevertheless it’s still a good way to keep your fans more connected to your brand. Although it is still questionable whether Milestones appear in the News Feed even though there is a “Hide from News Feed” option when creating a Milestone, the top righthand corner of ever Page beckons you to go back in history on each page.

In addition to creating new Milestones, you can create as many backdated posts – as well as hide as many older posts, as you want.

Creative Idea: Just as you might have hidden embarrassing content from your personal profile, what about hiding posts from the past that might not be as appropriate for your current brand? Or what about posts that didn’t end up getting any engagement? Take this one step further and, in addition to hiding select posts from the past, through a combination of adding Milestones and “new” posts from the past (albeit these new posts from the past will start with zero engagement), you can recreate how your brand should have developed content for their Page. It’s all about increasing the chances of engagement when a viewers scrolls through your timeline.

5. Apps Still Matter!

Apps are the new Tabs, and they’re still on your Timeline, right below your cover photo. While you can no longer use them to welcome fans to your Page (as in the case of a Welcome Tab), your visitors will still see them prominently under the Cover Photo. Therefore, it’s a must to rearrange the apps in order of importance and create thumbnail images for them (111 x 74 px) to showcase them. Hover over the thumbnail, click on the pen icon, and start editing.

Creative Idea: Take this chance to organize all of your old Apps and consider hiding ones that might not matter anymore. In fact, if Facebook is only exposing four, why don’t you limit your visible Tabs to four as well? Yes, this means that, in addition to the Photos and Likes, you can only use two additional tabs. However, the fewer calls to action you make, the more people will engage with the visible tabs. If you run contests, consider hiding the tab you replace it with – you can always add it back in in the future after the contest ends by visiting your Page’s App settings.

Now, after saying all of this, it is important to mention that maximizing your Timeline is only one piece of the Facebook marketing puzzle. After all, research has been pretty consistent in revealing that most fans never go back to a Facebook page after liking it, with only 0.1% to 0.5% returning to the actual fanpage every once in a while. Whether this number improves or not with the new Timeline has yet to be seen. My own Windmill Networking Fan Page Insights show that I get as many monthly Page Views as 1% of my fans. One of my social media agency clients who has several hundred thousand fans exhibits a number that is closer to 0.2%. For many small businesses, however, this number could represent a number that is close to the actual page views they get on their real website – which is why having a robust Timeline presence is still important.

Obviously, maximizing the Timeline is only one of several things that you need to do to maximize the opportunities to market to 900+ million users, but this is where you should spend a little time “getting your house in order” and setting your Page up for future success.

Now it’s YOUR turn: What other creative ideas do YOU have to spark engagement in the new Facebook Timeline for Fan Pages?

If you enjoyed these tips, join me on Thursday, May 18 for a webinar where I unveil my new Facebook for Business 10 Step Guide – practical and actionable advice to promote your company to 900 million users.

Neal Schaffer (370 Posts)

The founder and editor-in-chief of Windmill Networking, Neal Schaffer is a leader in helping businesses and professionals strategically leverage the business potential of social media. A Forbes Top 30 Social Media Power Influencer and creator of the AdAge Top 100 Global Marketing Blog Windmill Networking, Neal is a popular social media conference speaker who is also known for his two award-winning and critically acclaimed social media books: ”Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing” and “Windmill Networking: Maximizing LinkedIn.” As a leading social media strategist, Neal has created social media strategies and coached implementation for companies ranging from a Fortune 50 software company to a Grammy-award winning musician with one million social media fans.

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By: Neal Schaffer by Neal Schaffer http://windmillnetworking.com/
By: Neal Schaffer by Neal Schaffer http://windmillnetworking.com/
By: Octadyne Systems by Octadyne Systems http://twitter.com/octadyne
By: Morgan Barnhart by Morgan Barnhart http://twitter.com/MorganBarnhart

Are YOU the Weakest Link? Two Things to Do TODAY to Keep Control of Your Facebook Page.

2012-05-10T17:05:33Z

When it comes to social media presences for companies, Facebook is still the king. Even though upstart Pinterest is clearly giving Facebook a run for its money, the Facebook page is still the anchor for most companies’ social media strategy. Compared to other social media channels, Facebook is where the eyeballs are and that puts it at the center of the social media universe. For example, Coca-Cola’s Facebook page has 41,679,113 “Likes”, but their Twitter handle has 533,194 followers. Odds are good that your experience mirrors this.

The great thing about this is that it makes it easy for social media marketers to know where to target their efforts: the channel that puts you in front of the most people. The bad thing about this is that it also makes it easy for hackers, criminals, and people who mean your company harm to know where to target their efforts: the channel that puts them in front of the most people.

In the security world, this makes your Facebook page what we call “a high value target”. A successful attack against your page has the potential to do the greatest harm to your online reputation. It also has the potential to do the greatest harm by enabling attackers to use your page to identify and target your customers for attacks that can lead to real financial losses for you and them. This means that the bad guys have the greatest interest in getting control of your Facebook page for their use. Key to using pages safely and smartly is ensuring that you do all you can to remain in keep control.

The good news is that Facebook has some of the most sophisticated security controls available for social media. In contrast to Pinterest, it has a dedicated security settings center with some industry-leading tools at your disposal. The bad news is that these tools aren’t enabled by default, aren’t well known and the relationship between your account profiles and pages can make it unclear how you need to set security for maximum protections.

The important thing is that Facebook pages can be made more secure than some other social media channels if you do the right things. By taking two simple steps today, you can increase the security of your page to better ensure you don’t lose control of it.

Minimizing the number of administrators (“admins”)
Increasing the account security options for all admins

The Weakest Link: Admin is Admin

Every Facebook page has at least one admin. When you create one, you are set up automatically as an admin. The admin is important because they have complete control over every aspect of the page.

The idea of an “admin” borrows from a concept that’s been used in computers for decades (you may recognize it from your Windows or Macintosh system for instance) to ensure there’s at least one account that can do anything on a system for maintenance purposes. It is absolutely critical to understand that an admin always has TOTAL control. There is nothing that an admin can’t do on a system and that applies to Facebook pages. An admin has the ability to add or change any content on a page, to add other admins, to remove other admins, and even delete a page.

When you have a Facebook page that you manage and are the only admin, the greatest risk is that you might make a mistake can cause damage to the page. Where this concept gets tricky, though, is when you need more than one person to manage them. Each and every admin that you add has the same total control over that page. When people ask me how they can add an admin to manage content but not be able to delete the page, or add or delete other admins, the answer I have to give is: “You can’t: admin is admin”. All admins are equally powerful and have the exact same control.

This means that your Facebook page security is only as secure as the account of the people who are admins. If one of your admins loses control of their account, you can lose control of your page to whomever has taken control of that account. That attacker can then remove all other admins, completely locking you out from regaining access. The attacker can then delete content, post their own content, and even set the page up to deliver malware to users. Once this happens, you can work with customer support to get control of the hijacked admin account by reporting it through their “hacked” page. Until you get control of the page, though, the attackers have free reign with it, as we saw with Al Arabiya recently.

Because you can’t limit the power of admins, what you should do to help protect your Facebook page is limit the number of admins as much as possible. Ideally, you should have no more than one or two accounts as true admins. The fewer accounts that have this power over your Facebook pages, the less chance of one of them being hijacked and you losing control.

Strengthening the Link: Account Protection Options

Once you’ve minimized the number of accounts that have admin rights to your Facebook page, the next thing you want to do is increase the security of the accounts that still have admin rights to your page.

One thing you should consider is creating special Facebook accounts that are only used for admin of your page and nothing else. Just like I discussed with Pinterest, you should only log in to your admin account on systems that are fully up-to-date with security patches and antivirus.

In addition to creating a strong password for your admin account, you should utilize the enhanced account security tools the platform provides. These tools are a relatively new addition to Facebook and not well-known. But these provide an extra layer of authentication, increased monitoring for unauthorized activity and a faster means to regain control of a compromised account.

To access these options, on your Facebook page admin account, select “Account Settings” from the drop down box in the upper right. One the left-hand menu, click “Security“. This will give you access to the additional account security options (Note: this information is current as of this writing, these options may move or change in the future).

First, you should ensure that “Secure Browsing” is enabled. This will always encrypt your username and password from any device.

“Login Approvals” is very important: this will make it so that an additional one-time code has to be entered each time someone tries to access your account on a new device. The code is sent by text to a mobile phone number. This enables what we call “two factor” authentication by requiring that you give Facebook not just something that you know (your password) but something that you have (this one-time code sent by text to your mobile phone in your possession). This feature significantly increases the security of your account because an attacker would have to get your password AND your mobile phone to access your account from a new device. As devices are approved, you will see them listed in the “Recognized Devices” section and any active session listed in the “Active Session” section.

“Login Notification” will let you know via email, text or both, every time this account is accessed by a new device. You can use this to watch for any unauthorized access and take action right away to regain control of your account.

The “Trusted Friends” feature lets you list up to five FB friends who can help you regain access to your account if you’re locked out. As Facebook’s notes, you will need at least three friends but five is preferred. If you get locked out, you will need to enter three codes sent to these friends to regain control of your account. In picking these friends, you want people you’ll be able to reach quickly.

Taken together, all these options significantly enhance the security of your account. And they do so without significantly increasing the “hassle factor”. They also provide good mechanisms to let you know if your account is compromised and the means to quickly regain control.

Two Easy Steps to Greater Peace of Mind

Comparatively speaking, Facebook has done an admirable job of increasing the security of their platform. For companies, Facebook is still the king of social media channels. And they’ve built-in security capabilities that are fit for a king. The only trick is knowing what’s there and how best to use it.

With these two steps, minimizing the number of admins and strengthening the account security options on your admin accounts, you can significantly reduce your risk factors and increase the overall security of your admin accounts and your page and that should bring you better peace of mind.

Has your company already taken these page security measures?

Christopher Budd (3 Posts)

This monthly Social Media & Online Security column is contributed by Christopher Budd. Christopher is one of the foremost experts on managing crisis communications for online security and privacy incidents. Christopher combines his prior career as an engineer with his public relations experience as a ten-year veteran of the Microsoft Corporation, where he oversaw and managed worldwide internal and external communications around security and privacy incidents. As an independent consultant he merges these skills to help customers bridge the gap between the technical and communications realms and “make awful news just bad”.

Christopher Budd (3 Posts)

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By: Facebook and Online Dating Security « Christopher Budd by Facebook and Online Dating Security « Christopher Budd http://christopherbudd.com/2012/05/11/facebook-and-online-dating-security/

Email Marketing Is Growing Up — Leaving “Batch and Blast” Behind

2012-05-10T03:17:37Z

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a VP of Marketing about converting emails into two-way conversations.

We were reviewing my proposal for email nurture streams designed to move prospects from the top to the middle of the lead funnel. We found it easy to visualize the emails themselves. What required more thought on our part were the “engagement triggers” – incentives designed to turn one-way emails into trust-building conversations between the recipients and the staff.

Many of you are having the same discussion. Both demand generation marketers and marketing automation vendors are grappling with the question,

“How do we turn generic broadcast emails into personal interactions?”

The last few weeks have featured interesting blog discussions and a corporate acquisition related to this issue.

More Marketers Are Focusing on Relevance and Personalization for Email Programs

Loren McDonald (@lorenmcdonald), Vice President of Industry Relations at Silverpop, just published encouraging news in his blog post, Email Marketers’ Concerns Becoming More Sophisticated.

Loren has noticed an interesting consistency among the customers he’s visited lately. While they still care about list growth, they’re also eager to turn email marketing into relevant conversations. For example, his customers want to:

Tailor emails to the recipients’ interests. They want to leverage marketing automation to move past broadcast models. “This means combining multi-track programs with behavioral data to deliver one-to-one messages in real time.”
Personalize the early experiences of new email subscribers. Traditional, generic welcome emails are being replaced with “multi-step onboarding programs based on demographics and behavior at the individual level.”
Use advanced segmentation with third-party data. More companies want to combine their data with that of third parties and “leverage predictive modeling to create segments based on factors such as likelihood to buy.”

The three initiatives above show why marketers are interested in integrating email and social media:

Email nurture streams triggered by referrals from social media sites are potentially more relevant to their recipient.
Social media profiles are valuable sources of demographic and behavioral data.

For both B2B and B2C lead generation efforts, the result is email that is more fun or helpful, and more likely to drive sales.

Marketing Automation Vendors Are Improving the Integration of Social Media and Email

It’s safe to say that marketing automation vendors are now investigating how social media and email can mesh. As a case in point, marketing automation provider Marketo just acquired Crowd Factory, a social campaign management platform.

While explaining the acquisition, Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez (@phil1217) accurately summarized the fragmentation that most marketers have struggled with:

“Social marketing campaigns and marketing automation have been like the proverbial two ships passing in the night, with most social marketing tools sitting in silos disconnected from mainstream marketing processes.” (See the press release for his full quote.)

Let’s quickly look at some of the features Crowd Factory offers a traditional email marketer:

Social engagement tactics which can be integrated into campaigns.
These include 1) promotion applications like sweepstakes, 2) referral applications like special offers and 3) engagement applications such as voting and polls.
Social profiles imported into the CRM for rich data and more sophisticated segmentation.
This will make it easier for marketers to identify the top influencers in their database and target their needs specifically.

Regardless of whether or not you’re a Marketo fan, this acquisition should benefit you in the long run. It will spur all marketing automation vendors to continue integrating the silos of social media, traditional CRM, website analytics, email marketing and lead management.

Social Tactics Add Value to Both B2B and B2C Emails

As I read about Crowd Factory’s features, I remembered my need to find B2B “engagement triggers,” mentioned at the beginning of this post. Even though polls and sweepstakes are often considered B2C tactics, they could also be applied in some B2B situations. For example, visualize a poll that, with tongue-in-cheek humor, encourages a prospect to pick his biggest business challenge. That prospect’s answer might trigger a follow-up nurture stream targeted specifically to his concerns. It could also support a comfortable, positive conversation between the prospect and a member of the sales team.

How about you? Do these developments stir your own thoughts? What are you doing to bring more creativity and relevance to your email marketing programs?

Deborah Anne Gibbs (4 Posts)

This monthly Marketing Automation and Social Media column is contributed by Deborah Gibbs. Passionate about product marketing, lead generation and marketing automation, Deborah has over 10 years, experience in communications and program management. Her marketing experience includes a wide range of industries, including high tech, automotive and medical devices. She is Pragmatic Marketing certified and, for fun, enjoys jazz, Portuguese and anything Brazilian.

Deborah Anne Gibbs (4 Posts)

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Time to Write Off Your Company Blog?

2012-05-10T03:05:44Z

Just when you thought it was safe to fire up your company blog and reap the highly touted social business dividends, the marketplace seems to be sending mixed signals. Recent posts by social media influencers have challenged a University of Massachusetts study showing a decline in corporate blogging by rhetorically asking whether it’s possibly time to rethink your company’s blogging strategy, or even forget about it altogether. The marketing industry and businesses with a vested interest in the growth and success of the blogosphere have naturally assumed a bit of defensive posturing concerning the long-term outlook for blogging as a marketing and sales tool.

A widely reported Pew Research Center survey completed a few years ago showed a pullback in blogging, especially among teens (with a slight increase in blogging among members of Gen X and older adults). The usual complaints prevailed: it takes too long to compose posts and reader apathy is discouraging. In other words, writing without reader comments or feedback is a non-starter. It’s much easier to post text and videos to Facebook, teens argued, and besides, that’s where their audience hangs. Any business with a long-term outlook should pay attention to these teen views. As younger generations move forward into the workplace, their experiences and opinions may cascade into the future of business blogging. After all, all those Macs delivered to primary and secondary schools in the 1980s and 1990s (with generous academic discounts from Apple, thank you) certainly have gradually displaced the Windows PC as the predominant business computing platform.

It’s perhaps too early to tell whether there’s a trend, but it doesn’t go unnoticed when social media A-listers who carved an early path in blogging indicate they are cutting back. Or worse, hinting that blogging may increasingly be disrupted by other social media channels. As Jay Baer suggests, photo-based social networks such as Pinterest may “make written blogs like mine look quaintly Amish by 2014.” But let’s also not get too carried away. The UMass study spurred a digital media news site to surmise that because Fortune 500 companies were pulling back, it was safe to assume a similar trend was occurring with marketing agencies. Other social media bloggers have referenced that post and sounded the alarm. The conjecture might be true, but confirmation will have to come from the results of a wide marketing industry survey.

Technorati counters that people who write for their corporate blogs or their own small business blogs are cranking out even more posts than ever because, despite the effort, blogging is still viewed as a strong business marketing tool with measurable ROI. The reason to slack off on blogging: personal and job commitments. Add to that time spent engaging with the new shiny networks, such as Pinterest and Empire Avenue.

So is blogging headed for intensive care? Even worse, do we invoke the R-word? Is blogging still relevant in a social marketplace of consumers who are increasingly image-centric, highly mobile, constantly juggling different tools and platforms and, perhaps most important, very short on time? When social media turned the tables on traditional media, leveraging low-cost blog frameworks to create alternative news vehicles, many proclaimed the press release dead. The press release is still alive and well, though most companies now realize news announcements aren’t really going to generate instant headlines or immediate media response. Truth be told, they never really did. Press releases remain an important vehicle for freely and fairly delivering (read: no exclusives or insider advantage) official corporate news content, now with a potent SEO kick. So though the frequency and focus of blog posts may be adjusted and tweaked to accommodate evolving corporate objectives and consumer preferences, veterans concur that blogging is still a vital marketing strategy that can be integrated with other social media networks. It’s not an either-or business decision. Here are 10 key recommendations and points to consider for your blogging roadmap:

1) Reaffirm the objectives of your corporate blog. It’s a marketing tool and an SEO magnet. There’s no reason why you can’t integrate your content with major social networks, resulting in highly fluid digital partnerships.

2) Blog not working for your business? Query business colleagues and fellow professionals. You will be surprised by the input and generosity. The “pay it forward” philosophy has knocked down many traditional competitive barriers. Blogger forums such as ProBlogger are perfect for getting professional feedback and ideas. Tap the knowledge base in LinkedIn business groups. When it comes to social media business tools and strategies, there aren’t many secrets.

3) If you don’t have time, hire a content consultant or a designer/coder to help with the writing, editing, site add-ons or a complete makeover. There are even teen entrepreneurs offering amazingly cost-effective, high-quality off-the-shelf solutions and services. You don’t have to hire a team of CSS/PHP programmers out of Bangalore. Low-cost expertise nowadays is in your time zone. Plus the future may be pointing to frictionless blog frameworks requiring no coding.

4) Blogs are highly portable and customizable. If you are thinking about closing down your corporate blog and moving to Facebook, get a second opinion.

5) Take a lesson from Journalism 101, where students are taught that the history of World War II can be written in three sentences. The digital attention span is measured with micrometers. Keeping your posts to 500 words may be the blogging sweet spot.

6) Blogs continue to generate leads and increase company exposure, especially for smaller businesses looking to expand market awareness. No matter how you slice it, quality content and a site that demonstrates that your company is a serious player trumps cold calling any day of the week.

7) Bloggers who are cutting back on output volume are suggesting focused content and niche audiences, i.e. market segmentation.

8) When all is said and done, a blog reflects your company’s brand. You control the text, the images, the audio and video. You can blog 140 characters or 1,400 words. You don’t have to be like everybody else or match your blueprint to the status quo.

9) Your company blog can be a vehicle for nurturing loyal communities who opt-in to email lists and special content offerings. It’s a means of developing more personalized relationships with customers and followers via content that may not fit in the framework of Facebook or Tumblr.

10) Blogging rules were meant to be broken. This post exceeded the 500-word recommendation. I can live with that.

Has blogging lost its luster? Do you think that the marketplace will eventually shift from self-hosted company blogs to popular platforms such as Facebook, Google+, Tumblr or Pinterest?

Joel Don (4 Posts)

This monthly Social Business Trends column is contributed by Joel Don. Joel is principal of Comm Strategies, a public relations, social media and content engineering consultancy. He was formally trained as a journalist, working for newspapers and magazines throughout the country. Before starting his own business, Joel worked for several agencies, served as a public information officer at UCLA and UC Irvine and directed business and financial communications at a Fortune 500 computer manufacturer. Joel also started a company that developed a digital solution for measuring the readership of company news prior to the advent of today’s link-tracking systems.

Joel Don (4 Posts)

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6 Tips on How to Accelerate Word of Mouth Marketing through Social Media

2012-05-09T21:05:22Z

Whether we admit it or not, the opinions of other people matter. Whether it’s about simple things such as which brand of laundry detergent to buy, or bigger decisions such as who to consult with on critical business matters, we’ve always taken into account the points of view of those we deem important in order to get the information we need to make the best judgement calls.

This is exactly how we can define word of mouth from a marketing perspective: the passing of information, hopefully beneficial to our brand, from one to another via oral communication. The potential influential power that word of mouth has when it spreads is what marketers have always wanted to tap, so much so that giving people something to talk about has become one of the foundations of marketing and advertising.

Marketing through word of mouth took a temporary backseat when mass media started to boom. Television, radio, and print ads captured the attention of millions, making them the most preferred means of advertising. Brands accumulated loyal followers, that is until their audiences became overly-saturated with paid slots. These days, people are so bombarded with ads every turn that more often than not, they don’t bother giving them a second glance.

This shift back to word of mouth is clear: According to Nielsen’s April 2012 report on Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages, a whopping 92% of the world’s population trust recommendations of other people regarding products and services, while only 47% trust ads on TV, magazines, and billboards. Brands need to go back to making people talk about them instead of talking at people.

This is where social media comes in. With people trusting other people’s opinions more than paid advertisements, and with so many people utilizing social media to have conversations, we can safely say that social media has become a powerful “word of mouth” channel. If you’re interested in using social media to help accelerate your word of mouth marketing, here are a few tips that will hopefully get you to start thinking outside of the “traditional” marketing box:

Give people reasons to talk about you. You can’t spark word of mouth marketing without giving people reasons to talk about you, but social media can now make this easier than ever to accomplish by helping you directly engage with the public. Using the various social media platforms, ask a question, create an intriguing online event, or give away exciting freebies that can help start conversations with your followers. Conversations that are started online are continued offline, so have conversations and post information that would be deemed worthy of others to discuss.
Provide targeted conversation starters through social ads. Through the micro-targeted advertising that can be done in social media through the likes of Facebook Ads (pun intended), we can now provide visuals and dialogue in a relevant way to spark conversations in social media that, if done right, can get people online and offline talking about your brand in an extremely targeted fashion. Remember, these ads are not about pushing your product but about starting a conversation!
Create social media content that is begging to be shared. While tweets limit you to 140 characters, video as a type of social media content is of the most viral forms of media, so take advantage of this fact by creating YouTube videos that are begging to be shared. Here is one site that suggests a formula for the types of videos that have a better chance of becoming viral and sparking word of mouth. While social media posts are often personal, images and videos are often things that we want to share and experience with others, so take advantage of this to your brand’s benefit.
Be sincere and find ways to improve your relationship with your customers. One reason why word of mouth is one of the most effective ways of marketing and advertising is because it’s honest. You have to make an effort to be sincere in your dealings with your followers. Don’t connect with them just for the sake of doing so, and as much as possible, try not to automate conversations. If you do need to use prescheduled responses or posts, make sure that you are also regularly monitoring social media so that you can answer your customers’ queries as soon as possible. Consumers feel so empowered by social media that sometimes a quick response from a big brand can spark word-of-mouth activities.
Face your issues head-on. When something goes wrong, as something invariably does, don’t lie to your public or brush things under the proverbial rug, as this may anger your audiences even more. Take Chapstick, for example. An ad of a blond woman bending over to look for her lost Chapstick behind a couch has caused a stir on blogs and social media channels. Instead of properly addressing those who were offended, the company chose to delete negative comments about it on their Facebook page, which caused greater PR problems as the damaging remarks kept on coming with greater intensity. The moral of the story is, don’t shut your followers up or out. Be open about your issues, and prove to them that their concerns are being tackled quickly and accordingly. Word-of-mouth works as efficiently for you as it could against you.
Continue engaging. Consistency is one of the keys for successful social media word of mouth marketing. It takes time to develop relationships offline, so it’s no different online. Keep the conversations going long past your online events or campaigns are over and keep your fans interested. This way, they know that they matter. Make them feel special and foster passionate brand advocates who will continue to recommend you to their friends both online and offline for a long time.

In Japan, they say お客様はお王様, or Customer is King. Social media has finally made brands throughout the world realize this. What they say about you determines whether your marketing succeeds or not, so follow the above tips to utilize social media to help you spark positive word of mouth marketing.

What other tips would you add?

If you’re interested in learning more about word of mouth marketing, make sure you check out The Word of Mouth Crash Course: The “How to be Great at Word of Mouth Marketing” Conference. This is being held tomorrow, May 10, 2012, in Austin, Texas. The Word of Mouth Crash Course features 12 how-to classes, 12 real-world case studies, 6 brilliant authors, and an inspiring keynote from former Southwest Airlines President Colleen Barrett — all in one thrilling day. Apply the code NEALSCHAFFER33 to get 33% off your registration.

Neal Schaffer (370 Posts)

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By: Neal Schaffer by Neal Schaffer http://windmillnetworking.com/
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Optimize for Mobile and Watch Your Social Media Presence Soar

2012-05-09T07:49:56Z

If you follow the tech conference circuit as closely as we do, you’ll notice that seemingly every year the likes of South by South West (SXSW) and the Mobile World Congress (MWC) bring us a host of new social media startups. From Twitter to FourSquare to Gowalla to Highlight, new ways to connect with each other are flooding the market like a Yankee Candle Store on Mothers Day. With so many new social media outlets popping up all over the web each year it would seem that getting your social media presence to soar would be simple. Yet as many startup businesses will attest, this can be a much larger task than it seems.

There are plenty of ways to go about increasing your stamp on the web via social media, as this blog has shown time and time again. One of the most effective and possibly most underrated methods is to build a website that is optimized for mobile devices.

I’ve spent the past year of my life preaching about the need to go mobile, and whether people are hearing it from me or elsewhere, they are getting the message as mobile web use is skyrocketing. Most businesses that go mobile do so to enhance their sales or expand their client base, not necessarily to see their social media presence grow. Increasingly, however, businesses that do launch mobile optimized sites are seeing their social media footprint expand greatly.

So what exactly makes social and mobile such a perfect match? Well, a number of factors contribute to the marriage.

Optimized sites mean easier navigation to social media.

Probably the most obvious advantage of a mobile optimized site in terms of social media is convenience. Sites designed for mobile can make locating and following social media links much easier. While a non-optimized site can certainly lead you to Facebook or LinkedIn, an optimized one generally makes social icons or links prevalent and simple to tap. Social media traffic tends to quickly grow as a result.

Building a separate site for mobile increases your SEO presence.

The hot debate in mobile web at the moment seems to be designing a single responsive site versus designing both a desktop site and a mobile optimized site. While responsive design may seem the simpler option, this direction actually tends to be much more difficult to develop, can be far more costly, and may actually hurt SEO status. Businesses that create dedicated mobile sites are seeing an increase in their SEO rankings, and in turn a spike in their social media presence. One of the most beneficial elements of social media is its ability to drive traffic to a business’ websites, and more traffic to social media sites via increased SEO will in turn drive people to return.

Social is going mobile, so don’t get left behind.

Take one look at the top download lists for both the Apple and Android markets and you’ll see that not only have social media sites embraced mobile wholeheartedly, but so too have their users. Facebook is the number one most downloaded app of all time, with other social media players like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest climbing the ranks every day. If users access a link from one of these social apps using a mobile device and they are redirected to a non-mobile optimized site, the chances of these users returning drop off dramatically.

Social sites make the perfect complement for mobile media.

Mobile web designers tend to worry about including too much media content on their mobile sites out of a fear of slowing down load times and clogging up bandwidth. A perfect solution is to link to social media sites where businesses can share photos, videos, or other media that promote your product. This allows you archive media outside of your mobile site, in turn helping your mobile site operate efficiently and load quickly without having to delete any material.

I mentioned how closely my team follows the mobile conference circuit, and at MWC this year the folks from Facebook made it clear that they are focused on going mobile. The recent billion-dollar acquisition of Instagram, the introduction of the mobile web app test suite Ringmark, and the purchase of a number of the mobile-targeted patents that Microsoft recently bought from AOL, only pad Facebook’s mobile initiative. While the big dog in the social game may hog all the headlines, social media companies across the board are recognizing the importance of the mobile web, such as Linkedin, which recently released its new iPad app that relies on 95% mobile web versus just 5% native app technology. Companies that get on board are seeing the massive benefits mobile optimization can bring. The sky is the limit for the future of social media, however as far as the present is concerned, social and mobile go hand in hand.

Has your company optimized your web presence for mobile?

Alex Kutsishin (2 Posts)

This monthly "Social Media and Mobile" column is contributed by Alex Kutsishin. Alex is the president and co-founder of FiddleFly, Inc. He is an entrepreneur with a background in creative marketing and web design. When Alex is not helping the world go mobile with FiddleFly, he spends his time traveling the country speaking about social media, marketing, and the future of the web.

Alex Kutsishin (2 Posts)

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By: Dave Faulkmore by Dave Faulkmore http://twitter.com/usguyintokyo

Social Media for B2B Sales – 11 Tips for Building Better Client Relationships!

2012-05-08T06:51:12Z

Selling has always been about relationships. Particularly in B2B sales, people buy first from individuals and then from their companies. Social Media presents us with an outstanding opportunity to …

Discover potential new relationships
Create rapport
Establish relationships
Maintain, nurture, and expand those relationships

You now have, and quite literally at your fingertips, more arrows in your quiver than any of those B2B salespeople who have gone for generations before you! Don’t squander these opportunities. Make the most of these B2B sales tips!

Keep your eyes open – And also your ears while keeping your mouth firmly in the clamped position. Remember that the first rule of engagement is to LISTEN. Samson slew 10,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass and the same number of sales are lost each day using exactly that same weapon. In the old days (and I am both old and old-school), my eyeballs were darting from side to side from the time I hit the parking lot at a prospect’s office. What does the building look like? What kind of cars do I see? Are there reserved parking spaces with names on them? Their office interior … is it 1910 or the latest technologies on solid mahogany desks? Once inside the prospect’s office I was looking for plaques, diplomas, memorabilia … any clue that would help me to understand him or her better and to discover possible interests that we might have in common. Now we can do so much of this, and more, right from our desk via social media.

Be worthy – You will have to forgive me when I say that we seem to live in a world filled with people who are absorbed with their own concepts of self-entitlement. “Here I am and where is mine?” We used to call these salespeople “Jimmies”. “My name is Jimmie, what you got to gimme?” Here’s a news flash. If you want my business, you have to earn the right to ask for it and to keep it. Demonstrate, consistently, that you are a professional and that you know how to follow-up and follow through. You will need to … are you ready … work for it. I have no desire to find a new vendor. In fact, that process is downright painful and, if you put me in a position where I have to go through that again, I will hunt you down and kill you

Be Responsive – What in the heck ever happened to urgency!? I am amazed by the quantity of emails that I send out that never get responded to and the same thing holds true will valid messages that I send via social media. Still, you want me to refer you to others, or connect with you, let alone get my business!? I only look stupid.

Make the touches – And make them regularly. Just because you two are now married does not mean that the need to romance your partner stops. Ever! Consider the “A, B,C” approach where you contact your “A” clients “x” times per month or quarter and that schedule decreases with your “B” and then your “C” clients. If you have any “D” clients (and don’t we all) … that stands for “Delete”.

Be honest – It’s quite acceptable to say “I don’t know (but, I will find out)” or to give me a flat-out “No”. I see those sentences as indications of your honesty and as evidence that you are a real person and not some sort of sales cyborg. It’s cliché but, the goal of under-promising and then over-delivering still holds true. Exceeding client expectations is always the only acceptable result!

Provide value – You can provide value in a number of ways and providing value is already a key element of social media engagement. Why not subscribe to sites which publish articles that would be of interest to your clients and then forward those articles to their attention? Consider using Google Alerts to go out and find those articles. I have all articles and alerts come directly into my Google Reader and from there it is super simple to categorize those into folders that could literally be the names of your clients and prospects. You can even email directly from Google Reader as well as share these articles right to your social networks.

Find opportunities for them – Since you are already monitoring the social media channels for your own opportunities, why not do that for your customers as well? These can be done with simple or advanced searches on any of the social networks or with free tools like Google Alerts or Social Mention. Of course, you can spend big dollars on other tools to do this but cost-effective alternatives include Sprout Social and Nimble Social CRM which is a powerful and complete relationship management tool. I can almost give you a 100% guarantee that your competitors are sure not doing this and then, what chance does anybody have to now come in and take this account from you? See “snowball in hell”.

Educate them – Show them better ways to use your products and services and in ways that will make them money or make them more efficient. Or, perhaps you have talents outside of your particular day job. For example, if you are reading this, you likely already have some level of proficiency with social media. Might your client benefit from you sharing with them some of your expertise?

Connect them – There is a huge difference between being just a vendor and being a member of the “team”. Connecting your client with others who can use their services or who can provide them with valuable services that they need, is a fast trip up to team member status. LinkedIn is awesome for this purpose but, don’t neglect the other networks as they are all valuable connection resources for both you and for your clients!

Promote them – Become one of their best brand ambassadors. Help them to sell their products and services even if those items are not being provided by you. Send out social updates directing folks to their website or announcing their new products or scheduled events. Givers get and when you help to increase your client’s revenues, you will undoubtedly increase your own. It’s called karma.

Involve them – Your clients want to be involved in your business and it is important for them that you are successful. They have made an investment in you and your company and it is, therefore, in their vested interest that you are both around tomorrow to take care of their needs. Get their feedback on your products and services. Ask them what they would like to see in terms of new services. Continuous client involvement with both you and your company = long-term relationship!

O.K., that’s eleven tips for B2B sales and I know that you folks have got to have more! Now is your chance to create your own karma by sharing those with others by leaving a comment below. You might even find somebody to connect with. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing!

Craig Jamieson (7 Posts)

This monthly Social Media for B2B Sales column is contributed by Craig M. Jamieson. Craig has been in B2B sales since 1977 and during that time has served in a variety of positions including; sales manager, division sales manager, national sales manager, district manager, and as a business owner. He is the managing partner of Sales Results LLC in Boise, Idaho which owns and operates NetWorks! Boise Valley B2B Networking Groups, is a Nimble Social CRM Solution Partner, and Craig also conducts workshops and seminars relating to sales and social business applications.

Craig Jamieson (7 Posts)

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By: Craig M. Jamieson by Craig M. Jamieson http://salesresultsllc.com
By: davinabrewer by davinabrewer http://www.3hatscommunications.com/blog/

Give Your Social Media Campaign a Face with Video

2012-05-04T18:28:47Z

Social media has brought the idea of personal branding for executives more into the forefront today than in years past. The TV show “Undercover Boss” is a perfect example of personal branding. For those who haven’t seen the show, here’s the gist: An executive, usually the CEO, works for a day or so in a variety of positions within his own company. The executive is disguised, so employees don’t know who he or she is until the end of the show when the big reveal takes place.

During the first five minutes of the show, the executives are introduced to the TV audience—how they got to their current positions, a little bit about their leadership styles, an overview of their personal lives. To me, this is the most important part of the show. Why? Because showcasing an executive is a huge win for the company— it puts a face to the brand.

While not every company is able to get the attention of the producers of the show “Undercover Boss,” other companies can take advantage of a similar opportunity to put a face to the brand by combining video with social media.

I’ve heard people say that technology is making everyone more anti-social, but the truth is, the explosion of social media has proven that most people have a huge desire to connect with other people. Because social media is about relationships, it has made joining the conversation more important than ever.

People do business with those they know, like, and trust. Along those same lines, people want relationships with the companies that they do business with. While spokes models have been the way to put a face to the brand in the past, people now want to see the real face of the company. This is where Executive Profile Videos come in.

An Executive Profile Video is usually a 60 – 90 second video that can be shown on the web page, in a blog or online profile. It is a great way to build trust, strengthen the confidence the community has in you, and provide a face to your company. As the CEO or other executive, you need to have a public face for internal and external purposes. Using video, you can build instant rapport telling your story. With video, you are no longer just a stranger in an office somewhere. With video, you are able to make an impression on every person inside and outside your organization in a very real, very professional, yet very personal way.

Executive Profile Videos can also be thought of as a long-term influencer that can help you build your brand for the future. These videos provide credibility by promoting a face for the brand and building trust. In the event that a crisis occurs, the CEO and other executives are already known and trusted by their established audiences—both internal and external.

Executive Profile Videos also help individual executives increase their prominence in their own industries. According to the Department of Labor, the average CEO tenure is just a little over six years. (I’ve owned cars longer than that.) Video is a great way for executives to establish credibility in the marketplace to both prolong their tenure as well as help ease the transition to another position in the future. Case in point: I recently attended an event and met someone I was sure I had met before. Then I realized that I hadn’t actually met him in person but had watched an online video that he had had made!

Some of you might be saying, “I’m not good on camera” or “My executive isn’t good on camera.” Believe me, there are ways to make any executive look professional without sending him or her to acting boot camp. For example, an interview-style personal branding video can make anyone look good. After all, social media is about having a conversation, and an interview-style personal branding video is a perfect way to accomplish this versus having your executive talk to the camera and having it look like he is selling used cars!

Remember, people do business with those they know, like, and trust. Successful personal branding equals more sales. Face-to-face is the best way to build relationships, but video is the next best thing when you can’t be there in person. Executive Profile Videos are a great way to build rapport and increase trust both for individual executives as well as for the company and its products and/or services. When you create a video your message is consistent. Your message never has a “bad day.”

Do your corporate executives have an Executive Profile Video?

Jayson Duncan (2 Posts)

This monthly Social Media and Video column is contributed by Jayson Duncan. Jayson is an Orange County, California filmmaker and owner of the video production company Miller Farm Media. In 2003, Jayson began using video to help others tell their stories through his video production company, Miller Farm Media. He has created videos for Fortune 50 companies. In his spare time Jayson enjoys playing his guitar, song writing, and spending time with his wife, Gretchin.

Jayson Duncan (2 Posts)

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