With social media moving so quickly and content being shared so readily, brands may lose control of their trademarks and copyrights. My colleague Christopher Budd has written a two-part blog on common sense content security in social media. His posts rightly discuss that social media engagement requires some degree of foregoing control. At the same time, brands need to be sensitive to protecting their intellectual property. This post presents the top five mistakes marketers make that expose a brand’s intellectual property to risk. 1. COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT MISTAKE: Photographs on Google Images are not free for the taking. Regardless of whether …
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Shame on you if you’re seriously looking for my advice on this matter. I am a social media user who , as fellow LinkedIn author Viveka Von Rosen would say, is a “promiscuous networker.” I virtually meet and connect with a lot of other people in the world. It is a virtual connection to establish potential that I have been talking about ever since I published my first Windmill Networking book in September of 2009. Over the years, with the advent of open networking platforms like Twitter and Google Plus, many of us are much more promiscuous online than we …
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For years marketers have attempted to understand their target audience and create messages that speak directly to them. Focus groups, psychographic profiling, surveys and more have been used to get into customers’ heads for decades. And they still are today. But thanks to social media it’s even easier to become a “spy” and understand who you’re selling to. Cracking the nut of what makes your customers tick can be as easy a tracking a few key terms and listening in to the social chatter that’s already going on in your industry. Being a spy can help your marketing …
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A flip side of the social media revolution is that now anyone can be a publisher. This means that you need to compete with all kinds of bloggers, online media, Twitter and other social network chatter to get your content and postings noticed. It is a harsh reality, one that puts pressure on social marketing teams to be on top of their games. Content curation can help. it is the practice of using OPC (other people’s content) to generate a steady stream of high quality, relevant materials. Curation typically employs a mix of tech, process and skills, and should be …
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The hospitality industry has benefited greatly from social media, having narrowed in on a variety of creative uses. In this column, I’ve focused primarily on hotels and restaurants, but wanted to provide some due diligence to the source of getting there: air travel. Airlines have made significant waves in social media, and specifically on Facebook, over the past several years. Major brands such as Southwest, Virgin, American Airlines, United and JetBlue all have six or seven-figure fanbases, and post regular updates and engagement stimulators. Darren Booth of CNBC featured an interview with Jonathan Pierce, American Airlines’ Director of social media communications. …
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Monitoring traffic is almost just as important as generating it, and I’ve touched on the subject in the past as well. However, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit this subject and not only take a look at a different angle but also make a list of all the best tools to use to monitor your social media traffic. Monitoring traffic is, as mentioned earlier, extremely important. And, by monitoring your social media traffic carefully, you will be able to: Devise better, more efficient social media marketing plans and strategies Find out which social networks work best …
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Whilst not yet being embraced by every recruiting team, social recruiting is increasingly accepted as a mainstream part of the modern recruiting strategy. The trouble is, many recruiters are embarking on social recruiting initiatives for the very first time – and so inevitably are learning the hard way some of the mistakes that can trip you up on the road to social recruiting success. In the interests of making your journey less painful, I therefore thought I’d share with you the 7 most common social recruiting mistakes I see recruiters making today: Failing to plan Failing to secure adequate resources …
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I have to confess, spring is my favorite time of year. I’m a sucker for colorful blossoms as flower bulbs emerge from the ground, trees bloom and the weather warms up. All the signs point to new life when nature’s cycle comes full circle. As comforting as I find this annual rhythm, life in social media moves at a much faster pace. As a result, regular maintenance is required to keep the cobwebs out of your digital branding efforts, especially in your social media efforts. Here are a few quick spring cleaning tips to keep your B2B brand in tip-top …
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If you are among the more than 1 billion people that actively spend time on Facebook, I’m sure you’ve come across Facebook contests from pages that you liked, promoted through advertising or shared by one of your friends. A Facebook contest isn’t something new, it has been used by many businesses to reach new audience, build trust and loyalty, source for new data and many more. Today I want to cover some of the types of Facebook contests that you can organize on Facebook through third party apps. Different third party apps have different types of Facebook contests that you …
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One of the biggest questions every business has when it comes to blogging is what they should blog about. Last month, we touched upon ways to find blog topics in How to Create a Blog Content Strategy. In today’s post, we’re going to dig a bit deeper into additional tools and strategies your business can use to discover what content performs best on social media in your industry. Finding Similar Blogs Your first goal is to find blogs in your industry whose posts you want to research. You can start with your business’s competitors. If they do not have great …
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A new set of legal standards now governs advertising in social media. Last month, the FTC released its revised “.Com Disclosures: How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising,” setting new standards for making disclosures on space-constrained website, social media, and mobile platforms. While the original “Dot Com guides” had issued in 2000, advances in technology quickly rendered them incomplete. The new guides pick up where the old ones left off. They change the landscape for advertisers, putting a clear burden on them to ensure that consumers understand offers for sale of goods and services, regardless of the technology being …
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How do you equip your leaders when it comes to using social media for internal communication? What guidance is in place and what are the boundaries? In previous columns I’ve looked at 10 Reasons Why Internal Comms Pros Should Participate in Social Media, Why Use Enterprise Social Networks For Internal Communication and Coping With the Digital Evolution. I’m going to focus on using social media for leadership communication now and next month examine social media guidance. My advice when it comes to using social media for internal communication: Encourage employees to do the right thing, rather than assume they will do …
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One of the biggest challenges in sales is often just getting past the gatekeeper and some of them are very good at keeping you away from the decision maker. As a sales professional, you will never let anything get between you and your bone. Gatekeepers and cold calling are practically synonymous and, in our article last month, we already established that cold calling is no fun. Before we address this issue, we do want to keep certain things in mind … The gatekeeper is performing their task exactly as they have been instructed. Okay, sometimes they may be performing this …
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As I was flipping through the inflight magazine on my recent All Nippon Airways (ANA) Brand Ambassador trip to Okinawa, Japan, it was a pleasant surprise to see the below article: I’ll translate it further below, but for the sake of this conversation, let’s just say that ANA is very clear as to what content you can expect to receive should you Like the All Nippon Airways Facebook Page. Instead of simply saying, “Please Like our Facebook Page,” I always tell my clients that they need to give a reason as to why present and potential customers should Like their …
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Back in February, I talked about the question of who “owns” the pictures and content you post on the Internet. I closed the article by saying from a technical point of view that once you post information to the Internet, you don’t “own” it like you own physical copies of your information. Because online information is intangible and the technology is built with sharing in mind, you don’t have the near-total control over online information that you do with physical information. I said though that you shouldn’t necessarily take this to mean you shouldn’t post anything. Good security is about …
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“Maximizing Your Social” is all about fully leveraging the opportunities that social media holds for your entire enterprise. While most companies seem to be stuck on simply using limited social media channels for social media marketing or marketing communications, there is a new generation of enterprises that are using social media in a broader and more integrated sense to truly humanize their brand, better communicate on a one-to-one basis with stakeholders and influencers, and, for lack of a better word, reap the many benefits of simply participating in the conversations all around us for . I had the chance to …
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As a broker, owner or manager, overseeing your businesses hard-earned online reputation is imperative. In order to maintain and regulate strict standards around staff and sales agent usage of social media, the development and implementation of a social media policy is a must. Putting a social media policy in place with specific guidelines and requirements is a crucial step to offering your office the direction and answers they seek when it comes to best practices. It also acts as a company benchmark as you establish what is and is not appropriate when speaking about, around or for your brand. Below …
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No naked pictures were posted. No sexually charged words were Tweeted. No demands for sexual favors were made. Typically, social media’s role in sexual harassment has been to serve as “evidence” of inappropriate behavior; like someone posting a sexually explicit comment, or offensive pictures. However, recently at PyCon 2013, “the largest annual gathering for the community using and developing the open source Python programming language”, Adria Richards used social media to report, to the general public, allegations of sexual harassment. The fallout, so far, has been that 1) one of the two alleged harassers was fired; 2) Ms. Richards …
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Who is the target for your video? It takes an understanding of how people buy. We know that people buy emotionally, not rationally. I know this to be true when I look at my auto loans each month. We also know that people don’t like to be sold to but they love to buy. Knowing that the buying process is emotionally based, let’s look at how we can use video and social media in our sales process to different generations. Boomer: It is important to know that they are using social media. Social Media is where they can interact with …
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Nonprofits wanting gifts should give them. Relationships work that way. And relationships count for everything. Getting and retaining donors (and, really, any type of constituent) is all about building and stewarding relationships. Satisfying, long-term relationships; not quick transactions. And lasting relationships are measured by the mutually sustaining benefits experienced by all parties over time. Give and get. TOP 10 TRUTHS (We’ll explore what to do about these truths below). The principle of reciprocity applies in spades to social media. If you use it simply to broadcast stuff about you, you’re not going to get much in return. No clicks. No …
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