Social Media for Business Blog | Social Business

01 April 2013 / Social Media MBA 266 ReTweets

The Secret to a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy

When my Social Media MBA students take their first course in the Social Media Marketing sequence, I stress the importance of listening via social, before attempting to jump right in. One of the course requirements is to create and maintain a blog surrounding social media marketing topics as well as become active on Twitter. Engaging on Twitter is usually the hardest skill to master for some. Once accounts are set up and tweaked, many are ready to sit and twiddle their thumbs. Twitter (and other platforms as well) is only as valuable as the user makes them. My first suggestion …

28 March 2013 / Japan, Social Media Influence 183 ReTweets

Influencer Marketing: One-Night Stand or Long-Term Relationship?

As influencer marketing has risen with the likes of Klout Perks, exclusive Kred events, and the rise of Social Media Brand Ambassadors, there is one thing that strikes me as contradictory to the whole concept of social media marketing: If social media is about creating long-term relationships of value, why do so many companies target influencers for one campaign and move on? As others who read this blog already know, some of the contributors here, including myself, have been the recipient of exclusive giveaways through Klout, Kred, PeerIndex and direct outreach from brands. What’s interesting, though, is that rarely is …

28 March 2013 / Google Plus 478 ReTweets

Google Plus SEO: Everybody Talks About It – How Do You DO It?

Not too long ago I was looking at at thread in a popular LinkedIn group. Someone had asked whether Google+ has any relevancy for business. Many people tried to answer, but the following two were pretty typical of the positive answers given: Do you notice a commonality in these answers? It’s what I see time and again when such a question is asked: “Google+ is good for SEO.” But I’ve also noticed that when it comes to Google+ and SEO, in the words of the Harry Nilsson hit song, “Everybody’s Talkin’” but very few are explaining. Some seem to imply …

26 March 2013 / Social Media Writing 134 ReTweets

How You Can Make an Impact with Google Plus Writing

In the last column I covered some of the basic differences between Google Plus and other social platforms – namely, post length, formatting, targeted publishing and keyword usage. Now it’s time to get advanced. Getting active on Google+ is an advanced marketing move to begin with. It’s not just a social network – it’s a social layer on the entire online experience. So what constitutes an “advanced” approach to Google Plus writing? The basic mechanics of Google Plus are what sets it apart from other social media platforms. But it’s what you do with those basic tools and best practices …

26 March 2013 / Social Media Apps 253 ReTweets

3 Social Media Applications To Help You Rock Social Curation And Sharing

The web is noisy. There’s so much to see, so much to read, so little time. There is clutter. Here is how Wikipedia describes digital curation: Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. There isn’t a wikipedia article for Social Curation yet, but it’s happening, and there are apps popping up to help you find information and share socially. At MarketMeSuite we are focused on helping our users cut through the clutter to find value in marketing on social, so I’m always on the lookout for cool social media apps that are helping …

25 March 2013 / Social Media Influence 316 ReTweets

Social Media Influence: For the prosumer, the context will always be the queen!

In the past few years a number of start-ups, such as Klout, Peerlndex and Kred, have been offering Web applications that make it possible for companies and organisations to identify the most influential social media users. These analytical tools, based on private algorithms, help to identify those users that are the most active within the social networks, and award them a specific social score, depending on what metrics they use. They gauge these users’ activity and their level of commitment on the main networks (Twitter and Facebook) and work out the influencers’ social capital. The amount of influence exerted within …

25 March 2013 / SoLoMo 111 ReTweets

SoLoMo or SoMoLo? Does it really matter?

What is SoMoLo and why is it important to marketers? I have been writing and speaking on this topic for a while now. Social Local Mobile Most of the time I am making a case for taking advantage of the marketing opportunity that can be found where these three (social, mobile and local) overlap. In this post, I am going to take a slightly different approach. I want to share some recent learning. There’s a subtle nuance I’m wondering if you caught onto–did you notice the reversal of the words Local and Mobile? As a company, when referring to SoMoLo, …

22 March 2013 / Social Media Traffic Generation 215 ReTweets

10 Top Tips to Increase Your Social Media Traffic using Slideshare

Using social media can be very rewarding: it can get you lots of traffic, it’s a great way to build a community of engaged users and it’s a great marketing tool overall. But what do you do when you can’t find enough of your audience on Facebook or Twitter? The answer is simple: you look at other social networks. They may not have as many users as Facebook’s billion, but often times quantity is not quality. We’ve looked at Reddit and Digg in the past, but here is another great traffic generator: SlideShare – a small, yet highly effective platform …

21 March 2013 / Social Hospitality 97 ReTweets

Social Media Lessons from Rubio’s Restaurants

In addition to honoring their 30th birthday this January, Rubio’s has a lot to celebrate. The restaurant chain known for its fish tacos, flavorful seafood dishes, and devotion to the ocean celebrated a big year in the digital space in 2012. On Cyber Monday, they branched into the retail space with the debut of an online store that features a variety of Rubio’s gear for all ages. Their Facebook page showcases a ton of personality, and features a variety of content from gift card incentives, to giveaways, to quizzes and fill-in-the-blanks. They also have a Facebook tab entitled “original stories” where people are …

20 March 2013 / Social Media for B2B Branding 229 ReTweets

Beyond LinkedIn: Social Media Platforms to Expand Your B2B Branding

When I ask people about their B2B branding efforts in social media, the most common answer I hear is, “On yeah, we’re on LinkedIn.” As one of the oldest and best-known social networks, LinkedIn with its roughly 200 million users is the default starting point for many B2B brands. It’s an easy leap to go from personal profiles and connections to LinkedIn Groups and company pages. And that’s the extent of the effort for many B2B firms. Other more ambitious companies add Twitter and Google+ to the mix or maybe a Facebook page to round out their social media plans. …

19 March 2013 / Content Marketing 167 ReTweets

Bless This Content Marketing Mess – How to Pick the Best Tools and Put Them to Work

There is a tremendous amount of innovation in content and social media marketing these days, and this can be both a blessing and a curse; a blessing because of the wealth of technology coming onto the market; a curse, because navigating the field and picking the best solutions can be a challenge. E.g., I am sure most have had the experience of jumping eagerly into a new project – one that takes us out of our comfort zones, and requires new tools – only to get frustrated by the range of options. Or, just when we think we have it …

18 March 2013 / Social Recruiting 2723 ReTweets

Top Twitter Tools To Aid Your Social Recruiting Efforts

You’ll know from my last post here that I’m a great fan of using twitter for social recruiting. However, there’s also the danger of twitter becoming a monumental time drain! The key to ensuring you stay productive is having the right tools to manage your follower activity, engagement and content sharing in a time efficient manner. This article will share some insights for achieving just that outcome. But First A Social Recruiting Warning! This post should have been a breeze for me to write. Had I scheduled to publish it a couple of months back, it would have been! But …

15 March 2013 / Social Media and the Law 198 ReTweets

Essentials of Social Media Law: How to Get Started Legally

Brands are eager to harness the power of social media. They hire marketing experts so they can get it “right”, but they often overlook the legal implications of their social media marketing. Doing it “right” involves detailed risk analysis from both a marketing and legal perspective. Consider the rampant cause marketing we see in the wake of tragedies like Newtown and Hurricane Sandy. Many businesses are promoting their goods/services while offering a percentage of profits to victims. Are they aware that the New York Attorney General has issued “best practices” to promote cause marketing transparency through a series of disclosures? …

14 March 2013 / Social Media Contests 261 ReTweets

6 Benefits of Running Social Media Contests

If you spend quite a number of hours on Facebook, Twitter or any social networking sites, I’m sure you’ve stumbled-upon social media contests before. I love seeing how businesses are using contest to promote their business, especially brands that I’m already a fan of. I participate in most of them and it turns out that I am not very lucky, but hey, that’s life! I’ve even organized several contests on my blog before and I must say that picking a winner is definitely one of the hardest tasks after seeing how hard they try. A social media contest has many …

13 March 2013 / Blogging 225 ReTweets

How to Create a Blog Content Strategy

Now that you know why you need a blog for your business and the basics of setting up your blog with WordPress, we’re going to look at the most important part of your blog. The part that will make it succeed or fail. And that is your content. In this post, we’re going to look at how you can create a successful content strategy. Analyzing Your Competitors As the old saying goes, there is no point in reinventing the wheel. Chances are, you have plenty of competitors that have a business blog. Your first goal is to look at your …

12 March 2013 / Internal Communications 186 ReTweets

Internal Communication: Coping With The Digital Evolution

How do professional communicators persuade Executive teams to consider social media for internal communication in their organisation? How can employees convince management of the value collaborative communication has and encourage them to participate? What social tools exist for internal communication? Sound familiar? Many companies have moved beyond such questions, are in the implementation phase, or are even years down the line in their journey. But for many internal communication professionals, the reality is they have skeptical senior leaders, a workforce requesting social tools and access, and chaos and confusion is reigning. How do you cope with the digital evolution? This …

11 March 2013 / Social Sales 146 ReTweets

Social Sales | Taking the Chill Out Of Cold Calling

True cold calling in B2B selling is probably fairly close to being a lost art. If not, it should be. I’m talking about finding a street and then knocking on every office door one-by-one without the slightest idea of what might lie behind that wooden, metal, or glass barrier. The same can be said of “smiling and dialing”. Why is this traditional part of selling dying out? Probably because most of us who were trained this way are already dead or dying ourselves. The rest of us always hated cold calling so badly that we wished we were dead rather …

08 March 2013 / Social Media and Online Security 107 ReTweets

Social Media and Security: Have it Your Way – What the Burger King Twitter Hack Tells Us

We interrupt this month’s planned part two of Social Media and Online Security: Whose Pictures Are They Anyway? to focus on a more immediate, newsworthy event: last week’s hijacking of the Burger King Twitter handle (we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled column next month). The Burger King Twitter hijacking isn’t the first instance of Twitter hijacking. But it is good to examine now because it’s part of a broader trend of sustained assaults on password protection mechanisms and account hijackings. In looking at this latest event I would argue it’s time for everyone to stop looking at two-factor authentication …

07 March 2013 / Social Media and Employment Law 74 ReTweets

Social Media and Employment Law: March Madness (and Yahoo!/Telecommuting) Causes Craziness In The Workplace

Sharpen those pencils! March Madness is about to begin! Are you ready? Is your employer prepared? Selection Sunday is only a few days away and brackets will be published shortly. Here are some important tips for employers and employees about how to succeed in the workplace during March Madness. (You may not win your office pool by reading this post, but at least you may keep your job, or keep your company somewhat productive…) Each year, March Madness wrecks havoc at workplaces around the country and makes even the hardest-working employee a bit less productive. Frankly, workplace productivity takes a …