Provided you have not been living in a cave the past couple of months (which is not all that far-fetched given the imploding housing market in the U.S.), you have probably heard a lot of buzz about social media sites, especially Twitter.  You have probably also heard a lot of discussion about companies using Twitter and other social media to market their products and services.

If you are like most business owners, you probably haven’t had enough time to dig into what all the hype is about, let alone try to implement these new methods into your existing marketing strategy.  Which is why I decided to write this article.  Its time to shorten the learning curve because these new ways of marketing are inexpensive and highly effective at driving traffic to your website, which ultimately will lead to increased sales.  Who wouldn’t want that?

What are two of the most fundamental, yet most inexpensive methods of marketing your products and services?  Networking and word-of-mouth advertising.  Do you remember the days when you had to physically be present at networking events to try to increase awareness and generate leads for your business?  What about when someone had a positive experience with your company and would then tell 1-3 of their friends about it?  Actually, you should still be involved with both of these methods of increasing brand awareness, but imagine those things on steroids.

Now, instead of spending your evening attending networking events,  you can now simply find group discussions on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.  Imagine a customer who recently had a positive experience with your product or service not only telling 1-3 of their friends, but now hundreds or thousands of people in under 30 seconds on Twitter or Facebook.

That is just the tip of the iceberg with social media as a marketing tool.  In addition to supercharging basic and traditional marketing channels now you can create an environment of interaction between you and your customers like never before.  You can provide a platform for your customers to sound off about your exceptional service or the quality of your products.  Through Twitter and Facebook you can promote events you will be hosting, discounts that are available and useful information that will help your customers get even more out of their purchase and possibly even educate them about complimentary products or services you may have to offer – which is referred to in the biz as cross-selling.

Erin Nelson, the CMO of Dell, said it best in an article she recently wrote on Forbes.com:

For most organizations, engaging customers through social media has to become a fundamental part of marketing. Good marketing has never been just about staying on message. Now, in this connected era, it’s increasingly possible and important to participate in conversations and foster communities of loyal customers.

You may be thinking, “it’s great that Dell is using these cutting-edge tools, but my marketing budget is 1/100th of theirs.”  That is the greatest part of social media marketing- it is very cheap!  You could be a multi-national company, like Dell, or you could be a one-person sole proprietorship working out of your basement and still have access to the same tools.  The largest cost associated with using social media marketing is time.  It takes time to build your network large enough to get to an economy of scale that will begin generating increased business and, because its not a one-way communication channel, it takes time to respond to and communicate with those in your network.

Time is usually at a premium for most small business owners and startups, which makes implementing social media marketing into your current marketing strategy difficult.  Given that, it can still be done.  One idea is to use college interns to help manage the content and responses of your social media channels.  Its a great way for them to learn about marketing in the new Web 2.0 world we live in and they are usually very cheap, if not free.  Another suggestion would be to hire an outside marketing company that focuses on social media marketing <cough>..like RainierDigital..<cough> who can either manage the entire channel for you or at least educate you and get you up and running so you can then do it yourself.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic as well as why you may or may not be considering social media to market your company.  Comment below or drop me an email at travis@rainierdigital.com.

If you would like to read Erin Nelson’s entire article on Forbes.com (highly recommended), click here:  Online: An Essential Path to Igniting Brand Passion

Travis Scott RainierDigital Original Facebook, LinkedIn, marketing, social media, social media marketing, Twitter

Brienne Walsh of the NY Daily News wrote an article this past Friday that  provides some good information for small businesses and startups.  When trying to attract new customers, its important to stick to the basics of traditional marketing.  However, when I was reading this article, I couldn’t help but think of different ways to incorporate social media into her more “traditional marketing” suggestions.

Below is an excerpt along with a link to the complete article.  After reading the article, do you see the different ways social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can be used to expedite the positive results of these traditional efforts?

I am interested in your thoughts on this?  If you are having a tough time getting your head around how a business could use social media, comment on this blog below or send me an email- travis@rainierdigital.com.

Ten ways to gain new customers

by Brienne Walsh

Friday, March 27th 2009, 6:29 PM

One of the hardest parts of starting a business is finding customers. Even with a unique product or services, it can be hard to convince other people that they should buy what you have to offer. Part of owning a successful business is spending a significant amount of time and effort bringing new clients in the door. But how do you find new customers? We’ve compiled a simple list of ways to get started.

Complete Story:  Ten ways to gain new customers.

Travis Scott External Content Facebook, LinkedIn, marketing, social media, Twitter

CBS4 here in Denver recently ran a story about local companies such as New Belgium Brewing using Twitter for business. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Click here to watch: CBS4 News (Denver): Companies Turn to Twitter to Build Business

Travis Scott External Content business twitter, CBS4 News, Twitter

I came across this article this morning and wanted to share it with my followers.  Just another way Twitter can drive more traffic to your website if done properly.

Courtesy of Andrew Nusca | ZDNet.com | March 25, 2009

An eagle-eyed Robin Wauters over at TechCrunch points out that Twitter subtly optimized its title tags yesterday for an SEO solution that may just put your Twitter page at the top of your Google results.

Wauters:

Notice that title tag for my Twitter profile page?

It reads “Robin Wauters (robinwauters) on Twitter” where it used to say “Twitter / robinwauters”. For the TechCrunch Twitter account, it used to read “Twitter / TechCrunch” (only the username) instead of now “Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) on Twitter” (full name + username).

Minor tweak, you say? Mundane change? Perhaps, but with an undeniably big impact on how high Twitter pages will be ranked in search engines from now on.

Wauters says to Google his name for proof, saying that his LinkedIn profile and defunct internet marketing blog used to show up first, but now has been replaced by Twitter. (I tried this on my own name, but Twitter hasn’t yet changed in Google ranking.)

Twitter Improves Google SEO

Wauters said his results were correlated with other users who have had a public profile for more than two years, all with the same result: Twitter’s in the top five.

It’s a small change, but there are major implications to this for businesses and individuals alike.

For businesses — particularly startups — this provides a low-cost way to get instant Google love.

(Indeed, Wauters says Facebook is changing its profile URLs to better carry a person’s name for their profiles, too.)

For individuals, this means it’s now easier to brand yourself (like a business) without committing yourself to, say, a real blog. It also means that an employer may read your Twitter as easily as they would your resume or personal website — so think about what 140 characters you decide to tweet.

Furthermore, Wauters points out that the inflated rankings provide “one more entry point into Twitter, which should help it continue to grow visitor traffic exponentially.” So Twitter better continue to investigate ways to bring in revenue, n’est pas?

via Twitter improves SEO; may become your top hit on Google | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com .

Travis Scott External Content Google, SEO, Twitter

by Mark Walsh, MediaPost, March 23, 2009

A new report by Aberdeen Group spotlighted by eMarketer shows that 63% of “best-in-class” companies surveyed by the technology research firm plan to increase their social media budgets this year despite the recession.

Aberdeen defined best-in-class companies, among the 275 it studied, as showing the biggest gains in the last year in using social media to increase positive word-of-mouth and customer acquisition rates, among other marketing goals.

The findings are similar to Forrester’s “Social Media Playtime is Over” study this month, indicating that 53% of marketers plan to increase social media spending and 42% will keep it unchanged. Why are companies allocating more dollars to social media as overall marketing budgets tighten?

Mainly because it’s an inexpensive option and provides a promising way to benefit from word-of-mouth marketing. Marketers also sense the opportunity to seize an advantage by investing more in social marketing when competitors may be cutting back.

Another factor highlighted by Forrester is that budgets in this emerging category are still miniscule — three-quarters of marketers have $100,000 or less earmarked for social media. So any increases start from a small base.

“We recommend to our clients, in order to be successful, not to approach social media marketing as experimental, but to put the right roles, process, and measurement capabilities in place to be effective,” wrote Jeremiah Owyang, a Forrester analyst, in a recent post on his Web Strategy blog.

He added that the most expensive aspects of the social media campaigns stem from the “soft costs” involved in developing strategy, objectives, processes, and measurement.

Click here for full article:  MediaPost Publications Defying Downturn, Marketers Plan To Boost Social Media Budgets 03/24/2009.

Travis Scott External Content marketing spend, social media, social media marketing

With so much debate surrounding the new Facebook layout, I thought this was a great article.  As with the last layout change, Facebook users will adapt and move on after a few months of complaining.  As for brands, the new layout could be beneficial in helping them gain more exposure to consumers and could make Facebook even more powerful from a social media marketing standpoint-which seems to be Facebook’s primary motivation for the design change in the first place.

You Might Not Love the New Facebook, But Brands Should

March 19th, 2009 | by Adam Ostrow

Earlier this week, we posed the question “Where has the old Facebook gone?” to address the frustrating experience that many users are having with the latest homepage design. The post attracted tons of feedback, most of which agreed with the sentiment that the new homepage is less personal, less informative, and less attractive to application users and developers.

Users aside though, there is one audience that appears to be benefitting greatly from Facebook’s new design: brands. Not only are Facebook Pages – the network’s competitive play against celebrity TwitterTwitter reviewsTwitter reviews users – revamped and more social, but their updates are taking up space on member’s homepages, and in turn, as our data shows, driving lots of traffic and engagement for brands.

The Numbers

At Mashable, we’ve been using our page to share our articles, post photos from our journey to SXSW, and engage users in conversation. And the results so far have been rather stunning. Comparing traffic to MashableMashable reviewsMashable reviews.com referred by Facebook from 3/5-3/11 to 3/12-3/18 the 7-day period before and after the new homepage rolled out, we’ve seen a 75% increase in visitors. Moreover, our Facebook Page itself is seeing 2-3x more visitors on a daily basis than it did in the previous iteration of Facebook’s homepage.

via You Might Not Love the New Facebook, But Brands Should (complete story).

Travis Scott Uncategorized branding, Facebook, new Facebook

In my last blog post I mentioned that reputation management would be the next topic I would discuss.  So, here it goes….

Reputation management is simply the process of being strategic in how you portray your brand online (and offline) and having a system for tracking and responding to information that may be posted by other people or organizations that runs contrary to how you want your brand to be portrayed.

Over the past few years, reputation management has become a very important part of a company’s online marketing strategy.  With the emergence of Web 2.0 and the internet becoming a two-way street for information, so to speak, internet users now have the ability to broadcast their opinions to thousands of people.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the use of social media to promote your business can enable a company to foster an environment in which “brand advocates,” or simply put, people who are very enthusiastic about your brand,  can “virally” spread positive word-of-mouth advertising to their personal and professional networks, which could contain thousands of people.
Although this is an extremely powerful and inexpensive form of advertising, it also creates channels with which individuals who are not an advocate of your brand can spread negative and potentially damaging information and opinions about your company and brand.

The open nature of the internet combined with the power of Google make it easy to find out what is being said about your brand.  How you choose to respond is up to you.  The best way to combat negative information is to prevent it from being posted in the first place, but this isn’t realistic.  Even the most admired companies will have negative things posted about them.  The goal then becomes one of getting the positive posts to outnumber the negative.  If someone is doing research on you and your competitors and come across 1 negative opinion and 100 positive opinion they will most likely consider the negative comment to be an outlier and not a good representation of your brand.

Although it could be impossible to respond to every negative post about your brand, it is important to respond to as many as possible.  In doing so, try not to take the negative post personally, but rather be consultative and non-threatening in your reply.  If the user had a bad experience, apologize and offer something that will encourage them to give your brand another chance.  I would also try to create a dialogue with the individual in an effort to get to the bottom of their dissatisfaction and express your interest in their opinion and how important it is to you and in efforts being made to ensure a better experience for others in the future.

To me, this is the best form of reputation management and an excellent example of a company using Twitter as a reputation management tool is Comcast .  It is very simple to  create a real-time search of instances on Twitter in which your company’s name is discussed.  Comcast will then respond to any issues customers may be experiencing with their service and offer suggestions on how to fix them.

For more information on how Comcast uses Twitter as a reputation management tool, check out my previous blog post which contains an excerpt of, and link to, an article on BusinessWeek.com.

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Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/rainierdigital

Travis Scott Uncategorized Comcast, reputation management, Twitter

I came across the following article on BusinessWeek.com and felt it was a great example of how a company was using Twitter as a reputation management tool.  Enjoy!

Comcast’s Twitter Man

For Frank Eliason, managing the cable giant’s customer service department means tweeting strategically

By Rebecca Reisner

I think it’s safe to call Comcast’s Frank Eliason the most famous customer service manager in the U.S., possibly in the world. Ten months ago, Eliason, whose official title is director of digital care, came up with the idea of using Twitter to interact with customers of Comcast CMCSA, the mammoth provider of cable TV, Internet, and phone services for whom he has worked for a year and a half. Eliason’s maverick status has won him a recent flurry of media attention, and a number of corporations have followed his lead by making Twitter and sometimes other microblogging services such as Jaiku and FriendFeed a means for reaching out to their own consumers and resolving their complaints. About 3.5 million people worldwide use Twitter, mostly to share personal minutiae such as “Just tried Starbuck’s SBUX marbled loaf cake, not bad” with friends who sign up to follow their “tweets,” short messages up to 140 characters long sent via the Web, cell phone, or PDA. To learn more about Twitter basics, you can view the helpful video Twitter in Plain English on YouTube. Eliason discovered that by doing a search for the word “Comcast” and occasionally “Comcrap”, he could find tweeters who just happened to mention service complaints he could address. In December 2008, he celebrated the handling of his 22,000th tweet.

Read the entire article here:   Comcast’s Twitter Man – BusinessWeek.

Travis Scott Uncategorized BusinessWeek, Comcast, reputation management, Twitter

Twitter is getting a lot of press these days.  This morning I opened up the Wall Street Journal (yes, the print edition) and on page W3 of the Weekend Journal was a full-page spread on Twitter.  It even went so far as to show examples of celebrity “tweets” from Eli Manning to Britney Spears.

What seems like a burgeoning fad and source of entertainment for many can also be a powerful marketing and branding tool for companies; especially small businesses and startups with little to no marketing teams and a limited budget for advertising.

If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur, you have probably been asking yourself “what is Twitter and how can I use it to benefit my company?”  Well, allow me to explain…

Twitter was originally designed to be used as a way for people to broadcast what they are doing at any given time, using 140 characters or less.  The idea was that the “tweets, as they are called, could be viewed via text messaging on mobile phones, hence the 140-character limit.  It caught on quickly and soon I was able to know what my brother, who was 2,000 miles away in Indianapolis, was doing over the course of his day.  When my friends in Denver were hitting the slopes and what the conditions were.  Where my friends in Seattle were tailgating before a Seahawks game.  It was great for all of these things, but honestly, was a little redundant given the fact I was also using Facebook’s similar feature.

Then, Twitter began to evolve.  It was no longer just a place to tell friends what I am doing at 11am on a Saturday.  It became a place to disseminate news and information.  Now, if I were browsing the internet, came across an interesting story somewhere, I could now let my friends know about this article and provide a shortened link via bit.ly or tinyurl.com to the story.  I was able to read articles that I may have never found or had the time to find on my own that were being recommended by the people I was “following” on Twitter.  If I find the article interesting, I can now “retweet” or essentially forward my friend’s tweet to my entire network, which could contain 200 or more “followers.”  If one of those friends found the article interesting, they could “retweet” it to their friends, which could be another 200 or 300 “followers.”  Do you see how this has now taken on a viral effect?

This is precisely how it can be beneficial to a business.  The key, as a business, is to provide valued information.  You can’t simply say things like “visit us at www.acme.com.”  That is not going to generate much interest.  However, if you combine a blog or some kind of publishing tool to your website and offer valuable information that is also tied to your industry or products/services, now you have something to “tweet” about.  Whole Foods does a great job of this type of viral marketing using Twitter when they recommend that their followers read an article on their website about eating healthy.  With Twitter and other forms of social media, you are trying to cast a wide net, so to speak, and by doing so reach a few people you may not otherwise been able to reach.

Which leads me to my next point.  Twitter, to be effective, cannot be used in a vacuum or as your sole marketing/advertising vehicle.  To get the most out of Twitter you must use it as a strategic piece to your overall marketing arsenal.  In essence you have to provide value to obtain value.   You want to provide a sounding board for your “fans” and also provide them with valuable information to go along with the products or services they buy from you.  This will then foster repeat business, which is the cheapest form of business, as well as encourage them to tell others about your brand.  Twitter is essentially a PA system for word-of-mouth advertising.  People no longer tell one to three friends about how wonderful your service was at the last dinner party they attended.  Now they can tell hundreds in less than a minute.   And when it is combined with a Facebook profile, Myspace page, YouTube video and LinkedIn profile, it can really cast a wide net with a funnel back to your website and your products and/or services.  Because, let’s face it, they can buy anything unless they have their mouse on the “checkout” button or have a phone number with which to call you.

With that ability to broadcast good news also comes the ability to broadcast bad news, which is my segway into next week’s topic on reputation management and why it is important to your brand.

If you would like to chat about how you could use social media to promote your business drop me a line at travis@rainierdigital.com or give me a call at 425.443.3973.  If we find that using social media is a viable option for you we can discuss how we can work together to get you started.

Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/RainierDigital

Travis Scott Uncategorized advertising, social media marketing, Twitter