The more I see the outburst on TV or YouTube the more I think it was a marketing ploy set in motion by a few major media players. First of all, the VMAs have been worthless for the past 10 years. Hell, I didn’t even think they were still on or maybe I have been confusing them with the Disney Channel’s music awards. Anyway, I haven’t been the target demographic for quite some time.
I am very excited about my client, FeeTrader.com’s launch today! I think they offer a great service and I’m very grateful to be an integral part of their launch.
FeeTrader.com is a free, split-fee network for agency recruiters. It was a perfect match for RainierDigital since I have been involved in the recruiting world in some capacity for the last five years.
Congratulations on the launch guys! I’m looking forward to sending mucho web traffic your way!
I was on YouTube this evening looking at old Rainier Beer commercials as the Nuggets game got out of hand in the first half. Thought this was a fitting ad to share given the name of my company is RainierDigital. Enjoy!
This is an excellent article for anyone that is new to Twitter and still trying to figure it out.
by Ben Parr | Mashable.com | April 16th, 2009
Retweeting is an integral part of the Twitter experience. The retweet (or “RT”) allows Twitter users to share the best links, tweets, and gems they find from others using the service. But for beginners, it’s not immediately obvious what retweets are, or what tools to use to make retweeting easier.
This HOW TO article not only covers the basics of retweeting, but also highlights some of the best web and mobile-based tools for retweeting and tracking RTs in real-time. If you’re a Twitter beginner, we hope you find it useful; if you’re a more advanced user, we hope you’ll share it with friends who are just starting out.
Retweeting is how Twitter users share interesting tweets from the people they are following. They copy and paste the original tweet and send it out. To give credit to the original person, users usually put “RT” plus the originator’s username at the beginning of the tweet. Here’s an example:
Check out the other 4 tips as well as the entire article here: HOW TO: Retweet on Twitter
By Travis Scott, RainierDigital | April 8th, 2009
With the recent explosion in the popularity of Twitter I have been hearing complaints from people who are trying it out for the first time. A lot of people don’t know what to make of it and are probably a little intimidated at first. It is almost like learning a new language when you see things like RT and @milehighguy and #SXSW.
That’s why I thought I would take a step back for a minute and try to explain things in a simple, easy to understand way and for those finally taking the plunge. There is so much information to cover that I could really write an entire book about this – and people have. “Twitter Power” by Joel Comm is one of these books that I would highly recommend. I would also suggest following Joel on Twitter – http://twitter.com/joelcomm.
What is Twitter?
Twitter was launched in 2006 and was intended to be a way to keep people connected and in touch with that is going on with them on a daily, hourly and even minute-by-minute basis. All in 140 characters or less- which, by no surprise, is also the maximum number of characters that can be used in mobile phone text messages.
Jumping In
When it comes to Twitter, it can sometimes feel like you’re standing on the bank of a river waiting for the perfect time to jump. The only problem is that the water isn’t going to stop, so you might as well just jump. The same can be said for Twitter and, really, social media as a whole. If you’re late to the game, don’t wait any longer, because it will not stop anytime soon so you can catch up. Jump right in.
By this point in time, you have probably gone to Twitter and are wondering, “who cares what I am doing?” and “why do I care what other people are doing?”
And that’s a valid question, but Twitter has evolved into much more than simply a place to state “what are you doing?” It has become a place for people to share information about what is going on in the world around them. After you have built up a list of people you are following, you will be amazed at how much you can learn.
Once you have an account, do something with it. First, find some people to follow. When you create your account, one of the first things it will ask is if you want to check your email clients to find your friends that are on Twitter. Do this!
Next, change your profile picture- don’t just settle for the brown and blue “o_O” picture they provide.
Once you have done these two things, next look for other people to follow that you may share similar interests with. A good place to find these people is at www.search.twitter.com where you can do a keyword search of topics that interest you. I would suggest following anyone you find interesting and they will likely follow you back.
Learn From Others
Now that you are following people, it is a good idea to take a day or two and observe what is going on in your new “twittersphere.” Despite my advice on just jumping in, there is a little “twitter etiquette” to learn so that people can find your tweets and respond as well as understand what you are trying to say.
With that, I will now provide a rundown of Twitter definitions:
Now let’s put it together. Here is an example from someone I am following:
You probably noticed the link that was included in the example above. Because you are limited to only 140 characters it is important to shorten the URLs you add by using a URL shortening service such as Bit.ly or tinurl.com. I prefer to use Digg’s new tool, which I cover in a previous blog post. I also recently posted an article I found on searchengineland.com titled “Analysis: Which URL Shortening Service Should You Use,” which lists the pros and cons of many of the most popular services.
As a way to better understand Twitter…one way to look at it (and how it has been explained to me several times) is to think of Twitter as if you are at a cocktail party. People are usually off in different groups talking about different topics. Usually you find a topic you want to chat about and join the conversation. Twitter is very similar. Find a topic that interests you, find a conversation that interests you and jump in.
Also, it is very important to add the @ before their username because this will also trigger Twitter to add the reply to that person’s “@ Replies” in their Twitter page (see example below). You will also notice in the example below that you can send Direct Messages and save your favorite “tweets.” Direct messages are private messages between two users. The only constraint is that the message can be no longer than 160 characters. So brevity still rules the day.
I realize this is a lot of information, but I hope it has helped you get started with Twitter. If you have any questions about any of this, please don’t hesitate to comment below or send me an email (travis@rainierdigital.com). Or, even better, follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/rainierdigital) and ask me a question there. Be sure to add “@rainierdigital” to your “tweet” so I will receive it in my “@ Replies” box in Twitter or just send me a direct message.
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).
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
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!
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.
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
John Cook wrote an interesting article on TechFlash last week about the lack of media buzz associated with Seattle startups and I have included a excerpt below. Generating buzz, both in the media and in general, can sometimes be expensive and daunting.
The viral nature of social media/Web 2.0 can put your company and brand in front of thousands of people and generate leads from some of the unlikeliest of places. And the good news is that it costs close to nothing to maintain.
The key is figuring out where you need to be and what you need to say. That’s where I can help. Email me at info@rainierdigital.com if you would like more information about how I can help your small business take advantage of these powerful resources. You can also click the ” How? ” tab at the top of the page.
Seattle startups lack media buzz in YouNoodle ranking
By John Cook on February 19, 2009 at 12:32 PST
Seattle | Startups | TechFlash | Smilebox | Wetpaint | Zillow
YouNoodle made a splash last summer when it announced an online service that attempted to determine the valuations of startup companies. Now, the San Francisco company is attempting to measure the media buzz around those companies.
Today, it introduced YouNoodle Scores — described as “a quantitative measurement, on a scale of 0 to 100, of a startups impact and importance based on its traction, activity, and buzz.” I took the new service — which includes 27,000 startups — for a test drive this morning to guage the buzz factor for the top 10 companies from the Seattle 2.0 list. What did I find?
Click the link below to read the full story on TechFlash…
via Seattle startups lack media buzz in YouNoodle ranking – TechFlash: Seattles Technology News Source.
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