I created this presentation for a workshop I ran recently for around 20 different UK brands that were looking to use Twitter as part of their marketing mix. Most of the companies had done very little in the way of marketing on Twitter and they were looking for guidance on how best to approach something that many just didn"€™t see the value in. It's called Twitter Marketing Basics and looks at lots of examples of how companies are using Twitter with practical tips on how to setup or improve your existing Twitter account. It covers: What Twitter is Jargon buster Setting up your profiles The roles that Twitter can play How to write the perfect Tweet The Twitter ecosystem Managing and monitoring Who to follow I hope you find something useful in this presentation. Drop me a line if you would like to know more or add any questions below. Thanks.

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This year, I've heard from quite a few companies and agencies recommending What Users Do for improving their sites and services. I was intrigued by the relatively low cost compared to traditional usability services, so thought it would be useful to share some background on the service. Smart Insights are independent of companies providing tools to improve digital marketing, but are keen to share ideas of the options available and what people think of them - see for example our post reviewing website user feedback tool options. So, please share your experience on similar usability services. Thanks. Over now to Lee Duddell of What Users Do. Here are my questions...

1 What is whatusersdo? Which types of sites/pages does it work best for?

whatusersdo makes it easy for website owners to improve User Experience by observing real people using their…

Question: How should I measure online pr? I am trying to write my objectives for a marketing campaign. Smart Insights Expert Answer: Thanks for your question - it's good to see you're going for SMART objectives... While you may not be able to set specific goals for these, it's worth stating in the plan what you will be measuring, since then you can make sure you're tracking these measures and start to build up a library of the PR or buzz effectiveness of campaigns. As for any goal-setting and measurement you can't stress enough how having clear goals (business specific) is the key, and that those goals are aligned to commercials. I think it's always to break down campaign measures into goals of volume, quality and cost so for PR, the type of measures to consider are:

Volume

Number of mentions of brand or campaign name during the campaign Incremental growth in Facebook Likes or Twitter follows Backlinks…

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recently caused a stir at the Nielsen Consumer 360 conference by reportedly stating that Email is dead (she would say that wouldn't she and if you listen to the whole clip she didn't actually say what she was widely reported to have said). However, her argument that only 11% of teenagers use Email daily is compelling and I find when talking to students they don't really understand the concept of email marketing - they just perceive most marketing emails as Spam while being positive about integrating with brands through social networking sites.

What consumers say about their email and social media usage

Two recent surveys from the email industry suggest email is very healthy in terms of account usage and…

Being partly fascinated by infographs at the moment, I thought I'd share this one that has always intrigued me. It's also a great example of how to create a viral effect in a B2B market by producing something exceptionally useful and shareworthy - you can see how effective it has been as a viral agent - it's been around as a couple of years.

This infograph terrifies me for two simple reasons:

Naturally, all I (we) ever hear people talk about are the big 4: Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and LinkedIn - and though this appears common sense it struck me that looking at that infograph we're not even skimming the surface of the reach we could have based on where relevant conversations and interactions are taking place - and those big 4 are also starting to get busy - imagine 18 months…

Twitter has reached 100 million accounts yet only 20 million are active. How do you keep  your Twitter account active and relevant to your customers and partners when you also have a day job? How do you get others involved? And what do you talk about? In this article I'll show 7 ways Twitter users can better manage and make more of this social media tool. 1 Delegate and share! There are several tools that help you to manage twitter accounts, after all if people are talking about your brand or speaking to you via Twitter, you need to know what they"€™re saying. Tweetdeck works at one level. It"€™s free, easy to use but the downside is you need the user name and password for the account. That"€™s ok if you have a company account "€“ it seems to work ok with several people having the same account open…

Question: How Do I Get My Customers To Recommend Me To Their Friends?

"€œI am interested in learning more about 'Referral Marketing' and wondered if you have any blogs or references on this subject. Essentially, my boss has asked that I e-mail all of my database with a 'Please talk about us' kind of message. I'm not too keen on this as I think it needs to have a bit more substance? Are there examples out there of people doing these types of e-mails? I'm not necessarily talking about incentivising base customers to talk about us, just nudging them to ask them to recommend us. Is that a 'done thing'?"

Answer:

Just asking people to refer does not work -- after all, why would they? Keep it authentic and treat people as you"€™d wish to be treated, we"€™re all human and it can be annoying if you sense you"€™re being hounded…

Email marketing has alway enjoyed a reputation as a reliable source of responses. Send an email, get sales...send an email, get registrations...send an email, get pageviews... While the results are still remarkably good, each year they get a little bit worse...if you accept the ROI figures published by the USA's DMA: 2008 $44.93 (return for every $1 invested) 2009 $43.62 2010 $42.08 (estimated) Not much worse, mind, and many other marketing channels would sell a close relative for those kinds of figures. However, high ROI comes largely from email's low costs. If you want to ramp up the actual profits attributable to email, you have to invest more in targeting and technology. The rate of decline also depends on what else is going on in the online environment. And there are several trends that warn against email complacency.

1. The diversification of communication

For many years, email was pretty much the only way you could get updates on…

The most inevitable trend in marketing?

As you know, advertising has pretty much worn out its effectiveness. In my experience it has been this way for years now, evidenced through increasing marketing cost and decreasing ROI. The key challenge therefore is figuring out what's going to replace interruptive advertising. This is where social media has gained so much attention - but in truth social media is powered by content, as Chris Brogan puts it, "€œContent is a means to deliver interest. It"€™s a gathering place for you and the people you hope to entertain / attract / educate / equip... [it"€™s] wood for the fireplace around which great stories are told"€.

So, I want to focus this post on the fuel that powers those social media conversations - because I believe it"€™s central to success in marketing, whether you"€™re already hot on social media or not. Consider…

Through their experience, search marketing specialists know intuitively the questions to ask to review and improve the contribution of search marketing to an organisation. But what if you"€™re a business owner or marketer where search marketing is only a (small) part of what you do? Which questions should you be asking and where do look in your web analytics to find the answers? Our compilation of top-level questions is intended to give you a framework of questions to ask yourself or colleagues or agencies who are managing search engine marketing. Your review frequency will depend on the importance of search to your business. But you'll want to review the time-series or trends through time of the KPIs we suggest  these over a period of at least 3 months to see changes in performance. This is the type of report you should produce to review effectiveness over time - fairly stable performance in this…