Recognising and Rewarding Online Advocacy

Every brand will have its Advocates and its Detractors. There’s no avoiding the fact that some online users will be negative about your brand, but this is why you must value your advocates (find out how to respond to those comments in this Smartinsights article on managing online conversations). They will come to your defence, balance any negativity and even, in some cases, turn your detractors into new advocates for you. So what is an Advocate? In simple terms, an Advocate is 'a person who publicly supports or recommends a particular cause or policy’ or, in this case, a particular brand, service or product. We’re talking about real advocacy, not people who have been paid to talk about a brand; organic advocacy is much more valuable. These are the people who rave in forums about your products,…

Ideas for improving your blogger outreach

In a world where consumers are bombarded by advertising, how can you cut through the noise to deliver your brand message in a meaningful manner? Word of mouth recommendations are nothing new, but with the evolution of social media, recommendations can now reach hundreds if not thousands or millions of people. Then of course, there’s the new breed of influencer - the blogger. With established communities, bloggers command authority and trust from their readers having spent years honing their writing skill and content, studying their analytics and engaging with their readers. They know their audience better than anyone else and can talk about your brand in a way that they know their readers will relate to. A positive opinion about a brand or product by a blogger can be transferred to their audience, resulting in referral traffic and sales. So, we’ve established that there’s significant value in engaging…

The Shape Of Things To Come? How social media should influence our campaign creativity

Noticed anything different about snowmen this winter? Of course, the Christmas episode of Dr Who might have prompted a few of us to revise the long-held perception of them as representations of jolly, portly folk prone to roaming the skies while singing.

But what about in real life? Have you noticed that the traditional and rather simple model – two balls of snow (one big, one small) a couple of twigs for arms, a carrot for a nose and lumps of coal for eyes – is changing? Across the world, a fall of snow now seems to be more a blank canvas; a chance to go out and create something inventive, different, eye-catching. And it would seem we have social media to thank for that. Thanks to our smartphones, it’s not just our neighbours…

Using social media monitoring to evaluate the success of your digital marketing campaigns and reach your goals

When planning your digital marketing strategy or campaigns, you probably have a range of targets and goals for social media in mind that you are hoping to achieve, and that will help you measure your success. But how do you assess whether you are reaching these goals in practice? In this post I will outline the type of goals to consider and tools and techniques to assess success. For example, you might consider one or a combination of the following as goals when approaching integrating social in your business: Increase in followers/fans Increase in requests for information Increase in leads Increase in sales (of a specific product/service, or of everything, or perhaps in a specific market). Social media monitoring allows you to add another string to your bow, so to speak, by allowing you to…

14 simple steps to help find relevant influencers

Lots of people will tell you ”Social Media Influencers” are the key to social media marketing, but what does that really mean? Is influence based on number of connections? Klout, Peer Index or Kred score? A combination of all of the above? How do you identify them and what do you do with that information once you think you know who they are? The short answer is all and none of the above. There is no cookie cutter answer for creating an influencer list on a particular topic because you have to fine tune the list of influencers to the ones who are most likely to be interested in what you have and willing to…

Infographic shows the preferences of 72 UK journalists

Seeding social media assets like video and infographics to journalists of traditional publications is still important today, particularly since the online sites of many publications now publish these type of assets. They have huge reach too, of course. Given the continuing importance of engaging traditional journalists in addition to blogger outreach, I though this was an interesting infographic. It shows how journalists prefer to research and be contacted. Twitter and blogs seems to be the most favoured approaches. This infographic is produced by Text 100 public relations to mark their sponsorship of this weeks Social Media World Forum. If you can't make it, you can follow it on #SMWF.  …

Five types of tools and techniques to keep up with the socialsphere

I think you'd agree that trying to stay informed and up-to-date with the latest developments in digital and social media marketing is a bit of a challenge? The scale of this challenge was brought home to me by these 60 seconds in social media infographics. This is a particular challenge for me since I'm keen to keep my books up-to-date and deliver the most relevant info via SmartInsight to our Enewsletter, Facebook and Twitter subscribers. So I need to scan a lot of sources across the whole of digital marketing, as many non-specialist marketers/digital marketers do, but then find the most important ones - this is where software can help. So in this post I thought I'd share a couple of the approaches and tools I use. It's not at all sophisticated really, so do let me know about how…

[caption id="attachment_7731" align="alignright" width="360" caption="Slideshare: a part of the hub-and-spoke approach"][/caption] I think many readers will be familiar with Slideshare, a business-to-business (mostly) presentation sharing website which enables organisations to upload their PowerPoint presentations (or Mac Keynote) and Word documents and share them with the world. It’s an excellent way to showcase your thought leadership ideas as part of a content marketing strategy. As an example, you may have seen Dave Chaffey's Slideshare, its power is shown because some presentations like this one on trends for 2012 will reach several times more people through Slideshare's platform than the embeds on Smart Insights. This happens because Slideshare facilitates sharing within it's platform and through the social networks. Elqoua and Hubspot are both great examples of leveraging Slideshare to its best potential, they leverage the paid service to turn Slideshare into a well branded…

Showing the power of blogger outreach

I thought this was a nice example of how a relatively small number of bloggers can get a campaign message across to a wider audience. In 2010 Renault launched a new range of zero emission vehicles. Renault’s objective was to get people talking about the range, and especially the star model, the TWIZY. Renault wanted to create links with opinion leaders sensitive to the automotive sector but also to ecology and new technologies. To reach influencers and help spread the word about the new model, Agency BuzzParadise organised a special meeting at an international event, LeWeb. The idea was for Renault to use this platform to set up viral advertising aimed at a target sensitive to technological advances. Invitations were sent to thirteen bloggers from France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Spain writing about High-Tech, Trends, Innovation and Scientific themes.…

How popular is Quora? Latest statistics on Quora growth

As fans of the principle behind the online Q&A concept, we really like Quora so thought we'd share this infographic from Kissmetrics. We're not  as wrapped up as some with the Quora concept though - you can see our previous see our previous review explaining options for using Quora for marketing. Given how spoilt we are with the mega numbers on Facebook or You Tube,  you're not going to be blown away, but Quora is showing strong growth (50% over last year) and has a committed user base. Most interesting is Kissmetrics have mapped how different users interact with it - this is useful from a broader social media context when you consider previous related models like Forrester's Social Technographics Ladder. [caption id="attachment_4876" align="aligncenter" width="576" caption="Quora Statisitics"][/caption]…