Introducing the Offline Social Networking Game: A tactile social game for the whole crew. Turn your office into a place where the popular people feel better about themselves and the rest of us hate our lives. (ummm…) Ok, so that’s not very nice (and not really true at all), but using only a paper box and slips of paper, you can take your online social networking skills to the real-world level. Benefits And Rewards We hate to make crazy promises, but we think the Offline Social Networking Game might give you at least a few of the following benefits: You’ll [...]
Getting a Google+ profile for our business has grown in importance now that Google, the leading Internet search engine, has made changes to how their searches work. The Google social search, called ‘Search Plus Your World‘, mixes public Google+ pages with regular search results. The idea is to make it easier for people to find all relevant information, including content that might be provided by friends privately through the Google+ and Picasa Web networks. So far, this new search option doesn’t include other social networks like Facebook or Twitter. What does that mean for us? It means we need to [...]
Just 10 days ago, Google announced a major new initiative to incorporate social media into our search results. The combination of social media and search has a sticky past – and from the looks of it, it’s only getting more gooey. From Google: “Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search. We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and [...]
With Facebook, there are more than a few hidden features that can mean a lot to any business if leveraged properly. Recommendations are one of those features, and just about any business can take advantage of them with almost no effort at all. One of the main reasons that businesses get involved in social media is because of the sharing opportunities they provide for fans and customers. Facebook recommendations provide a simple way for anyone who likes your page to ‘recommend’ you to a friend. Think of this as a customer review, but with a more positive twist. How Facebook [...]
As another year comes to close, we know that you are all wondering who will be on Santa’s much coveted Social Media Naughty and Nice List. Well, there’s great news – we here at Todaymade have received early access to the list and are ready to share it with you today. Enjoy this short video to see what Santa and his elves have been up to at the workshop. Social media made 2011 a great year, and so did all of our loyal readers, fans, followers, and clients. From Todaymade, we hope your holiday season is filled with joy and [...]
For the most part, marketing is a relatively simple idea. We develop a product, identify the audience, and then sell it to them based on the benefits it provides. The way we usually do this is through advertising methods like radio, newspaper, and television. But, I challenge you to think about this scenario for just a minute. Your customers are sitting in their living room enjoying a show, when your ad suddenly interrupts them right in the middle of doing something that they enjoy. Not cool, right? We all know from experience that this type of advertising is annoying, and [...]
Every business is in the business of solving problems, but more often than not, we see those problems differently than our customers do. We tend to look at the problems we solve through the lens of features that we offer, rather than the benefits they provide. For example, if you sell insoles, it would be easy to think that you solve the problem of sore feet, but what about an aching back, or being cranky at work? Your customers use and enjoy your products for many different reasons. Your job is to constantly be peeling back the layers to understand [...]
With the yearly celebration of giving thanks upon us, I figure that now is as good a time as any to cover how you can say thank you to your online community. In an era where marketing coordinator has started to mean community cultivator, we need to learn to give back to those that have made us successful online. Building a community of fans that all know, like, and trust us is not an easy task. It takes work, and we need always remember to thank the ones that got us there in the first place. This list is not [...]
Social media is not something that we can ignore anymore. It has changed marketing and business for good. Businesses that want to be taken seriously, as we move into what is now being called the age of the customer, need to develop a social media lifestyle. And, this really lifestyle really needs to start at the top. In today’s video post, we discuss what it takes to develop a social media way of life. For those of you that have hesitated in making social media an obvious and clear part of your day, there is no better time than now [...]
Today is our second official Fireside Chat, a new video blog series that we will be posting once per week. You can see last weeks here. Today, we are talking about two social media books that we think every serious marketer needs to read. The thing about social media is that it isn’t only our methods and tools that have changed. The way we think as marketers and business owners needs to change, as well. Social media has not only changed marketing, it has changed communication. It has also changed every other aspect of marketing, not just online. So, these [...]
In this video we give a quick tutorial on how to set up your own Google+ page, and how to do some basic customization. If you haven’t heard much about Google+ branded pages, here is an article over at Mashable about the recent launch. Google+ is not a “must have” for local brands yet, although it holds some very exciting opportunities for Google searches and SEO. One of the most interesting features is Google+ Direct Connect. I cover it briefly in my video, but blogger Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land does a much better job. Good luck, and [...]
Many times when visiting with people about social media, it is discussed as a tool for acquiring new customers. This is often the case in traditional marketing and advertising as well. Ironically, for many industries, it costs more money to acquire new customers than it does to sell to current ones. So, the question is, why do we constantly make social media about customer acquisition when there are plenty of other opportunities elsewhere? For example, there are many great examples of social media being used to support current customers. Take Best Buy as an example. It’s @twelpforce Twitter account is [...]
All of the experts tell you to monitor your brand, and to be responsive to the needs of your online audience, but rarely do they tell you what to do when you have no audience. What do you do if no one is talking about your brand? Here are a few quick tips that should help rouse up some conversation.
Social media is kind-of a big deal. Everyone needs it, everyone wants it, but not everyone gets it. There are thousands of Facebook pages out there that have never made it past the first few posts. So, what happened? In some cases, it could be a technical problem, or a lack of understanding. After all, there are plenty of us that don’t know what we should be saying on social networks. My guess, however, is that the problem is something completely different. I think it’s lack of results that has turned them away. We live in a world that has [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] The book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie was one of the first self-help books ever published. It is also one of the bestselling, have you read it? For many salesmen and marketers, this book has been required reading for generations. But, the principals outlined don’t only work in the board-room. They also work online. If fact, Socialnomics author Erik Qualman has said that todays successful companies need to act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Man, which [...]
After finishing up a presentation the other day about push marketing, a customer asked me what they were suppose to do with their traditional marketing budget. “75% of our marketing is traditional marketing,” she said. “Are you saying that I need to cancel it?” I think my answer surprised her when I said “nope, don’t cancel a thing.” A lot of times, marketers like to make the discussion about traditional vs. social media when it really doesn’t have to be that way. There is no doubt that social is stealing some of the traditional thunder, but the world isn’t black [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing Better Websites Series.] By now, we all know that first lesson in marketing is to define your core audience, and the second is to understand what you do best. But, when it comes to creating online content for a social network or blog, things get fuzzy. The question that starts popping around in our head is “will anyone care?” They Don’t Care The safest assumption that you can make is to assume that they won’t care. I know, it can be hard to hear, but it is the real truth. If you think about [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing series The Complete How To Guide for Twitter Marketing] Often times, the simplest sounding questions come with the most complicated answers. Trying to figure out what the best time of the day to tweet is precisely one of the questions. The “what time” debate has raged on for years already, and it will only continue. I mean, we honestly still haven’t figured out what the best time for email marketing is, how on earth are we suppose to understand Twitter already? There are several theories out there that attempt to answer this question. [...]
Defining an audience is one of the most talked about, and least understood, activities of marketing. It is an essential part of marketing, no matter the medium, but it is rarely done correctly. Usually, when we start talking about audience we go straight for demographics. We start thinking about customers age, sex, and something more personal like marital status. But, breaking our audience down into a series of statistics may not be all that productive. After all, we aren’t trading baseball cards. You see, the ‘real’ audience that we are after is a lot more human than these mere statistics [...]
By now you have most likely heard about the changes that the CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg announced at the f8 conference in San Francisco. If you haven’t, the long and short of it is that the new Facebook is very different from the one that we all know and love. And, that probably isn’t a bad thing either. Yesterday’s outline of Facebook’s future made it absolutely clear that the goal of Facebook is to become THE social layer that we all use to communicate and document our lives online. Their goals may sound lofty, but if any company was [...]