social media marketing

An Online Marketing Argument for Non-Believers

I am writing today to those of you who don’t think your business would benefit, or those who are not taking part in your companies inevitable involvement in online marketing. So if this is you, take a few moments and read on.

Online Marketing Relies on the Interconnections between People Online

The following explanation has its roots in the study of Stanley Milgram, who was an American social psychologist who was fascinated by all aspects of social order. For more details on his studies you can see this recent article on PSYBLOG.

I intend to focus on his studies of the interconnectedness of human societies.

In 1969 he conducted an experiment which sent letters to random people in Nebraska or Boston and asking them to forward it to someone who might be more likely to know the target person, who lived in Massachusetts (Travers & Milgram, 1969).

He found that on average it would take 5.2 intermediaries for his letter to go from the first person to its destination, via each person’s social network.

This was 1969 and the experiment required the subjects to overcome the relatively high obstacle of physically mailing something, and to rely on their social network which (without the online networking tools of today) was significantly smaller, yet it still only took 5.2 intermediaries to find its mark.

This Number is Surely Lower Today

With the average number of online connections reaching the thousands the ability to sort and direct information today is much higher than when this study was conducted.

Here is a Facebook insight Statistic from a recently launched real estate company Facebook Page:

Notice two stunning statistics here: 87 people have liked the page, and if they all shared the page’s next post, it would reach 24,885 people. Amazing isn’t it? That is 286 friends per person who liked the page, and what this does not tell us is how many connections those friends of fans would bring to the table.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Social Networks (Share on Them) But Host Your Own Website

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Why Host Your Own Website, Social Networks Host a Page for You for Free?

Today Posterous got bought by Twitter, and likely will fade away and be shut down in the not too distant future. It follows a long line of other social networks, some alive but irrelevant like MySpace, and others that have been shut down completely.

The image above is from The Next Web delivering the news today, and those who have built their web presence around a Posterous space are now left to either try and move it or start anew. I am here to explain why you cshould choose a wordpress sefl hosted site over other social networks.

This moving around could all be avoided, and should be avoided at all costs, by any business who wants an online presence. You need to create and host your own content, on your own website, and it is easy and not that much money either.

I host all my sites (15+) on one Bluehost account which runs about $5.95 a month, then I build them on wordpress using the genesis framework of amazing WordPress themes. You can check them out here: StudioPress Themes for WordPress, by using wordpress I can log in from any browser and post/edit/manage my website without needing any software on whichever computer or device I am using. I can also use the wordpress app on any iOS or Android device to make the edits. It truly is as simple as can be imagined for a self hosted website. I am an affiliate of both of these companies and you can see them in action here on spirocks.com, I love using them.

But You Want to Be on these Social Networks

You can be, in fact you will get more out of social networks this way. Here is how the workflow goes:

Create Content for your blog. Video, Text, Photos, etc.
Share the link to that post on your Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr, Pinterest, Etc…
When people click on those posts they are led back to your website/blog and you get a chance to show them more.

Now in this scenario if Posterous is gone, all you lose is the links from your blog that you shared there, not the actual content that you spent time, effort, and money creating.

It is clearly the way to go, and sooner or later there is always a new popular site, and a fading older one, so why not be a part of them while they are vibrant and not lose anything when they fade away?

What are your thoughts?

Find me on Twitter and say HI here: @Spirocks and be sure to subscribe to my updates above.

Blog is the Foundation — Your Blog is Your Online Foundation

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

The Only Way to Put Your Business in the Center of Attention

Spiro Pappadopoulos

The time to deny it, IS OVER, mobile internet rules the day.

If you question this, do the following:

Look at any child with your iPhone or iPad.
Look at your spouse across the table from you.
See what people are doing on the train.
Check out what gets the attention of people in line at Starbucks.
what was the driver of that car that swerved at you on the highway today doing?

Ignore it at your own peril, the future is in the pockets of all of your customers. Is your marketing online? Do you give it the credit it deserves? Is your website usable on mobile devices?

If you are using flash, do not have a mobile ready site, or spend your time and dollars on offline marketing only, the answer is no, and you are losing out regardless of whether you feel it or not.

Mobile is an Opportunity not a Threat.

Can you deliver more than your competitors via online content, mobile access, and social integration? Are you ready to allow your customer to know you, the real you? If you are you will be the new king of your market before long, as the customers you seek will be found here.

Where is Here?

Here is everywhere now. Here is where ever they are when they think they need what you sell. Here is on the toilet. Here is on top of the Empire State Building. Here is in an airplane. Here is in a Doctor’s Office waiting room.

People buy diapers on Amazon from a bar at 1Am, and you don’t think they are going to search for an eyeglass shop while they wait for their coffee in the morning?

Ask yourself if you have done enough to put your business where people are looking for you. THEN DO MORE.

Find Me @spirocks on Twitter, I hope you enjoyed this pep talk.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Social Proof helps Launch a Restaurant

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Social Proof (noun) – The impact that an individual’s friends and acquaintances have on their likely hood to buy a product or service from a brand, derived from the commentary and activity the friends and acquaintances have with the brand on social networks and in social settings.

Ok so like I said in the video, Andolini’s has been open to the public for less than two full nights as I write this and I wanted to give examples of many kinds of social proof that have happened already. Its a motivator to be out there and get involved, and to ask for help if need be. This results in sales as you will see right now.

Open Announcement and Reactions Social Proof

Here you can see a post on my personal facebook page where I announced that Andolini’s was open. You can see that in the hours since it was posted 10 people have liked it and three more have commented. What this means is a few things:

A high level of engagement will likely push this post into the ‘Top News’ feed, which will result in just about all of my friends and all of these people’s friends seeing the post and comments.
By commenting on this, each of these people have brought it to the attention of all their friends via their Wall, where facebook places a notification that Dental Bright ‘likes’ the post.

Interaction and Testimonial Social Proof

As you can see here we have posted several photos of the food that we are serving at Andolini’s which a customer who had been waiting for us to open saw. The restaurant being responsive and answering him in a timely fashion is key here, and I think it is clear that he will be in soon. Down at the bottom Mr. Newman had been in the night before and posted a comment that serves as a quick review and endorsement. This post is a great example of social proof for a couple of reasons:

Interaction via the posts comments led to Mat letting us know he was coming soon, any of his friends who see his post will take that as an endorsement and be more inclined to try the restaurant.
A customer that has already come in raves and encourages people to try it. You don’t need me to explain why that is social proof I hope!

Third Party Generated Social Proof

This example differs from the previous two because in this case neither I nor the restaurant initiated any of the posting, it was purely the result of these people being inspired by something they saw or heard about Andolini’s. This is the best kind of social proof, because their friends will see that they were inspired to post and the friends will have a natural curiosity as to why.

The Social Proof of a Champion

Champion (noun) – An individual who is devoted to your brand and is passionate about promoting it for you.

As I have been writing what you have been reading, the above dialogue has been going on on facebook. The social proof of a Champion is a nice thing to nurture and enjoy. In this case the role of Champion is played well by Meah, who starts by praising the restaurant after her first visit tonight. When a friend of her refers to another Italian restaurant in a neighboring town she quickly re-iterates her preference and strong endorsement for our new place. You can see from the rest of the comments that having a champion is a great source of social proof.

Social to Sales – Social Proof

This is actually a husband and wife, and as you can see a post leads to them coming in for dinner immediately. Which is nice as that is the end goal, that in itself is not the social proof. Though it is proof that social media leads to sales. 🙂 Anyway the proof is in the fact that these messages were broadcast to all their followers on twitter, who may very well be influenced just by that, and or ask them how it was today. Anytime a customer shares the fact that she/he is spending money at your place with all their social contacts, repeat after me: THAT IS SOCIAL PROOF.

I have ton more screenshots to share, but I think you get the point by now. If you want to see more just check out the gallery at the bottom of this post.

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If you are interested in what me and my team at GuestFeed can do for you at your business or in your professional practice, you can contact me here, on twitter @spirocks, at spiro@guestfeed.com, or at 617-379-3015.

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Trust Points

Spiro Pappadopoulos

I would like to introduce you to Ryan Critchett, an enthusiastic and active participant in the thought and process of social media integration in businesses. His energy is infectious and I quickly thought it would be nice to share his thoughts with all of you, so without further ado here is what he wrote for you:

Social Business Trust Points – Strategy Or Integration?

What are you moving toward? More specifically, when you’re tweeting out, Facebooking and blogging up a storm, what are your objectives? I’ve thought about this at length and I keep coming up with, you’re trying to create trust points.

Trust points: Points at which people trust you, as a brand or organization, that lead to actions that directly benefit that brand or organization.

Actions: Links to your website, writing about your brand, talking you up over breakfast with friends, direct referrals and actual buys of your product or service.

The question really becomes, how do I create content and interaction that naturally leads to those trust points, which get people to take the kinds of actions that benefit my company?

This becomes the game.

Let me introduce myself. I’m Ryan Critchett, I’m a blogger and an entrepreneur, I love people and am fascinated by the social revolution, but most importantly, as it relates to this, I’m really into doing things the right way, when it comes to human interaction.

Let’s talk marketing. Traditional marketing is about strategy right? Even social media is about strategy but what has been making its way into our world is the growing need to actually become something that naturally attracts people, leads and if you can convert, sales as well.

Let’s talk social media integration. Social media integration is the act of integrating a permanent social business operation into your organization, becoming a social company, and as a result, attracting great customer interaction, leads, solving problems, putting fires out and a whole group of other beneficial business elements.

But coming from a traditional media marketing standpoint, a lot of people just want to execute on a strategy, and let it all fly. They go “let’s design a campaign.” They say “how many impressions can we get,” and their sole mission in social is to push and make dollars as a result.

Sadly, to their dismay, the results are sub-par to say the least: the customer (or potential customer) tunes them out.

So what is the answer? How do we really “do” this social thing and get real results?

Well if you know anything about people, and more importantly as it relates to this, the shift in the collective business mindset taking place right now as a result of social technology, you’d know that more and more, what we’re really seeking, is authentic, natural human interaction mixed with a lot of excitement.

Well what happens if you have a company that is not human? That doesn’t really like communicating with the public? That’s only into whatever will get people whipping out their credit cards and doesn’t believe they have to be exciting, or social?

They fall behind. Times are changing. People are changing. Media is changing and an alignment is necessary.

Social business alignment really demands that business organizations change themselves psychological and systemically to align with the increasingly social consumer. Moving forward into 2012, that’s going to be the big win.

Let’s bring it all together. Trust points are what you’re moving toward. To naturally create trust points that create lead generation, sales, and whatever else your social media goals are, you need an actual social integration as opposed to a “campaign,” which implies a kind of one shot deal.

People from your organization have to change their behavior to become more social. You have to begin to consider hiring charismatic, naturally social people in the selection process for positions in your company.

Leadership in your business needs to learn how to create content and engagement that actually hits people’s emotional centers, as opposed to just their buying triggers.

And you have to have an ongoing integral strategy of creating content that excites people, builds trust points with them and naturally pulls them in.

Social media is not a strategy, it’s something that works best when fully woven into the fabric of an organization and building solid trust points with your target market, that lead to the kinds of actions that benefit your company, is an ongoing, time consuming, but well worth it, reality.

Thanks Ryan for a great well thought out idea and explanation, if you want to see more about Ryan remember the link in the intro and you can always click here to see what’s new on Spirocks.com

I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Getting the most from your Blog?

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Thoughts from the Beach…

Whether a small business or a professional your blog is not only a part of your online marketing efforts, it should be your lynchpin that holds it all together. Now since you are creating posts that share valuable and interesting information and offers on a regular basis it is time to make sure that you are getting the most from this library of content you have created.

Have you heard of Evergreen Content?

That is a term that refers to blog posts that contain information that si not date specific and still of value to the reader months or even years after it is written. Just because it is buried thirty posts ago doesn’t mean it is done and gone forever. Google search will have them indexed and send visitors too your pages when they are relevant to search terms. That is one of the primary reasons we write blogs, to create content about the business we are marketing, and allow customers to find us via search. You may have heard of inbound marketing and this is a founding principle of that method.

But we want to Turbo Charge Inbound Marketing

Search is amazingly easy, and it currently sends upwards of 20% of the traffic to this blog, but we want more, faster. Sharing via social networks and email is the obvious answer, but how you do it will determine success or failure. At GuestFeed we pay careful attention to the frequency of messages we send out for ourselves and for our customers, I created the EFT Ratio to aid us in maintaining a helpful non-intrusive vibe with our followers. I believe it is one of the primary reasons that our clients and our own followings have increased so rapidly.

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We made a tool to Help

So we spent a lot of time creating great content, most of it evergreen, and tried to determine how to best share it. The over riding principle is that no matter what we don’t want to come across as a spammer, or annoying, or repetitive. But we want to share our evergreen posts more than once, especially on twitter. That is how Spoke Social was born, we wanted to create a tool that both our clients and us could use to help automate some of the sharing. How we do it:

We write a great post first.
Next we share it immediately on all our networks.
Then we schedule it to be reposted with Spoke on twitter at a specific interval, like every 15 days, for a specific timeframe, like until August 25th.
Then we monitor the click throughs and page views for all our pages. When one of them is clearly a STUD post with great interaction numbers we share it again on Facebook a month later with a comment along the lines of ‘In case you missed it the first time check out our most popular post of the past month.’

Isn’t automation Evil?

The answer is yes and no. Yes if your feed is a robot driven non-human inconsiderate self serving stream of boringness. No if you automate a very small percentage of what you send out, and if it is sincerely helpful things you are sharing. Check my twitter feed for an idea of what I mean: @spirocks

Keep in mind that EFT ratio idea from earlier, on twitter it is highly unlikely that a large percentage of your following will see a particular tweet. It is just the way it is with twitters real time stream of tweets pushing your last one out of view quickly. So with that understanding the second or third time that you share a post may be the first time that it is seen by a follower. That means that was their only opportunity to see what you are sharing and decide if it was of interest to them.

Take a look at this screenshot, see the spikes? Those are re-shares on twitter. What this tells me is that there were a bunch of people who were seeing this for the first time even three months after the post was written.

So why do we need a tool to help us automate the Re-Posts? Well creating content is time consuming and time is short when you are running a business. Spoke allows us to schedule posts out as long as we want with exact frequency in a matter of 10 seconds. That single feature would make it worth using for us, of course we use more of Spoke’s capabilities but scheduling recurring messages alone is the key one for us. Of course you can manually schedule posts with Hootsuite, we tried that and found that we were just not doing it as much because it was cumbersome and repetitive.

The bottom line is that you should do it, it is proven to drive more traffic to your blog, which means more potential customers are exposed to the fantastic things you are doing.

That is successful marketing defined.

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I am Spirocks on Twitter.

Features Google+ beats Facebook At (part 3)

Spiro Pappadopoulos

This is part 3 to a series of posts on features that Google plus does better than Facebook. Part 1 (photos) and Part 2 (open development) can be found at these links and I hope you enjoy this series. I really wanted to write about Google “Hangouts” today, the video group chat feature that has the potential to deal a serious blow to Skype. But I am devoted to writing about what is truly the most important feature first, so maybe hangouts next… now it is time for:

Google+ is better at Privacy than Facebook

You already knew that right? I know. But here are ways and reasons that may not have crossed your mind yet. I call them the granularization of privacy (my word) in Google+. Everyone is talking circles, and rightly so, the ability to define groups of individuals to share certain items with is a simple yet novel approach to the online sharing quandary. What I see is that Google+ has a chance to be THE SOCIAL NETWORK, not a niche site. I think LinkedIn should be worried, as should Facebook.

Google+ could replace both LinkedIn and Facebook for Most Users

Lets be honest, the things you share and the info you put forth on Facebook is significantly different than what you do on LinkedIn. So basically you have two separate networks for two separate purposes. That means maintaining and updating information in each of them whenever something changes, it means checking messages from both regularly, etc. In short you are maintaining two different CIRCLES of contacts with two different services. Sometimes sharing completely different information, sometimes the same information. With Google+_ you are able to do just that, all within the walls of one network.

Each thing you share is a grain of information, and with google+ you are able to precisely and easily manage whose eyes see it. Facebook fails to do the same, as they push to have everything more and more public, they redesign security settings and leave them open by default so you are required to consistently monitor changes.

By Design Google+ has privacy that you can rely on.

This is not a setting, this is you telling the network exactly which individual you want to share this piece of information with. It is not up for debate and the settings can not be changed in a way that changes that fact. That is privacy that you can rely on.

In the span of 1 minute you can post a picture of yourself accepting an award from the State house for running a few family businesses, and share that with the your customers, friends, family, employees. And then post a video from your liquored up karaoke party where you sang AC/DC and share that with your friends only. Done, no worries, no security setting menus to navigate through. Basically no bull shit.

Facebook is likely to have to change to keep up, consider this quote from the Fortune story on the privacy differences between the two:

…it’s much easier to manage Google’s privacy options than Facebook’s. Reviews of Google+ mention its superior ability to manage personal data, better transparency on how that data is shared and the option to delete all your data… If better privacy is in fact a big factor for many people, then Google+ could easily become so popular enough that Facebook will be forced to improve its own privacy policies.

Implications for businesses are huge.

Privacy is a strong word, it stirs up emotions, but on a level that relates to marketing it can be less strict and more of a tool. Think for a moment of a company Google+ page with various different customer Circles, they could be leveraged to:

Deliver offers to select groups of customers, by geography or other factors.
Test out different marketing pitches and campaigns.
Send customer groups to different landing pages and monitor effectiveness.

In this way the ease of Google+’s circles becomes paramount to encouraging there use. Check out this video for an idea of how easy they are to use:

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I am Spirocks on Twitter.