Highly recommended (and very condensed) a talk by the excellent Mike Cadogan (LifeInTheFastLane @sandnsurf).
in 5 minutes Mike shows us how to begin to manage your digital footprint. In other words taking charge of what people find out about you in a google search. Don’t let anyone take over your digital identity.
Looking forward to the next installment Mike!
Every year more and more businesses turn to social media to get their message out, many are not sure on the return that they are getting or the effectiveness of their strategy. Hubspot publish a yearly report on the cost effectiveness of some of these methods.
Traditional ways of getting your message out there (outbound shotgun approach using newspaper adverts, direct mail, flyers, tradeshows etc) can be prohibitively expensive, particularly for small companies. Inbound marketing (where people opt-in using social media such as blogs, facebook, twitter) provide new and very efficient ways of reaching an audience.
As an example, I do some work for a not for profit organisation BodyInMind.org (in fact we make no money at all) whose main aim is to disseminate high quality research on the topic of pain research. Using social media has proved a very effective means of not only reaching a niche audience but of enabling them to spread the message further.
If you are looking for marketing advice this report will give some good pointers as to what is effective and why. Along with evidence as to which platforms work best depending on what it is you are looking to do
The 2012 State of Inbound Marketing
You are just starting out. Brand new website. Brand new product. The midnight oil has been burned, energy levels are high. But…. visitors to the website are low. Social media followers grow at an infinitesimal slow pace, and you wonder if you are doing it right. Chances are, you are. Stick with it.
This is from the veritable hubspot team on the success of a landscape gardening firm. Some may think it would be hard to blog, facebook and tweet about lawns but this is how they did it. And what I really like is that they show the results comparing some of the things they did before and after.
On the health side this is a great article on how a doctor uses google to market and recruit patients. A website is not enough.
According to CBC news last year Allfacebook.com estimates three Facebook account users will die every minute. That’s 1.78 million people in 2011 with accounts in limbo. Adam Ostrow (editor-in-chief of Mashable) gives a 5 minute talk at TED:
Many of us have a social media presence — a virtual personality made up of status updates, tweets and connections, stored in the cloud… What happens to that personality after you’ve died? Could it … live on?
For some more links on ‘What happens to social media when I die‘ see HCSMANZ’s site which has gathered some good info and discussion
Although Google Buzz is being phased out (and merged with Google+) businesses can now add themselves to Google+
From the Google Blog:
For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you’ll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello.
A number of pages are already available (see below), but any organization will soon be able to join the community at plus.google.com/pages/create.
Direct Connect from Google search
People search on Google billions of times a day, and very often, they’re looking for businesses and brands. Today’s launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we’re rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search. The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect.Maybe you’re watching a movie trailer, or you just heard that your favorite band is coming to town. In both cases you want to connect with them right now, and Direct Connect makes it easy—even automatic. Just go to Google and search for [+], followed by the page you’re interested in (like +Angry Birds). We’ll take you to their Google+ page, and if you want, we’ll add them to your circles.
That sounds like a good SEO opportunity to me! HubSpot also do a good write up on Google+ for business and how to add yourself.
Stats, stats, it’s all about stats at the moment. This one is on the current state of play on LinkedIn for those who are needing B2B info.
LinkedIn is definitely a B2B platform – at its most basic used by professionals as an online CV. There are still more males than females who are members, but now younger people seem to be joining (25 to 34 year olds being as big a proportion as the 35 to 55 year olds who have joined LinkedIn)
Unsurprisingly America has the largest chunk of the pie chart as far as membership but Australia has 2.3 million members (over double what it was a year ago) and is in the top 10 countries on LinkedIn. Not bad considering the relatively small population in Australia – and not to be underestimated as to what LinkedIn can do for a business.
From a health perspective, 8.6% of industries on LinkedIn are medical – although what ‘medical’ encompasses is another matter (only 3.5% of jobs on Linkedin are medical)
Thanks to @RazChorev to alerting me to this on twitter
