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
I was recently asked to present on the topic of ‘Monetising Social Media’ at Magazine Week in Sydney. The audience were experienced publishers who had moved into the digital world and looking to continue to evolve with the changing landscape. I personally think the presentation title is a little misleading. You cannot really monetise social media – but you can use it as a vehicle to drive traffic to your website to generate revenue. This does work if done right as the Old Spice case study shows. In this case Old Spice was a dying brand but used new inbound marketing techniques (the audience opts into your network are via facebook, twitter blog subscriptions etc) with traditional outbound marketing (pushing a message out hoping the right audience finds it (print and TV advertising, radio, trade shows etc) to great success.
One of the biggest thing that impressed me was that the publishing companies in the audience had moved on a great deal in the last 18 months. iPad apps, digitization were the norm and Michael Nielsen’s prediction in 2009 was being borne out:
Today, scientific publishers are production companies, specializing in services like editorial, copyediting, and, in some cases, sales and marketing. My claim is that in ten to twenty years, scientific publishers will be technology companies. By this, I don’t just mean that they’ll be heavy users of technology, or employ a large IT staff. I mean they’ll be technology-driven companies in a similar way to, say, Google or Apple. That is, their foundation will be technological innovation, and most key decision-makers will be people with deep technological expertise. Those publishers that don’t become technology driven will die off.
Michael Nielsen, Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted
Here is some of the presentation with evidence to show outbound marketing is becoming less effective whereas inbound marketing is cheaper and and has more impact (for traditional powerpoint format go to slideshare here
Thanks to @sandnsurf for the Peter Shankman quote and @iggypintado for the Old Spice case study
With over 55 billion tweets sitting in their database and more being added in real time, twitter provides a lot of data mining opportunities – both for brands and for research. If you are at all interested in analytics this new offering from PeopleBrowsr is worth having a look at:
