The “New” New Thing is Over Before It Starts?

Are you on Google+? I joined a few weeks ago after receiving a slew of invites from friends, Google Buzz connections, Google Wave connections and everyone else.  So far we like the UI, the circles and the privacy, but usage is trickling down.  I know it is for me, because frankly, I don’t have time to update Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or my blogs (hence the 6 month hiatus).  How on earth can anyone keep up with status updates and have time for friendships in real life?

There are lots of opinions are mixed in the industry as well:

• Facebook is Toast
• Google+ is Over (Site Traffic Down)
• Choosing a Social Network Winner One Year from Now

So what gives:  is Google+ the new black?  Or is it the new taupe?  Or is it just out?

 

Apple Pie and the Wrath of Writers

Today on Twitter, I posted a Gawker article about Cooks Source. Twitter was abuzz with commentary:

The story is available here in the Washington Post:

A quick summary:

• Girl writes article and pulishes it on the web in 2005
• Friend calls Girl and says, saw your article, how did you get it published?
• Girls says, that was news to me
• Girl calls publisher asking for an apology
• Editor freaks out
• Girl blogs about the incident
• Social media spreads the post

We are still waiting for the ending in this story, but the commentors are out in full force.  Sharing stories, contacting advertisers and taking over the magazine’s facebook page.  Oh and investigating other copyright infringements.  And, unfortunately for the editor, Judith Griggs, they are looking to tarnish her image as well.  It has been a bad day for Cooks Source.

For business, social media can be your best friend or your worst nightmare.  The number one thing is to remember not to go into hiding when something goes wrong.  Ask Hotel 71 Chicago.  They handled a social media incident the right way, as covered in this case study.   Another good idea?  Social Media Training for your employees; social media is key element in your communications strategy.  Today everyone has a voice in building your brand, it’s a good idea to make sure it gets used the right way.

The last tip for today?  Be cautious before getting into a war of words with a writer.  They’ll take to the pen (or keyboard).

Outwit, Outplay, Outlast, Out-market (Food Truck Edition)

I’ve been watching the Great Food Truck Race on Food Network. It is just like the other competition shows with teams, challenges and eliminations. The thing that has impressed me so far:  The Nom Nom Truck.  I have no idea is their food is any good, but their marketing strategy is spot on.

They have been rolling over the competition with a few key ideas:

Find the right partner

At a stop in Texas, they contacted a local gourmet food market.  They figured, Vietnamese sandwiches in Texas might be a hard sell, but going where the “adventurous eaters” go is where they’ll find there customer base.  The market made announcements and also helped the team out during a challenge.

In New Orleans, they parked in front of the Pinkberry store.  Considering all of the yogurt chasers that chain attracts, the customers would embrace this LA-based food truck too.

Make it work for you: find a complementary product with the same customers you have.  It is a lot harder to move upmarket or downmarket via your partners.  It is an easier sell when you are already talking to the same people

Your fans are influencers

For the first challenge, the trucks went south to San Diego.  The Nom Nom truck went to Facebook and their fans told their friends in San Diego.  Suddenly it was a trending topic among SD college students.  Sell-outs ensued.

Make it work for you: when you have news, tell your customer right away. You never know where their networks may reach.

What marketing lessons have you learned from the food truck craze?

The Farmer’s Market meets Social Media

I typically visit the farmer’s market weekly.  Last summer, or maybe the summer before I discovered Blue Chair Fruit, a local jam/spread/marmalade maker.   They make the best jam I’ve ever tasted, I am sure I am know to the Blue Chair team as the girl who stops by every week to try all of the samples.  (I like the stone fruit and berries the best so far.)

I’ve chatted with the owner/creator, Rachel, regularly about her upcoming book, all of the flavors and the typical banter.  It’s great to be able to meet the purveyors, and that is one of the main reasons I go to the market (and of course the fact that is fresher and tastier).

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed Blue Chair was on twitter and facebook.  I “liked-ed” them on Facebook and the next week when I was at the farmer’s market,  Rachael commented “Hey, you are our newest facebook fan!”

Facebook moved from online to reality!

A few weeks later, I gave Blue Chair a shout on twitter.

And sure enough, at the market I met Jamie, and she was holding 2 jars for me. 

We all know twitter is a great way to connect with people online, but it great to take that connection offline too. If you have a business where you meet your customers in person, encourage them to follow you online and off.  And reward them for participating in the conversation.  Your customers (and your revenues) will thank you.

Starbucks cards managed by Facebook?!?!

I saw this tweet from @PaulaJohns

and this Mashable article.  All I can say is….

Pinky and the Brain take over the world again....

(BTW this cartoon originally was about Walmart)

Social Media invades Retail

Earlier this week, as I was headed home, I passed EA Active.  EA is rolling out a few pop-up store/demo stations to lure fitness-minded women into buying video games this holiday season.  I like the concept of the pop-up store, it reuses vacant space and offers retailers a low-risk way to try something new.  Pop-up streetfood malls anyone?

This store opened a few weeks ago, and is shiny an new the same way current retail stores are: clean lines, modern furniture, etc.

I hadn’t passed this location since it was completed, and I did a double take when I saw this sign in the front window:

Facebook, Twitter links critical to EA store signage

Twitter and other forms of social media have been critical to the success of new school food carts.  Local businesses use Yelp, respond to reviews, and place targeted local ads.  Big Business is using Twitter as a customer service channel.  And now, as witnessed above, brick and mortar retail is using social media to connect after hours.

Two questions:

• Who’s next?
• B2B marketers, what are you waiting for?

What’s PR 2.0 anyway?

So I’ve spent a bit of time over the past couple of months thinking about PR and social media.  It is interesting because suddenly a lot of people are controlling or impacting your message (as a business).  Intentionally or not.  And this time around everyone contributes.  Positively and negatively.  My thoughts?  PR agencies, in the traditional sense should serve as facilitators, participators and filters for the new flood of info.

We discussed this very issue in my marketing training with @jessica_misspr and @shonalnarayan after recapping some of the commentary on the PR 2.0 chat,  so I thought it was a good time to get some feedback on a presentation I’ve been experimenting with.  90% of the experimenting was around being more visual, but I had a brainstorm and outlined this idea.  Comment away, it’s on slideshare (check the notes too).

Try it: Twitter’s not just for trendy techies (and celebs)

So I wanted to call this post “to tweet ot not to tweet,” but that is clearly played out.

After being a pretty avid user for the past 6 months or so, I thought it was time to save some observations and tips.  I first joined Twitter to update my Facebook status without using a data plan from my cell phone.  (Yup, I’m cheap.)

Here are some upfront notes:  my tips are aimed at people who are using twitter for b2b marketing, market research, networking or personal branding the tips might not apply to you if you have different goals and objectives.

Let’s get started.  Here are my tips on using twitter effectively:

Choose your name wisely. With your online identity you have a couple of choices.  Use your real name, use your nickname, use your hacker name, or be random.  If you are trying to brand yourself, I’d stick to something that is a lot closer to your name and a lot further from Britneys1stfan.  But don’t forget that in Twitter characters count.  So if you have a 20 letter last name, please don’t follow the first_last format.  Considering that every reply or direct message much include your username, you don’t want to eat up 40 characters on the name alone.  Try to stick with something in the neighborhood of 20 characters or less.

Follow your interests, not the crowd.  There are zillions of “best people to follow on Twitter lists.”  They usually include celebrities:  tech, pop culture or business.  These lists are irrelevant if those people don’t discuss stuff you care about.  Seek out people that discuss the topics you are interested in.  Use Twitter search to look for conversations using keywords you are interested in.  Look at your favorite blogs, magazines, newspapers, organizations, and people to see if they are on Twitter.  That’s who you should follow — not the 100K+ follower-club members because they are on the list.

Webinars + Social Media = 75% more attendees

I wanted to follow up last week’s post on landing pages, webinars and social media with some final results.  Last week I focused on the improvements in landing page conversion. This time I will focus on actually event attendance and registrations.  The good news is social media leads to more leads.

Part one: overall stats

Here are the stats from last week updated with the final results from the event.  Plus a few bonus stats.

1. The blog and the email drew equivalent visitors and pre-registerants.
2. Email receivers > landing page visitors? 3% This seems to stack up in the average for B2B
3. Conversion rate of blog visitors > landing page visitors?  40% — 13X improvement in response rate
4. The conversion rate for blog readers > pre-registrations?  26%
5. The conversion rate for people who didn’t visit the blog, but went to the landing page was 22%
6. The overall conversion rate for the landing page was 34% (better)
7. People who clicked on the landing page from the blog registered 67% of the time
8. 50% of attendees came directly from reading our blog post
9. # of pre registrations vs. the previous, similar campaign? 75% more
10. 80% of new suspects were from the blog.  3% from paid search.  3% from Natural search.  The rest from our website.

Part two: profile of blog readers

After tallying up the results, here is the pattern from the blog readers.

1. They were likely to visit the landing page vs. people who received an email for the event.  (Email recipients were opt-ins that requested more info on the topic or to hear about our upcoming events)
2. It took 18X more impressions (email receivers vs. blog visitors) to get to the same number of pre-registered people
3. The social media efforts increased the number of pre-registered people by 75% Yes, I mean 75% more people (compared with a similar previous event)
4. Most of the new “names” came directly from our blog and had no previous interaction with us, or our website.
5. 50% of these newly acquired suspects attended the event

What I’d love?  A better way to connect blog traffic sources.  search.  incoming link.  The good news: we are getting much closer to end to end marketing analytics. Online, offline and social media.

Is it worth an extra 90-120 minutes of prep time to double your webinar attendance, by using social media?

You betcha. 

400% increase in landing page conversions with blogging + social networks

We tried something new to promote our latest webinar.  More social media.  Less email.  The results so far are pretty interesting.  These additional activities added approximately 90 minutes to the typical time used to promote events.  And replaced multiple email invites so overall the time spent was probably pretty close to the typical amount.  We found out that social media efforts drove up pre-registrations for our upcoming webinar!

We had about 10 days to promote this event.  Here was the plan in a nutshell:

• Create a registration landing page to capture visitors (outside of the actual meeting tool — Go to Webinar, our marketing automation tool is Pardot’s Prospect Insight)
• Send an email to our lists: interested in news and events or that topic
• Blog about the upcoming event, with the appropriate tags
• We already tweet our blog posts, so we will continue as normal (using Hootsuite to schedule tweets and the like)
• Post a link to our posts in relevant LinkedIn groups we are members of
• Schedule a couple extra tweets right before the event

Here are the stats to date.  I’ll post some final stats after the event.  But the ones so far are really encouraging.

1. Blog post stats:  the traffic was pretty similar to a normal post, but the click-through rate was much better than usual
2. 18% of blog page views were from direct from Twitter — this is pretty typical for us
3. 40% of the blog post views were from Linkedin discussions (this was the first time we used LinkedIn this way.  One link was removed from the news section, but no big deal)
4. Typical click through rate on posts is about 20%
5. The conversion rate for blog readers to registrations?  22%
6. The conversion rate of blog visitors > landing page visitors?  30%
7. Typical landing page conversion rate for us?  15%
8. The conversion rate for people who didn’t visit the blog, but went to the landing page was 17%
9. The overall conversion rate for the landing page was 31% (better)
10. People who clicked on the landing page from the blog registered 75% of the time
    
11. 59% of attendees came directly from reading our blog post

And if you ask me, that’s proof that social media leads to leads. 

Take a look, 75% of the people who read the blog and visited the registration page registered for the event.

And 20% of the post readers registered for the event.  I wish I could convert 20% of my website visitors. 

Only time will tell how much revenue is created, but for b2b marketers getting qualified prospects is half the battle.

I really shouldn’t have posted these stats and tips, because now LinkedIn might get clobbered with webinar invites. Hopefully people will try to stay relevant.  Unlike this discussion I saw earlier this week:  a design company posted a link to their latest project.

Huh?  What does this actually have to do with the topic at hand? Wouldn’t it have been more targeted to post the pitch for design services on the Technology Marketers group?  My 2 cents.

OK back to social media.  I think this is proof it works.  What’s your take?  Do you have any social event marketing and lead generation strategies?