Do you remember to use your Twitter hashtags throughout  your marketing campaigns?

Many social media users are familiar with the Twitter hashtag. For those who are new to social media, a hashtag is a way to identify and track conversations on Twitter using a product name, complaint issue, or special event title. Hashtags are created by Twitter users to allow other tweets searching for relevant conversations. The following are great examples of hashtags:  #binladendead , #tucson , #chevy, and #obama.

Your hashtag usage should be integrated not only into your Twitter campaigns but into your overall marketing strategies. Remember, most hashtags being used reflect the name of your product, your company, or a well known issue or problem. Some hashtag creations will attack the credibility of your organization.

Outside identifying and targeting conversations on Twitter, hashtags can be continued into the following :

• Create a Twitter hashtag with your name. Place on your business card. Place on your on-line profiles.
• Place hashtags in the descriptive text for all types of your shared social media.
• Create your own positive and negative hashtags and place on your website, your advertising, and your TV commercials.
• Place on promotional products.
• Place on business correspondence, billing, packaging, and Slideshare presentations.
• Leave them in replies on discussion boards allowing fans and detractors to try to reach you using these hashtags.
• Your placement of hashtags will allow stronger search engine optimization and stronger search engine results.

Your hashtags are a great portable way for businesses to increase their inbound and outbound marketing success!

What other ways do you use Twitter hashtags? Do you find that hashtags serve as wonderful portable reminders?

Do Share!

 

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Your into social media and networking and your business, your employees, and your clients are still trying to understand this evolving communications revolution. Many users of new technologies make the mistake of trying to race their competitors in pushing their usage of new technologies. Don’t race! Be relevant and focused to your solving the problems of your clients and prospects.

Whether using social media or social networking, ponder these five simple ideas when starting into this new communications revolution.

-Social media is a real-time, thinking and breathing entity. Remember what you post, share, and endorse will be on-line forever.

-Social media will take time to learn and use. Take a month to look over all the tools and decide which one fits your business personality. Learn one social media tool at a time. Take your time…

-Before adding social media and content marketing to your marketing mix, drop out the marketing operations that are ineffective. Yes, drop the failed marketing endeavor even if the competition is still doing it!

-Social media and other Internet technologies are here to stay and are growing. Social media and social networking means business! Social media means faster globalization of your business.

-Social media branding is a generalization. You need to create several subsets of objectives meeting your companies goals and needs of your customers. Your subset objectives will often dictate the social media channels to be placed into your marketing mix.

Will Dobbs is the owner of Collective Cloud Consulting in Tucson, AZ.  His business specializes in social media content marketing,  web development, web analytics, and online competitive intelligence. His blog:  http://collectivecloudconsulting.com .  Please tweet with on Twitter: @Willdobbs .

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Courtesy SXC- Your Klout score is a snapshot your spheres of social influence.

Why does Klout matter?

The question one really asking is: “What social proof could I collect as part of my social media ROI?”

Klout is an application that measures one’s influential interactions on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. Klout looks at your influence as pertains to your followers, your followers reactions to your content, and your followers influence within their social networks. Your Klout Score is determined by your actual reach, the echo or range of your content across conversations or networks, and how you are influenced by other social media participants. Your Klout Score can be based on one social network or combination of the four above.

Klout really is about social proof, social credit, and social commerce. Social credit is the concept of creating on-line based goodwill through conversations, and unique social media. Social commerce is the growing concept of using influential-think and group-think strategies to drive commerce in Internet environments. When combined, they can give you outstanding ideas to drive sales, improve products, and build strong industry presence.

Klout allows your on-line activities to be judged by a third party and allows your followers to even nominate you for being influential in certain topics. In short, Klout acts as a quick snapshot of your social networking and social media sphere of influence.

If you like to do a little research and web analytics drilldown, Klout can help you determine the following Return on Investment factors:

-Where you influencers or followers are from

-What subjects or topics drive your followers

-What type of keywords they use-general and specific

-How frequent your followers use their social networks

-What days of the week and hours of the day are best for your conversations and content release

-What types of content snippets have appeal

-The Klout Style matrix offers great nicknames for target demographic profiles

-Points to other industries where your social proof and credit will be welcomed.

FYI-My present Klout score is a 60. Klout identifies me a specialist. According to Klout, a specialist is subject matter expert with an highly engaged and interactive audience. My content is focused, consistent, and unique. My interactions point to establishing true social proof and social credit with my audiences. In the realm of social commerce, I have built a good sized network that could be very easily influenced into driving conversions based on my say so. Also, my followers know I’m into quality not quantity inbound marketing.

What is your Klout score?

Posted from Casas Adobes, Arizona, United States.

Thanks for your patience…I will need a  couple of days to rebuild. Please feel free to look over previous stories!!

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Test

Business continuity issues are stacked against your business. Facebook will help you solve these dangers.

Have you considered the power of using Facebook for business continuity?

Besides, marketing empowerment and crowdsourcing ideas, Facebook offers many enterprising ways for businesses to combat the ever present  spector called business continuity.  Your creativity with Facebook and its tools will dictate how successful you will be in using this social networking application to solve business continuity problems.

Business continuity is the process of developing and using risk management principles to mitigate all sorts of issues organizations face due to emergencies, technical failures, competitors, or industry volatility.  Often, when one thinks of business continuity in organizations, they immediately think of the IT department. Business continuity is a never ending thought process and mitigation of hazards affecting the success of your products, your customer service, and reputation of your enterprise.

5 Ways Facebook Will Help with Business Continuity (BC) Issues:

-Portability: Because Facebook is a social computing application, it can be accessed from anywhere at anytime. All one needs is their log-in information and the ability to create accounts as needed. One can access the Facebook application from their home, foreign locations, or from their smartphone. If you lose your office to weather or hostile takeover, you still have the ability to talk to your clients and employees.

-Create one or multiple accounts for a particular BC incident:  Both FB pages and groups can be created to deal with a particular problem within your organization. Consider creating a FB Page for each BC incident. You have the ability to restrict access by only inviting certain people to that page. Remember, Facebook is really an informal meeting place but it could easy double for a conference environment with the latest forms of chat and video within the application.

-Backup communications directory:  When your friends, followers, and fans choose to join your particular Facebook business page or group, you will gain access to one’s personal profile. Unless, the profile info is not shared, you now have another way to access client and employee information that could have been lost during a network meltdown, or a building fire. If the information is blocked and communication is crucial, message your friend privately and ask for the information.

-Real-time communications:  Have a company emergency? Place information for customers and employees within status boxes on your company page. Or consider creating a FB page for company emergencies for your customers, contractors, or employees. Do tell your customers and employees about the page and how to find it. With a separate formal communications page, you have an easy accessible channel that your employees can access in times of emergencies as well as the media. Now consider creating multiple pages (channels) for communicating with your contractors, executives…You get the idea.

-Basic Information Page:  This is for the daring individual who isn’t afraid of hiding some confidential information in plain sight. This could be a great way to display codes or information that you understand alone. Consider placing more general business focused information onto this page. Also, consider using your basic information page as an “in case of emergency” page combined with a checklist. Many readers do not usually read down a large info page of content.

-Applications:  There are many great Facebook features and 3rd party applications built into this social networking venue. Notes could be used for official company statements. Translation feature could be used for global communication abilities.  Use the Events feature to post a proper time to meet with your employees or customers. Consider using Social RSS to re-route industry news feeds and updates to your planned BC page.  Remember, to check frequently to see if your applications are functional.

If you use Facebook for business continuity, do remember to deploy it to deal with both internal and external issues! Also, remember to watch the administration of these special business continuity pages and who you allow to friend the pages.

What are some ways you have used Facebook to solve your business continuity issues?

Do you use other forms of the social media to solve business continuity or crisis management issues?

 

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

When creating social networking, social media content, and user experiences take a moment to create personas focused on senior users or the aging demographic.

Aging users are fast becoming the principal users of smartphones, Ipads, or e-readers.  Also, within the next couple of years, aging users will be active social media users. Aging users in this post are retirees or those above the age of 67.

Throughout my content creation and web development endeavors, here are some observations learned from trying to anticipate this demographic. Keep these ideas in mind when deploying and integrating all your Internet marketing tools.

-Often, desktop icons, and social media badges and widgets will not be big enough to be viewed. Do make them twice there size.

-Often, action based shaped icons like printer shapes or email messages may not be understood. Consider placing titles above these type of icons.

-Ways to share all types of content maybe familiar to you and others. Consider creating a title above these sharing tools to explain what they do.

-Use of keywords will differ with you aging demographic. When focusing on Search Engine Management and Search Engine Optimization techniques determine what keywords they used then and now when searching for products.

-If needing to explain how your website works, consider posting these topics on your blog, and micro-blogs. In your email marketing correspondence consider pointing to places on your website where users can find this information.

-Short training videos are great ideas. Some older computer users prefer text based or infographic based instructions with screen grabbed pictures.

-When training the aging demographic in new technologies, start training them in techniques they are familiar to them, THEN start to mitigate to new techniques. For example, conduct shoulder to shoulder training on the basics of an application then move them to e-books and white papers on how to use the application in other ways.

-If clickable buttons are located on your website, make the buttons bigger and label them with the proper offer and action you want user to perform.

-If budget and talent exists, consider creating a separate website for your aging demographic.

-If creating an on-line community for aging social media users, plan, develop, and build five must need tools into the community. This will make your aging users return and become familiar with this venue.

Considering the above ideas will develop the concepts of safety and security with the aging demographic. In turn, this will increase interactions and conversions with the aging demographic.

What have you noticed about senior user demographics in Internet marketing? What have been your successes or failures?

Do share!

 

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Take a moment to remember!

This Sunday please take a moment remember those who passed and listen to those who survived the September 11 attacks ten years ago.

Then, I was in NYC that fateful day attending meetings at CBS News and experienced the horror first hand while actively continuing to shoot footage and cover a horrific news story. Ten years later, the enormity of what happened still rebounds through my memories.

Above, I have included a link to digital archives created around the September 11th attacks. Watch at your own risk..some media will be hard to watch! Nice bit of social media content if one see’s it that way. Also, great example of what a social media center could do for a website. I’m ever the marketer and content creator…Comes with my business.

This Sunday, September 11th, I urge you to remember those who were lost by not sitting by your computer! I like many do alot of this..nature of our job. Go out, live and be thankful for blessings of good friends, good health, and happiness.

If you do feel the need to tweet or do a status update. Might I suggest: WE WILL NOT FORGET !

Where were you on September 11, 2001? Do you remember?

 

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Like blue ocean strategy, Your social media usage will make you a change agent!

Did you know using social media makes you a change agent?

Do you know about blue ocean strategy?

We live in very hard unemployment times. Both small and large businesses are uncertain of their destinies and profits. Add to the mix, the recent push in American businesses moving into foreign markets and the discovery that being a nation of consumers isn’t a bright economic windfall.

Businesses are focusing their recruiting efforts toward highly innovative individuals who can adapt to these evolving technologies while incorporating them into daily routines. Those who learn and adapt using social media will not only be conducting business but will become change agents.

Yes, the one to four hours a week you spend on social media makes you a change agent.

A change agent’s life is a hard one. One has to integrate their understanding of evolving technologies against the corporate based business beliefs of conservatism, bureaucracy, and ROI. With becoming a change agent, one will face many great moments of inspiration, success, failure, and conflict.

As a change agent, your usage of social networking and social media technologies will not only focus on finding and developing demand in new niche marketplaces but on the mechanics of how to convert many types of friends, followers, and fans to your products or expertise.

What makes one a social media change agent?

-You understand that both push and pull marketing is now a dynamic enviroment

-You understand that your products and marketing boundaries will always be redefining

-You understand the differences between real-time customer service and static customer service

-Your create and adapt your specialized media not to the masses but toward targeted individuals to create both awareness and transactional activities

-You understand taking the road less traveled will lead to better education and success

-Your daily work will focus on helping niche communities understand how your expertise can help increase their customer demand or your products can solve their problems.

-You understand that this new communications revolution offers great improvement opportunities to enterprises

-Your strategies for marketing, sales, content creation, and sharing are now viewed as forms of social commerce or social credit.

-Your resume can be found not just within on-line profiles but in your daily interactions

-Your operations mindset is not get around the problem, Go thru the problem and solve it.

-Your now practicing innovative relations

-Your rules of conduct as a change agent are unwritten, so is the technologies one is deploying

Do you think your social media activities make you a change agent?

What other ideas are missing from my list?

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.

Are you and your new social networking buddies pondering intentional and unintentional criminal activity in on-line envirnoments?

Think again!

Many reading this are pondering why I am giving a social media tip on what could be very obvious.

Our federal government and regional law enforcement agencies can be a little bureaucratic in integrating new internet marketing technologies into their operations. Don’t let this fool you.

If you are planning a crime using many of the social media outlets, don’t think you will get away with it! Too many people know, espcially your friends, followers, and fans. Somebody will “talk”…

Also, I include unintentional criminal activity in this category. Many social media users are very innocent when they plan and advertise events using very popular news-based subject matter wording. Over this summer, flash mob  stories dominated press headlines. Flash mobs started out as innocent, simple passive resistance techniques. Now they are highly criminal activities.

For example, here in Tucson, AZ is a mayoral election year. One mayoral candidate supporter posted a flash mob get together on Facebook. This was at the height of the negative media stories. Further, in the local paper two days previous to the mayoral flash mob event posted, the police and sheriff for the county stated they would crack down on any flash mob activities within their jurisdictions. Nothing could end a mayoral candidates run faster then being busted for illegal flash mobs activities.

Again, ponder before you post. Remember, your messages will be found and discussed by someone.

Do you know individuals who have unintentionally posted criminal activity on their social media venues?

Do describe the problem but don’t use names. People are “watching”.

Posted from Tucson, Arizona, United States.