Shrill - Social Media Marketing for the Rest of Us

What’s your Fascination Score?

Cynthia Freeney — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:09:31 +0000

This is a great quiz based on Sally Hogshead’s work. Sally wrote a book about Fascination and its Seven Triggers.
I am really suspicious of the vast majority of these types of assessments, but this one actually gave me great professional insights.

Posted via web from cyfree’s posterous

“tWe can’t all be Apple or Cirque du Soleil or Basement Systems Inc. But we can damn well die trying” – Tom Peters

Cynthia Freeney — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:29:01 +0000

We can’t all be Apple or Cirque du Soleil or Basement Systems Inc.
But we can damn well die trying.

via tompeters.com

I began my career working as evangelist for an Apple dealer, and now I work for Basement Systems. Things like that make my day.
And no, I have no intention of joining the circus…

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5 Social Media Lessons For Paid Search Landing Pages

Cynthia Freeney — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:30:01 +0000

Can you apply the spirit of social media to other marketing channels?

At this year’s SMX East, after my presentation on Landing Page Usefulness—emphasizing a “usefulness” mission over “usability” tactics—it struck me: great landing pages can bring many of the ideals of social media to paid search marketing campaigns.

Here are five principles of social media marketing that can energize your landing page program:

1. Engage in specific conversations, not generic one-size-fits-all talk.

When a company engages in social media, the worst thing it can do is echo canned, cut-and-paste responses to every incoming comment. It’s painful just to imagine! Yet many paid search marketing campaigns commit that very faux pas: a user clicks on a keyword/ad combination with a specific promise, and then they are unceremoniously tossed to a general-purpose page. Such “message mismatch” between keywords/ads and their associated landing pages damages brands and hobbles conversion rates.

The reason I advocate deploying dozens—or even hundreds—of landing pages is because doing so lets you deliver focused and well-matched introductory dialogues with respondents, framed in their terms. As I said in my presentation, the goal is have respondents exclaim, “thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for!”

It’s not about optimizing one page to rule them all—an illusory, marketer-centric fantasy—but deploying many separate pages that each speak authentically to their niche. That’s the kind of respect that honest social media marketing shows to people reaching out to you, and a good landing page strategy can live up to the spirit of that goal.

2. Embrace “constant content,” continually releasing new ideas out into the world.

From blogging to tweeting, the engine of social media is the frequent generation of content. Hopefully it doesn’t take a committee or half a dozen pairs of hands to put up a new blog post or to update your Facebook fan page. The incentives in social media are to be fast, prolific, experimental, relevant and real.

The same tenets should apply to landing pages.

Sometimes, when I suggest that people should publish dozens or hundreds of landing pages, I get a look of incredulity: how could we ever create so many landing pages? Yet organizations who embrace social media marketing produce 10-times as much content without breaking a sweat. The resistance to such agile production of landing pages is often a hang-up from the bygone days of long-cycle web development. Today, deploying new landing pages should be as easy as—maybe even easier than—posting to your blog.

If you have a good content management system (CMS), a nice collection of page design templates, a shared library of images, maybe a few reusable Flash components, and a standardized mechanism for data collection and analytics tracking, then you’re ready to crank out landing pages on demand. And if you don’t have all of those pieces yet, none of them are particularly difficult to put in place.

3. Harness fast feedback to learn about your audience.

Arguably the best feature of social media is that it lets you tap into candid and immediate feedback from your market, albeit in an unstructured manner. It’s a wonderful environment to put ideas out into the community and quickly gauge reaction.

However, you can also solicit a different kind of feedback—more quantifiable and more directly connected to sales—through rapid experimentation with landing pages and keyword buys. Participation is more predictable with such PPC experiments, and the results can be easily benchmarked against your e-commerce or lead funnel metrics. It’s a small, low-risk investment that can help you discover big wins.

Struck with a novel theory about an unaddressed customer segment over your morning coffee? Don’t just hypothesize about it or file it for the next quarterly planning meeting. Launch a targeted search ad and tightly matched landing page for it before lunch and have real-world feedback by the next day. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You can test and tweak as you go along—an ongoing feedback loop.

Ads and landing pages also lend themselves to A/B tests, in a more controlled fashion than variations in social media tactics. If you structure your tests with good hypotheses, you can learn a lot about audience preferences and personas.

4. Open up a dialogue by asking relevant questions—and respecting the answers.

Social media is a conversation, not a soliloquy. People can ask questions, usually quite informally, to help identify the content or information that’s most relevant to their interests. This allows a single discussion to adapt itself to many different participants.

A similar dynamic can be achieved with landing pages. Sometimes, you have to field clicks from keywords/ads that appeal to several different segments of respondents. Instead of reducing the specificity of your content to a bland common denominator—the ill-fated, one-page-to-rule-them-all approach—start by offering them a few meaningful choices. Are you more interested in A, B, or C? Based on their one-click selection, you then deliver more detailed content that’s tailored to their needs.

This technique is known as multi-step landing pages or conversion paths. It can be a tremendous source of feedback, especially when you test different types of choices. However, it’s crucial that the choices genuinely help respondents find what is most useful to them—you want segmentation that benefits users, not just marketers. Remember, we’re striving for that “thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for” effect.

5. Champion transparency and authenticity over cleverness and technology.

The essence of social media is its authenticity, plain and simple. You can try to manipulate it with gimmicks and complicated machinery, but such machinations tend to fall flat. People love what’s real in social media, not what’s artificially crafted to appear real. Human trust is more important than plastic perfection.

Certainly this holds true with landing pages as well. There’s no shortage of sophisticated software you can use to dynamically alter your pages to users based on their IP address or behavioral profile. You can layer rules upon rules to calculate the optimal offer for each respondent. But inevitably, such overly processed experiences lose their authenticity.

Similarly, you can play UI tricks to try to force people to engage with your page (e.g., you must fill out this form before continuing!), but it’s almost always more of a turn-off than a successful hard-sell tactic. If you’re going to remove your regular navigation choices from a landing page, do so because it helps eliminate clutter for a respondent in that context—but still always give them an option to easily jump to your main site.

Be genuine, creative, open, and enthusiastic in your landing pages, and you will win more converts.

Landing pages, like social media, are something that you get better at by doing. So release your inhibitions and make more landing pages.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

via searchengineland.com

Interesting article on how to apply social media concepts to landing pages.

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These are your customers.

Cynthia Freeney — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:52:48 +0000

via youtube.com

Remember these people when making your Internet Marketing decisions. Understand that they are not supposed to know the “lingo”. It is up to you to market it well, promote it clearly, educate your customer accordingly. No matter how much money you made, or how successful you are. This is the new media age. You want them to buy from you, you better understand that YOU serve THEM.

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New Media Haven #2 – Social Media – Technology- Eventbrite

Cynthia Freeney — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:16:58 +0000

via newmediahaven.eventbrite.com

Excellent networking opportunity. Get to know and exchange ideas with area professionals and enthusiasts.

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Home Improvement Fail Blog – Home Maintenance Fail

Cynthia Freeney — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:11:44 +0000

via community.livejournal.com

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5 Reasons Why I DON’T Follow You on Twitter

Cynthia Freeney — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:23:13 +0000

This post is translated (poorly and with a few impertinent edits) from a great post I read at a friend’s blog. (Thanks for allowing me to translate it, Han!)
Han Badalamenti, the guy who wrote this, is not a Social Media marketer. He is a Social Media user. He is one among the millions of social media savvy users you are trying to market to, one of the guys who you are planning to target with your Social Media strategy. He is writing to other users but what he says applies to Social Media Marketing as well
He, like many others in this environment, knows what he wants and he knows that, when it comes to Social Media, he has a choice. He can pick who he wants to listen to. He knows what every Social Media user knows and so many Social Media Marketers seem to ignore.
Let’s hear what he has to say, shall we?

5 Reasons Why I DON’T Follow you on Twitter
This is a text for you that logs on to Twitter everyday only to see that the number of people following you is dwindling. If you are asking yourself: “what did I do wrong”, here are your answers.
My friend, here are the 5 mains reasons why the idea of following you on Twitter gives me the creeps:

1 – You post too much
It is extremely irritating to log on to Twitter and find the same name repeated 80 times in my timeline, with only a few posts from all the other people I follow sprinkled here and there.

I am sorry if it hurts your ego but I do not use Twitter with the sole purpose of reading what you post. When my timeline begins to look like you personal page, something is very wrong.It gets even worse if the above is combined with the following item on this list:

2 -You don’t say anything relevant

I know, nobody has an exciting life all the time. I am also well aware that the core of the Twitter concept is to use the tool to mainly answer to a single question: “What are you doing?”

However you, my friend, are taking this way too seriously. No one needs a detailed log of each and every one of your mundane and uninteresting daily activities. I don’t particularly care to know exactly when you are at work or at home. Out to lunch? I don’t care. Back from lunch? Please post something useful like “You’ve got to try this X dish from Y restaurant. It is delicious!” Spare me from twits like “bologna sandwich with diet coke… yum”.

Furthermore, twitting about all your social activities (snip) is a pain in the neck. Also, I do not need to know that all your friends are on Twitter with posts that have more @names than content. Ok I get it, you are popular and you have a life and I am probably jealous because I’d love to be like you. Now a quick reality check: nobody can be cool and a show-off at the same time.

Here’s a simple idea. Before clicking that “update” button, ask yourself this simple question: Do this tweet have any potential whatsoever to become a relevant piece of information, or even a source of amusement for any of your followers? Will it make them think? Laugh? Enjoy? Like it for any reason? Is it at least an honest attempt to accomplish that rather than a narcissistic tweet? If the answer is “no” or “I don’t know”, don’t click that button.

3) You pollute my timeline with replies

Picture the following: You are at a party, sitting at the dinner table surrounded by several people. In such a social situation you will often switch between talking to everyone in the table to addressing a single person or small group around you. When you are talking to everyone at the table, they will naturally expect that you talk about subjects that interest everyone or in which everyone can participate. If all you have to say is “Hey Diane, we need to get our nails done, How about Thursday?” you are better off talking to Diane alone without disrupting the conversation and getting everyone’s attention to address a single person. Get the idea?

Twitter is like the world’s biggest and most crowded and most flexible dinner table. One in which everyone can talk at the same time and still be heard. However, in an environment where the laws of physic do not apply, good manners and common sense become even more important.

The Reply feature is great when it comes to commenting or answering to a specific Tweet, Replies have the added bonus of appearing only in the timelines of the people who follows the person being addressed in the reply. And that is why you should not abuse the feature to chat with someone you know. Direct messages should be used or personal matters and conversations. Did you ever give them a try?

“Yeah, but then I can only talk to people who follows me”, you might say. Well, you can use email and Instant Messengers as an alternative. I mean… think about it. Somehow people use to hold entire conversations before Twitter. Heck! People used to have conversations even before the existence of the Internet! Can you believe that?

4) You flood …….. my timeline …….with …… incomplete …….. posts.
Make no mistake: the simpler the tool, the higher the number of people misusing it.
Instant messengers give you about 400 characters to say something.
However
Most people
Talk to you
Like this.
Using
Several
Separated messages
Until the sound
Of the “new message” alert
Drives you insane.
(It is more or less like that, only the content is usually grossly misspelled and so filled with intrusive emoticons the message becomes unreadable)
In Twitter however, the character limit is 140, and all of a sudden everyone needs to write long posts. Go figure.
Everyone was guilty of that at some point. It happens. But if you fo it often, it is time to publish a blog or start using Woofer instead.

5) Your overuse of meaningless hashtags.

Hashtags are stupid #thereisaidit
Their usefulness is questionable. You don’t need the “#” to transform an expression into a trendy topic – which also has questionable usefulness. Most of the time we only use it for fun, ending a post with a sarcastic hashtag like #ohreally, #rocketscience , etc…

It is quite funny when used with moderation. Obviously that is not the case nowadays. People hashtag random terms with no real purpose or ends every post with a “funny” hashtag .
If you are caught within the follow/unfollow Twitter dynamics and still following some obnoxious users just because they are your friends, send this to them. They might get a clue.

(My personal take on hashtags: Hashtags are highly valuable to organize content in Twitter and organize some people around the same subject.

For example:
During our annual convention, we used a hashtag to send updates via Twitter, to employees and customers of over 300 dealers worldwide. We had all the tree house team posting updates live and whoever wanted to know what was going on in the several events and seminars, only had to search for the hashtagged term.)

SMM and SEO: Setting the Record Straight

Cynthia Freeney — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:56:07 +0000

Let me say this once and for all: Social Media Marketing is not Search Engine Optimization, period.

No, SMM is not a part of SEO either, and calling it SMO (Social Media Optimization) doesn’t make it any different. A top-notch SEO expert is not necessarily a Social Media Wiz, and vice-versa. They are different specialties with a different focus.

Allow me a “girlie ” analogy to better illustrate my point:

A hair dresser and a pedicure specialist work in the same field, yet we would be better off not trusting the first with our toes and the second with our “dos” just because they work in the same salon.

What happens in Internet Marketing is about the same that happens in the beauty parlor: different professionals with different skills collaborate towards a great result.

Social Media can eventually, and often does, contribute to better search engine rankings. You are building links, you are spreading the word, you are generating buzz and eventually people will respond giving you more links, more buzz and more attention. You are using keywords quite often; you are publishing company related content in relevant places. Combine all that off-site work with excellent SEO and your rankings will most likely improve.

Sometimes, so much, people tend to call Social Media Marketing “off-site SEO”. Another HUGE mistake, if you ask me. The focus of a good Social Media professional is totally different of that of a SEO professional.

Let me point just a few of the differences:

A SEO professional thinks “rankings”, that is their focus. Their job is to come up with ways that will make your website appear in a good position in search engine results, every time someone punches in a query related to the website he is working on. A SEO professional is a person that has unparalleled knowledge about search engine algorithms, as well as website coding and organization, able to make the crawlers read, understand and index the site.
A Social Media Marketer, although mindful of SEO concepts, has a different focus: people. Not bots, not crawlers, not algorithms. A Social Media Marketer’s job is to get people to find your site, love, visit, mention and link to it. We are evangelists for the companies we represent and our mission is to make people happy about these companies.
Our goal is not better rankings or even better traffic, although, as I said earlier, that is often a result of well applied social media efforts. Our goal is to spread the word, improve a company’s reach, reputation and conversion rates through online branding and reputation management strategies.

Good SEO and SMM professionals can clearly see and respect these differences and the boundaries, and will often collaborate. Sadly that is hardly the norm, and because the people who buys these services doesn’t usually have a good grasp on this matter either, we often have one type of professional trying to sell both services or, while being very good at one specialty, passing and selling him/herself as the other.

The result is disastrous: SMM consultants that can’t get the site to rank and SEO specialists spamming the web with keyword stuffed (and usually quite poor) content and using popular SM platforms to publish an obnoxious amount of promotional links and sales pitches, to artificially inflate inbound link count, but adding no relevancy whatsoever.

And I am not even touching the spam bots in this post because it would be like kicking a dead dog.

I am fortunate enough to work in a place that has very good SEO pros and I learned a lot with them. They never cease to amaze me. We often exchange ideas and collaborate and so far we’ve been getting great results for the clients. (Well, we get paid for performance, so we better know what we are doing… *laughs*)

I had to write this post as I know many small businesses are in the process of buying such services, and it is a good idea to verify exactly what kind of specialty is being offered, which services and how much your provider really knows about it. But I can tell you this, concerning Social Media: be very suspicious of any provider who promises huge numbers, and fast results. You know the drill, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Keep it Human

Cynthia Freeney — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:01:28 +0000

I have this conversation quite often:

Small businesses asking me if they should open Social Media profiles in their names or the company’s.

Here’s my take on this: in most cases, people buy from people. Social Media is about people, so Social Media Marketing should be too.

The Social Media crowd is not very fond of companies without a “face” and “faces” without a little bit of humanity. Understandably so. Spammers are out there creating mass profiles and flooding social gathering sites like Twitter with sales pitches, phishing scams, phony links, mass “follow” apps, and spam bots and taking the fun out of Social Media just like they almost ruined email, before email clients developed smarter filters.

Social Media platforms are coming up with good filters too, but ultimately the users are the ones calling the shots and manually deciding who they want to listen to. That is the beauty of Social Media.

The huge problem with many marketers is that they have a hard time understanding that marketing in this environment is a 100% opt-in. Meaning, they will only listen to you if they so chose. They have the power to block you completely of they don’t like what you have to say and, to make matters a tad more complicated, it is no longer a one-sided deal. You talk to them, you can bet they will talk back to you… and about you!

You say “look at me”, and they say “why should we?” and you better have a very good answer to that.

That said, it is easy to understand why people are more open to other people than they are to business profiles in Social Media sites. A business is an “entity” trying to sell them something. A solicitor. Someone who is only there to make a buck. A professional, on the other hand, is a human being, tied to a business.

However, it will all definitely boil down to how you conduct yourself out there. Having a personal profile and acting like an obnoxious spam bot, talking only about your company, product, service and website will lead you nowhere.

So my answer is: open personal profiles and act like a human being. Talk about you business but also about things that interest you and your audience. If you want to list the business only, look for Business Directories and Local Search Sites like Merchant Circle and Insider pages, which also have business related Social Media features.

Open a Facebook Fan page for your business and a Company Group on LinkedIn and brag all you want about your business there.

Social Media Starter Package

Cynthia Freeney — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:32:54 +0000

So, you really want to get started with Social Media. You’ve decided that you can no longer afford to not be there. Yet, you don’t have a lot of time to devote to exploring the vast landscape of Social Media platforms and sites and you definitely can’t afford to hire a specialist or a good Virtual Assistant to do the job, or you don’t have the time and means to train anybody on the peculiarities of your business so that they can effectively represent your company over the Internet.

You are thinking maybe of something you can do and administer yourself in your spare time, or have your secretary or someone in marketing do, just so you will not be completely absent. Is it possible?

Well, in my experience, yes and no. Of course it is better to be out there somehow, than not at all.

However, success in Social Media is directly proportional to the amount of effort you put into it. Except in the rare cases when some content suddenly goes viral, the ones who succeed in Social Media marketing spend a great deal or time (and money) doing it.

So is there hope for you? To some extent there is. You can pick and stick with one or two of the suggestions I am listing below and follow through. It is actually better if you focus on one or two than if you try to spread your campaign and is unable to keep it up.

Keep in mind that the very essence of Social Media is content. It is all about creating and sharing content, then talking about it, generating discussions, buzz. Social Media is a gigantic cocktail party. You better not start a conversation if you have nothing to talk about, or no time to properly address your audience and peers.

That said, here are my picks for this particular moment in time: (Social Media changes quickly. Places that are hot now, are bound to be abandoned as soon as something better happens.)

Facebook profiles for owners and/or marketing/PR/customer service employee, and a Facebook fan page for the company (This is very important: profiles are for people, fan pages are for entities and companies. Facebook users frown upon user profiles with pure company information on them). For more on using Facebook for Business, reffer to this pretty cool webinar from Hubspot
LinkedIn profile for all the key employees, LinkedIn business profile, and a LinkedIn company group
Twitter accounts for interested employees and company.
An in-site blog or news page with a consistent flow of new content to be promoted on the above media (otherwise you will run out of stuff to talk about defeating the purpose of being involved in it)
Optimized and consistently updated profiles on Merchant Circle and Insider Pages.
Listings on Yahoo Local and Google Local
YouTube account.

Please stay tuned as my next posts will walk you through each one of these platforms and help you get the most out them.