Here are some of our top posts and favorites from this week: Startup Marketing 1. Quick Tips on How to Get Your Startup Noticed Community Management 2. 10 Community Manager Tools You Might Not Know Marketing 3. How to do Market Validation Ideas 4. Little Idea Leads To A Lot - Financial Post Blogging 5....
Recently, Spark Boutik had the chance to sit down with a leading thinker on social ROI to ask him about the industry. He spoon fed us some awesome information we just had to share. Below is our interview with Clay Hebert.
1. Please tell me a bit about your background. How did you get into social media and, specifically, into understanding social media ROI?
Back in 2003, I was working for Accenture, flying around the country working on large-scale consulting projects. During a layover in O'Hare, I needed a book to read for the second leg of my flight and saw this strange looking purple book in the airport bookstore. It was Purple Cow by Seth Godin. It was the first business book that really spoke to me. When I got home, I immediately subscribed to Seth's blog, and ordered everything he'd ever written and devoured it.
Soon after that, I read The Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations. I knew that the changes these books spoke of were imminent, but I didn't know how they would end up impacting my life.
In 2007, I dabbled with blogging and in early 2008, I discovered Twitter. Later that year, I read Tribes and then got a chance to move to New York to participate in Seth Godin's Alt-MBA program. While the program didn't focus on social media specifically, it was a lens through which I looked at many of the concepts and ideas.
After the program, I founded Tribes Win, a marketing and innovation agency based in New York City. We help brands lead their tribes using the social web.
According to a poll from Effie Worldwide and Mashable, 70% of brands plan to increase their social media spending by more than 10% in 2011. So, the big question is no longer whether social media is an important segment of a marketing plan. Instead, the question is how important social media is to a successful marketing plan.
The only way to determine how important social media is to a company is to determine how extensively brand reputation relies on social media. There are three critical ways your brand relies (or should be relying) on social media, customer service, personal connection and engagement, and converting naysayers.
Customer Service
Perhaps the most obvious way in which brand reputation relies on social media is related to customer service. The phone number of a customer service centre with a ridiculous call holding time is not nearly as effective as it once was. A contact form with a note promising a response within twenty-four hours is even worse.
Today, customers want instant responses, and social media allows you the opportunity to provide just that. If your brand is not already using social media as a way to improve customer support, now is the time to look into it. More and more customers are turning to social media for answers to questions not covered on your website.
This week Ad Age put out this social demographic map of the users of major social sites. What I don't understand is why they measured MySpace as one of the top social sites. I get that it still has users and traction, but considering the influx of newer...
We recently wrote about Jennifer Aniston's success with YouTube marketing. Since then, the popularity of her viral video has grown to over 9 million views. In comparison, Rebecca Black's "Friday" video has grown to over 100 million views. With so many videos on YouTube, many...