Marketing Safari

10 Reasons Why Companies Should Engage in Social Media

Why should I or my company participate in social media? That´s a question many are asking themselves these days. Isn´t it just rants and trouble? Is it really worth the risk or should I rather just leave it? Well, even though you decide not to take part in social media, your brand and reputation will. So if those matter to you, you should seriously consider a social marketing strategy.

I have listed here ten reasons why companies should engage in social media.

1. People will tell!
When the word goes out, it’s not just rotating around the kitchen table anymore. It’s rotating around the world. Or at least as far as your brand name travels. So you better be aware of what’s going on.

2. Power to the people
The revolution of the web 2.0 is that power has shifted away from the corporation to the people. They have the tools and the means to make you or break you. They are actually a world wide media empire.

3. Your Customer is Your Boss
The customers are running the show now so you better start listening to what they say. And you do that by participating in social media, building relationships and participating in the conversation.

4. Your Customer is NOT Your Boss
Controdictive? I know. The thing is, you still have a reputation and a brand to protect. That’s why you need to take part in the conversation. The character of your social media voice should reflect the character of your brand. Without sounding corporate – it’s the brands character we’re talking about.

5. Honesty is the best policy
You can’t run and you can’t hide. If you’re not honest, people will tell. But you will be surprised at how quickly people are willing to forgive if you’re straight with them.

6. It’s your new PR-tool
If you need to get a message out there, either about something you’ve achieved or a respond to some news or rumors, whether good or bad, social media is the fastest and most effective way to do so.

7. It’s your new marketing tool
No, not advertising. Marketing. Make your self available for your market, your target group. They use social media too. But do not, I repeat, DO NOT use it like a one stream advertising channel.

8. Your Blog is the Craddle of Your SEO
Search engines love blogs. They are frequently updated, usually with quality content and they are well linked (at least if they’re managed correctly). You can use the title of your articles for long tail keyword targeting. Each and everyone may not give you much traffic, but when you’ve written a new article every day for a year, you’ve got a great amount of text and keywords for the search engines, keywords that don’t belong on your corporate site.

Great articles tend to get quite a number of links as well, which increases your rank. Links building is a very important part of your SEO and a quality blog is one of the best link builders you can create.

9. Customer Relationship Management
Companies are the sum of the people that work there, but still just people. Communicate to your customers as a person representing your company, but not as a company representing the people working there. In other words, write under your name and status within the company and build a personal relationship with your customers via social media.

10. Respond to criticism
But never go into details in each case. Be polite. Apologize. Make a statement. Don’t go into arguements, rants, blames or personal information. Be professional.

If you´ve got more reasons to add or if you disagree with the ones listed above, share your views in the comments below.

Hjörtur

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World's Most Valuable Brand Has Never Advertized

Most people agree about the value of a strong brand. But the debate today is more on how to build them. I've often said that advertising is dead, sometimes getting harsh reaction. I'll admit, these are strong words, maybe a bit too strong. Advertising still works (a little bit), if they're just loud enough (and annoying). But when you calculate what you get for your dollar, it's in no context to the influence they have today.

Brandz top 100 is a list over the top 100 most valuable brands in the world. When the list for 2008 is checked you can see that the world's most valuable brand today is Google with 30% growth from last year. The jumper on the top 10 list is Apple with 123% growth this year.
Here's the top 10 list for the world's most valuable brands:

Some of those brands have been spending fortunes for decades or even centuries on advertising all over the world to build up their brand. But what I find most interesting is that the brand that is valued the world's most valuable brand has never launched an advertising campaign in those less then 10 years they have existed (see this discussion on branding on Harvard Business Online)

What Google has built on is word-of-mouth in the world's biggest society, the internet society. The same goes for many of the others of the world's fastest growing brands. Those are companies that don't advertise but count on word-of-mouth and participation in social media. Apple, the fastest growing brand on the top 10, uses both. It has been proven over and over again in marketing research that the most powerful influence on buying behaviour is a recommendation from a friend, not an ad. That's why you have to focus on the quality of the product, the delivery and the service you provide. Google has got their amazing growth by daring to be different and delivering what they promise.

When Google started as a search engine there was nothing on the page but the search window. At the same time their competitors were adding all sorts of add-ons, features and modules growing the complexity in both running the business and the experience of the user. Google managed to keep their image simple and clean, people knew what they were expected to do and what they could expect to get. Search results. The quality of the results was one of the most important part of Google's success. They delivered what they promised in a more useful and effective way than any of the competitors. Google has still got this advantage as you can read about in this article from Brandchannel about Google (from 2006) and this article on ReadWriteWeb about Microsoft Live. I also had a great video here on the blog that showed the difference between Microsoft and Apple.

Word-of-mouth marketing on the internet is much cheaper than any traditional advertising, but it's also much harder. It sets much tougher demands on the quality and honesty of the company. You really need to excel in quality and service and make it easy for people to spread the word. But Google proves it can really pay off.

Hjörtur

Download the BrandZ-2008-Report.pdf.

My 1st Month on Twitter - What I've Learned

Now it's been a month since I signed up for Twitter, and I must say, it has taken me by surprise. I set up Twitteriffic so I have a small window on my desktop which updates automatically and makes it very easy for me to follow all the conversations.

I have been quite active, picking up new people to follow using Shel Israel's guidelines on who to follow (only those who display a name, a website and a picture) and have a reasonable following/followers ratio. That way, I have managed to stay free of spammers. So after my 1st month I'm following 191 person and am being followed by 166. Most of those I follow are internet marketers or travel bloggers (and some are both). I have written 438 twits in this month which may sound a lot, but I'm being told is just below average which is 15 a day (of those who are really active).

So if you're new to Twitter but want to be a part of the action, I recommend that you give yourself 2 minutes to fill out your profile with a name, website and a picture and a couple of words in your bio. When you start following, don't start following all at once. Build up your connections gradually so that you get followers back. If you are following over a thousand people but only 12 are following back, you will be considered a spammer and no one will follow back. If I'm to recommend a few to start with, those are the ones that come to mind now (in random order):

Who to follow on Twitter:

Guy Kawasaki - @guykawasaki
Seth Godin - @SethGodin
Robert Scoble - @Scobleizer
Shel Israel - @shelisrael
Dan Sullivan - @dannysullivan
Michael Arrington - @TechChrunch
Jesse Stay - @JesseStay
Jason Alba - @jasonalba
Jason Calacanis - @JasonCalacanis
Rand Fishkin - @randfish
Dewald Pretorius - @dewaldp
Andy Beal - @andybeal
Jeremiah Owyang - @jowyang
Tamar Weinberg - @tamar
Connie Reece - @conniereece
Michael Gray - @graywolf
Rohit Bhargava - @rohitbhargava
Saul Colt - @saulcolt
David Armano - @Armano
Maki - @doshdosh
Barry Schwartz - @rustybrick
Ann Smarty - @seosmarty
Rishil - @rishil
Brent D. Payne - @BrentDPayne
Will Chritchlow - @willchritchlow
Hamlet Batista - @hamletbatista
ShoeMoney - @shoemoney
JohnChowDotCom - @johnchowdotcom
Aaron Brazell - @technosailor
Ike Pigott - @ikepigott
Lee Odden - @leeodden
Laura Fitton - @Pistachio
Warren Whitlock - @WarrenWhitlock
Lars Hilse - @lars_hilse
Jacob Morgan - @jacobm
Graham Jones - @grahamjones
Gregg Scott - @greggscott
Dan Zarrella - @danzarrella
Wayne Sutton - @waynesutton
Anna Farmery - @EngagingBrand
Darren Rowse - @problogger
Leo Laporte - @leolaporte
Adam Morris - @brainysmurf
Rae Hoffman - @sugarrae
Steven Lubetkin - @podcaststeve
Julio Fernandez - @OracleJulio

And travel bloggers:
T-list - @tlist
Guido - @happyhotelier
Elliott Ng - @elliottng
Sam Daams - @samiwasnt
Chris Clarke - @Chrispitality
Gary Arndt - @EveryWhereTrip
And check out this list of travel twitters for more

And a few more:
Katja Presnal from Skimbaco - @skimbaco
Christine Lu, China Business Network - @christinelu
Tan Siok Siok, Singapore filmmaker - @sioksiok
Jim Long, camera man - @newmediajim

I'm leaving out a bunch of great people. Sorry about that folks, if you're a great twitter to follow, feel free to add yourself in the comments below. You can find more great Twitters on Alltop and of course, if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm @hjortur

What I've Learned
I have learned tremendously much in this month about social media, SEO and the industry. I've got tips about so many great articles that my Firefox browser keeps filling up with tabs with unread blog articles that look very promising and are waiting the time to be read, and my RSS reader keeps getting more adds. I will list here some of the best articles I recall from this month:

4 Pillars of Trust in Social Media by Jeff Quipp
Want That Post To Go Popular? - When to Post by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Social technology marketers bullish in face of recession by Josh Bernoff
The Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet by Danny Dover
Let's Skip the Meeting by Seth Godin
Social Media Marketing Beginner's Guide by Jon Rognerud

So I guess I can really recommend Twitter. Another thing that Twitter does is updating my status on my blog (look left) and on Facebook. I really like to be able to use Twitter on Facebook, because I don't really like Facebook that much. But Twitter keeps my name popping up with updated status all day long as if I was active there and keeps my name (personal brand) fresh with my Facebook friends.

See you on Twitter
Hjörtur

Let Customers Run Customer Support

The weather has been fantastic this weekend. The garden was filled with I-don't-know-how-many kids, we had 7 kids for dinner and 6 kids over the night. And when I sat at the dinner table, I was just thinking how little problem it was to have so many kids (only 4 of them are mine though).

People with one or two kids sometimes shake their head in horror when they hear how many I have and ask how I manage. And I point out that it's actually easier to have two young kids, when you have two older ones at the same time, because they help out, babysit and they play together.

When I have many kids, they will also be a great network for each other when they grow older which they can rely on, both in good times or bad. They will always have each other to lean on and go to for support.

Your customers can be the same for your product and brand. Don't try to manage all communication with your customers yourself. Allow them to communicate with each other.

Forums are brilliant for customer support. If you look at how support is for open source software, for Google, Dell or any other of the rising stars of today, you'll see that before you can contact customer service, you're encouraged to look through faq and then you can ask in their forum. In the forum, you are just as likely to get a reply to your question from another customer, as from an employee of the company.

The replies from the customers are often better than the ones you get from customer service because they are from people who have been in exactly the same situation and therefore, know where you're coming from. That gives the other customers a lot better understanding and support than if you have someone at your office, or in India, answering from a manual. Someone that has maybe never even seen the product in action.

If your forum turns out to be a good one where your customers become active, you take a lot of heat off your support team. The more activity there is on your forum, the less work it is to maintain it. Another thing that happens when your customers start to interact is that they build up a relationship, not only with you and your product, but also with each other. They exchange experience and ideas regarding the use of your service or product and you actually start to build a brand community.

Hjörtur

Do You Trust a Blogger?

Graham Jones, the Internet Psychologist just posted an interesting article on his blog (errr, website?). It's about a research that shows that bloggers are the ones that have the least trust of all people when it comes to recommendations of a product. Now, why would that be? Isn't that in contrast with what we social media marketers like to think and preach?

I think the key here is building a relationship. I don't trust A blogger I come a cross, no more than a person on the street that I have never met before. It could be anyone. But there are certain bloggers that I read regularly, have commented on and who have commented on my blog, whose recommendations I would take just as seriously as if they were from a close friend.

I have the feeling that the question was too limited to give a correct picture. First of all, we might have to limit the question only to those who read blogs in the first place. If I have never read a blog, I'm certainly not going to trust a blogger. We might even have to stop thinking about them as bloggers, like Graham suggests that we stop thinking about our blogs as blogs. It's a conversation where we build relationships with our customers (and even competitors) and through constant ongoing interaction with our readers, they get to know us and trust us. So asking if you trust a blogger is pretty much like asking if you trust a person. What person? What blogger? Someone I know or a complete stranger?

If we look at the other end of the scale, we see that people trust "people like ourselves" the most. That's what makes blogging so good for businesses. Because you can change from being the voice of a CEO (or even worse, just a blogger) to being the voice of a "person like myself". That gets you (and your blog) to the top of the scale.

So I guess we just have to stop being bloggers and start being "people like ourselves", building relationships.

Hjörtur

Alltop.com - Best of the Best

Connections go into circles. Remember how I told you how I got from Twitter to Guy Kawasaki's blog to Alltop to Shel Israel? Well, a fellow Trendhunter and an active travelblogger, HappyHotelier, just twitted that he got listed on Alltop.com. He doesn't know how, but his guess is that Guy Kawasaki, the man behind Alltop.com, came across him on Trendhunter.com.

That's quite possible. That's how Guy found me for the first time. He quoted one of my trends on Trendhunter. I think that it was not based on the "content of my character", but more on the "colour of my article", so to speak. It was about goldfish living a good life in a deep fryer in a restaurant in Japan. But it's also just possible that HappyHotelier has become such an authority in the world of travel blogs that he would have been included anyway.

But what is that Alltop all about? It's quite simple actually. It's a handpicked collection of the best rss feeds of the Internet. Sort of a directory for quality webfeeds. And how do they choose the sites to list? Well, it's a bit complex to explain, so I'll leave it to them:

We use a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford. Just kidding. We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.

And they don't just choose pages that reflect their own beliefs.

We like to shake things up and urge people out of their comfort zones. Hence, Aljazeera is early in the News.alltop.com topic, and we mashed together Christianity, Buddhism, Islamism, and Hinduism together in Religion.alltop.com.

I like that policy, challenging peoples way of thinking. So if you have a blog or a news portal, this is the place where you want to be.

Alltop.com is devided into eight main categories, such as Work, Living, Interests, People, Culture, Geekery, Good and News. Each main category has then several subcategories such as Travel, where HappyHotelier just got listed, and Egos, where I want to be when my Ego becomes big enough :)

Hjörtur
ps. If you'd like to nominate my blog to alltop.com, just send them an email. Thanks :)

Ten Great Tips About Facebook

Guy Kawasaki posted a great post on his blog today, or an interview actually. It's ten tips about Facebook from Jesse Stay, who wrote "I'm on Facebook, Now What?" with Jason Alba. They actually wrote a book on LinkedIn too but I got to know Jason Alba and his work through the Australian Stan Relihan who is in my network on LinkedIn. (It's amazing how small the world gets when you get active on the social networks).

I highly recommend you check out those ten tips on how to get the most out of Facebook, a social platform with loads of apps and possibilities where alot of people seem to be very lost. Now I'm a little less lost :)

Cheers
Hjörtur

Share This - a Viral Marketing Widget for Typepad

Notice that little icon below this post? I've finally got the Share This application for viral marketing. I've been sending emails to both Share this and typepad asking for it and maybe someone listended. I'm so happy, specially because feedburners feedblitz never worked properly on this blog.

This means you can more easily share my articles on social networks, such as digg, SU, Facebook, technorati or send it directly to your friends via email or messengers. Brilliant application. I encourage you to pick out my best post and try out Share this. Go on, it doesn't bite. Try it all out, digg it, stumble it, redd it ... ;)

Cheers
Hjörtur

A-Listers and the Tipping Point

Sometimes, I just love the Internet and the blogosphere. How ideas and debates sometimes spread like wildfire online.

The most recent one is a debate on Gladwells theory of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Differencestarted by Watts, a scientist from Columbia University, now working for Yahoo. According to The Fast Company Magazine Watts has pointed out with research that trying to get A-listers or influentials to start a trend is no more likely to be successful than trying to get any other person to start a trend. The Fast Company writes:

In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) --has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Guy Kawasaki bought it and wrote about it on his blog. In theory this is correct. This is just like a chain letter. It doesn't matter if it is started by one person or 50. If it is picked up by the society it will spread in the power of x until the market is full. So it only seems to be a question of "the ripe moment". When the society is ready you will succeed. If it's not ready, you will not succeed, no matter how many influentials or A-listers you get to promote your product.

But the key lies in the last sentance of the quote above: Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure. You see, marketing isn't rocket science. It isn't engineering. It's social arts. You can't put it into a formula like that.

The thing is, if you don't pitch the right influentials that are ready for your product, you will not succeed. Watts argues that mass marketing should be used to get the product exposed to more people because you never know who is the right person to promote your product. That is correct "When he tried to pitch "some company's shitty product," he couldn't force it to go viral." So for shitty products, you use mass marketing like they recommend. But the importance of reaching the masses again proofs that A-listers should be more influential than technorati-one-millioners, like me, because they are more likely to expose the product or idea to someone who will love it.

We can just take this discussion as an example. Now if it wouldn't have been published on the Fast Company Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin wouldn't have written about it. If they hadn't done that, I would have missed this discussion, and most likely, so would you. If it would have been on just any other technorati-one-millioner blog the chance of a someone picking up the story would have been far less.

So my summary of this discussion is:

1. You should try to pitch A-listers within your niche. If you don't find an A-lister within your niche, go for the technorati-one-millioner instead of picking an A-lister outside your niche. Choose quality over quantity, because a sucker for your product or idea is going to get you a lot further than someone that doesn't really care, even if that person has thousand times the number of readers.

2. Your product, idea or contect has to be exceptionally good. I don't pass things around or endorse them if I don't love it (or hate it, that works for viral spread but not for actual sales). So quality is essential in what you are passing around as well. And the market has to be "ripe".

3. All this discussion proofs that no matter how helpful and fantastic marketing statistics and numbers may be, and how complicated mathematical formulas you can draw on your whiteboard, they can never replace the social touch you need to have, to succeed in marketing.

If recommend reading the article on The Fast Company first, then Guy's post including comments and finally Seth's input.

And of course, you are welcome to email this article to all your friends, influential or not :)

Cheers
Hjörtur

Marketing Tactics in a Recession

Remember the Y2K computer break down? Neither do I. But there always has to be some scare it seems. This time around, it's the RECESSION! A spouky, scary thing that tells everybody to keep their pockets closed and wait it off.

One of the first thing companies cut down is often marketing. I mean, it seems so easy. It's just cost, you don't have to sell anything, close anything down nor lay anyone off. Or what? What affect does cutting down on marketing have? Usually that means less sales, smaller market share, and even less sales so eventually that company is going to be forced into real cost cuts.

Warren Buffet, one of the world's richest men, once revealed his big secret to success in business: "Buy low, sell high!" When everyone is selling you buy. When everyone is buying you sell. If you want to get to the top, you will have to go upstream.

The same goes for marketing. If your competition is cutting back on advertising, increase your advertising. Fill the vacuum they are leaving behind with your message. It will be easier to grab the attention of potential customers when the competition is not there and it will even be cheaper too if the media gets a bit more desperate selling the ad space.

If recession is really hitting you hard, you're going to need marketing more than ever. You may have to cut down on expencive mass marketing, but mass marketing is dead anyway, so who cares. So what can you do instead?

1. Internet marketing
Increase your effort in Internet marketing, SMM (social media marketing) and blog marketing. The Internet has some very effective alternatives where you can get to your primary target group on a very low budget. Engage in the conversation. Just be targeted.

2. Guerilla marketing
Use guerilla marketing tactics to get to the customers, sponsor events and make headlines by doing something out of the ordinary for your customer.

3. CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)
Increase your CSR efforts. Don't cut CSR out though it may be tempting. The "correct reason" for not cutting CSR out is because people are going to be needing it more than before. But the other reason is that if people are low on money, they are going to appreciate all social responsibility you and your company take on, much more than if nothing worries them. If they can imagine they might need a helping hand, they will respect the giving hand so much more.

4. Word-of-mouth
Remember that it's much cheaper to keep your present customers than getting new ones. The next thing that is cut down after marketing is the service level. All those little extras are removed. Portions shrink. Bags and parking start to cost. Well think about this: If your competitors think this way, they become very easy to beat in the competition. If everyone else thinks this way, including your customers, they are going to really value your free parking, your little extras and those small pleasures they are denying themselves. You are sending them the message that you're not going anywhere. You are staying on the market and continuing to provide excellent service. So they are all coming to you and if you're really good enough, they will bring all their friends with them.

Most see a recession as a depression. Others see the opportunities it brings. It will never be as easy to gain market share as in a recession. Carpe diem!

Always look at the bright side of life
Hjörtur

UPDATE: I've released an ebook on this subject called "The Marketer's Magic Chest - Marketing tips, tricks and tools to unlock the chains of recession".