Save Your Bacon WATCH THIS

The New Internet Marketing Inner Circle

Happy New Year!!

Here is the new video just explaining the basics of the new inner circle launching on the 13th Jan

Getting Value From Social Media

I had this article sent to me today and I thought I would share. It is origionaly from BCS I think

The market is ablaze with the latest form of buzzword bingo: social media. Everything and everyone has become social - social CRM, social business, social government. Some of the biggest software vendors from Microsoft to Oracle have a new focus on social software.

Get past all the noise, and you may start asking some of the more challenging questions. How is the social web, and my participation in it, impacting my business? Can I measure the impact? Should I be involved, or is this just a passing trend?

Peel off the shiny packaging and look deeper into what social media really means for you.

Collaboration is a much more accurate definition for the objective of most organisations: collaborating with customers, prospects, partners, employees, and colleagues. Social media tends to be a type of activity, but collaboration is an activity with a purpose.

Dell is a well-known success story of an organisation that has maximized the value of social media. Dell’s very specific business purpose? Increase sales revenue and decrease support costs. What makes Dell successful in its foray into social media is a clear strategy with measurable objectives.

While Dell views Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube as new communication channels, the team at Dell runs its own collaborative community (on Telligent’s platform) for blogs, forums, profiles, groups and more. Using these tools, Dell can lower support costs by leveraging peer-to-peer communication. Often, the best answers in Dell’s communities come from Dell customers.

EA uses collaboration platforms to enable publishing and viewing videos. Gamers can record short video clips from games and publish them to the community to share. While the benefit to the gamer might be bragging rights, the benefit to EA is free advertising. Customers become advocates and evangelists for the game; new customers are introduced to EA products through word-of-mouth social sharing. This translates into bottom-line revenue growth from net-new sales.

So other than research what other companies are doing well with their investments into social media and collaboration, what can you do to achieve success? Speak to a social media consultancy

Develop a clear strategy. First and foremost, that strategy should articulate a plan for what goals will be accomplished.

Find a platform to enable your strategy. You can start out simply by using a free service like Twitter, and graduate to an enterprise collaboration platform when you are ready.

Measure the results. This is the most important step, and one that is too often simply ignored. If the strategy is clearly defined, then there should also be measurable objectives.

Is there business value in social media? Yes, there is. But to extract that value you need a clear strategy, a platform to enable the strategy, and the tools to measure and analyse the results.

You are in business to make money, serve customers, and out-maneuver the competition. Don't jump in blindly. Clearly define your objectives and identify your sources. Then listen, engage and measure. Contact Blue Ethos for a clear outlay and to speak to a social media consultancy with real answers

Christmas Spirit

I did a 5k jog around the park dressed as Santa on Sunday with around 600 other people and had a great time. It was all in aid of Mary Stephens Hospice and helped raise money for their very good cause.

I'm the one on the right with the big belly (padded of course!!)

Any way as a result of doing this run, and running late for Christmas, I have decided to add up the total cost of sending out Christmas cards and donate that money to the Mary Stephens Hospice, and send e-cards to friends, family and customers this year instead of regular ones in the post. (At least it is one less chance of the royal mail messing up)

Any way on a work front, I will take this very quick opportunity to tell you about a new online marketing product we are launching in the new year that will take the SEO and online marketing world by storm!! I know we normally talk about social media consultancy here, but online marketing is also a very big part of what we do. This new product will change the face of online marketing for UK businesses. All these Mickey Mouse SEO firms will run and hide when they see the brute force of our online marketing product. All product updates and news will be posted here first so come back often for updates.

The Death of Sexy – Social Media, Integration and Real Business

I saw this on convince and convert and thought it would be good to share:

Maybe we’ve gotten a little ahead of ourselves?

In our zeal for YouTube videos, and Facebook apps, and iphone wizardry, and augmented reality we’ve in many cases neglected the many ways we can socially enable the marketing we’ve been doing all along to integrate social media?

Social Media as an Ingredient

‘Tis the season for people to make predictions and promises for next year. For me, I want to focus this blog in 2010 on social media convergence, and how social impacts other marketing and operational disciplines.

Sure, I could write about the new Twitter this or the new Facebook that, and I’m sure I’ll continue to cover that world at times.

But since I was a public relations professional first, a client-side marketer second, a digital marketing agency owner third, and a social media consultant fourth, what really interests me (and I hope you) is how social media is the new ligament of marketing – tying together disparate tactics with unified messaging and platforms.

In 2010, I want to focus on how we retrofit our email marketing, search marketing, banner advertising, even print and TV, to include social components universally.

How can your blog drive your search marketing? How can you test email newsletter content on Facebook? How can your mobile apps drive database marketing? How does social CRM impact downstream conversion rates?

Sure, social media has made incredible progress in a short period of time. But to reach its full potential – especially from an ROI perspective – social media needs to be a component in a larger marketing program. Yes, I believe all companies will “be” social eventually. But that’s not a marketing strategy, that’s a cultural initiative. We need to treat social media as a marketing ingredient, not a marketing cure-all.

The Next Big Thing is the Little Things

The social media baby has been birthed. The stories have been written about the “first to do this” and the “first to do that.” With your help and permission, I want to get beyond the excitement and focus on the business of social media.

At almost every social media speaking engagement, I’m asked what I think the next big thing will be. “What’s the next Twitter?” people want to know. This will be the year (I hope) when we stop asking that question. Instead of “what’s next?” we should be asking “what’s the best way to use what’s out there?”

Are you okay with this direction? Can we focus on social media integration and convergence together next year?

It all takes time...

Just a quick one today to put a few minds at rest. Brands have been advised that using social media as a promotional method for business is beneficial in the long run but return on investment might take time, as networking on pages such as Facebook is about establishing relationships.

Social media consultancy is about looking at the current trends and advising customers accordingly. Now relationship building takes time, it is no different online. I think businesses may be hesitant to direct large portions of their marketing budget toward social media consultancy or social media activities because the percieved ROI is not instant.

Those looking for "long-term, sustainable customer relationships can spend less per month/year/quarter using social media". According to clickthrough 64% of people marketing online have tried social media, but 31% of these have spent no money at all on it.

If you want to see what social media consultancy can do for your business, then call 0800 988 5722

Blue Ethos White Christmas...

...well blue actually. I've been accused of being a bit of an Ebenezer about the Christmas period, which in all fairness is probably not a million miles from the truth.

So in the Christmas spirit of things I have decided to add some snow to my website. Now considering that the back drop of my site is white, I have had to improvise and make the snow a blueish colour.

So If any one accuses me of being an Ebenezer from now on, I will point them in the direction of my semi Christmasy website. How many other social media consultancy companies have snow??

As a christmas gift to you all, if anyone wants the snow on their site let me know and I will do it for you for FREE. Just contact me through my site.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE

Social MediaToolbox

Seeing as I have been a little quiet on the whole blog, twitter, linked in and any other platform latley, so I thought I better come back with a Christmas Cracker of a post. Here is a brief list of tools and sites you can use to make your social media experience a little less time consuming

1. Screenr is a nifty little twitter tool that lets you record up to 5 minutes worth of screen casting and then shares it amongst your Twitter friends, or you can embed it on your blog.

2. Topicfire is a simple news aggregator. You only need to select the topics you are interested in and scroll through the latest news on that topic. RECOMMENDED

3. Site Report offers you a nice overview of any domain including traffic, rank and various other site statistics. All you have to do to get the report is add your chosen domain to the search bar and hit enter!

4. Obsurvey is an easy to use way of creating your own surveys, collecting answers and analysing the results. You can embed the finished survey in your blog.

5. Mashlab is tool that allows you to create a visually interesting website without needing any web design knowledge. Unfortunately this is a paid-for service, but it is pretty cheap

Any way these are a couple of the tools when offering social media consultancy for our clients.

Netorking on and off line

I have just arrived back home after a fantastic networking meeting held by Ian at the best of Bromsgrove, and as I was driving home I was thinking about how these real word networking meetings are no different to how we network on-line using twitter or facebook etc.

There were about 80 businesses in the room tonight and only a hand full of them used social media for their business and had any sort of real return!

Why?

These people (myself included) get work from off line networking events, but they seem to struggle when faced with doing it on-line. You don't have to be a social media consultant to get work from on-line networking, Just ask Jason Addison at Addison Tyres. He tells me that he registered a Facebook account a couple of months ago, just for finding people he has lost touch with. But in that time he has had a raft of business come through the door from people who have connected with him on Facebook.

The reason he got the work? Because he did not sell to anyone. He just engaged them and communicated openly. The extra business he had was just a by-product of conversation and that is what we are supposed to do on social media sites such as twitter etc, have a conversation.

You don't have to sell, just communicate the sales will take care of themselves.