In an interesting find today, Brian Woodward, a Senior Consultant with GCI Mannov (PR Firm in Denmark), pointed to Miller Electric’s social media efforts in a recent blog post titled “The Case for B2B Social Media”. Mr. Woodwards post is a brief introduction on the use case for social media in global B2B companies. The three example companies he used were Chevron, GE and Miller Electric.
Talk of communities is all the rage on the web these days. But does building a community really matter? Isn’t having a company website enough to reach my customers? The answers to these questions are yes and no respectively.
To understand why building a community matters we need to understand an idea called the Law of the Few popularized by the author Malcom Gladwell in his popular book The Tipping Point. According to Gladwell, a tiny percentage of people (called connectors, mavens, and salesman) do the majority of the work to build momentum. It turns out that this is a restatement of an old idea, the Pareto Principle (or better known as the 80-20 rule). The main concept is 20% of your customers are able to reach 80% of your customers. That is a reach that beats a typical e-mail marketing campaign. So how do I reach the 20% that are the buzz makers?
It turns out all you have to do, if I can steal a phrase from the movie Field of Dreams, is build it and they will come. Create a community, engage that community, and then sift your data to identify your buzz makers. Once identified, a little care and feeding is all they need. You have just extended your marketing reach well beyond traditional methods. Traditional marketing is important, but people rely on the recommendation of friends when purchasing products. Here is a way to influence that opinion.
If you want expert advice on community building contact us here at Envano and we will create a plan that will extend your marketing reach.
Social networks are maturing. No longer are they the sole domain of college students providing details of last night’s youthful transgressions. Social networks have become sophisticated tools to interact and share information with a trusted network of friends and colleagues.
Social networks have become a mountain of captive consumers that are ripe to be marketed to. Take the Facebook phenomenon. According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, they currently have “passed 50 million users, doubling once every 6 months,” and this number includes “only active users who have used Facebook [in the] last 30 days.” He goes on to state that Facebook has “more than 25 million people [are] using Facebook every single day. Each person is viewing more than 40 pages a day, more than 65 billion page views a month.” That is a lot of exposure for a brand inside Facebook.
That data alone makes social networks an exciting marketing target, but we can sweeten the deal for you. It turns out that social networks are really good at connecting friends together. According to a recent social Internet survey conducted by Faves.com, 36% of Web users “highly trust” the information they receive from their online social network. What’s more is that this number jumps to 90% when we add those that “moderately trust” their social networks. Contrast this with only 4% of people having a high degree of trust in the content/opinions from vendors and advertisers in blogs or forums and you can see that it’s important to get these networks energized about your business. 2
Trusted networks are the easiest way to gain credibility with your marketing message. Social networks provide you an easy path into these trusted networks. The result is highly targeted and energized consumers visiting your site and purchasing your products.
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? What is SEM (Search Engine Marketing)? Are these terms just technical jargon that really mean the same thing? These are all good questions that should be asked. Let’s take a few minutes to dig into these concepts and see what they mean and when we should use them.
First let me state that they are not two phrases that mean the same thing. SEO and SEM are two very different concepts, applied to your site in different ways and at different times. So lets start off with definitions.
The distinction seems subtle in these definitions but when you get into the nuts and bolts, the differences becomes much more apparent.
Lets see if we can shorten these definitions making them clearer. We could define SEO as the things you do to your site to make it more visible and increase its relevance in search engine results. SEM would then be defined as the things you do on other sites to increase your site’s visibility and relevance in search engine results.
Here are some examples of things you can do to your site as part of SEO.
Here are some examples of things you can do on other sites as part of SEM.
These are just a few ways to get started with SEO and SEM.
So why is SEO and SEM important? SEO and SEM are important because 70% of searchers click on natural or organic listings in search engines. So being in the search engines is important. Ranking well and being visible will ensure a steady flow of targeted Internet traffic for pennies or less per click thru.
Remember SEO and SEM are both important and different. These concepts should be part of your web marketing plan to drive in that highly-qualified traffic at prices well below those of other advertising.
What is tagging anyway? According to Daniel Terdiman, a staff writer for CNET News.com, it’s defined as “the searchable keywords the individuals can assign” to web content. This content usually consists of web pages or images. Tagging empowers the end user by providing a way for them to categorize information according to their own taxonomies. Much like a librarian does with books in a library. This process of tagging by an individual gives a site or services an added level of usability that an individual has never had before.
Now the big question, why does it matter? A recently released Pew Internet & American Life Project study found that 28% of Internet users have tagged or categorized content online. Furthermore, the same study determined that 7% of Internet users say they tag or categorize online content daily. Considering the 2006 estimated number of Americans residents that use the Internet is 202 million and worldwide estimate of between 922 million and 1032 million users, that is a lot of tagging.
Aside from the usability gains that a tagging enabled site provides to the end user, you get the added bonus of the individual sharing the tagged material. Take a site like http://del.icio.us, a social book-marking site, for example. An individual can tag and bookmark a page from your site, then by sharing this new bookmark, anyone that does a search on http://del.icio.us has the ability to find your page in the results. Driving highly qualified traffic to your site.
So why does tagging really matter? It’s a 65 million market potential worldwide on a daily basis.