all the news that's fit to blog, tweet & post

This week’s post on GigCoin is about Email Marketing and the good news from the findings is that email marketing is very much alive and well. And if you’re wondering whether social media will push email marketing out of the arena, Forrester Research believes that social and mobile campaigns will actually help you send more emails since “email tethers together customer experiences across channels.”

You can read the full post on GigCoin’s blog.

This week I researched and wrote about restaurants and contests for a post for Gigcoin’s blog. Our goal for the post was to demonstrate some successful, unique and clever contests.

I put a query out on Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and through the query we heard from a number of businesses around the United States. We selected four to profile in the post: Ling and Louie’s Asian Bar and Grill, Lou Malnati’s Pizzeria, The Bistro Group, and Mia’s Pizza and Eats.

I was very impressed with the creativity of each of these contests and it really drove home the point that businesses need to be strategic with their social media approaches.

You can read the post on GigCoin’s blog.

This past week I’ve had two new blog posts published: 1) 30+ Design Apps on the Mac App Store on WebDesigner Depot and 2) 15 Ways to Monitor Your Competitors’ Use of Social Media to Gain Social Intelligence on GigCoin.

Click on the images to read the full story.

Infographic  “History of Social Media” via Skloog. History begins with Postal Service in 550 BC right through to Google Buzz in 2010—with lots in between!

[Click image to enlarge]

Publish. Post. Update. By now you can probably hear those words in your sleep.

See my post published on MyAdEngine.

The title of MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Handbook, Social Marketing ROAD Map, is not only a clever analogy referring to the territory marketers must navigate to map out a social media strategy, the acronym is memorable and quite right-on. ROAD stands for: Research, Objectives, Actions and Devices.

I know writers are supposed to resist the temptation to use clichés—but I can’t help it—so indulge me here for a moment while I offer you a personal perspective. For me, someone who fears getting lost, my Global Positioning System (GPS) has changed my life with its turn-by-turn voice directions. The ROAD Map Handbook offers the comfort and confidence that I’ve come to rely on from my GPS. I think you too will find great direction from the guidelines, best practices and tactics, templates, suggested resources, worksheets, list of social media platforms, and comprehensive glossary.

Whether you’re a marketer just starting out in Social Media or have been traveling these roads for some time, you’re bound to find many valuable tips and strategies in MarketingSherpa’s Social Marketing Road Map Handbook. >>Continue reading the full post on Impressions through Media.

In the past few months I’ve been coming across a number of Infographics I really like. Here’s one on the Do’s and Don’t's of Social Media for Business from David Steel. Great material!

Via: The Steel Method

Article first published as The Blog is Alive and Well on Technorati.

If you ask me, the last two lines of “An empire gives way” an article in the June 24th issue of The Economist, about the state of the blogosphere, sounds ominous. The piece cites research from media-research firm, Nielsen, on how traffic to blog-hosting sites, Blogger and WordPress, are stagnating and how by contrast, Facebook’s traffic grew by 66% last year and Twitter’s by 47%.  Okay, I get it–but to be honest– I was alarmed by the article’s projection: “Where will that end? Perhaps in a single, hugely long blog posting about the death of blogs.”

Can Facebook, Twitter and blogs play nicely together? Can they co-exist without one sending the other to their Internet grave? I think so. I think the forms compliment one another and feed off of each other very well.

Blogger, Cory Doctorow, writes, “I still blog 10-15 items a day, just as I’ve done for 10 years now on Boing Boing. But I also tweet and retweet 30-50 times a day. Almost all of that material is stuff that wouldn’t be a good fit for the blog – material I just wouldn’t have published at all before Twitter came along. But a few of those tweets might have been stretched into a blogpost in years gone by, and now they can live as a short thought.”

I share links to material I find valuable on Facebook and use the comment field to make a brief point or to ask a question and initiate a discussion. On Twitter, I often re-tweet when I’m reading an article on a blog or online newspaper. It’s a quick way to say to Twitter followers, here’s something I think you’ll like. But when it comes to covering a topic in more detail, there’s still nothing in my opinion that beats the blog post.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re like most business people today you’ve probably found yourself wondering>>Read my full post on MyAdEngine.com.

Article first published as Keeping Business Audiences Engaged with Social Media on Technorati.

In the past several years, we’ve seen businesses adopt social media into their marketing and customer support practices. And naturally, there are still laggards. There always will be. But what about the businesses who have created presences? Now what?

Maybe customers and online visitors heeded your social media call. Maybe you can even say that your analytics are up. Perhaps, the quality of the visits demonstrate more engagement than six months ago. But now the question we must ask ourselves is– if we built our social media presences, will they keep coming?

Maria Ogneva’s post, How to: Better Serve the Social Media Customer takes a look at how each department can “blend traditional social media to drive business goals and collaborate on a seamless customer experience.” Maria demonstrates how businesses need systems and “a flow for easy and consistent information dissemination.”

Content is key as it moves across an organization and as Maria points out businesses need to have many touchpoints with their customers, of which social media is one.

For businesses who have climbed over the social media hump, I think Maria has the right ideas when she suggests: 1) Don’t forget about the corporate website, 2) Remember thought leadership and content creation (blogging, guest-blogging, webinars, whitepapers, e-books, presentations, and videos), 3) Participate in online and offline events, 4) Monitor your social media activity for engagement, 5) Build relationships with partners, resellers, and blogger outreach.

Which customer touchpoints have proven to be most effective for your business?

Image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com ‘s photostream