Did you know that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text? (HubSpot, 2012)

You can’t deny it – we love pictures. Visual content is revolutionizing social media and how web content is consumed. Facebook recently reported that their users upload an average of 300 millions photos everyday, and the rise of photo sharing social media sites like Pinterest – now the third largest social networking site, behind Facebook and Twitter, and Instagram – bought by Facebook for $1 billion this year, tell us that there’s real power behind pictures.

So what does this mean for B2B marketing? It means that pictures are a viable content opportunity for your marketing mix of web pages, white papers, videos, webinars, case studies, and blog posts.

Read on to learn 4 quick ways to optimize and effectively integrate photos and visuals in your B2B marketing activities.

1. Name the file appropriately. Pick a related keyword for your web content and use this in your file name. Many users will name their image as “image1” or “logo.png” or “screen-shot 2012-10-22.” Is this you? Search engines, like Google, rely on textual cues to understand what the image is about. So if you leave your image file name like the examples above, Google will not know what to do with them.

2. Add alt text. Use keywords in the “alt tag” text box when you upload an image to your blog or website. By adding descriptive alt tag text, search engines can better identify what the image is about and how it relates to your content.

The image below shows how a blog, dynamometermanufacturers.com, found an image of TREW client, Wineman Technology’s dynamometer system via Google search and used it for a blog post. The blog attributed the image to Wineman Technology by linking to winemantech.com, which generated web traffic that spent more than 11½ minutes on-site and viewed an average of 6 pages per session. This cyclical effect of posting and tagging images helps increase your backlinks, gain third-party credibility, and generate highly engaged web visitors.

3. Add context for the image in the page text. In addition to naming the file correctly and adding keyword rich alt text, Google also recommends you add text on the page where the image is located. Referencing the image in the page text ensures that Google understood your alt text correctly. See tip #2 above for an example of referencing an image in your page text.

4. Use rich visual snippets for Facebook posts. Using visual content for Facebook helps increase fan engagement with your page. The more engagement you receive on your page, the more positively Facebook’s EdgeRank Algorithm will favor your posts, thus expanding your reach.

TREW Marketing tracked our Facebook page content metrics to learn what content generates the most engagement. The results are very telling of engaging visual content on Facebook. Updates with photos receive 2X more total impressions versus posts with just a link. Additionally, our photos receive 12X more engaged users (people who like or comment on the image) over the link posts.

So here’s what you can do. By snapping a quick shot of a chart or image used in a blog post, you can upload it as an individual image and link to the blog post. This makes your Facebook post stand out more in the newsfeed and in the timeline. Below is an example of this, from Rand Fishkin’s presentation at Inbound 2012.

Contact us today to learn more about TREW Marketing social media and search engine optimization programs.

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In part 1 of our social media series, we reviewed the benefits of using social media and dispelled common myths using real-world examples. A key data point to know is that for the first time, internet users are more likely to visit social media sites than corporate sites for information about a company’s products. However, 65% of companies have little-to-no social media strategy. If you are in that 65%, this post will help you create a social media strategy through taking the steps to define, act, measure, analyze, and improve.

1. Define: Choose content that meets your objective

Feature hot industry topics – browse your favorite industry publications and identify what topics are being published and discussed. Do you have interesting views on this? Social media is a great channel to state your opinion and ask for others’ feedback. This is also a good way to collect feedback that will help you develop the content that you’ll use in your traditional channels.

Use existing assets – use content such as white papers, core slides, and customer testimonials. Below are a few examples of taking your current content and using it in social channels, directing people back to your website to learn more.

• Create a series of Tweets sharing insights from a white paper, include the URL to download the entire paper.
• Share your customer success stories on Facebook, and be sure to “like” your customer’s business page, and include them in the post. 
• Post all publicly available slide decks showcasing your industry expertise on Slideshare. Remember to edit your slides before posting, so they capture key verbal comments.
• Include a link in YouTube videos to a specific page on your website to direct people where to find more information.

Company culture – What makes you different from your competitors? Social media is a casual communication space, and being personal helps you connect with your audience. Take photos of employee luncheons or company outings and share with your followers. It will make them feel special with an “insiders look” at your company.

Conferences and events – Are you planning to attend trade shows this year? Use the conference hashtag to target attendees and media covering the event, engage in discussions around the conference, drive traffic to the booth, and launch your product to valuable social contacts. The example below is from AWEA’s Windpower conference, where Wineman Technology inserted hashtag “#Wp11″ to ensure their content was pushed to their target audience of Windpower attendees. 

2. Act: Balance scheduled content with on-the-fly responses

Scheduling your activity – Use a shared company calendar to delegate and schedule content. Start small with a few posts a day and increase once the processes are in place. Map out content for the first month, measure, analyze, and then find ways to improve for the next month.

Monitor conversations and be ready to respond – Know where your content is located so that you can easily answer questions or provide social media users with additional information. For technical companies, it’s always helpful to have an engineer who is involved in the social media team, so they can provide helpful, specific answers when you get specific questions via social media. And remember, people who ask questions through social channels expect immediate answers. Free tools like TweetDeck allow users to monitor tweets, including providing real-time, ongoing search results:

Share more than once – Research from Bit.ly, a link shortening and tracking service, looked at over 1,000 social media links’ lifespan. The results indicate the average life of content shared on social media is 3 hours, with the exception of YouTube, which gets you more than twice the lifespan: averaging 7.4 hours!  Ultimately this shows that the content of a link means more than where you share it, backing up Marketing lessons 101: content is king.

3. Measure: Track progress with key metrics

The metrics below are key measurements of progress. You can track these on a spreadsheet week to week, or monthly, whichever fits your schedule. By recording these metrics in a spreadsheet, it will eliminate time spent later creating trend graphs to present your efforts.

• Activity- Opting into a social network, friend, follow, or fan is a positive sign of interest. These users are eager to learn more about your product/company.
• Clicks- Using link shortening tools, such as bit.ly or Hootsuite allows you to track links, so you know what content is being consumed and what isn’t.
• Re-tweets (RT)- Re-tweets amplify your social media message, think of this as a personal referral for your company.
• Source traffic- Tracks how visitors get to your website. This provides insight into where your users are and where they are not. Track this month to month, and adjust your strategy if necessary. The charts below are from a 3 month report of TREW’s social media.

4. Analyze and Improve: What to do next…

Through this data, TREW can adjust our strategy to:

• Maintain a strong Twitter presence, it’s the highest source referrer among the social media channels to trewmarketing.com
• Encourage employees to expand and maintain their social networks. High average time on site shows quality contacts are coming from LinkedIn and Google+, which are likely coming from personal employee profiles, and consuming content on the Spotlight blog.
• Reduce resources or switch up the content strategy for Facebook, it is not generating traffic or time on site

In part 1 of this post, we reviewed the social ad experiment on Facebook and LinkedIn. With a 60% CTR improvement and the potential to increase weekly ad impressions by 3.5x, LinkedIn was the clear winner. In part 2, we go beyond the numbers and give our analysis and insights with 5  reasons why we think B2B companies should have a strong presence and advertise on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn: 5 ways it’s taking care of business

1. Professional information

LinkedIn’s strength comes from their well-defined professional networking database. These users range from white-collar professionals, industry thought leaders, businesses looking up potential hires, and candidates seeking jobs. In fact, middle management and top-level executives use LinkedIn for 3 main activities: keep in touch, industry networking, and to promote their business. Compare this activity to Facebook, and ask yourself, does it make sense for your technical B2B company to advertise on the same medium where your “most relevant” newsfeed story is about a guy breaking up with a girl?

2. Target decision-makers

Although LinkedIn doesn’t have the variety and amount of user information as Facebook, if you’re a B2B marketer, they have the pertinent demographics you will likely use, such as: industry, job position, geographic location, gender, and age. B2B companies can benefit from this approach, because it streamlines the setup process and forces you to target decision-making professionals. So like we said in part 1 of this post, LinkedIn’s targeting function is broader, but not weaker.

3. Ad variations

LinkedIn advertising’s smartest feature is the rotating ad variations. Unlike Facebook, where you have to go into the ad and edit to make changes, LinkedIn allows you to create multiple ads that run simultaneously, at no extra cost. For TREW, we created 3 variations, then compared results to see which ad performed the best among our target audience.

Results:

• The 3rd ad dominated with a 2 to 1 and 10 to 1 CTR comparison to the 1st and 2nd ad, respectively
• The higher CTR for the 3rd ad resulted in a 25% and 27% increase of ad impressions compared to the 1st and 2nd ad, respectively

The results of the side-by-side ad comparison leads us to a key marketing takeaway: Our audience of scientists and engineers are more likely to respond to educational content and technical images.

4.  Get Recommended

LinkedIn gives businesses the opportunity to really differentiate themselves with recommendations. Reading how other customers have benefitted from your products or services is a powerful and compelling sales and marketing tool. If you already have customer testimonials written and approved, reuse this valuable content and post them on your social media channels. On LinkedIn, you have two options:

1. Ask a business partner to write a recommendation for a product or service on your company page

2. Re-purpose your current case studies, by posting them in the product/service section, then link it to your company website, as TREW Marketing has done here:

5. Potential

LinkedIn shows a lot of promise for brands in the future. The 8 year old company shattered expectations when their IPO shares skyrocketed more than 80% in May, recently rose to the #2 social media site (of course behind Facebook), and is growing to be a top referrer for website traffic. Additionally, 90% of users are satisfied with LinkedIn and find it to be a useful social networking tool, whereas, Facebook has one of the lowest customer satisfaction scores. If LinkedIn maintains their professional integrity, while Facebook users become more dissatisfied, they have potential to close the gap between the #1 and #2 ranks in the social media market.

What About Facebook?

At its absolute core, Facebook users are there to connect. It originally started as an exclusive college-networking site, where people formed connections to stay informed on campus social circles. Because of the way it began, Facebook is rooted in maintaining quality relationships in a fun way. If you are seeking to grow your online audience, the “like” button will help foster community growth by empowering others to vouch for your business. So let’s not forget that Facebook is still the reigning leader of social media, and use it for what it’s made to do: connect you to people you care about and who care about you.

Parting Thoughts

It’s important to remember that paid advertising on social media is not a stand-alone marketing strategy. Think of it as a tightrope-balancing act between your paid ad campaign and current organic resources like your Facebook or LinkedIn company pages. Furthermore,  think quality not quantity. Just because Facebook has a whopping 750 million users and is slotted be the #1 online ad site for 2011, doesn’t mean it’s the most cost-effective solution for your company.

I recently attended a local meeting of the Austin Social Media Breakfast Club where I had the pleasure of hearing John Moore talk about – or more accurately, test us on – the power of Word of Mouth Marketing from his years in leadership roles at companies such as Starbucks and Whole Foods. Based on the findings from research conducted by Keller Fay in June 2009 in the US, I thought John did a good job of testing our knowledge while also incorporating social media and word of mouth tactics into this talk, so I’ll do the same here in this post.

To start, my first question – what is Word of Mouth (WOM) Marketing? Give this some thought and tweet your answer now using the hashtag #smbaustin. We’ll come back to this later.

And now a few quiz questions:

1. 76% of consumers believe companies are untruthful in their advertising – True or False?

2. 68% of of global consumes say recommendations from other consumers are the most credible form of advertising – True of False?

3.

4.

5. 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity on Twitter – True or False?

6. 22% of all brand-related conversations are sparked directly from advertising – True or False?

One of the greatest takeaways for me from this discussion was the power of the total customer experience in reinforcing your brand promise and creating great word of mouth buzz about your company, product, or service. If the brand promise of your company or service is marketed one way, but the real life customer experience is contrary to this, then your brand will suffer. At the end of the day, while having a thoughtful and well-executed marketing strategy is critical, if every employee and every customer interaction is not aligned to the brand, not only is a huge opportunity missed to reinforce the marketing message and strengthen the brand, but likely the brand will be or is already damaged from the broken promise.

This power of real-world customer interactions also reinforces a key finding made by Keller Fay COO Brad Fay in this article by Marketing Daily, “…more than 80% [of WOM] relates to the experiences that consumers have with brands.” So while Twitter and Facebook are all the rage (and they can play an effective, complimentary role in employee, customer and community engagement), good old in-person and phone conversations are still king.

OK, so now for the answers. First, a definition of WOM Marketing. The one I wrote down was “When someone passes along information about a company, product or experience.” John offered this at the end, “The act of giving consumers a reason to talk about your company/product.” He followed this with another take which I thought was very cool – “earning an opinion” – and offered that if you’re doing something polarizing in the market, it’s good. Some will love and some will hate, but you have earned an opinion, and that builds awareness and discussion, which marketers can then turn into action.

Here are the other answers:

1. True

2. False – it’s 68%

3 &4. I’ll report on this in a week after the poll closes and the votes are tallied

5. True

6. True (which means 78% of WOM is sparked by something other than advertising, such as great customer experiences as noted above)

A big thanks to John Moore, whose talk was as good as his website and blog. For anyone interested in WOM marketing, I highly recommend a regular visit to his site to hear great stories, learn about new books, and be entertained while becoming more knowledgeable. I am getting ready to start reading one John gave to me at the meeting, I Love You More Than My Dog. I’ll report out on it in a future post.

You want prospects to find your website when searching Google, Yahoo, Bing, or other engines.  You know you need to “optimize” but are not sure what steps to take, or perhaps you wonder why your past search engine optimization (SEO) tactics failed to produce the desired result.

TREW Marketing knows SEO.  We’ve worked with customers to achieve amazing results, and have learned along the way that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.  It takes a thoughtful strategy, a multi-faceted approach, and lots of monitoring and tweaking.

In this blog post we offer 5 practical tips for marketing your website.

Create an SEO strategy. Set goals.  Why do you care about SEO?  Is it to increase awareness?  Capture leads?  Make sure that you keep your goals in mind throughout the project, as they will drive actions.  Put in some research time, such as noticing those ranking above you.  What reasons can you uncover for their superior ranking, and how does your position change relative to them as you implement changes?

Identify customer segments, applications, or other “keywords” that you want to own.  This might be a product that you supply to the market, such as “solar panel thin film” or an audience that you aspire to reach, such as “solar panel design engineering.”  Be realistic — if you are the small fish in a big pond, you’ll do much better to target a narrow audience that is being overlook by the big fish.  Also, give consideration to the regional reach of your business (i.e. city, state, national, global) as this is another way to narrow your keywords.

Look critically at your website. Does the content on your site reflect the segments you’ve identified?  If not, consider creating new sections or pages dedicated to the segment.  You’ll have much higher success converting web visitors into customers with relevant information that is easy to navigate.

How often do you update your content?  Search engines love sites that change often.  By adding a blog, you will have a hand in guiding your SEO over time and keep your content fresh.

Do you have a way to capture leads on your site? If this is a goal for your SEO project, make sure you set the proper mechanisms into place.

After you’ve written your updated content, then have a web programmer create page titles and metatags, which inform search engines about the content that resides on the page.

Who links to your website? One of the biggest SEO boosters is having other websites link to yours.  The higher traffic on those 3rd party sites, the more it helps you.  TREW Marketing takes a multi-prong approach to this, considering popular general lists, such as Manta, Yelp, and City Search; industry-specific lists, often managed by industry publications; social media, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook; and unique businesses and organizations that partner or associate with your company.

Measure, tweak, measure, tweak. As you make changes, measure improvement.  Know that your ranking will rise over a course of weeks, not days.  If you make major changes to your site, ask your web programming to “submit” the site for search engines to crawl.  Once you know where you stand, makes some tweaks as necessary.  You’ll want to measure weekly at first, then biweekly on an ongoing basis, as things will likely change dramatically over time.

Ready to kick off an SEO project?  Contact TREW Marketing and leverage our expertise in web marketing.

In Part I of this two-part post on social media (SM), I briefly covered the key features of Facebook and Twitter, and I gave some examples of their uses. Today, I want to provide another great example of a business use of TWitter, briefly review LinkedIn, and end with our recommendations and references of how businesses should and do use SM tools to achieve their goals. I also include other examples and a few really helpful articles.

A recent situation involving the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) provides a very real and effective use of Twitter. The CDC has been on high-alert since late April dealing with swine flu. In another post about swine flu, I talked about responding to the media during a crisis. Today, I want to focus on another aspect – the CDC’s very effective use of Twitter to communicate to the public. On May 5th, when I took the screen shot below, @CDCemergency, the CDC’s emergency response Twitter account, had ramped up to 51,139 followers. Two weeks later, they had 172,900.

Why? Simple – because, as in any other aspect of marketing and communications, content is king and timing is everything. The CDC focused on providing the facts to people, from FAQs to live press conferences, that dispel rumors and misinformation. For example, a post in mid-May simply states, “Update 5/18/09: 5123 total cases of novel H1N1 flu, 5 deaths, 48 states affected: http://bit.ly/9MRt3 #swineflu”. They provided regular updates so the information was timely – a must-do for any blog or social media site, and absolutely critical in a time of crisis. As proof, they tweeted about once a day leading up to the outbreak, but over the few weeks at the height of the swine flu outbreak, they had 127 tweets, equal to almost 5 a day.

This new channel provided the CDC with direct access to the public and helped ensure up-to-date facts were received quickly and easily. People want to help people and share important information…by leveraging Twitter, the CDC very effectively and successfully unlocked the power of the online network of others to help disseminate information factually and immediately. You can read more about their success in this recent Ad Age article (you have to register to read).

Now I’ll move on to LinkedIn, the third and final SM tool I’ll review here. LinkedIn is a free, business-oriented professional networking site. Emphasis on “professional” and “business-oriented”, which distinguishes it from Facebook and Twitter which are more mixed in focus. LinkedIn has a strong presence, with nearly 40 million users in 200 countries. It is, in essence, an online resume and contacts database whose best use is for connecting to others professionally. Similar to Facebook, you have to invite someone to “link” with you and they have to accept your link before you can see their full profile and begin interacting with them.

Your LinkedIn profile starts with your current job and title, lists past jobs you’ve held, your education, related websites and blogs, etc. You also have space to write a short summary of your work experience and areas of specialty and can ask others to “recommend” you, which is an online version of a short letter of recommendation. We recently found this nice blog post on five tips to taking full advantage of LinkedIn.

Like the other SM tools, LinkedIn is constantly adding new features. For instance, they recently added an Update feature identical to the “Share” feature in Facebook, where you can answer the question, “What are you working on now?” They also have LinkedIn “Groups” you can ask to join. When you are accepted, you can then post discussion topics that all others who are in that group can see and respond to. LinkedIn also has some nice applications you can take advantage of, such as a WordPress app that allows you to feed your blog into your page, as you see in this image of my LinkedIn page below. Similarly, you can use the Twitter app to feed in any tweets that include keywords into your LinkedIn page.

So now we’ve briefly covered what Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are. So now what? Should you start a Facebook Fan page for your company? Or a Twitter account? And what about LinkedIn? How do you decide which one(s) to use and how? Well, to start, we recommend you first go back to your business and marketing goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Let’s take the case of the United Way group I spoke to. Their challenge was trying to engage more of their members – getting more to come to events and starting an online conversation where they could grow the community dialog in between physical meetings. For other organizations, it may be trying to grow sales or increase web traffic.

Once you know your business goal(s), then you need to look at your marketing plan. What are your goals – awareness? leads? reducing costs? positioning in a new market space? If you have not first clearly articulated and agreed on your business goals and the related marketing goals, then you are not ready to embark on social media or any other type of media for that matter. Your money and your time will likely be wasted. However, if you have your business goals – to raise sales by XX% or to increase member engagement by YY% or to lower costs by ZZ% – and you have a solid marketing plan that outlines the goals you need to achieve to help support the business goals, then you are ready to think about what marketing channels – or media types – to use to best achieve those goals.

This may sound preachy, and OK, it is. But the fact is, we see many jump in to social media without a plan
or end goal. With the buzz around social media, they feel like they’re behind and they need to jump in, and figure out a strategy later. Bad idea!

Social media is an important new tool in the marketing toolbox. Just like paid media (aka, advertising)and earned media (aka, PR), now there is social media with its own new set of rules, best practices, and costs. To minimize risk and get up the learning curve, we recommend that you begin engaging in social media with one or all of  these three SM tools by listening first. Likely your company and/or industry and/or competitors are being mentioned online, so, an important place to start is to have a small team or one employee join in and begin listening and studying others. When we began our research on social media, we found out which companies and organizations were on the various sites, and we started watching them. We also followed the online conversations of our clients to better understand the online conversation about them, which was fascinating and enlightening.

If you are trying to build community, creating a Facebook fan page is probably a great place to start. And to maximize the tool, it’s best to have a diverse set of content including video, pictures, and links to your own or other sites for relevant information. Having regular updates to the fan page is key, so before you start, it will be important to create a 2-3 month editorial calendar of post ideas and content developers so you ensure a process is in place and the quality of content stays high. Here are some nice examples of brands using Facebook to meet a variety of goals.

If you are launching a time-based, lead-generating campaign or have a big news event, Twitter can be an effective tool. With the right call-to-action (free on-site visit by an engineer, limited-time product or service discount, etc), you can send out a tweet about it, and it will likely be “retweeted” (aka, forwarded) by others. As I mentioned in my part 1 post, Twitter can also be a great way to get feedback or do research. Southwest
Airlines used Twitter this way recently when they announced new service to Boston’s Logan airport. They tweeted ahead of the announcement asking their followers to submit questions online about the new service. Then, on the morning of the announcement, they did a live interview with a senior executive, where he answered followers’ questions.

They not only got great questions, they effectively used social media – Twitter and video and their corporate blog – as a medium to talk directly to their customers and the public.

Twitter also has some really nice third-party applications, such as Twtpoll, where you can create a simple poll, send a tweet with the question, and have your followers participate and retweet. It is a fast way to get great, anecdotal feedback about a particular topic.

The primary way for companies to take advantage of LinkedIn is for recruiting. By creating a company page on LinkedIn, you can then post job openings, job-related news, and research candidates and prospects. By creating a LinkedIn Group, you can also increase the visibility of your company as others join your group and you can efficiently communicate out news to the group with the discussion feature.

As with other areas of marketing, for social media, you’ll need to try some different approaches and over time, refine your SM strategy and implementation based on your goals. There are literally thousands of ways to take advantage of these and other SM tools, from YouTube channels to blogs. Mashable.com has a very helpful post on the 35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media in Action, there is a Social media Case Studies Superlist including the social media awards list recognizing companies such as Whole Foods, Zappos.com, and Jet Blue. I liked this post, which lists alot of interesting and varied articles about businesses using Twitter.

The key to social media success is the same as with other tools in the marketing toolbox: know what your goals are, learn the rules of the game, and try different things until you find success. If you have other great examples of SM, we’d love to hear about them.

Recently, I was asked to present to a group of United Way volunteers about the basics of social media (SM) and advise them how best to take advantage of these new tools to further their mission and achieve their goals. So I thought I’d share a snapshot of my presentation here.

If you are actively using SM tools and have integrated them into your overall marketing strategy and plan, then this will likely be too basic for you. However, we have found that many are still struggling with what exactly all these tools are and how they can best be used to help achieve business and marketing goals. If you are in this latter group, maybe the information here will be helpful.

To start, one of the biggest challenges with SM is just trying to figure out what functionality these tools provide and how to effectively use them. As you can see from this image, there are hundreds, if not thousands, to choose from.

Three of the most common SM tools that I will focus on here are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. In this post, I’ll talk about Facebook and Twitter. In the second, I’ll provide an additional Twitter case study, talk about LinkedIn, and then summarize with our recommendations on how best to take advantage of these tools to meet your goals.

So, let’s start with Facebook . Facebook is a free-access social networking application used by over 200 million users globally. In order to connect with people on Facebook, you have to “friend” them (yes, the noun just became averb) and they have to “accept” you as a friend. Once you are connected, you can begin networking: see their activity, who else they’re friends with, comment back on their updates, etc. Some cool features of Facebook include the ability to posts websites, images, and video right on your page. This is an important point and distinction from an environment such as email or even other SM environments, where you have to click on a link and go to another site to view it. On Facebook, it serves it all up right there on your page.

Another cool feature of Facebook is the ability to “become a fan” of pages. They could be company pages, cause-oriented campaigns, Hollywood stars, etc. This is not only fun for users to “become a fan” of groups they are associated with, care about, and/or want to promote to their friends, but they can be a very effective way for organizations and businesses to create an online community where they can keep users, donors, and constituents up to date on the happenings of the group. You can efficiently feed content to your Facebook fan page by linking it with your organizations’ blog, so blog posts automatically feed into your Facebook page.

Similar to fan pages, nonrprofits can create Cause pages that users can join. With Cause pages, interested users can join and thereby encourage their friends to learn more and join as well. While these Cause pages have not shown success in actually raising dollars for nonprofits, they can quickly and efficiently raise awareness and visibility of the work of the organization in a cost-effective manner. There are many more features of Facebook, and new applications introduced daily. We strongly recommend a serious evaluation of Facebook for your department, product, individual brand, or company/organization for these and many other benefits.

Secondly, let’s look at Twitter, which is a free-access microblogging SM networking tool. The essence of Twitter is short 140 character “tweets” very similar to the updates in Facebook. You can use tools such as TweetSync to have your tweets automatically feed into your Facebook page. Unlike Facebook, where you can only talk to “friends” who’ve accepted you, you can “follow” anyone on Twitter whether they reciprocate or not – ie, you can follow others even if they don’t follow you. Also unlike Facebook, Twitter provides great search ability and can be a very effective tool for quick research. As a simple example, a few weeks ago, I was trying to compress a video and having trouble. I sent a tweet out to ask if anyone had advice, and using TweetSync, had it also appear on my Facebook page. Literally within minutes, I had two responses – one on Facebook from a personal friend and one on Twitter from someone I had never met. I had my problem solved almost immediately.

There are many, many tips to effectively using Twitter and many perceived “rules” that you don’t necessarily need to follow. While I won’t go into all them here, a critical practice to using Twitter successfully is setting expectations for what your followers can expect from the specific account. For example, Dell Outlet uses their Twitter account exclusively for sharing deals on Dell equipment. That’s it. They don’t follow others, they don’t mix up the content of their tweets to be funny jokes, personal stories, and business information. They share great deals, and that’s it. And if the number of followers is any indication, it’s working. When I checked today, they had 583,428 followers. And how many do they follow, you may ask? 23 users.

Twitter is a very fast-growing, popular SM tool. In fact, Twitter saw 1M new users in December 2009 alone, and as of this presentation in early May, had a total of 4.3 M users according to mashable.com, including many stars, politicians, and some of the most well-known brands. We see huge potential for businesses and individuals to leverage Twitter for their business and marketing goals.

Look for the next post to cover another Twitter case study, a brief overview of LinkedIn, and a wrap up with our recommendations for how best to leverage SM tools to meet your business objectives.

We can see from this week’s Facebook debacle that social media has clearly become a critical part of any organization’s overall marketing strategy. With one post on consumer-advocacy blog Consumerist.com about Facebook’s changes to their Terms of Service, concerns among the social networking site’s 175 million users quickly spread. This crisis started and ended in the social media realm – it broke on a blog, spread through Facebook and Twitter, and was resolved back on Facebook.

With this backdrop, we thought we’d ask a couple of local Austin social media pros who were recently named among the 25 others as Texas Top Social Media Winners – David Neff of the American Cancer Society and Lisa Goddard of the Capital Area Food Bank -  for their social media tips.

David’s video tips

Lisa’s top 5 tips for social media.

1. Keep your tweets organized.  As your “friend and follow” list grows, it’s easy to miss out on good information from people you’re following.  I like to use www.friendorfollow.com to make sure I’m following the people I want to follow. TweetDeck is great to help me keep on top of legislative news, learn about food bankers across the nation using Twitter, and find the latest local news and buzz.
2. Make it personal if you’re raising money online for a cause so people can relate to your passion. Asking someone to donate to the Food Bank because of the impact hurricane evacuees have on your community, or because children don’t have access to school meals in the summer is a heckuva lot more compelling than just a general ask.  Show the impact.
3. Give your site a makeover, and often.  Freshen up your Twitter profile page with a new skin design or change the photo header on your blog.  It’s another simple way to communicate what’s new with you and show your creativity.
4. Don’t go overboard with hashtags. Sometimes it’s to your benefit to associate with an existing hashtag versus creating a new one.  For CAFB’s legislative initiatives, we’re using the exisiting #txlege tag so people interested in the 81st Texas Legislative session will also see what we’re doing and associate our nonprofit with public policy efforts. For events, a new hashtag makes sense.
5. Say “thank you”. I can’t stress that enough.

Thanks to David and Lisa for being guests on the TREW Marketing Spotlight!

Yesterday, we had the unique opportunity of witnessing one of the great communicators of our time – the 44^th president of the United States, Barack Obama. No matter your political viewpoint, you can’t ignore the unprecedented millions who were personally inspired to get involved and ultimately succeeded in their mission to elect him president. President Obama’s followers truly trust him and they show it. From the 3,851,604 friends on his Facebook page to the record-breaking estimate of over 2 million attendees at his inauguration, it is clear President Obama is committed to communication – from traditional media to new media – and he has driven record-breaking results.

There are great lessons for all of us in business to take from President Obama and others leaders’ committed and innovative approaches to communication. Especially in these very uncertain times, business leaders have a unique and compelling opportunity to inspire employees and build trust, and as a result, lead their markets, strengthen their customer relationships, and beat their competition. Employees are at the heart of your company’s success – they are your most vocal and honest spokespeople, whether you ask them to be or not, and building trust and inspiring this community by empowering them to make the customer experience better than any other in the industry takes great commitment over a long period of time.

Herb Kelleher, co-founder and past president and CEO of Southwest Airlines said it best in an interview with Worth magazine in April 2001: “Employees come first, and if you treat them well, they treat customers well. That makes customers keep coming back, and that makes shareholders happy.” SWA’s performance shows how this commitment pays off, as Fortune magazine reporter Barney Gimbel said in March 2008, “Besides posting its 35th consecutive year of profitability, [Southwest Airlines] was the most punctual, lost the fewest bags, and had the least complaints compared with its peers.”

One of TREW Marketing’s most unique consultation offerings is executive and employee communications. We have led award-winning employee communications programs, and we know first-hand there’s not a silver bullet. We understand the best practices from years on the front lines and bring our collaborative, measured approach to customize programs for our clients, from new, innovative approaches employed by President Obama to the tried-and-true commitment of day-in and day-out global leadership communication.