We have a motto at TREW Marketing: “Trust Drives Results.” TREW started with humble beginnings at one of the worst possible economic times – early 2008, just before the Great Recession began in earnest. Despite this, we’ve achieved a new milestone that less than half of all small businesses ever reach – the 4-year mark. It’s been a year of building trust and driving results for our growing clients, and here are a few highlights:

• The Wall Street Journal selected TREW as one of ten most innovative small businesses in America
• We self-published a new e-book, Smart Marketing for Engineers, and our promotional campaign won the Gold MarCom Award
• TREW revenue is on track to grow 34% YOY in 2011
• 179% more visitors came to trewmarketing.com and spent more time once there
• Our Twitter followers have grown by 4x in just the last 5 months of 2011

(click images to enlarge)

But books and awards can only carry a company so far. What really counts is driving results for our customers. Here are some highlights from their marketing successes in 2011:

Branding and positioning success

TREW developed client DISTek’s branding “brain”, including clear visual branding online and offline, and differentiated messaging that distinctly positions the company in the off-highway engineering markets.

TREW also created a “brain” for new client, Adaxa USA including a positioning statement, long pitch, tagline “Guiding You Through ERP” and company-level messaging such as, “Adaxa develops powerful ERP solutions for mid-size companies that need to order, shelve, assemble and ship their products efficiently.”

New website launches

TREW created new websites – including design, development and CMS – for clients DISTek and Bloomy Controls.

Growth in website traffic

Through ongoing integrated marketing management and execution, TREW client WTI had continued website traffic growth throughout 2011.

Optimized search advertising

Results from various paid search programs we managed for clients in 2011, including lowering costs while driving up clickthroughs and time on site

Awareness through targeted PR outreach

From news release development to major product launches to ongoing media relations outreach, TREW helped many clients drive results with their PR investments.

With this success, we continue to build trust with our customers. With this trust, we are honored to be working with many of the same customers as well as nearly ten new ones in 2011:

We believe this success is due to three key advantages TREW uniquely brings to our clients:

1. We know engineers and scientists.

We are focused. As one of the only marketing agencies in the world whose sole focus is working with B2B companies and organizations targeting engineering and scientific markets, we know the unique challenges of marketing to technical audiences:

• Engineers and scientists are skeptical of marketing.
• They need a wealth of technical information that is easy to find and read.
• They want to know a solution is proven – that they can trust your expertise and specs.

2. We plan broadly and then go deep.

The key to smart marketing is to start with a plan tied to business goals and with defined measurable objectives.  As a full-service marketing agency, we have a broad understanding of all aspects of marketing and how to integrate across media for the greatest impact. Once a plan is in place, we then go deep into each media to create thorough programs that leverage each other.

3. We believe Trust Drives Results.

We at TREW Marketing firmly believe that trust – with each other as employees, with our clients, and ultimately with our clients’ audiences – is the key factor for producing consistent marketing success.  That trust also drives loyalty, such that nearly 100% of our science and engineering customers who came on board in 2008 are still with us today.

With our proven record of thriving partnerships, more and more companies are coming to us for our unique expertise marketing to technical audiences. We look forward to delivering continued smart marketing and outstanding results to our customers in 2012, and wish all of you a joyful holiday season! To learn more about why engineering and scientific customers consistently choose TREW Marketing, see our video TREW Stories:

Theory x Practice is the motto of the University of Texas AdGrad program. I should know, as I’ve lived it everyday for the last year as a full-time Masters student in Advertising and intern for TREW Marketing. Over the course of 2011, I’ve been a student of all sorts, learning things like Social Cognitive Theory, media calculations – CDI and BDI, social media applications, and the process of developing marketing plans. I’ve been fortunate to have a hands-on education through the AdGrad program and with TREW Marketing.

So what have I learned this past year? Summing it up in 5 lessons, here it is:

1. Master the message. One of the first things Rebecca and Wendy taught me was the importance of being able to write like a marketer. This was a refreshing crash course on how to be brief and be smart with all writing projects – from emails, blogs, presentations, case studies, and everything in between. Concise and compelling writing is important, because you can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t communicate your ideas, it doesn’t matter.

2. Revise…revise….revise. This goes in tote with lesson #1, but it’s so important, I figured it deserves it’s own lesson number. TREW Marketing has taught me patience and to embrace the process of revising and editing. Many times, I’ll submit work that will undergo two to three rounds of revisions. This process is long and tedious, but also smart and collaborative, producing the best messaging results.

3. Go all in. There hasn’t been a dull moment over the past year as an intern. Rebecca, Wendy and all the project managers have consistently come up with new and exciting projects for me to work on. It would be impossible to write out every project on this blog, so I’ve wrapped up a year in review of internship projects with TREW Marketing in the Slideshare presentation below. (Use full screen mode to read)

4. Be resourceful. Being part of a virtual team requires a unique set of skills. Specifically, being resourceful to educate yourself and the team on latest trends, virtual tools, and interesting articles. The virtual aspect of the job requires a balance of independence and collaboration. For me, it was an acquired skill, but it’s been such a blessing to gain more independence and a work-life balance from it.

5. “Listening is 51% of communication.” This motto, borrowed from Rebecca, describes the TREW approach to marketing planning. Careful listening entails precise note-taking, and consideration of the tone of voice, personality, and dialogue. Over the last two months, I’ve been honing in on this skill, listening to clients explain their pain points and marketing goals, then taking this information to develop marketing plans that best fit their goals and needs.

As I graduate this early December, and begin a new chapter, I reflect on the last year with TREW and year and half as a Masters student. The decision to go back to school was very tough, but I did it to be prepared for opportunity. Graduate school and TREW have prepared me with the right marketing knowledge for a career in this fast-changing digital industry. Then at the beginning of this semester, TREW also came with a great opportunity, to stay on board as a full-time Marketing Specialist. So at the beginning of next year, I will be returning and re-iterating all five of these lessons I learned during my time as an intern at TREW Marketing.

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

Did you know that for the first time, social media has surpassed company websites for consumers’ research on product information.

If you are one of those business leaders who thinks social media is only for big companies, it’s not relevant to your industry, or you’re thinking about social media but not sure where to start and how to measure its success, this blog series is for you. In Part 1, we’ll outline the five key benefits and 3 myths about social media. We’ll dispel these myths with real-world examples that illustrate why social media not only cannot be ignored, but with a clear strategy and plan, can truly enhance your company and marketing program. In Part 2, we’ll cover social media planning, how-to’s and tools and measurement tips.

So what are the key benefits of social media? Here are our top 5:

1. Gain deeper insights into your target audience and industry trends more affordably
2. Push relevant content around the clock through third-party endorsements and ease of sharing
3. Reach and engage new audiences that your traditional communication channels may not be touching
4. Increase credibility by being a valued member of and contributor to your community
5. Improve your search ranking through deeper links with social integration

Myth #1: “My customers are highly technical scientists and engineers. They don’t post on Facebook or have time to tweet.”

Reality: Don’t make the assumption that because you aren’t on social media, other engineers or prospects aren’t either. You might not be looking in the right channels for your highly technical interests. For instance, LinkedIn is a treasure trove of key decision makers across various industries. The largest population are ages 35-44 years, followed closely by 45-54 year olds.

Below is a screen shot of a LinkedIn group discussion, answering the question “What do you feel is the #1 challenge or threat to IT today?” The topic was posted in the CIO Network Group, which garnered 422 comments, many of which reveal deep insights and thorough analysis of the IT industry and provide on-the-fly market research. For more information about LinkedIn’s demographics and useful business practices, see blog post, “Social Ad Showdown: 5 Ways LinkedIn Takes Care of Business.”

Another example is Twitter. This can be an overwhelming channel if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Although Twitter has fewer members compared to other social sites (Pew Research estimates put it at approximately 10% of the global population), the channel’s users are very active spreading messages to new audiences you wouldn’t normally reach. For example, let’s look at trade shows. With tighter travel budgets, people are not attending like they used to, but through online forums, those who stay home can still follow the events of the conference and discuss. The image below shows the Twitter discussion and promotion at IP Expo, a conference serving the IP converged network community. In addition to people talking about the show off site, IP Expo uses Twitter to create a community, so people can continue the conversation after it’s over.

Myth #2: “Only outrageous or edgy products get social media attention”

Reality: While much online buzz is focused on the entertainment and fashion industries, social media also influences less consumer-focused industries such as the agricultural, electronics, and medical fields. In fact, the most unlikely products can generate tremendous online buzz. This doesn’t magically happen for B2B companies; typically it’s a result of careful marketing tactics, integrating online advertising, PR, shareable content, and offline activities to get these results. Here’s an example where one B2B engineering firm reached nearly 44 times more people through social media.

In August of this year, engineering firm Wineman Technologies and European-based applied research lab,  Tecnalia Research, announced their release of Dynacar, a fully validated, real-time vehicle model simulator for developing and testing passenger and light commercial vehicles. TREW Marketing executed the product launch around trade show NIWeek and results included coverage in print, in video, across the web, and in social media.

The graphic below illustrates the relevant impact of social media around Dynarcar’s launch. Wineman made their announcement on their website distributing to their 125 Twitter followers,which was amplified by 8 key influencers in the engineering field, who retweeted the message one or more times, reaching a total of 5,845 people on Twitter.

Myth #3: “I’m a small business and can’t afford the resources necessary to manage social media”

Reality: Social media is not free. Although it doesn’t cost you anything to create a Facebook or LinkedIn site for your company, it does take time to learn the landscape, keep up with the latest tools and trends, and maintain a consistent presence. And as we have said before and outlined in our guidebook, Smart Marketing for Engineers, we strongly encourage you to invest in social media only after you have developed a marketing plan, website, strong content, and an email marketing program.

When you are ready to begin a social media program, keep in mind some powerful statistics that may alter your future marketing allocations:

• 8 out of 10 companies of all sizes are using social media. The relatively inexpensive nature of this channel is the cause for rapid and widespread adoption of it, helping smaller businesses compete with their larger competitors (Omniture, page 3).
• Approximately 50% of companies plan to increase their social media and email marketing budgets for 2012 or in the near future (Omniture, Page 4).
• 70% of consumers reported turning to social media for objective information about a product, and 68% rely on the company website to obtain further specifications of the product. As mentioned above, for the first time, social media has surpassed company sites for consumers’ research on product information. Consumers are increasingly relying on social media for objective information about your product, then going to your website to purchase (Omniture, page 5).

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.

One of the best ways to learn about marketing and communication is by watching and listening to others. Last month, Domino’s used video and great attention to their content to  communicate to their audiences. While this example happened to occur during a crisis, it provides lessons that marketers can use every day, including:

1. using video to communicate a message,
2. choosing words that help us seem approachable, real and authentic, and
3. remembering that content is king and timing is everything.

You may have heard about the very unfortunate crisis Domino’s faced when two employees posted a disgusting and offensive video while preparing pizzas (pizza ingredients up noses, etc – really nice stuff!). This struck at the core of Domino’s promise to their customers – that the pizza they sell is fresh, safe and prepared by clean people in clean kitchens. If you don’t have this basic trust, you don’t sell pizzas.

It would be one thing to read about this in the paper or on a blog, But, the fact that it was posted online as a video made this immediately global and very, very real and shocking. The video viralized instantaneously, and as a New York Times article pointed out, a few days after the posting, “the video had been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.” And with the masses on social media, it was accelerated even more quickly with discussions about Domino’s throughout Twitter linking back to the video.

This is not necessarily a new phenomenon – we see examples of the power of viralization every day. Think Susan Boyle But this is a very serious matter, and responding by video is a big risk AND opportunity. What is said, who says it, and most importantly of all, how it is said, has the potential to stabilize OR do even more damage to the Domino’s brand. Watch the video, and then I’ll share my opinion about how well I thought it was executed.

I personally thought the delivery was spot-on. The spokesperson, Patrick Doyle, is President of Domino’s USA, and has the high-ranking title needed to demonstrate the seriousness of the matter. He is also, by title, clearly the one responsible for the region in which the crisis took place. He apologizes within the first 15 seconds of the video, and goes on to succinctly and, in my opinion, sincerely, communicate important points including the quick and decisive action taken to dismiss and arrest the employees. Mr. Doyle also did an outstanding job of making Domino’s feel very local and personal with comments such as “this was an isolated incident in Conover, North Carolina”, “the independent owner of that store is reeling from the damage this has caused”, and mentioning that Domino’s employs “125,000 men and women [who] work for local business owners.” In addition, his use of every-day language, such as “sanitized from top to bottom” “delivering high quality food to our customers day in and day out”, and “thank you for hanging in there with us” also made him feel authentic and approachable.

For the most part, Domino’s is getting kudos for their response, as detailed in this USA Today article. The one area where they are being criticized is in the timing of the apology video, which came 2 days after the employee video surfaced – the equivalent of weeks in online crisis time. Timing is everything, especially in a time of crisis, as US Airways discovered in their lack of response following the crash of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in January. In Domino’s defense, they did respond within hours on a blog where the video was first mentioned, and then on Twitter. The video then followed two days later. In the end, while the sooner they would have put out the video, the more authentic and effective it would have been in addressing the public’s trust in Domino’s, overall they responded in a very timely manner and have been applauded for their overall handling of the crisis.

This is a great example that we can all learn from. Do you have others? Please share them here. Do you disagree or have additional thoughts? Please add your comments.

In a recent post about Twitter, I suggested that speakers monitor their audience’s live Twitter conversation during their presentation, and respond in real-time to tweets. I just found a great example of this being done at a panel session during this week’s South By Southwest Interactive Conference here in Austin.

It’s a little fuzzy, but I found the above picture from searching #free #sxsw. It was posted by @djchuang, who was in the audience. You can kind of make out the Twitter avatars on the left hand side and see that they projected the live Twitter feed to the audience while the panel was ongoing. Another Twitterer, @gandy, commented during the panel, “Yay! At last, live Twitter feed at the #free panel. First to have the guts to do that.”

What a great new tool for presenters/panelists. Presenters often wonder what people think about their presentations. They usually have to wait for surveys to be returned or hear anecdotally from audience members after it’s over. Now, with Twitter, presenters can see in real time what audience members are thinking, what questions they have, and what they are saying to each other. As we see from this example, more and more presenters are using this technology to get real-time feedback from their audience.

Of course presenters don’t have to provide a live feed – as I suggested in my previous post, you can have a designated person watching the feed privately, and you can pick and choose a few tweets to comment on. And you have the entire conversation documented to reference later, so you can use the feedback to make tweaks and improve the presentation for the future.

Provided live or referenced offline, either way, Twitter now provides presenters and their audiences the tools to interact in real-time with and among each other. A definite win-win!