Posted by Rebecca on Nov 4, 2009 in
new media 
…therefore we are.
Mentioned it in Safe Haven for Pirates, but wanted to flag up Charles Leadbetter’s ‘We Think‘ book-come-video-synopsis again on two counts.
- That We Think is a fantastic concept/vision and a credit to Charles’ own ability to innovate, think outside the box and all of those other cliches
- That I could definitely get into this ‘watch a 4 minute video and pretend you’ve read the book’ malarkey.
Surely there’s an enterprising opportunity there – to make short, digestible, video summaries of interesting texts/docs and ideas, so that the time poor (can’t help myself, dropping cliches all over the shop today) can still be plugged into the founding concepts of work such as this. Far from detract from books sales, this has actually inspired me to purchase We Think, as the synopsis is sufficiently appetite-whetting to loosen the recession-induced, iron-clad purse strings.
Tags: Books, Charles Leadbeater, video, We Think
How it works:
Digg, Netscape and Delicious are just a few examples of social bookmarking tools, which allow users (us) to flag or ‘bookmark’ something of interest – from large corporate sites and news announcements to obscure blogs and the wandering thoughts of anyone who happens to have access to a computer. Other members of the site community then vote on them (it’s time sensitive, so after about 51 votes within 24 hours on Digg or 10 votes within 10 minutes on Netscape) your story can be catapulted to the stratospheric heights of the home page.
Use it to:
Drive. Lots. Of. Traffic. The catch? What you’re writing has to be of serious value, well-written and incredibly well seeded. Perfect for when you’ve written a timely, interesting and relevant article. If you can upload this and seed the link on all of your social platforms, including your blog and website, providing one-click access to rate your article, you’re sure of a major spike in traffic.
What you could get:
Impressions on your impressions. Engaged pairs’ of eyes at that. For someone to read your article and consider it worth putting their name to as a voter or commentator means that they more than likely actually read it (and it’s now immortalised in a massive repository of newsworthy content for more people to find, which sounds like a bit of a Brucey Bonus to me).
Tags: Delicious, Digg, new media, social bookmarking, social networking, Stumble Upon
How it works:
So there are thousands of other sites from which you can launch your message and participate in stimulating debate other than just your own website….but there aren’t a thousand extra hours in the day with which to complete the enormous task of staying abreast of the ever-evolving online community. So exploit your efforts by writing once and posting, tweeting or updating many times simultaneously on your different networks.
Use it to:
Claim back your life! As much as social networking is a fabulous exercise in brand building, lead generation, customer service, conversion and retention; there is other work to be done in the office, you know like actually developing the products and services you’re generating all this buzz around, strategising, finance plans, meeting humans face to face, that kind of thing. Between your feed burner and your aggregator you can live the life of a social entrepreneur, continuing to converse, provide information, have an opinion and stay up to date with everyone else’s news, as well as actually leaving the office before midnight.
What you could get:
An online footprint like a woolly mammoth. Big enough to make you known to a much wider audience and net people that can be drawn in to your social web (by cross-promoting your various channel appearances), ready for you to nurture and over-awe with your valuable wisdom. Enough said.
Tags: Aggregators, friend feed, gigya, ping.fm, social networking
Posted by Rebecca Sykes on Aug 6, 2009 in
marketing,
new media,
social networking How it works:
Linkedin is your 80’s rolodex…online. You create a profile to sell yourself (which should do the equivalent of a power suit and walnut desk for your online reputation), including all of your professional qualifications, experience, fields of interest and expertise; and then you add your contacts. As in everyone you know in a business capacity, who knows when a contact of a contact will become a vital link in your career path?
Use it to:
Link with people you know. Keep people informed about what you’re up to or looking to be involved with. But crucially, as with all networking, stay interested in what everyone else is doing too. Be part of other people’s chains – if you have a colleague who does freelance web design and know the Digital Marketing Manager of a firm you used to work for is looking for support with their new site, introduce them. Acts of altruism in this context propel you to the front of people’s minds and reciprocal connections inevitably come flooding in.
What you could get:
A widened net. As in MUCH wider. Wider than that which you could ever have cast in real life. Instead of ringing round old friends and colleagues for access to their rolodex when in need of an opportunity or referral, these people become your own contacts, to nurture as you see fit. The better you do this, the stronger your net and the greater your pool of resources becomes.
One thing to remember: nurture when you don’t need anything. Then when you do, connections are already established and not on an awkward ‘needy vs bestower of contacts’ basis.
Tags: business, contacts, corporate networking, employee network, Linkedin, social networking
Posted by Rebecca Sykes on Aug 6, 2009 in
digital marketing,
marketing,
new media How it works:
YouTube is online video, online video is YouTube. Newer sites are popping up and growing in popularity, such as Vimeo, Viddler and VideoJug, as the web becomes more and more closely linked to video production, but YouTube is still a good place to start. However, don’t be fooled into thinking if it’s on YouTube it’s found an audience, millions (literally multiples of millions) of videos are uploaded just to YouTube every day. You now have to work harder to carve out a viewership and the best way to do this is to aggregate.
Use it to:
Err…aggregate. Create your own YouTube channel, brand it, set your status as a Comedian, Musician, Director, or – my personal favourite – a Guru; and then assume the mantle of expert, collecting and sharing content about your area of expertise. Yep, that’s right, you don’t even need to be creating video content to be a sharer of video news. A good tactic is to create Playlists. Organise similar videos, or those that tell a story, teach parts of a process or give a rounded view on a subject together into playlists that form specific watching for a viewer.
What you could get:
A direct feed of engaging and noteworthy video content, maximized for usability by your clever organising and streaming of content into relevant lists – making you a valuable source of information to friends, colleagues, contacts, followers and fans.
Engaging is worth repeating, in an environment when everyone has a web presence and your website is your single biggest marketing asset and communicator of your brand values, differentiation is often elusive. Although your site might be brimming with goodness, getting someone to browse around for long enough to find it is a challenge in itself, so streams of watchable, specific, engaging rich media is invaluable to making your site stickier than a jam doughnut on the beach.
Tags: broadcast, film, social media, UGC, user generated content, video, video jug, vimeo, YouTube
Posted by Rebecca Sykes on Aug 5, 2009 in
digital marketing,
marketing,
new media How it works:
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and (without pertaining to any technical knowledge) allows you to sit back, get a coffee and put your feet up, whilst the news you are interested in comes winging its way into whatever feed burner or aggregator you are choosing to deploy. It avoids email congestion and means you don’t have the headache of remembering to track all the sites you want to keep up to date with.
Use it to:
Nurture your universe. Your universe of potential contacts is everyone you, your business, marketing material or reputation has ever come into contact with. Many won’t be ready to do business, but will value your news for months or even years, whilst you demonstrate your industry knowledge through the interesting and dynamic changing sections of your site – effortlessly. With the same effort it takes to write your blog, your content is also delivered to the virtual doorstep of your readership. The challenge then is in promoting your RSS feed and proving its worth. When the world and his wife has a constantly dripping news feed, despite the relative ease with which readers can obtain the feed, there are still only 24 hours in a day and a finite amount of information anyone can read – so prove that yours should be one of them.
What you could get:
An informed readership.
A reputation as an expert. Much like with your blog, a good mix of industry and business news, opinion, diversity, conversation, rich media and a slight Devil’s Advocate attitude could get you an engaged, amused and informed audience.
Prime position front of mind – the equivalent of being able to freeze time in terms of marketing super power.
Tags: digital marketing, new media, online behaviour
Posted by Rebecca Sykes on Aug 5, 2009 in
digital marketing,
marketing,
new media How it works:
Facebook has been and to some extent still is THE social connection platform that helps over 250 million people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. Now with fan pages for business users, vanity URLs and Facebook advertising there are many more ways to grow your network, build awareness and link to new prospects through the news feeds of your loyalists.
Use it to:
Create a hub (yes, much like the way in which your website is a hub) but with the added bonus of being rooted in sociability. Meaning that you can upload images, videos, thoughts, opinions and links…and other people can upload them too. Creating a dialogue, a cumulative net of resources, an audience for asking questions and seeking feedback and an organic mechanism for inspiring new prospects to come and take a look. NOTE: this is not your own personal advertising platform, one way communication is as ineffective on Facebook as national cinema advertising might be for your local garage.
What you could get:
A friendly network.
A social hub (from which to connect all other social mediums, with an Aggregator if you’re not a fan of spending hours repeating yourself across numerous platforms).
Or…a completely useless page of one-way announcements and dwindling fan numbers, if you don’t invest some energy and backbone into. Dare to ask, reveal what isn’t yet finished, collect feedback and respond directly to it.
Tags: connect, dialogue, facebook, fan page, friends, MySpace, social networking
Posted by Rebecca Sykes on Aug 4, 2009 in
digital marketing,
marketing,
new media How it works:
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform for messages of less than 140 characters. Short sharp tweets, delivered across a number of platforms to followers (of your brand, not knights of the realm). It is partly down to this assimilation across mobile platforms (the only social network to truly grasp this, due to its simplicity, as even Facebook stumbles when it comes to images and video) that Twitter is so successful. The other reason is its use of vertical connects. You follow on Twitter based on interests and expertise, as social as it is, it’s about information dissemination and VERY niche targeting, which makes it unrivalled in its power to connect brands and the individuals who want to meet them.
Use it to:
Develop your personal branding; direct traffic to sites, blogs, podcasts, videos, images, comment, forums – WHEREVER the party is; or crucially to administer unparalleled customer support and prospecting. Organisation happens via #tags, which collate tweets around a certain topic, creating pockets of relevance and applications such as Twitterhawk allow for the searching and automated tweeting of hot, not vaguely warm, but HOT leads in your exact target vicinity. Your searches can include key terms, exclude key terms, be weighted for positive or negative attributes, filter for location and include up to 5 different responses for different types of identified tweet. Very clever.
What you could get:
Real business. Whereas conversion has historically been hard to prove, with almost no concrete stats emerging from any social (or anti-social) media for that matter, Twitter can deliver hot leads that just require tipping over the edge into a pot labeled ‘revenue increasing’.
Information, faster than any other method as networks catch fire with big (and small) world and niche news.
Tags: clients, follwers, link sharing, micro-blogging, real time, social, social networking, TweetDeck, Tweetie, Tweetpic, tweets, Tweetvid, Twestival, Twitter, TwitterFox, TwitterHawk
Posted by Rebecca Sykes on Aug 4, 2009 in
digital marketing,
marketing,
new media How it works:
Blogging is all about branding. Whereas traditionally branding was about imagery, colour palettes, sounds, jingles and strap lines (which all still apply); what blogging now allows for is the stream of consciousness, the personality, interests, tonality and opinion of your brand (and employees) to shine through, which is much more compelling and engaging than engineered ‘snippets’ of our brand in pictures or words.
Use it to:
Communicate your viewpoint, comment on industry-specific happenings, celebrate work – yours and other peoples, provide employee updates, make announcements, ask questions, start conversations and respond to comments from other people and critically on other people’s blogs – your blog is not an island, CONNECT.
Overall, a good mix of news, comment, invitation, opinion and insight is always a good recipe.
What you could get:
Excellent blogger relations – how does a pool of engaged, respected and respectful contacts, customers and prospects sound?
Feedback – don’t be afraid of criticism, it may be the best chance you get to surprise and delight a customer. Let’s face it, if you do everything perfectly first time then your customer gets exactly what they paid for, nothing to write home about then. If you happen to disappoint them slightly, (but publicly thanks to your corporate blog) but you then respond to that disappointment by going the extra mile and (publicly) delighting them, you may just have an advocate on your hands.
Tags: Blog, Blogger, blogging, blogosphere, citizen journalism, commentary, Wordpress
Posted by Rebecca Sykes on Jun 16, 2009 in
digital marketing,
marketing,
new media Just bought the book ‘How to sell clever things to big companies’ by Carrie Bedingfield and absolutely loving it! An easy-to-read and insightful dip into the world of the modern marketeer. Ranging from thought-starters to complete step-by-step guides and subtly suggesting ways to excite and engage the ever-sceptical client, it’s a must-read for anyone genuinely trying to sell something clever, to the big boys, on behalf of the little guys!
http://tinyurl.com/aeet5a
