Archive for category Social Media
Disturbing similarities between dating and raising capital
Posted by Michael White in Search Engine Marketing, Social Media on August 25th, 2009
A great video from SEOMoz.org’s Rand Fishkin describing how raising funds from VCs is like dating. It isn’t specifically to do with marketing, or PR, or lead generation ….. but it kind of is. First, like the “WTF is Social Media” slidedeck by Marta Kagan, his presentation is a great combination of text and images (and in this case speech) to communicate ideas. Secondly, if you can create fluent, interesting, entertaining, informative content like this people will come back for more, which is the essence of online marketing.
SEOmoz: 10 Disturbing Similarities Between Dating & Raising Capital from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Rise of the Social Media function
Posted by Michael White in Marketing, Social Media on August 21st, 2009
A good post by Michael Gerard of IDC on the potential uses of social media within B2B marketing organisations. His suggestions include:
- Establish a direct, relevant connection with your customers as a source of voice of the customer for new product development (e.g., through an on-line community)
- Improve customer satisfaction (e.g., enable customers to share experiences on-line by creating a self-running community where customers can interact with and learn from their peers)
- Increase the speed for troubleshooting and R&D by reducing the distance between customers and engineering
- Join the on-line technical conversations about your products that your customers are already having, by either leveraging your own community or listening to and participating in other companies’ communities
Read the full post at Michael’s technology marketing blog
Twitter resources
Posted by Michael White in Public Relations, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media on August 20th, 2009
More information from “Who’s Blogging What“, this time focused on “The Most Useful Marketing Posts on Twitter“. It includes a link to a slidedeck from Ogilvy that shows how they recommend you use Twitter for branding. Also has a link to Twitter’s own guide, “Twitter for Business 101“. All this is good introductory information while you get to grips with using Twitter. While we’re on the subject, Twitter provide one of my favourite explanatory product videos, “How to use Twitter“. It’s clear, nicely paced and easy to follow – not easy to do when explaining technology.
10 things your company can do to be social
Posted by Michael White in Social Media on August 17th, 2009
A good post by Amanda O’Brien on the SocialMediaB2B blog called “10 things a b2b company can do to be social now“. (This blog post was brought to my attention by the excellent B2B Lead Generation blog from Brian Carroll.) She highlights that the second most-visited page on the majority of websites is the About Us page (the first most popular is usually the home page). People go to the About page to see what you look like, who you are, where you’ve worked. Humans are curious about other humans, which is why you should take social media seriously.
The 2009 Inc.com 500
Posted by Michael White in Advertising, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media on August 16th, 2009
Inc.com launched its Inc 500 list this week, which ranks the fastest growing privately owned companies in the US. For anyone starting their own business the list should prove inspiring. For example, I’ve been looking at the Advertising and Marketing companies on the Inc500. Check out the top entry (and 5th in the overall list) IntegraClick. Founded by John Lemp in Sarasota Florida in 2002, it achieved 12,654.4% three-year growth, and has revenues of $96.4 million, with 55 employees. Next among the advertising and marketing firms, and 8th in the overall ranking, is One Technologies, founded in 2000, with 9,946.4% three-year growth and revenues of $50.7m. It’s good to be reminded that it’s still possible to be ambitious and achieve outrageously high growth despite the economic turbulence of the last year.